Everything is falling apart, coming to an end, precisely because we are unable to believe in the possibility of change. And what is true of the West in general is, as always, spectacularly, gruesomely true of America in particular. At the risk of stating the obvious: nobody is going to make America great again. Nobody even seriously imagines it to be a possibility. America might, it is true, eventually stop outsourcing its manufacturing to China, but if those jobs are ever brought back home, they will return in the form of automated labor. Robots and algorithms will not make America great again—unless by “America” you mean billionaires, and by “great” you mean even richer. Its middle class has been gutted, sold off for scrap. Trump is only the most visible symptom of a disease that has long been sickening the country’s blood—a rapidly metastasizing tumor of inequality, hyper-militarism, racism, surveillance, and fear that we might as well go ahead and diagnose as terminal-stage capitalism.
What Hardwick calls the abstraction of never-ending possibility has its historical precedent in the frontier. Among the many other things it is animated by, abstract and concrete, America is animated by a foundational imperative of expansion. And this much it has in common with another of its great animating forces, capitalism, which exists and thrives through expansion of its own frontiers, through a relentless force of deterritorialization. And it is running out of frontiers; running out of boundaries to obliterate, nature to exploit. The legacy of its monomaniacal pursuit of cheap resources is a devastated planet that may soon be unlivable for vast numbers of its inhabitants.
“Human beings can’t go west anymore,” write Charles Wohlforth and Amanda R. Hendrix in their book Beyond Earth: Our Path to a New Home in the Planets. “Our planet is full. Our personality as a species suggests some of us won’t put up with that situation indefinitely.”
The fantasy of colonizing Mars is, to employ Hardwick’s terms, a means of overthrowing the future before it arrives as stasis. In calling it a fantasy, my intention is not to dismiss the idea as a mere delusion. The world, after all, is built on mythology. The foundations of our flimsy reality rest in the bedrock of fiction.
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Once you start using the apocalypse as a way of encountering the present, an anxious response to uncertainty and change, it presents itself everywhere in the form of cryptic signals, deep emanations. On the final afternoon of the convention, I took an Uber back to the city from Pasadena. I got talking to the driver, a man of about fifty whose name was Alexander, and he told me about his childhood in the Philippines. His parents had both died when he was very young, he said, and he’d been taken in by an older brother, who himself had many children and little time or inclination to look after him. And so he’d grown up on the streets of Manila. Somewhere along the way, he’d picked up a pretty serious gambling addiction, which had only worsened when he moved to California in his twenties. But all that had changed now, he said. He hadn’t held a deck of cards in years, felt the rattle of dice in his closed fist. Something in his manner, a kind of entrepreneurial approach to the retailing of his own story, told me I was talking to a born-again Christian, and indeed we had only just hit the freeway by the time he turned his attention toward his personal relationship with the Redeemer.
Between one thing and another, he got to talking about the end of the world, a subject that was drawn to me as much as I was drawn to it. The catastrophes that were happening now, he said, were so much worse than they ever had been before, and were happening so much faster. The world had gotten so bad. God had told us to love one another, and we were doing so much greed. God had said I gave you all enough to eat, enough to live good lives, but still there was so much suffering in the world. So many people doing greed, he said: everywhere greed. He was in no doubt, he told me, that he and I both would live to see the end. Noah’s flood would come again in our time. Though not myself a Christian, or really much of anything at all, I was helpless to resist the lure of this