I am sorry to write all of this but you got me thinking and I couldn’t stop typing.

I think a lot of what you mean is concentrated in the US. We don’t have a monopoly, but the idiocracy is here in a huge way. What I want to say, if you do mean the US, is: Your nation doesn’t have to be a country. Your nation doesn’t have to be under a government. The country is falling apart into fantasies and failure, as you say, but the nation is fine.

This all has happened before, in the mid- and early 20th century. Somehow, Europe went from literally the center of power for the entire world, running shit on the other side of the planet and living like emperors, inventing everything and running everything, into a place where the morons were in charge. It was for basically the exact same reason: A new style of technology that disrupted the way the old one had kept things on their course, and the people with their monkey-brains couldn’t keep their handle on what was even happening, how we make sense of the world and react to reality, especially with people lying to them on purpose on an industrial scale. And so… death and destruction and disease and economic deprivation. Misery without end, shattered buildings, corpses in the street in the rubble. Prisons with dark windows, visits from shadowy figures and someone never seen again. A modern society is too fragile and depends too deeply on things to happen in the right way and for people to understand and react, to survive for long if it departs from reality. The trouble comes on gradually and steadily, like Wile E. Coyote going off the cliff, but once the fall comes it is quick and inexorable. Mass starvation, mass incarceration, someone says the wrong thing and it’s war and bombed-out cities. It’s so easy, it’s like a slip and fall on an icy path. It is very close.

Right before and while that was happening in Europe, a lot of the nation I’m talking about decided to get the fuck out. Neils Bohr dissolved the Nobel Prizes of two of his friends in acid, calmly kept the jars of orange liquid in his office. And where did he go to find new employment? Los Alamos. Then when it was over he got the gold back out and in 1950 the Nobel committee helped him turn them back into medals and gave them back to the owners. He’d sold his own medal, and gave the money to the resistance, but those two weren’t his to sell, so he didn’t. The Hungarians did the math, the Germans built the rockets, work is easy to find in this nation I am talking about.

This nation is strong. You shouldn’t fuck with it.

When it happened the last time, it went to the United States. They lived in the plywood palace, they made the space program and all the fancy computers. Knights of the Lambda Calculus, the Lisp Machine, ARPANet. They still make weapons now, or their grandchildren do, alongside children of other citizens of that nation who came here much later. They keep tons of money coming in too (a lot of it stolen), and so there’s plenty to spare for stealth fighters and we can talk people into doing sanctions if anyone makes us irritated.

I don’t know if that time has come for that nation to move on from the US. If you ask me honestly, I really hope not. It’s time to start thinking about it but I hate it. I want to stay and fight and teach the people. People are fighting now, they’re getting in the ICE people’s faces and yelling on the cell-phone video, they’re still going on TV and making fun of Trump. Did that happen with the Gestapo? I feel like not, or not much. Some German people talked about how surprised they were that there wasn’t an outcry. There is here. Some. It’s different than Trump wants it to be. Like in Tolkien, we are soft as butter sometimes. Not always.

Is that going to last? I don’t know. There are a lot of stupid violent people, and a lot of the concentration camps are still coming true. Right now. We’re not stopping them, we’re just arguing while it’s happening. And there’s a whole process to be done, identifying the ones of us who can lead and resist and taking them out. But also, there’s a whole process to resisting. Let people know what is happening. A lot of people making the right decisions in government said that having a crowd of people down the street yelling, in public, that this is fucking wrong factored into their decision. Well, they did that, and no one shot them or anything, so I guess it’s safe for me to do this. It’s contagious.

The people aren’t any more stupid than they always were. Not any more cowardly or malicious. Same genome. They’re just miseducated, they don’t value the right things, they don’t know what’s going on. Their viewpoint of the world got fucked with investment of steady effort, so it can get unfucked with investment of steady effort. Right?

I don’t know. The point I am trying to make is that there is a stupid nation and a great nation, and they’re both in every country. The great nation is fine. I think it came to live in America last century, and that’s why America prospered. If America the geography really does lose its mind forever (and it’s well on the way and no fucking mistake) the great nation will simply move on. There will be a new mid-century New York City, there will be a new place where all the universities have a chatter of different languages, and the miracles will start to get done for someone else instead of for the State Department. Maybe that is naive on my part but I have to believe that it will go somewhere.

We have a bad storm coming this century. Even the countries who have their act together are going to get messed up bad. If America the geography has not righted itself it is in for a hard, hard time.

They will start losing the wars, get fucked up on the world stage, death and suffering. No money. Disasters. Wildfires and droughts, hunger and homelessness, even if no one from outside is messing us up. And maybe some future person more sensible than Trump will have to go hat in hand to some other government asking for help like King George on his sad little boat ride, grabbing Roosevelt by the arm, talking hoarse in desperation. Save us. We’re fucked. We need you.

Or, maybe not, maybe we will just splinter and struggle.

What I’m saying is, idiocracy is always self-correcting, but you don’t have to go down with the ship.

I apologize for the screed I guess. Like I said I was just sort of typing about it and thinking. This long thing is mostly for me, trying to organize what I was thinking about from reading your comment and trying to answer. Like everyone I am trying to decide how to react to what is happening, and so it is intensely important for me, I can’t look away.