HANDS UP, AMERICA: THE INTERNET HAS WON!
Eulogy for a Nation I Loved
“Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
The America I grew up passionately in love with has expired.
I mourn her grace, her wisdom and her eternal promise.
The nation of noble ideas, reasoned debate, and thoughtful compromise has bowed its head and taken its last breath. The devil of the internet—with all of its divisive hatred and foolish simplicity—dances triumphantly at the foot of the tree.
We have traded the public marketplace of ideas for the backroom bitcoin of memes and fifty-five second lectures on art, philosophy, and science from jejune high school dropouts and ruthlessly ambitious psychopaths.
There is blame enough to go around.
A Banksy slapped on a wall serves as a nicely adequate statement for the fractured intellect of the left.
The strutting puffery of a manly phrase sums up the rhetorical gas balloon of the right.
Indifferent fascination with the lightning fast dance of fashion, celebrity, and streaming media hypnotize the complacent mass of humanity lumbering on between the antipodes.
Righteous fools, the dangerously stubborn ignorant, and deluded madmen have always lurked within the secluded basements and dark back alleys of our singular city, shining ever so brightly on our unique hill of noble aspiration and grand opportunity. But the great open space of public debate, humanly flawed as it may have been, was dominated by the moderated arc of progress toward universal ideals, informed by reason, restrained by respect for one another. Its highest ideal was summed up in the passe description of the United States Senate as “the greatest deliberative body on earth.”
The coming of the internet—amoral, mechanical, indifferent to wisdom and grace alike—opened the public space to the lowest common intellectual denominator. The haters, the ignorant, the shallow, the greedy, the exploiters, and the ruthlessly ambitious swarmed out of their nests and dens of iniquity and overwhelmed our democracy. The carefully crafted balances of independent judiciary and legislature have been torn down. Now they serve at best to:
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.
For decades empty slogans have advised us of the wisdom of violence, that an armed society is a polite society, that it takes a good man with a gun to stop a bad man with a gun, that the guys with guns make the rules. Dutiful catch phrases have excused the most degenerate conduct of our rulers, told us that it’s only locker room chatter, that she asked for it, that there is nothing we can do about it. Righteous commissars have whipped us with the flagellum of shame for the justice of oppressors and demanded of us love for the criminally violent whom the “system,” we are instructed, has failed.
Now, for one fleeting moment we see our civic princess on her bier and shed a tear or two and then ask what streaming show are you watching, who will win the Super Bowl, and did you see that woman snatch the home run ball from that kid?
“I grow old ... I grow old ... I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled…” and I now toss the first handful of earth into the abyss that yawns before me.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Quotes from T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and Dylan Thomas, “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night.” Original art by Tom Diaz. "The Herd" and "The Howling."
Source: HANDS UP, AMERICA: THE INTERNET HAS WON!
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