Although predicting the future has forever proven to be frustratingly difficult, despite the fact that, according to my Necromancy Monthly subscription, I am most certainly eating the proper soothsaying-enhancing fruits and vegetables, fuck it, I say, Full pundit mode ahead! Let er rip, damn the torpedoes, consequences be damned, just as mightily.
Here’s a thing that’s most definitely going to happen, according to yours truly:
In the future, when asked where they were on that eventful Friday when Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, met the baying U.S. jackals and hyenas (no disrespect intended to actual jackals and hyenas) in the Oval Office, people will all have their stories, apocryphal or not, comprising exact locations, the company they were keeping, the food they were eating at the restaurant they’d been dining in at the time, kicking off their Everybody’s Working for the Weekend.
“Ahhhh, yes, my boy,” they’ll intone haughtily. “The day the old world order cracked and fell apart. Well, I’d just started into my zucchini fritters, you see…”
Yeah.
It was that searing a moment. People were talking about it days later, as the fallout from American capitulation to Russian demands continued, up to and concluding with the predictable halt to U.S. arms shipment to Ukraine in its 3+ years war against Vladimir Putin’s invasion.
A certain hyper-surreality, I’d call it. This can’t be happening, can it? you’d think. This isn’t an actual real thing, is it? you’d insist. To yourself. To anybody listening.
“What the fuck am I watching?!”
An increasing sense of disassociation from events on the ground, a direction heralded for a decade now with Donald Trump’s entrance into the political arena. Nope. He’s not going to get the nomination. Nope. He’s not actually going to be elected president. Nope. He won’t instigate an insurrection. Nope. He’s going to jail. Nope. He didn’t just say ‘They’re eating the dogs’. Nope. The won’t re-elect him.
Nope. Nope. Nope.
This can’t be happening.
This can’t be happening again.
The sentiment bled into this week for residents of Canada and Mexico when he made good on the tariff threats he’d been yapping and gargling about since the inauguration. Nope. He won’t do it. Nope. He’s just bluffing.
Nope. Nope. Nope.
Well,
he has and he did, and it feels like this is more than a temporary setback.
It feels as if Donald Trump has killed off the past 80 years of American hegemony and a postwar political and economic order that survived and, many would argue, bulked up after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. For those of us who benefitted from the largesse, ill-gotten and highly concentrated, this is an unsettling notion, to say the least. Especially as he eyes us balefully with his 51st state lechery as if we’re trapped inside a Bergdorf Goodman change room with him.
We’re beginning to understand what it feels like to be much of the rest of the world in terms of its relationship with the United States. The non-Western world, let’s sloppily classify it as. Our counterparts to the south, Mexico, Latin and South America. The Caribbean countries, long objects of American imperialistic capriciousness and covetousness. Africa. Asia.
Etc. & Etc.
Through American eyes, rheumy, myopic, transfat-laden orbs, we are all nothing more than mouthwatering chunks of their Manifest Destiny. Our relationship is unique only in its proximity. It has always been transactional.
If you don’t make too much trouble and give us fair access to your resources, we’re gonna be OK, kid. The two of us.
By and large, we’ve kept that equilibrium and, as a country, benefited greatly from it. Many of us, at any rate. Most of us. More or less.
Maybe one advantage to our seeming expulsion from the Garden of America will be an honest and frank assessment of the exploitive part Canada has historically played and greatly profited from with our capable assistance in promulgating American capital’s winner-take-all, adapt or die way of life that we’ve increasingly made ours. Forced now to take a long, hard look in the mirror, we might not like what we see. A desperate, grasping face that is a sad reflection of the people we believe ourselves to be.
Maybe.
The future’s going to future.
It’ll be uncertain, unsettling and maybe even dark.
It is going to be different than how we imagined it would be even just a week ago. That’s a prediction I’m fairly confident in making. We can, though, use the moment to try and imagine a future that isn’t so dependent on a mercurial power that’s ditched its humanity because the cost of caring became too burdensome a carrying cost.