America is circling the drain and Donald Trump is pissing on it so it goes quicker. I set up a wall of cellphones in a five-star hotel room and they are all playing short form video content. People yelling in their cars that their country is going to hell as jets sonic boom overhead. Footage of riot cops, police brutality, burning shopping malls, tanks driving through crowds, crying celebrities, drone shots of ruined cities, empty shelves at gun stores and nuclear weapons tests by the Armed American Resistance. I eat oysters from a big dish filled with ice, thinking of the wide range of decisions that spiralled away from the present like roots, disparate events that would end up connecting together into larger and larger themes, culminating in the collapse of the nation.
In the history of the world, the United States was here but for a moment, not even five hundred years old. Barely more than a pup, the United States had burned itself out by being the world’s best country. Let’s think for a moment of its great achievements. They landed on the moon. They invented Microsoft Windows 98. They answered the question of what if you fed everybody corn all the time. They will be missed. No more will you walk through the streets of a European city and hear an American shouting at somebody stood right next to them. People the world over will no longer be able to watch skits from Saturday Night Live, or even Jimmy Fallon, and we’ll also really miss hearing the accent on YouTube videos.
That isn’t to say the people in the area known as the United States would disappear. On the contrary, many would flee back to their ancestral home of the Scottish Highlands. Canada, Mexico and Cuba would take their share of refugees, as would the rest of the world. The sudden swell of asylum seekers lived in camps as the countries media would decide their fate, and homeless ex-Americans would fill the streets of major cities. Some would start working collectively on criminal enterprises as the nation they had ended up in had no interest in accommodating them, with groups of Americans tending to buy property close together, not learning the local language, smoking and selling marijuana they rescued from back home. Many would also stay in the land that was the United States, though the memory of it would fade with time, it would turn to smoke staining a surface, bearing no semblance to what it had been, and instead the stain would be how it would be thought of. What word will precede America? Ancient Rome, Victorian England, Nazi Germany – or would it be just good ol’ fashioned, root beer drinkin’, burger eatin’, baseball playin’, gun shootin’, mother fuckin’ United States of America?
As time passes, the concept of the U.S. will become more and more warped, with cowboys riding down Wall Street as the World Trade Centre collapses behind them being the main mental picture someone has when you say ‘America’. Until then there are the memories of its survivors. Very few images would remain, especially as none had been printed in the last two decades, and any actual photographs and videos would be percolated into an idealised image of America generated by an AI for a child’s class project. Very quickly the U.S. would become a myth, a cliché used to suggest the next Empire of Earth is collapsing, the Stars and Stripes would be mutated and mangled over time until it is unrecognisable, America would cease to be.
Until that point I have a front row seat with an XL coke and
an automatic rifle, and I was the kind of guy that liked to watch the credits.
I light some DMT in a glass pipe with a hundred dollar bill. Go back to the
disaster screen. Look across at the statue of Shiva with the skull of Walt
Disney mounted on it. See out the window that the city has become like a
painting by Bruegel, The Triumph Of Death. I look at the hotel ceiling and the
light blossoms, pulling a curtain to one side. The corpse of America begins to scream.
