An observant and independent-thinking man reaches the age of 62. Born in Chicago in 1960, he has spent his entire life in a country that, in 2022, still calls itself the United States of America. However, he knows that this country today does not even remotely resemble the USA that he remembers from his youthful years in the 1970s. The country’s basic, essential characteristics are long gone, and its very soul seems to be dead and rotting. This is now a strange, transformed, foreign land, and the man feels like a misfit, out-of-place, out-of-time alien within it.
This American-born man is now totally alienated from America. The old man no longer considers the USA to be his country. He cannot identify with this transformed nation. He feels no loyalty to it anymore. He does not care about it anymore. And he doesn’t like most of the people who populate it today. It is as if a foreign or extraterrestrial power has invaded and conquered this so-called USA—a power that has ideas and values that are the complete opposites of the ideas and values that his USA used to have. And the American people have all willingly collaborated with this alien takeover. Perhaps that is what has secretly happened? Or, more likely, the country has just rotted internally of its own accord.
The old man recalls a time long ago, when he felt differently about America—when he could identify with the USA and feel proud to be an American living in a free country. That was back in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s—when the USA was still the real USA—when the country’s people were free, capable of rational thought, and genuinely American. But those memories are growing dimmer day by day.
Democracy? Freedom?
The old man has concluded that the “democracy” and “freedom” that American politicians like to shout about and that people wave flags over are nothing but shams. They are make-believe illusions in 2022—ideas that might make one feel good but that don’t really exist. He wonders if maybe they always were shams and he just never realized it before.
Yeah, America is a democracy… Until they throw away your votes in rigged elections, stuff ballot boxes with phony votes, and install the preferred candidates of the permanent ruling establishment. Until illegal alien noncitizens are allowed to vote while the votes of citizens go uncounted. Until elected politicians ignore their campaign promises and even the Constitution to do whatever the hell their big donors and the ruling class want them to do. Until people are not even allowed to make informed choices in the rigged elections, because the media never tells the truth about any candidate or about any issue. Until the unelected bureaucrats in secretive government agencies enact rules and regulations on virtually every aspect of your life, and there is nothing you can do about it. And until the US government hands over America’s public health authority and other policy authorities to corrupt, incompetent, unaccountable foreign entities, like WHO.
No, America is not a democracy anymore. It is more like an oligarchy of giant multinational corporations that dictate their desires to the thoroughly corrupted DemRepub uniparty.
Yeah, Americans have freedom… Until you refuse to let yourself get injected with Big Pharma’s experimental drugs, and then you get fired from your job. Until you’re not allowed to go someplace because you’re not wearing a senseless mandated covering on your face. Until you protest in the nation’s capital against a rigged election, and you get arrested and imprisoned like a terrorist. Until you express your opinions online, only to get your views deleted, shadow-banned, or outright banned, and maybe even get arrested. Until the news outlets that you prefer get banned because they report news that counters the establishment narratives and official propaganda. Until you go to the store or gas station only to find that you can’t afford to buy the food that you want or the gas that you need… maybe you can’t even find the food and other things that you need on the empty store shelves. And until you are forcibly silenced when you object to the sick propaganda being stuffed into your kids’ skulls in school.
No, America is not a free country anymore. It is more like a mental institution in which you are required to believe, say, and do whatever the entrenched establishment authorities tell you to believe, say, or do. And if you dare dissent, you will be punished and you will suffer the consequences—like McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
As Vonnegut wrote, a sane person to an insane society must appear insane.
So much for democracy and freedom in 2022 America, the old man mutters to himself.
Amorality. Violence. Crime. War.
What about morality? Is America a moral country in any meaningful sense? The old man considers the question.
There is the corporate greed for more profits. Government greed for more power. Individuals’ greed for more possessions. Well, nothing new about any of that shit. But now we can add to the list. Individuals’ lust for social media “influence.” Propaganda from schools and media to purposefully cause confusion about sex and gender. Women can be men, men can be women, men can get pregnant, 75 different genders. Societal obsessions with the color of skin and with whom other people have sex with. Enforced ignorance about real science and real history. Consumption of drugs for every imagined ache and pain and every anxiety and stress. Ever-increasing drug addictions and overdoses. Narcissism masquerading as spirituality... Oh, there is much more that can be added to the list of Americans’ moral sicknesses—new ones seem to pop up most every day. It is all amoral, immoral, decedent, depraved—and precisely characteristic of today’s America.
And then there is the American cult of violence. Violent crime is totally out of control in US cities today. And in fact, the violent criminals, if black or some other now-specially-privileged race, are actually justified and celebrated by the government and media as racial justice warriors. Many go unprosecuted, literally getting away with murder.
Violence is celebrated and encouraged not only with crime and chaos in American cities, but also with America’s endless series of wars and proxy wars in foreign countries—wars that the US fuels with money and weapons to benefit its all-important military-industrial complex, which makes up the absolute highest, most powerful, most privileged class in the American caste system. Winning these wars is not particularly important. After all, the US hasn’t been victorious in a war since 1945, but it continues to wage war and war after war. The point is not really to win. Rather, the main point is simply to wage continuous war to generate profits for the military-industrial complex—as we see now in the latest example, Ukraine. As Lee Camp has put it, the United States is not an actual country, but instead a military with a stock market.
American people—get away from me
And what can the old man make of the American people themselves in these dystopian 2020s? He cannot relate to them at all. Their characteristics are so strange to the old man that either they must be space aliens or he must be a space alien.
He sees the ignorant, unthinking, sheeplike, zombielike, clonelike American people walking around with masks covering their faces and cell phones perpetually glued to their hands. He sees how they are addicted to all kinds of technological gadgets and countless other material things—buying the things with money they don’t even have while they pile up mountains of debt that they will never pay off. Just like their government.
In terms of whatever knowledge is inside the mushy heads of these strange people, the old man guesses that many of them probably get their news from twentysomething online “influencers,” bimbo brain bubble butts who wouldn’t know the difference between George Washington and George Bush if you asked them. So the ignorant people end up voting for politicians with dementia or other mental disorders. The people have also been trained to obsess over nonexistent, purposefully manufactured “crises,” such as a virus pandemic, climate change, racial and gender “discrimination,” and wars in foreign countries that are irrelevant to Americans. More and more of these confused people seem to be wandering aimlessly around US cities, apparently homeless, mentally disturbed, addicted to drugs, and shitting and pissing in the street. The old man figures that that must be the new American dream.
The old man also sees the people of America as represented in television commercials and other corporate advertisements. These ads seem to suggest that about 80 percent of the population is made up of black men in relationships with white women (rarely the other way around), or gay or trans couples. Wow, he finds that most interesting, especially considering that he doesn’t notice many couples like that in the real world. What the heck is this? Some form of corporate social propaganda? Some type of inside joke that he doesn’t get? And what is it with all the bizarrely sick TV shows, movies, and “music” that he hears about these days? Have the American people really become that perverse? Or is it all various forms of corporate/government propaganda?
Has all of American life been distilled into little bites of corporate/government propaganda designed to brainwash? For what purpose? How very strange, disturbing, confusing, and irritating all this is for the old man.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers?
So this 62-year-old man finally asks himself, just what the hell is this twisted tortured demented deranged unfamiliar USA that he finds himself in today? He thinks, it has been going downhill for a long time, but all of a sudden in the last couple years, it has seemed to totally crash and explode! He does not know what this country is. But he does know that it is not his country. And he rejects this so-called America, as well as the so-called Americans that populate it. They are frauds. It is like Invasion of the Body Snatchers—the country and people still look like the old country and people, but they are not. You can tell, because they act different. The whole society must have been replaced by lookalike space aliens! Except for this one old man. (Is there no one else left?) And he is the one who feels like the alien.
Everything everywhere is fucked up today.
Nothing he can do about it
Oh hell yeah, the old man is very pissed off at this modern-day USA! But he knows there is nothing he can do about, because the suicidal collapse of this society is way beyond his control. There are overwhelmingly powerful, unstoppable forces pushing this collapse along. It all started long ago, it has accelerated at warp speed in recent years, and it is now just too goddamn late to do anything about it. Trump, DeSantis, and nobody else in the feverish dreams of conservatives can or will do anything meaningful about it. The majority of the American people seem to like things this way, and every single large institution in the United States seems to be pushing it and profiting off of the current situation in one way or another. It is what it is, as they say.
The old man knows that although he can’t do anything about this drastically altered society (except rant and rave to himself and anyone else unfortunate enough to hear him), he can try hard to ignore it and detach himself from it as much as possible—in order to try to achieve some peace of mind and preserve whatever sanity he has left. He can limit his exposure to the latest maddening and depressing news of the day and to all the online bullshit. Rather than be connected to today’s deranged world, he prefers to live as much as possible in the better past that he remembers, such as by listening to rock and country music from the 60s and 70s. And, whenever he wants to, he can try to totally forget about the ugly warped modern society that people have created by getting outside into the beauty, purity, peace, and goodness of nature.
But, no matter what he does, the old man knows that his mind will return to the anger that he feels about his country being stolen from him by stupid, demented, and evil people. They have made him a man without a country—forever alienated from America.
