Novus Ordo Seclorum

William Timberman

Along with many others, I’ve long thought and said as much here and elsewhere that Americans would have a difficult time adjusting to the end of post-war US hegemony and the rise of a multipolar world order. It now seems fair to say that the re-election of Donald Trump makes that hard-core recalcitrance a certainty. And when you start finding things like this on the Internet, it’s probably also fair to say that none of that pig-headedness will go down well with what our previous leaders have been pleased to call The International Community:

A map of the united states with the words " dumbfuckkistan " written in it.

2 thoughts on “Novus Ordo Seclorum”

  1. bystander January 9, 2025 / 4:27 pm

    Yeah; nope, it probably won’t. From the NYTimes:

    “The House on Thursday passed legislation that would impose sanctions on officials at the International Criminal Court, making a frontal assault on the tribunal in a rebuke of its move to charge top Israeli leaders with war crimes for their offensive against Hamas in Gaza.”

    Meteor 2028 gets my vote if there is anything left.

    Reply
    • William Timberman January 9, 2025 / 5:24 pm

      There’s a line from an old Bob Dylan song: “I pity the poor immigrant when his gladness comes to pass.” Like all of Dylan’s imagery, it’s poetically ambiguous to a fault, with a direct conduit to the muse that governs all things truly visionary. What I took it to mean at the time—at the pinnacle of American prosperity, and therefore smugness, with the Vietnam War poised to reveal just how much of that prosperity was built on lies—was that the huddled masses of Emma Lazarus’s poem had finally gotten what they came here for. They were safe, they were free, they had bank accounts. For the most part, though, they were also in the suburbs, where they somehow encountered sterility and soul-sucking emptiness, and it curdled them, turned them nasty and covetous. And yes, I’d seen plenty of this firsthand, and knew it was real, but I also knew that it wasn’t an occasion to blame anyone, it was instead an invitation to go elsewhere and do something else with my life.

      Now, a couple of generations later, immigrant has a different connotation altogether. The dyspepsia so evident in the late Sixties has mutated into something far more virulent, and it seems to have finally tipped the country into the abyss that was always waiting right at the end of the driveway. All of this, of course, is a generalization, and one doesn’t have to look too hard to find Americans of all ages and circumstances who don’t deserve to be included in it. Still, I think Dylan was right. Pity is as appropriate an emotion as anger when confronted with what’s become of us, and appropriate or not, it’s an emotion more likely to help us stay grounded when we try to avoid the worst of what’s undoubtedly coming.

      Reply

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