The Curse of a Promised Land

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 Why is America Collapsing Before It Became a Civilized Nation? 

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In recent essays, I’ve advanced a strange, bizarre, and foolish notion. That America labours under something like a curse. The curse of a promised land. What a funny and odd thing to say, I know. And yet how many promised lands do you see over which the specters of violence, ruin, and hate don’t seem to perpetually hang, like a funeral shroud? Over which the very same tribes seem doomed to fight over and over again, acting out something like an endless, perpetual, recurring tragedy? And isn’t all that precisely what America seems trapped by?

Now, this is going to be a jarring and dark essay. I recommend you don’t read it at all, in fact. Go watch Anderson Cooper or the latest sitcom. Do something acceptable. And if you still want to think about this strange and grim question — why is America collapsing before it became a civilized society? — with me, then come back. But in a while — if you really want to.

If you want me to put in that question in the terms of American discours, it goes like this. America is a uniquely backwards place, an outlier among nations, a place that “grew” economically but never really progressed much socially, it always has been, and it seems unable, ever, really, to shake off the crushing weight of its past — why is that? But I don’t want to speak to you like a pundit in this essay — with the stilted language of neoliberal quasi-statistical pseudoscience. Just as one tiny and mortal human being to another, I suppose, starting here. It is as if America’s soul is broken by some kind of terrible curse. But why? And who cursed it, anyways?

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Read all here

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Tema principal: América.

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