The Boulevards of Extinction. Andrew Benson Brown

We, with portraits of great men on our walls, aspire to money-changing and can’t manage to turn enough dollars into food stamps.

      If we had never broken away from the British we could still claim the Bard as ours. Instead he is just another verbal concession. Having survived the infancy of self-determination, we do nothing but gaze out across the Atlantic as we die from neglect in toddlerhood, pronouncing our first and last word with nervous hunger. But “Mama” is more interested in her sisters than us.

      Constitutional Checks

      Life having become so common, one is surprised to find it valued more than ever. But human rights, too, are Malthusian. Liberty is the new war, access to the pursuit of happiness the new potato famine.

      “The Rights of Men”: by the power of an abstract principle, to be indifferent to the realm of ideas—unalienability of umbecility; free of the caprices of feudal lords, to obey the whims of the stock market; to choose one’s devourers, to submit education to ambition, to inherit the genetic mutations of parents and let children set standards of taste, to bestow a written history to every subculture and erect a world literature on a sea of endangered dialects, to substitute talent for self-expression, to consume oneself into a coffin. In the end a boorish civil society balances itself out: those with a short-term cultural memory receive justice in Alzheimer’s. Natural law, bestowing political freedom through immutable ethical principles, introduces the determinism of drives, giving people the opportunity to pursue their annihilation at the most rapid rate possible without even consciously choosing it—the only genuine dignity one has in life.

      Idioms Spewing Idiots

      The world makes anglicisms with the same profusion that it once made latinisms and gallicisms, but with none of the enthusiasm, none of the connotations of borrowed refinement. Dumbed-down oral behavior engulfs all objects of expression and infects foreign cultures in a pestilence of sensual neologisms. Every historic district becomes an erogenous zone as abstract terms gain a new sense of possession. Archaisms, once spoken with such delicacy for fear that the tongue would grate against the palate and flaw pronunciation with a faint but devastating detail, are rendered inefficient by the cheaper production value of monosyllables. The gauge of imperial corruption is not moral degeneration within the mother nation, but the exportation of its depravity to the provinces via word of mouth. Conversations, devoid of the grace and wit of the French, cut out the chiffon cake—for we are now even lacking in substance-as-triviality—and lay the most important emphasis on the smooth transition from beginning to ending. The salutation inaugurating every colloquy foreshadows its parting phrase and becomes a metaphor for weariness.

      Noose as Lasso

      Age of God: 1607–1776

      Age of Heroes: 1776–1945

      Age of Men: 1945–Present

      ***

      In America’s Age of God, poor men of piety carved tracts of land from a forest of native corpses and sacrificed its own population to the starving time—divine justice needs scapegoats and martyrs.

      Provident Periwigs of the Founding Fathers: as Athena disguised Odysseus in the form of an old beggar, so did the Lord impart an aspect of divinity to an epoch of bad hair days. Men of genius and valor powdered their heads before their muskets so the combined eruptions would be heard worldwide.

      In an Age of Men that covers stupidity with hair growth formulas and puts a safety lock on spray bottles, the triumphs from the Age of Heroes seem superhuman. An industrialized army unable to capture a few primitives hiding in caves lacks the honesty to explain this earlier success without recourse to heavenly aid. But total victories give way to endless stalemates because God abandons a people only after virtue leaves them. Technology dissolves moral force through impersonation.

      The way back to virtue? A mountain of scapegoats and martyrs that surpasses the Hindu Kush.

      Commentary on The Discourses, II.31

      The danger of trusting refugees: despite any promises they give, they will betray their adopted country as soon as they get a chance to bring their native one into it. The desire to transplant their own culture upon the one that took them in, though initially nonexistent when a matter of a few scattered individuals escaping poverty or persecution, becomes strong once the displaced population becomes large enough. Why else would they have been driven from their homeland in the first place? They employed the same strategy there, too: even their own culture they wanted to purify—remake or congeal. Failing in that—unable to either renovate their own traditions quickly enough or assimilate to changing regimes—they simply migrated somewhere else to achieve their goals. Unlike their fellow countrymen who decided to stay put and endure, refugees have a drive to non-adaptive survival: they do not suit themselves to circumstances, but alter circumstances to suit themselves, and if successful ultimately transform those around them. Theirs is the will to enculturate.

      America’s strength and its curse is that it has always been the land of refugees. Whether this characteristic is a strength or a curse depends on the dominant type of refugee.

      An Invasion of Greatness

      The most penetrating analysis of American social life was written by a Frenchman. The most acclaimed twentieth-century American writer was a Russian. Our greatest logician was Austrian, our greatest physicist German.

      Without just wars for America to fight, geography cannot donate its useful exiles to us. We are forced to turn to our own population for intellectual originality—a barren strategy, if not a dangerous one. After the steady flow of Grecian culture stopped, the Romans produced only a few dry moralists to oppose the loud virtues of the enfranchised barbarians.

      If only we could plant tyrannies in the other developed nations, our influx of peacetime freeloaders might be outweighed by a band of refugees with scientific training in border-hopping. The Europeans could be the first to make an orderly research project out of illegal immigration: sending a control group of tortured Basques across first, dropping Finnish paraskiers onto mountaintops at regular intervals. Testing the reactions of east coast beach populations with a rising of nudes from the sea, wine-soaked Mademoiselles are interspersed with a placebo effect of castrati to gauge the rate of depopulation. After the invasion has been reliably reproduced, the published results might be exchanged for green cards.

      Barring this, where will the great Americans of the twenty-first century come from? —The cosmos and the gutter. Above and below, but not parallel to us. Competing against aliens and rats, the last natives will lower their flags, don them as capes, and hunker down in their fallout shelters, too busy fending off abduction and plague to do anything worth remembering. With a xenophobia that scorns expatriation and a tobacco-chewing addiction that discourages evacuation aid, the Midwesterners will make their final stand—with the prize of “Greatest” jointly awarded to what experiments on their chosen few and swarms the rejects.

      Aetoichthymachia

      Predation is the condition of soaring; one cannot simply live off the view. In the next life when philosophers are eagles and businesspeople are fish—even then the fish will swarm the eagle and pull it under when it swoops down. If man’s nature seeped into animals the food chain would become a circle of absurd altercations, a burlesque worthy of a pseudo-Homer. Transmigration has not equalized oppression because there is no point—man needs no help in endangering himself.

      Palpable Endearments

      Socialists are callously insensitive to our attachment to objects—a bond far more incorruptible than that between people, the more so as it is removed from them. Trinkets associated with the body parts of dead mothers are talismans of sorrow and nostalgia, reminders that the flesh has seen happier days. Much preferred is an object that honors another object through facsimile in a chain of inert mater going back to the garbage of Eden. The first pair of underwear, botanical snugness of soiling and decomposition—a testament to the heritage of stains, the primogeniture of use-value.

      A God for Everyone

      god—first decapitalized, then degendered. The father no longer reigns alongside