The American system of governance on the whole, at every level down to literally the local dogcatcher, has long since been in a state of catastrophic failure. The only things to keep anyone from noticing this are well-stocked retail shelves, entertainment products showing us an America that never existed but seems more or less fine on a 70-inch flat-screen, and the legacies of prior generations such as jet travel, interstate highways, eighty-thousand dollar automobiles no one ever really owns, and comfy tourist destinations abroad pandering to an English-language marketplace to make Americans feel like benevolent conquerors while the locals relieve them of their borrowed money.
And every bit of this presumptive prosperity, which we so easily mistake as freedom, not knowing the first thing about the rule of law and how it had been designed to function, is an illusion built on permanent debt at every level of both public and private sectors, permanent interagency rivalries and suspicion between every official edifice and every other one all only out to preserve their own stakes in their own turfs, tens of thousands of different police jurisdictions answering to tens of thousands of independent local courts and none of them ready to work cases together unless they are forced to.
And then, every time something goes wrong, the arguments are over who had been to blame and why, as the horse runs free having sauntered out the barn-door of accountability while no one took responsibility for its escape much less for rounding it up and getting it back in the barn, and every official either blames the other party, some other agency, or postures as though there had been nothing anyone could have done in the first place.
Un-stock those shelves for a few days, ground those jetliners, render those rolling five-figure robots we call cars useless for their keys no longer getting a signal, and be met with hostility and suspicion while strolling around Cabo San Lucas to the distant sound of cartelista gunfire, and it all falls apart.
Because it already has, we're just currently not (quite) required by our own history to notice.
The American system of governance on the whole, at every level down to literally the local dogcatcher, has long since been in a state of catastrophic failure. The only things to keep anyone from noticing this are well-stocked retail shelves, entertainment products showing us an America that never existed but seems more or less fine on a 70-inch flat-screen, and the legacies of prior generations such as jet travel, interstate highways, eighty-thousand dollar automobiles no one ever really owns, and comfy tourist destinations abroad pandering to an English-language marketplace to make Americans feel like benevolent conquerors while the locals relieve them of their borrowed money.
And every bit of this presumptive prosperity, which we so easily mistake as freedom, not knowing the first thing about the rule of law and how it had been designed to function, is an illusion built on permanent debt at every level of both public and private sectors, permanent interagency rivalries and suspicion between every official edifice and every other one all only out to preserve their own stakes in their own turfs, tens of thousands of different police jurisdictions answering to tens of thousands of independent local courts and none of them ready to work cases together unless they are forced to.
And then, every time something goes wrong, the arguments are over who had been to blame and why, as the horse runs free having sauntered out the barn-door of accountability while no one took responsibility for its escape much less for rounding it up and getting it back in the barn, and every official either blames the other party, some other agency, or postures as though there had been nothing anyone could have done in the first place.
Un-stock those shelves for a few days, ground those jetliners, render those rolling five-figure robots we call cars useless for their keys no longer getting a signal, and be met with hostility and suspicion while strolling around Cabo San Lucas to the distant sound of cartelista gunfire, and it all falls apart.
Because it already has, we're just currently not (quite) required by our own history to notice.
Yet.