HELL IS REAL, says the billboard on my right.
Driving through Indiana, I think: ain’t that the truth.
As the town of Gary – at this point, just a crumbling monument to U.S. Steel’s past greatness – comes into view, my partner gasps from my Prius C’s passenger seat. A Spaniard, she’s used to seeing clean and modern roadways and pristine infrastructure built, in part, with European Union funds. “It’s like a third-world country,” she says, staring at the abandoned factories.
Europe isn’t paradise, of course. My partner and I live in Brussels. It’s not a hellhole, as our President has so eloquently said. But it can feel gritty. A new downtown pedestrian area has banished all the cars. I sometimes miss them. At least all the honking drowned out the drunks.
But still, in Europe, you rarely doubt that you’re living in a place with a certain decency. Overall you live longer. You’re often happier. You’re not so damn fat. I had to wonder: how is it that my partner comes to middle America, and is horrified by which she sees?
It’s as if the shining city on the hill gradually slid down that hill into an opiate-infested trailer park down by the river.
Money is always a good place to start. Last year, the American Society of Civil Engineers said that the US faces a $1.44 trillion shortfall in infrastructure investment. In its 2017 Report Card, the same group gives the country a D+ for infrastructure. That’s not the GPA of a student with a bright, 21st-century future. It’s what you’d expect of the future class drop-out.
Meanwhile, the star pupil, China, is spending huge money on infrastructure. China’s also investing more on research and development. That’s a country getting ready to call the shots for the next hundred years. It helps that Chinese leaders are not reality show stars, but scientists and engineers. Yes, their leader is an authoritarian. So is ours, at heart.
I have no grudge against China. If the US drops the baton of global leadership, and Europe can’t get any of its 27 pairs of hands on it, then someone has to pick it up. Better Xi Jinping than Putin.
Where did all the money go? A lot of it went to wars. The Watson Institute at Brown University says that the total cost of the global war on terror is now approaching $5 trillion. But that figure only includes the direct outlays. It doesn’t count what economists call the ‘opportunity cost’ — that is, what we missed out on by not spending that money on better things. Education and training, for example, that could have made us more productive.
Let’s say we had only spent half of the $5 trillion by refraining from going into Iraq. On an annual basis, we could have provided free college tuition for everyone about four times over (assuming a cost of about $70 billion a year), and still had billions left to cover one 63-year-old Nebraskan smoker’s deductible when Congress eventually wrecks Obamacare.
But why did we fight all those wars? You remember why. The horror of 9/11, which this Trump supporter thinks was an inside job. Back then, we had a surplus. You remember that? We had a surplus once, long ago. This was back in the days when a mystical knowledge database called ‘reality’ informed our policies. Good times.
It all ended when Osama Bin Laden brought down the World Trade Center, and mangled our minds.
I write that not to be flippant. That’s what he did. The truly lasting damage was not economic. It was psychological. He wanted us to do something stupid, to intervene in a part of the world we didn’t understand, and to pay heavily for it. In a cable-news-fueled frenzy, we obliged him. A long chain of causality connects the war in Iraq to rise of ISIS. The Islamic State’s atrocities terrified Western publics. That fear, in part, greatly propelled the appeal of candidate Trump, and other populist politicians like him.
Make no mistake: if Bin Laden could have picked a US President, he would have picked someone like Trump, the embodiment of white America’s collective Id. Forget about his promises about infrastructure. The only bridge he’s building heads straight to American kleptocracy. He may have won, in part, because he outflanked the Democrats from the economic left, but he’s governing from the ridiculous right.
Just look at the last few weeks. Forget about our bridges breaking down. Our brains are breaking down. Are we talking about serious issues like deforestation, climate change, water security, or adult education and re-training that might actually help some of those put out of work by foreign competition? Not really. We’re staring at our smartphones, wondering how our President’s itchy Twitter fingers will show us the power of positive psychosis.
This is what Bin Laden would have wanted: complete American disengagement from serious issues. He may be dead, but we’re the social media zombies in the world he made.
Bin Laden was lucky. He struck not just a building, but an edifice — the American psyche — that was far more unstable than he understood, and it came crashing down. The original wounds — racial hatreds and sexual obsessions that run like a river of molten lava through the foggy no-man’s-land of American political discourse — run deep. They have never healed. The animosity towards Muslims has catalyzed far older and more primal white fears, most of them imaginary.
So when our President spends an entire interview not honestly grappling with our problems but bathing himself with past glories and wrestling with ghosts in his head, he’s not alone. Many Americans are doing the same thing.
So as I drive along a dilapidated interstate in need of repair, and hear angry, deluded voices shouting at each other on talk radio, I can’t help but think: this was the dream that bin Laden did not dare to dream.
In this national lunacy, your imagination is your reality. Our imaginations tell us that other language, religions, and civilizations are strange, suspicious, and perhaps evil. Substituting nightmarish fantasies for foreign policy makes us oddly similar to our real adversaries, the violent extremists, who see the world in similar terms. And so we are locked in a parasitic embrace, feeding off our mutual fears, while those at the highest echelons of power have fever-dreams about starting even bigger wars, and their cheerleaders celebrate bombs while confusing foreign policy with virulent masculinity.
Back in Brussels, my girlfriend and I would like to visit the United States to see my parents again. But we’re afraid to go. She works with refugees and asylum seekers in Europe, and has visited many Middle Eastern countries. During our last visit, she was nearly detained when a border agent misread a stamp in her passport. He took the French ‘Liban’ for Libya (not Lebanon). Fortunately all turned out well, but that incident happening during the Obama Administration. What now, doing the Trump era, when a French historian on the Holocaust is threatened with deportation? Could she be detained, questioned, and even expulsed?
Roosevelt said, ‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself,’ even if at least one policy betrayed that noble thought. Nowadays we don’t even pretend to honor such a principle. To borrow a phrase from Gordon Gekko, fear is good. Fear works. Fear gets ratings. Fear makes money. Fear gets you elected. In a world adrift, fear is our anchor. It makes us feel safe.
HELL IS REAL, the billboard said. That’s damn right. We’re living in it.