- cross-posted to:
- FuckTheUSA@lemmy.ca
- politics@beehaw.org
- AttentionUSA@lemm.ee
- cross-posted to:
- FuckTheUSA@lemmy.ca
- politics@beehaw.org
- AttentionUSA@lemm.ee
cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/61920691
The first impression America gave me was gentle carelessness. We were driving down from Canada to visit family friends in Texas sometime in the mid- to late 1980s, and a young border patrol agent at a booth, crouched over a newspaper, leaning back in his chair, carelessly waved my family’s station wagon across without looking up. You didn’t even need a passport to enter the United States until I was 33.
You need clear eyes at the border today. Europe and Canada have issued travel advisories after a series of arbitrary detentions, deportations to foreign jails without due process and hundreds of valid visas pulled or voided amid a sense of general impunity. While I have crossed the border a hundred times at least, sometimes once a month when I lived there, I cannot say when I will see America again, and I am quite sure I will never return to the country I once visited.
The America I knew, the America I loved, has closed.
And so I find myself like a man who has been admiring bubbles floating in the air, trying to recall their shape and swerve and shine after they’ve popped.
America was a country of bubbles. I loved it as one loves anything that is both real and fantastical.
Donald Trump has blown himself into a bubble of gilded ceilings, ersatz Roman murals, sycophants on tap and midnight rants of imperial conquest on personally owned social media networks. He is only one story. America was millions of bubbles. For some reason, I find myself remembering Tom Waits in a junkyard making Bone Machine, turning rusted fenders and tossed-out dry cleaners and cracked sheet metal into a scrap marimba of his own invention. Even its dumps could give birth to magic.
Golf course palaces and wrecking-lot percussion: twin American truths.
MORE AT: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/apr/20/american-dream-trump-canada
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Eh, Yosemite is still beautiful. BANF and Patagonia too.
The America I loved was always the land. Fuck the people in power.
Some of us are still here, my friend. Maybe we’ll convince the morons(morons who’s idiocy could be funny or endearing) how good we all had it, soon or some day. Though I can’t seem to find the words lately.
The America you loved was a lie built for the silver screen. Fixed that for you.
Further, the sheer audacity to mention Tom Waits and not recognize the brokenness of so many the characters that populated Waits’ songs that reflected the brokenness of America.
- Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis
- Romeo is Bleeding
- Anywhere I Lay My Head
- Frank’s Wild Years
- Soldier’s Things
- Clap Hands
- House Where Nobody Lives
- Crossroads
Fuck me, I could go on, but that’s just a handful of examples of Waits songs that are explicitly about how broken the USA is. Waits’ music never described a hopeful or happy America, no matter how touching and beautiful his music is.
Wasn’t the late 1980s reagan era, when he decided to promote the trickle down effect, went really really well, Oh you know if the rich gets the taxed reduce, the money they paid for tax might go trickle down the company towards you. Went really well, the rich just hoarded it.
This was also a time when the october surprise may have occurred as well, when republicans may have caused iran to delay releasing the hostages just so, the winner of inauguration could be the person could be held as the person who released them.
You also had reagan with his impeachable iran-contra affair, american dad ollie north song gives a brief summary of what he did and why it was quite bad. You also had America coming off an era when the CIA experimented on people for mind control by giving them LSD, and then moved on to other drugs.
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Isnt it a crime against humanity (and a typical sign of human trafficking) for them to steal your passport?
I know they might detain and deport you, but they can’t steal your passport.
The prosperity and good memories he writes about were always built on the exploitation and outsourcing of misery to the rest of the world, not that there ever was a lack of it domestically.
