🏙 🔥 9/11 Broke America 🇺🇸 ⚰️
A False Civilization Was Unmasked That Day: Steel ⚙️, Debt 💵, & No Saints ✝️ 🚫
“It is easy to see where North America stands at present, and whither it is tending. Its rapid progress, due to the most degrading works, has fascinated Europe; but the results of this progress, exclusively material, already appear. Barbarism, profligacy, general bankruptcy, systematic destruction of the native races, idiotic slavery of the conquerors, bound to the most trying and repulsive of lives under the yoke of their own machinery. America might founder in the ocean once for all, and the human race would suffer no loss thereby. Not a saint, not an artist, not a thinker has it produced, unless one may term thought the aptitude for twisting iron for the construction of freight trains. The priests who wear out their lives there cannot create a civilization. Thus far there is no civilization in America, and as far as appearances go, there never will be.”
~ Louis Veuillot, French writer & politician (1813 – 1883), L'Univers
1. ⚰️ Veuillot’s Eternal Curse 🕯
Louis Veuillot looked westward & saw not a culture in its springtime but a din,
A hammering.
He wrote of America not as though it were an adolescent nation…
On its way to greatness… but as though it were already spent, already hollow.
He heard the noise of railroads being laid, bridges thrown up, factories roaring,
& he recognized the sound for what it was:
A workshop insisting that it was a Civilization.
& he laughed at the idea, though not with joy...
More with the resignation of someone who has seen enough to know…
That no miracle will arrive.
Some people later brushed him off as just another European elitist,
Sneering at the rough frontier.
But there’s something in the texture of his writing,
A tone that isn’t quite contempt, more like weary amusement.
He didn’t hate America; he pitied it. Or maybe he pitied the delusion:
He pointed out that here was a land quick with tools & quick with trade,
But incapable of producing the higher figures...
The saint whose life gathers people into memory,
The poet whose words endure,
& the thinker who ties the moment to eternity.
Without those, the noise would remain just noise.
It’s worth asking what sort of heroes America actually gave itself.
Not saints or prophets, nor even philosophers who could shape the depths of a people.
Instead: The pioneer, the hustler, & the industrialist;
Achetypes obsessed with motion & appetite.
Useful, yes... men who could build railroads or squeeze profit out of steel.
But not the kind of figures who consecrate.
Nor the kind who can leave ruins worth remembering.
Think now of September 11…
Two towers collapsing into dust, not ruins:
They weren’t temples in the way that Rome left temples, or Athens left columns.
They were office blocks, filled with paper,
Computers, staplers, coffee cups, human lives... all gone in smoke.
What lingered afterwards wasn’t the solemn grandeur of a ruin…
But the fluttering of memos drifting over the streets,
Fragments of a bureaucracy scattered like leaves.
It looked, more than anything, like the inside of a filing cabinet…
That had been overturned in a storm.
& in that image, you can hear Veuillot’s whisper:
This was never a Civilization to begin with.
The line people remember (you were dead before you began) feels cruel,
But only because it fits.
A workshop can grow louder, richer, & cover more ground.
It can dazzle with size…
But it cannot give birth to the kinds of souls that make history…
Into something more than machinery & soulless materialism.
At the end, all it can leave behind are broken tools, heaps of dust,
& the fading echo of its own racket.
2. 🏭 The Machine Triumphant 🩸
By the Time the twentieth century began,
America had built up enough noise to convince itself it was greatness.
The newspapers filled with breathless accounts of railroads cut through forests,
Bridges spanning rivers like threads of steel,
& new cities springing up where the prairie grass had barely been broken.
Everything moved faster, everything grew taller,
& for a while, sheer motion was treated as proof of destiny.
If the skyline continued to climb higher each year,
Surely history was unfolding correctly.
Yet motion isn’t meaning:
A machine can spin endlessly without producing a single vision.
The mythology followed the same rhythm.
The pioneer trudging westward,
The self-made man climbing out of poverty,
The tycoon boasting about iron, oil, & rail…
They were celebrated as emblems of freedom,
But what they really embodied was appetite... appetite disguised as virtue.
Civilizations are usually remembered for the figures they raise up as exemplary:
Rome had its jurists, Christendom its saints, Greece its poets.
America raised up its hustlers & its magnates,
Men whose genius consisted of conquering land or bending steel into profit.
It is telling that the most sacred names in its political catechism…
Became the “Founding Fathers,”
Merchants & lawyers whose legacy was paperwork rather than prophecy.
The noise of industry drowned out what little Silence remained.
A locomotive shrieked across the plains & was praised as a hymn.
A skyscraper clawed at the sky & was treated like a temple.
A factory doubled its output & people nodded as though culture had advanced.
The nation mistook the glare of its lights for illumination,
& in doing so convinced itself that it had discovered a destiny.
Yet no lamp glows forever.
Behind the brightness, the shadows grew only deeper.
One can see it most clearly in the way America spoke about itself.
Progress was the favourite word... progress in size, speed, & wealth.
But progress toward what?
To move faster & higher isn’t the same as to move toward a destination.
The very restlessness that fueled expansion revealed the emptiness at its core.
Each conquest of land, each new patent or industrial marvel…
Only delayed the question.
& Motion became the only answer it could give.
Veuillot’s sneer comes back here:
He said America was a workshop, & what else could it have been?
A place that could assemble tools, replicate parts, & keep the machines turning…
But a workshop isn’t a temple.
It doesn’t sanctify, nor does it remember.
It consumes raw material & spits out product,
& when the floor is cluttered with waste, it sweeps it aside & keeps going.
Such was the nation’s vision of itself.
Not a culture ripening into maturity, but a mechanism grinding ever faster,
Hoping that noise alone would Silence doubt.
3. 🏙 Empty, Hollow Towers 🩸
On the morning of September 11, the towers came down,
& the world spoke of shock, of rupture, of history turning on its axis.
But if One looks carefully at the images…
The smoke curling upward, the endless sheets of paper fluttering through the sky…
like some obscene snow…
What stands out isn’t grandeur but emptiness.
These weren’t temples brought low,
Not ruins that could stir reverence centuries later,
But office blocks collapsing into dust:
File cabinets, broken chairs, computer monitors, & human bodies.
Rubble rather than relics.
& rubble doesn’t speak; it only lies there until it is carted off.
For a brief moment, the country insisted the day had revealed something new,
That innocence was lost, that the world had suddenly changed.
But innocence isn’t lost when it never existed.
What the cameras captured wasn’t the destruction of a Civilization at its height…
But the unmasking of a façade that had been hollow from the beginning.
The towers were symbols of commerce, of finance, of numbers flowing across screens,
& when they collapsed, they revealed themselves for what they had always been...
Scaffolding filled with paper.
Civilizations that fall leave behind monuments that command Silence:
Rome’s broken aqueducts,
The shattered stones of Athens,
The cathedrals blackened by centuries of smoke...
These endure as reminders of a greatness that once lived.
They decay, but their ruins still hold shape.
What New York revealed that morning was something else:
Structures that were never more than functional,
Built to dazzle only in height & shine, without depth, without sanctity.
& when they failed, they left nothing but dust clouds & the smell of burnt plastic.
The spectacle was consumed instantly:
Television repeated the collapse again & again,
Until the event was less a tragedy than a performance.
People spoke of it in sacred tones, yet the ritual was hollow:
Flags waved, hymns played, & speeches promised vengeance.
No new covenant was born.
What happened instead was that death itself became a kind of content,
The replay looped endlessly until the images lost their sting…
& became part of the background hum.
In this sense, the towers didn’t so much fall as dissolve into the circuitry of the feed,
Their meaning flattened into pixels.
& perhaps this was Veuillot’s curse written in fire:
A workshop can produce height & shine, but not memory.
A machine can roar, but it cannot pray.
America mistook the roar for transcendence,
& on that morning, the roar ended in Silence.
The towers were empty before they fell.
Their collapse wasn’t the death of a Civilization,
But the confirmation that no Civilization had ever stood there in the first place.
4. 🪦 The False Funeral 🪶
What followed the collapse wasn’t mourning but a pageant,
A liturgy of flags & slogans stitched together at speed,
As though a nation could drown out the sight of dust with the sound of brass bands.
The dead had barely been counted before they were turned into symbols,
Draped in red, white, & blue, paraded across screens…
In an endless procession of talking heads & candlelight vigils.
Mourning requires Silence, but Silence is unbearable to a machine.
So noise rushed in... hymns sung off-key at stadiums,
Choruses of politicians promising vengeance, news anchors choking up on cue.
A funeral without sanctity, staged for the cameras,
Replayed until grief itself felt scripted.
The rituals were thick with words about unity,
But unity imposed by spectacle is brittle.
Beneath the surface, the fault lines only widened.
Those who questioned the pageantry were cast as traitors;
Those who asked why the towers had fallen…
Were drowned in accusations of conspiracy or disloyalty.
The nation didn’t mourn; it mobilized.
The funeral turned into a rally, & the rally became a war.
The corpse was never left to rest;
It was hoisted onto the podium, forced to speak in favour of the empire.
In that sense, the “post-9/11 world” wasn’t born on that September morning,
But in the weeks that followed, when grief hardened into performance.
Flags unfurled on every porch, bumper stickers shouted defiance,
& the dead became a permanent backdrop for political theatre.
No One asked what it meant…
That the temples of commerce had been reduced to rubble,
Because the answer was too dangerous:
It meant they had never been temples at all.
Better to call them holy, better to call the ruins sacred ground,
Better to build a shrine to emptiness than admit the truth.
Civilizations that truly mourn build cathedrals, compose requiems,
& carve memory into stone.
What America built that day was a brand:
“Ground Zero” became a logo,
A phrase that carried with it both solemnity & merchandise.
The very act of naming the place gave away the emptiness of the gesture: not a temple,
Nor even a monument, just a zero, a hole in the ground.
& around that absence, the rituals multiplied,
Each One louder than the last, each One less capable of touching the reality of loss.
Veuillot’s curse hung over it all:
A workshop cannot mourn; it can only repurpose.
The nation took the corpses of the towers & fed them into its machine,
Grinding them into slogans, campaigns, invasions.
What might have been Silence was filled with the roar of engines heading east,
Carrying soldiers who would become the next set of bodies in the cycle.
The funeral was a sham because it was never meant to end in eternal rest;
It was meant to keep the machine turning.
5. 💣 The Wars of Iron ⚔️
The wars that followed were never holy.
They weren’t crusades, nor battles where sacrifice could be mistaken for sanctity.
They were operations, logistics, convoys of trucks rolling through deserts,
Satellites circling above, drones humming like insects in the dark.
The language was swollen with grandeur (freedom, justice, security),
But the reality was mechanical.
Afghanistan became a theatre of spreadsheets,
Iraq a ledger of costs & losses,
Each death recorded, categorized,
& forgotten with the same bureaucratic indifference that files away invoices.
The republic didn’t march to war as Rome once did;
It shipped its machinery abroad & called the churn of gears a mission.
The soldiers, too, bore the marks of this machinery.
They were no longer knights, legionaries, or even crusaders,
Convinced of some higher vision.
They were technicians in uniform, trained to maintain the machine:
Calibrate the rifles, fuel the tanks, & program the drones.
Their courage was real, men bled & died,
But their deaths were absorbed without meaning,
Consumed by the system that couldn’t pause long enough to sanctify them.
& Sacrifice without sanctity is simply a waste.
Thus, the empire produced waste by the ton, lives included.
& what did it all build?
Not temples, nor monuments,
Nor even ruins that could be admired later for their shattered dignity.
It built bases that crumbled as soon as the contractors left,
Airstrips abandoned to sand, green zones that rotted the moment the gates closed.
The wars consumed without producing.
They drained, but they didn’t consecrate.
Entire landscapes turned into proving grounds…
For technologies that would be obsolete within a decade,
While the people living there were reduced to collateral,
Entries in reports no One read twice.
The funerals came home in Silence,
Coffins draped in flags unloaded in the middle of the night, far from the cameras.
A true Civilization honours its dead with music & stone;
America hid them away,
Because the machine cannot tolerate reminders of what it has chewed through.
It needs motion, not memory.
Mourning would have slowed the gears.
So the corpses were whisked aside, while the slogans kept flowing...
Mission accomplished, freedom on the march, a safer world.
But the wars dragged on, each One feeding the next.
Afghanistan bled into Iraq, Iraq bled into drone strikes across continents,
Drone strikes bled into proxy wars that bled into nothing at all.
No victory, no closure, no sacred narrative of triumph or loss.
Just entropy.
The machine ran until it sputtered,
& when it sputtered…
The empire discovered it had no language left to explain what had been done.
It had fought for two decades & produced nothing but waste.
Veuillot’s sneer could be heard here, too:
Slaves of their own tools, fighting wars they didn’t know how to end,
Piling corpses like coal to keep the furnace alive.
Wars of iron, wars of machinery,
Wars where the only victory was the continuation of the system itself.
6. ↔ Of False Continuity ♻️
The years rolled forward & the empire told itself stories of change.
One face left the stage, another entered;
The crowd was instructed to believe that the script had been rewritten.
Obama’s smooth cadences gave way to Trump’s vulgar bellows,
Then to Biden’s weary mutter, & then, astonishingly, back to Trump again.
Each arrival was hailed as a rupture, as the end of an era & the dawn of another.
Yet beneath the shifting masks, the machinery stayed the same.
Tariffs rebadged as national security,
Wars rebadged as counter-terror,
Deficits rebadged as investment.
The slogans changed, the substance didn’t.
Mark Fisher once spoke of “capitalist realism,”
A Time when it was impossible to imagine alternatives.
That age ended not in liberation but in multiplication,
Where every alternative leads back to the same place.
Under Trump, the imagination soared:
Deportations by the millions, walls rising across deserts,
Mars colonies, & the return of 1950s prosperity.
Under Biden, the fantasies turned in a different key:
Reindustrialization, moral crusades abroad, & the rebirth of a middle class.
Yet both men, for all their theatre, expanded the same wars, imposed the same tariffs,
& relied on the same bureaucratic machine that ground onward with or without them.
This is the secret of American politics:
Not division, nor rupture, but rot that spreads evenly through both parties.
They loathe One another in words but mirror One another in deeds.
Each condemns the other for hypocrisy…
While preparing to inherit the same tools of power, the same wars, the same debts.
The voters are invited to choose between night & day,
But the choice is between dusk & dusk.
Look closely at the Ukraine conflict:
Trump called it Biden’s war; Biden called it Trump’s legacy.
In truth, it belonged to both, & to neither.
It belonged to the system itself,
Which required a permanent frontier to justify its endless expenditure.
Likewise with tariffs:
Trump’s brash announcements seemed like unprecedented shock,
Until One remembered that Biden had already laid the groundwork…
With semiconductor controls & trade walls built under quieter names.
The continuity was embarrassing in its clarity.
The politicians shouted difference, the machine delivered sameness.
This sameness isn’t stability. It is decay.
A healthy order repeats itself through ritual & custom;
It sustains identity across generations.
But America’s continuity is the inertia of collapse,
The way a corpse twitches even after the last breath has gone.
Obama to Trump, Trump to Biden, Biden back to Trump...
These weren’t cycles of renewal…
But spasms of a system that no longer knows how to stop.
Veuillot’s words once mocked the workshop, pretending to be a Civilization.
Today, the workshop doesn’t even pretend. It simply runs.
A conveyor belt of presidents, each promising rupture, each delivering the same dust.
Continuity as a symptom of death, the empire’s final trick:
Convincing its people that they are choosing…
When in fact they are only watching the machine choose itself again & again.
7. 🧩 Slaves To One’s Own Tools 🔗
Veuillot had warned that America would become the slave of its own instruments,
& the phrase has aged like iron left to rust in the rain...
Truer with each passing decade,
Sharper each Time the machine unveiled a new set of chains.
The republic that once congratulated itself on liberty…
Now spends its days in quiet bondage,
Not to foreign powers but to the technologies it cannot live without.
The hand that forged the tool now bends beneath its weight.
The conqueror drags his own chains behind him.
Look at the faces bowed to their glowing screens, millions scrolling in Silence,
Eyes glazed, bodies still, as though awaiting instructions.
The promise of infinite knowledge dissolved into endless feeds,
An avalanche of images no One can remember.
Algorithms nudge, cajole, predict;
& the human will softens into reflex.
What once was leisure becomes surveillance, every gesture tagged, every word stored,
Every preference translated into a data point for markets or governments.
The citizen is no longer a participant in a polity,
But a user within a program they didn’t write.
He is observed, tracked, & monetized… & yet, he calls this freedom.
Elsewhere, another chain:
The opioid vial, the fentanyl strip,
& the pill bottle rattling in drawers across the continent.
Pain numbed, then life numbed, until entire towns dissolve…
Into half-lit pharmacies & abandoned houses.
The empire that couldn’t sanctify its dead has no idea how to comfort its living.
It dispenses chemical quiet instead,
A pharmaceutical Silence that spreads like mildew.
A Civilization that cannot produce saints breeds addicts;
Both are searching for transcendence, but only One leaves behind miracles.
The other leaves behind corpses in trailers & alleys.
& now a fresh idol, offered with the fervour of a new gospel:
Artificial intelligence, a name heavy with prophecy,
Promising salvation through code.
Yet what has it brought except more noise, more synthetic speech,
More images generated out of nothing to fill the already choking atmosphere?
AI churns out slop at an industrial scale,
& the nation congratulates itself on its cleverness,
Unaware that it is drowning in its own output.
The machine writes, the machine paints, the machine thinks...
& men grow smaller, duller, less necessary.
Tools multiply, but meaning shrinks.
This is the idiotic slavery Veuillot foresaw, more humiliating than conquest by armies.
To be ruled by others can be borne with pride;
To be ruled by One’s own devices is shame without remedy.
America became the workshop, & the workshop has imprisoned its workers.
They may boast of freedom,
But they live by compulsion, staring into screens, swallowing pills,
& obeying prompts.
The master is gone; yet the chains remain.
8. 🩸 The Martyrs: Stage & Silence 🎤🕯
Charlie Kirk fell on stage in Utah, mid-sentence,
As if still convinced that the ritual of speech could summon authority…
In an age when words had already been hollowed out,
When syllogisms & applause lines carried less weight than the sudden crack of a rifle.
A sniper’s bullet tore through his throat, & in that moment,
The performance of politics dissolved into the convulsions of a body…
Brought low before an audience that no longer believed in speeches…
But still believed in blood.
The cameras didn’t look away.
They drank in every detail, the jerks of muscle, the frantic movements of those nearby,
The smear of crimson staining the podium,
& in the instant of collapse Kirk ceased to be man & became corpse.
The activist, the provocateur, & the debater…
Who had tried to wrestle the abyss with arguments was gone,
& in his place appeared a martyr already pressed into service,
A pawn circulating through the bloodstream of partisan rage,
A unit of meaning manufactured out of flesh.
Within hours, his name was no longer his own but a vessel,
Cited as proof that ballots had given way to bullets,
That the last fragile barrier of civility had been shattered,
That America had entered a stage…
Where convulsions mattered more than conversations.
Far from the stage lights, Iryna Zarutska died in Silence.
Twenty-three, a refugee from Ukraine,
Sitting on a bus in Charlotte with her attention fixed on her phone,
She couldn’t have known that the man behind her (restless, muttering, armed with a knife),
Was about to unspool her life in a matter of seconds.
The act was sudden, vulgar in its ordinariness,
Not staged for spectacle but executed in the drab banality of public transit,
The kind of setting where people look away even as blood pools at their feet.
She collapsed between seats as others froze in paralysis,
Their inaction a second wound,
& within minutes the loss of life that should have commanded outrage…
Became little more than another line in a police report.
The vigils never came, the murals never appeared,
& the sanctity of innocence was never granted:
Wrong demographics, wrong narrative, wrong perpetrator.
Her youth, her vulnerability, her foreignness…
(qualities that might once have amplified her death into lamentation),
Instead rendered her invisible,
& she slipped from memory almost as quickly as her blood seeped into the bus floor.
Placed side by side, their deaths form a cruel symmetry:
One amplified until the human disappeared beneath the roar of commentary,
The other muted until the human barely registered at all.
In both cases, the result was the same...
Individuality erased, the corpse retooled into discourse,
The wound reshaped into symbol.
Kirk’s twitching became proof of civility’s extinction;
Zarutska’s stillness became an inconvenience brushed aside.
Neither was granted the dignity of Silence.
Both were conscripted into the same circuitry of decline,
Unwilling saints of a Civilization that feeds not on memory but on raw flesh.
& so Veuillot’s curse reemerges, sharpened across the century:
A society that cannot sanctify will inevitably cannibalize,
Hammering at its martyrs as it hammers at steel,
Retooling One into spectacle, another into absence,
Both consumed by the same machine.
Kirk & Zarutska, though strangers, belong now to the same litany:
Emblems of decline pressed into use by factions desperate for omens,
Proof that the American polity no longer buries its dead but sells them,
Packaging grief as content, Silence as erasure,
Until even the final breath is stolen…
& repurposed by the workshop masquerading as Civilization.
9. 🪦 The Cartel of Death ⚔️
What happens on a stage in Utah or on a bus in Charlotte doesn’t stay there;
It leaks, it stains, & it travels along the seams of daily life…
The way oil finds the gutter after rain.
By evening, you can feel it at the strip mall...
The stiff flutter of yellow tape in the heat,
The bored officer guarding nothing in particular,
The convenience store TV replaying some other city’s sirens…
While the cashier slides your change under a pane of cloudy plexiglass.
People keep moving, but the motion has a flinch in it now,
A stutter in the walk to the car,
A glance at the dark pane of glass to see who else is reflected there.
If this were heading toward a real war, there would be banners & fronts.
Instead, Americans get something smaller & meaner:
Crews, hobby militias, fevered loners with manifestos stapled together at 3 a.m.,
Security contractors who can’t remember which acronym they draw a paycheck from.
Violence becomes a cottage industry; franchised, improvised, outsourced.
No declarations, only incidents.
A parking-lot ambush at dusk;
A stabbing on the late bus;
A doorbell camera catching muzzle flash & nothing else.
The state still shows up…
(lights spinning, forms filled, a press conference behind a lectern that lists slightly to the left),
But the monopoly of force has slipped through its fingers.
Power shares the block now with the boys who run souped-up chargers,
The uncle who “knows a guy,” the private firm renting rifles by the weekend.
Courts mumble postponements; cases age on the docket;
A judge quotes procedure to a room…
That stopped believing in procedure two summers ago.
None of this adds up to a cause.
The killings don’t recruit; they harvest.
They don’t clarify; they cloud.
Meaning arrives prepackaged (the caption writes itself before the body cools)…
& yet every caption contradicts the last.
Attention-seeking fuel, spectacle-seeking corpses.
The shooter in a borrowed car, the kid with a kitchen knife,
The man who goes live for fifty-seven viewers...
Each moves as if summoned, though by what they couldn’t say.
This is the economy of the late empire:
Blood as tender, panic as yield, rumour as growth.
The export is footage & the import is dread.
Americans trade in candles & hashtags,
In blue-and-red strobes reflected on wet asphalt,
In interviews with neighbours who “never thought it could happen here,”
Though of course they did.
Police rehearse the script; schools rehearse the drill; hospitals rehearse the overflow.
Between rehearsals, life continues in a thinner register:
Smaller gatherings, shorter glances, & the steady, guilty relief of making it home.
Veuillot wouldn’t be surprised:
A nation that makes tools its gods will One day serve the tools’ sacrament.
Here it is:
The rifle, the stream, the knife, the post, not as instruments of politics,
But as politics itself... a grim liturgy without priest or altar, only participants.
& if you ask where this is going,
The honest answer is that it isn’t going anywhere at all.
It is settling in.
It is choosing the places where the tape fits best & waiting there,
Patient as a habit, ready for the next offering.
10. 🪶 An Empire of Corpses ☠️
Veuillot’s old line (the workshop dressed up as a nation),
Feels less like prophecy now & more like an inventory tag…
That you’d find taped to a crate in a dim warehouse:
Smudged pen, date half-legible, & still true.
Americans have lived through the set pieces...
The towers turning to dust,
The wars that kept accounts better than memories,
The presidents switching podiums while the gears stayed oiled...
& now the residue clings to ordinary surfaces:
Bus floors, grocery parking lots, school foyers that always smell faintly of cleaner…
& panic.
Nothing breaks cleanly. It just keeps thinning.
If there were a grand ending, Americans would recognize it:
Trumpets, banners, & a calendar date to circle.
Instead, there’s the small weather of decline:
A pop of gunfire two blocks over,
A knife pulled between stops,
A gathering that ends early…
Because someone didn’t like the way a stranger hovered by the door.
The language that once tried to dignify all this (“polarization,” “resilience,” “healing”)…
Feels like a brochure left on a wet bench.
Courts postpone;
Police arrive with the lights but not the monopoly;
The news reads like competing sermons,
Each parish canonizing its own dead & skipping the others.
Meaning used to come slowly, through stone & song.
Now it comes pre-captioned.
Clips spool out on the feed while the comments fill before the blood dries;
A family member stares at a phone in a hallway that hums…
With the sound of vending machines;
A city worker zipties plastic flowers to a fence that sags in the wind.
Americans don’t argue about what happened so much as who gets the body...
Who may speak in the name of the wound.
When the arguments end (they never do), the footage remains.
Servers purr. Another reel joins the archive.
What finishes an empire isn’t always an enemy.
Sometimes it’s the habit of converting every loss into usable content,
The reflex that turns grief into inventory.
Americans are good at that.
They know the angles, the candles,
The pressers with the slightly crooked seal on the podium.
They know where the tape goes, which curb catches the rain,
& which hashtag reads sober without sounding weak.
This competence is its own indictment. It means the work is routine.
So there will be no Archduke, no neat sides, & no final trumpet…
Just a patchwork of little rackets & private uniforms,
A slow exchange of whispers & weapons,
& a state that still stamps forms while meaning walks out the back door.
Once more… the export is footage, & the import is dread.
Between them, a people moving carefully...
Shorter errands, fewer glances, & keys ready in the hand.
Call the last chapter what it is:
Not collapse with grandeur, but consumption with paperwork.
The ledger grows... names, dates, locations, each marked “processed.”
The book will close the way a shop closes when the bulbs finally burn out:
No ceremony, only a door that doesn’t quite latch…
& a sign that was never flipped to CLOSED.
What remains isn’t a ruin that teaches, only a Silence that doesn’t bless.
& if anyone asks what the nation became in the end,
The plain answer will suffice:
A place that learned to live on its dead, & then ran out.
💀 🔥 The DOOM Cometh…! ⏳ 🕯️
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Very good analysis. The French writer is writing after the initial format had been obliterated and exchanged for empire. An empire based purely on shaking out Benjamins via grift and graft. Sad, but I think he pegged it and your follow through is spot on.
Why do you fake h1b slop accounts use so many emojis? English giving you a hard time?