Empires Fall
Maybe it's our turn?
Editor’s Note: Have a question for Matt about how to win the fight in Iran? Matt’s a lover, not a fighter, even if he loves to fight with rude commenters, who he enjoys punishing with rhetorical fists of fury. Also, considering our spotty war history, Matt would settle for not losing. And you can’t lose fights you never start, which is why you should think three or four times before starting one. In need of Matt applying such Clausewitz-levels of strategery to your particular predicament? Ask him a question, any question, at askmattlabash@gmaill.com
Dear Matt,
Everybody kept saying that we were a stabilizing force in the world. What happens if we’re unstable? Are we fucking around and finding out?
A.R.
Whoa, Haus! Let me stop you right there. Yours is a good question, and I don’t mean to play Language Gazpacho, but I explicitly forbid any meme-talk in these pages, like “fuck around and find out,” now so overused, it enjoys its own acronym (FAFO). And the reason I hate memes isn’t just because I have a rich history of hating memes, though — not to brag — I was perhaps one of the earliest haters of meme culture. Here I am hating on it in 2012, while attending a meme confab at MIT, back in my Weekly Standard days, before most adults even knew what a meme was. Because I don’t just believe in hating the culture as it happens, but anticipating it before it happens. AnticiHate™, I call it.
But I also hate it because our current leadership now speaks in memes, which comes as blocks of prefab thinking from people who are afraid or incapable of doing the hard work of independent thinking on their own. Many, of course, call this our first AI War, but also our first meme war. And I speak here, of course, of Secretary of Defense War Pete Hegseth, the former weekend Fox & Friends cooking-segment host with his ever-present Stars’n’Stripes pocket square, a not-quite-human Ken Doll whose heavily-gelled coif suggests a throwback to mid twentieth-century Brylcreem culture, when We Liked Ike, along with men with respectable haircuts and working levels of competence who ran the earth. Back when we even occasionally won a war now and then.
Instead of fighting to a stalemate or worse, with no clear objectives. Or objectives so ill-defined, they might as well not exist at all. (Can you keep track of varying administration reasons for starting this war? Because most can’t, even if many have valiantly tried.)
SecWar Hegseth, a historically drunk impregnator-of-mistresses— just the kind of cautious, sober-minded person we want leading us into war — has himself used the dreaded “FAFO” in a sentence during his address to military leaders last year, who he also warned not to be fatties, because fatties don’t make for good Instagram Influencers, like Pete. He said all this while starring as General Patton in the movie in his head, complete with American-flag backdrop. One gets the sense there are lots of movies in Pete’s Head, for which he has racked up many phantom IMDB credits.
Though the snatch of movie dialogue that most haunts me, when hearing Secretary Pete talk, is one from Oliver Stone’s Platoon:
Sgt. Elias: What happened today was just the beginning. We’re gonna lose this war.
Chris Taylor: Come on. You really think so? Us?
Sgt. Elias: We been kicking other people’s asses for so long, I figured it’s time we got ours kicked.
And indeed, this entire war, so far, feels like a bad movie unfurling from the Trump administration’s head. From their propagandistic use of everything from Grand Theft Auto to SpongeBob Squarepants to Braveheart and Breaking Bad, one gets the sense this is not a real war endeavor, so much as it is a production. One meant to either distract us from unpleasantries (Trump featuring prominently in the Epstein files, his sagging economy, etc.). Or maybe just to play into Captain Bonespurs’ fantasy version of alpha war-fighter (he likely once bravely marched around a parking lot in Fordham University’s freshman ROTC program, before plotting how not to go to Vietnam). Or just because they enjoy sucking up to the manosphere — which is leaving them in droves, as even blinkered simps like Joe Rogan can now see through what they’re doing.
And so, to your question, what are we left with? Well, letting down the world, who once largely subscribed to American might and moral order as a salve for all the globe’s ills. Even as we now look like an insecure prepubescent these days, trying to prove manhood that it is not at all convinced of itself. And how are we faring in that department? Well, I knew we were in real trouble when Pete Hegseth told us there was nothing to worry about in the Strait of Hormuz, the chokepoint for one-fifth of the world’s oil, the effective shutting down of which has contributed to record oil price hikes — which shows no signs of abating. And which, despite Hegseth’s hollow assurances, has seen multiple ships get bombed by everything from Iranian drones to missiles. Such is always the problem with insurgencies — as we should’ve been fresh from learning after two decades of pointless insurgency warfare in Afghanistan and Iraq. They don’t have to “win,” they just have to disrupt sufficiently in order to notch a victory. Which seems to be Iran’s plan.
That’s true when you have concrete objectives, even ones that go unrealized. (Such as creating stable democracies in places that are inhospitable to them.) But it’s even more true when you have no earthly idea what you’re doing or why you’re doing it, as seems to be the case with our Memelords, who have the short attention spans of the kind of people who think it’s important to win the Internet. Though the Internet forever moves on, as Trump himself seems on the verge of doing, already scoring his Bush-era “Mission Accomplished” moment, claiming the war is all but over, even as he insists we still have to finish the job — whatever that “job” is, which has yet to be clearly articulated.
So I kind of feel sorry for the rest of the world, the same way I feel sorry for orphans. It’s comforting to know there’s an authoritative parent in charge. Which is the function America has served for the better part of the last century. But when your parent becomes an unreliable, temperamental child — one prone to temper tantrums, emotive hissy fits, social media outbursts, and general jankiness—then what do you do?
God only knows. Maybe find a new-world orderer, whatever that looks like? But this is exactly how empires fall. They rise, they grow decadent and depraved, they overextend, they believe their own hype, even when their hype is based on past glories which they’re no longer capable of. And a sad fact of history is that every empire eventually does fall. The Romans did it. The Mayans did it. The Mongols did it. The Ottomans did it.
Maybe it’s our turn? But hey, at least we’ll get some kick-ass memes out of it! Maybe even as we go down, we’ll go viral.
Bonus Reading: I just found out, belatedly, that one of my favorite naturalists/essayists, Edward Hoagland, died at the age of 93. I won’t give you the whole shot on who he was, but The New York Times covered it nicely. Here’s one of many favorite passages of his. And I can’t recommend his 2011 collection, Sex and The River Styx, highly enough.
You’re only as old as you feel is a refrain one hears enough that it must have some truth to it, though your oncologist might disagree. The remissions he sees uplifting the spirits of so many dying people a week short of death - when they think they are going to live on for years - could be interpreted as the existence of fetal angels confused by a passage toward ecstasy, or as an aspect of the anesthetic that commonly tranquilizes creatures that are being engulfed by death, whether a wildebeest in the jaws of a lion or a frog in the mouth of a snake. While in the army, I worked in the morgue and noticed that most dead people smile. Yet we are indeed, in some respects, as young as we feel. Life is moments, day by day, not a chronometer or contractual commitment by God. The digits of one’s age do not correspond to the arrhythmia of one’s heart or to the secret chemistry in our lymph nodes that, mysteriously going rancid, can betray us despite all of the surgery, dentistry, and other codger-friendly amenities that money buys. Good works don’t keep you off the undertaker’s slab either. But cheeriness, maybe yes. Cheery, lean, little guys do seem to squeeze an extra decade out of the miser up above, as if feeling young were not as important as having a peppy metabolism and appreciating being alive. Blurry eyesight, fragile knees, broken sleep, the need to pee a dozen times a day....are not inherently fun, however, although the smoothing out of temperament does help you cope. Your ingenuity, your curiosity must find a new focus, not simply exploring the world as a kid does. When I watch from my canoe a tall blue heron stalking field mice through the grass, then washing them down with minnows and tadpoles, I don’t experience the surge of ambition to be a zoologist I would have felt when I was fifteen. I just want to go on seeing these intricate things next year.
Bonus Track: Here’s The National doing “Fake Empire” off their great-from-start-to-finish 2007 album, The Boxer.