When it calls, answer
A voice of thunder and brass
Sitting in his palm
Death is a place; it is a timeA time that always ends, a rhymeThat always falls without answerNot because the dead may preferSpeech without any verseBut that the curse --That is death, may be perfectedI hope else we had not expectedAs in death there's no spaceIt is that sort of place;The dead may hope we prayThough naught they can sayNot in rhyme, nor in proseTheir year has met its closeAnd opens no more, no springAwaits or any other thingBut to dwell and be forgotIn forgetfulness of aughtElse-- and we must remember allAnd in remembering a fallIn a garden, and a treeAnd another tree, you, I, we--Cannot afford to forget anyoneHistory cannot ever be undoneBy us, we bear everythingThis was our Christening;And if to be remembered we striveBy other than God, while aliveWe err, for in time I've thoughtEv'ry grave must at last go unsought.
Diagnosing the Patient
The sickness of the United States is profound. There are many ways to look at the patient- the Sick Man- and many reasons to do so. We can think of innumerable ways in which she is sick. Yet, it stands to reason that as the patient has gotten sicker, like the woman with the issue of blood, none of the physicians she sought to treat her had, or perhaps have, either the correct diagnosis, the correct medicine, or both.
There are very many opinions about this. I cannot overstate this fact -- the number of different perspectives is simply staggering. Yet, if we wanted to understand what happened, why she became sick, why perhaps (if I suppose rightly) she died, how would we do it? Or where would we start?
Often in medicine we treat symptoms, not because medicine as a science or art believes that the symptoms are the disease, but because symptoms are often complications that prevent healing, and so in some sense, though being effects, are also causes of what they are effects of. For the reader, yes, I have described a feedback loop.
Swelling for example is often a symptom of some malady, but the role of swelling in healing is questionable beyond a certain degree and swelling itself, especially in muscular injury, often perpetuates the injury rather than helping in its healing. We can definitely look at America and say she is swollen.
It is rarely necessary to treat root causes. This is the truth, and it should be accepted as such. It is rarely necessary to treat root causes. The body of man has survived countless generations because it is fundamentally robust; and there was never a time when people could consistently treat root causes.
We might even go so far as to speculate that attempting to identify and treat root causes is maladaptive in many cases, because these causes are often hidden, whereas symptoms are objects of the senses. If one is to misidentify the root cause, or one is to treat a disease invasively to get to a deep root cause, one may easily do more harm than good.
It is also possible that in a very sick Man, such as America is, the idea of a root cause is a myth. Causes and effects cascade into each other and while tracing backward might give us a sense of where some of the effects originated from in time, these older causes, perhaps even root causes, are themselves gone now and even if we had an effective treatment for them, it would be without merit to employ it.
Yet, we do see a sick Man, who is being treated in a way that is only making her sicker. She is perhaps already dead; it is hard to tell. Perhaps it is her sister who has died - who can tell with these types -- they all look the same. If they had been twins, were they playing games of identity with us?
There can therefore fundamentally be only two approaches to this. The first is to start as far back as we can go reasonably, (we try not to go back to, "And in the Beginning...") and start by tracing the roots of current problems as they appeared in earlier forms in history to the current day.
The second approach is to start in our current time, and trace backwards the symptoms to their apparent origins. Both approaches have their merits, both have their demerits.
An approach I don't recommend is attempting to identify a syndrome or disease. For example, an Objectivist might tell you that America is suffering from Collectivism or Statism, and then list off various symptoms that match. That is well and good for Objectivists, who have, we expect, solutions tailor-made for those problems.
The reason why I don't recommend this approach is simple: if societies are organisms, and organisms which acquire pathologies, they are far fewer than human individuals. To think that we have a reasonable catalogue of individual human maladies is somewhat of a stretch despite the incredible count of cases; to suspect that the small population of human societies has exhausted its possible pathologies in 'white supremacy', 'liberalism', 'fascism', 'elitism' and so on, is laughable.
Yet, it is probably true enough that what is wrong with America (or her sister, at least) is that she has caught a nasty case of communism. However, the known cures for communism don't at all look like cures -- and it's not at all true that our communism looks like the others, exactly. After all, if it did, it would have been diagnosed much quicker than it was.
If indeed, America has caught a novel communism, it might be that it infects the blood instead of the lungs - viruses are very adaptable things and based on adaptations might be able to infect almost any cell. One might get a different communism based on the origin of the infection, and so on. The worst part is that even if we had a vaccine, an anti-virus, or some other kind of cure, it isn't even certain we'd be able to administer it from the inside.
Worst of all, all of the immune system seems to have been compromised, for the most part, to the production of more of this virus, and even the uninfected parts seem unable to clean out infected areas.
So we resort to one of our methods above; we will look at symptoms, their origins, and treatments. Communism is largely a self-reinforcing and mutating pathogen; treatment for the 1917 variety isn't going to work on the 2020 variety. Thus we're at square one.
We know where we are though, and that is how to begin.