You look around this country, this beautiful, sprawling, and completely fucked-up experiment called America, and you see the strangest goddamn things. You see people living lives that are a quiet, smoldering dumpster fire. They’re fifty years old, making twenty bucks an hour if they’re lucky, living in some rented shithole, maybe got five baby daddies scattered across the county like dandelion seeds. Their own house is a mess, their own life is a testament to a series of spectacularly bad decisions.
And yet, they have opinions. Loud ones. About politics. About the President. About the goddamn geopolitical situation in the Middle East.
And you just have to stand there, with your drink in your hand, and wonder, How? How can you have a goddamn opinion on anything beyond the overflowing pile of dirty laundry in your own bedroom? How can you pontificate on the fate of the nation when you can’t even figure out how to keep your own lights on? This town, Tucson, it’s a beautiful, sun-baked armpit, a quiet, sprawling testament to the slow creep of the third world into the first. Shit on the streets, crumbling roads, junkies nodding off in the doorways. And these people, living right in the middle of it, they’re worried about Trump?
It’s amazing. It’s beautiful. And it’s completely fucking insane.
You think about the setup. Born in America. Free education up to high school. Community college practically given away like free samples at Costco. No army kicking down your door. Cops who, for the most part, are just trying to get through their shift without getting shot. All the goddamn tools laid out on the table for you. And you spend fifty years on this planet, in the richest, freest country in the history of the world, and the best you can manage is fifty grand a year? How is that even possible? What does that say about your own goddamn effort, your own capabilities?
I meet these people. They’re smoking so much dope they can barely string a sentence together, but they can give you a ten-minute, passionate, and completely incoherent lecture on why the President is a Nazi. Where the hell are they getting this shit? Who is feeding them these lines?
Because that’s the only explanation, isn’t it? We’re not in control anymore. We’re puppets. Beautiful, stupid, and completely oblivious puppets, dancing on strings we can’t even see. We’re being fed shit, directly into our heads, a constant, intravenous drip of beautiful, toxic, and completely manufactured outrage.
They keep us distracted. They keep us angry. They keep us pointing fingers at each other, while the real crooks, the ones in the quiet rooms with the clean suits, they’re picking our goddamn pockets clean. It’s been going on for so long now, it’s not even about ideas anymore. It’s tribal. You can’t talk to anyone. You try to have a real conversation, and they just start screeching the party line, like a goddamn parrot with Tourette’s.
You look at California, that beautiful, sun-kissed graveyard of the American Dream. The governor, a man with the charisma of a used car salesman and the morals of a rattlesnake, he’s presided over the slow-motion demolition of a whole state. And they love him. Why? Because he says the right words. He hates the right people. It doesn’t matter that he’s a psychopath; he’s their psychopath. You ask one of these believers, “What’s your resume? Who the hell are you to have an opinion?” And you find out they’re just some broke, bitter, Baby Boomer piece of shit who’s never accomplished a goddamn thing in their life except maybe keeping their own liver alive. They’re the quiet, grey majority of the mediocre, and they’ve finally found a flag to rally under.
You see them protesting on a Wednesday morning. Who the hell are these people? Who’s paying them? How do they get the day off work? They’re screaming about human rights in Palestine. You ask them, “What about the human rights of the baby in the womb?” And they just stare at you, their eyes blank. Error 404: inconvenient truth not found. You ask them how “systemic racism” is the reason their seven-year-old kid is running wild in the streets at ten o’clock at night. And they just change the subject.
It’s like the goddamn Matrix. Everyone thinks they have free will, but they’re all just reciting the same lines, marching in the same direction, plugged into the same beautiful, comfortable, and completely soul-crushing machine. Are we even as smart as we think we are? Or are we just sophisticated monkeys who’ve learned how to parrot the opinions that keep us safe in the tribe?
You see a woman, maybe she’s had three husbands, five baby daddies, lives in a shithole, smells like stale cigarettes and regret. And she’s yelling at the television, telling the President of the United States that he’s stupid. How do you not soak your own goddamn feet before you open your mouth? You’ve got your hoodie on, you’ve spent your whole life working some shitty fifty-grand-a-year job that’s amounted to nothing but a pile of bills and a bad back, and you’re calling him dumb?
It’s beautiful. It’s perfect. And it’s completely insane.
The news isn’t the news anymore. It’s the ministry of propaganda. Two hundred channels all pushing the same narrative, the same quiet, respectable, and completely bullshit version of reality. And then you’ve got Fox News, the one lonely voice screaming in the wilderness. God bless ’em, but they’re just as brainwashed in their own way, just with a little more common sense mixed in.
It’s like the movie. Red pill or blue pill? Do you want the truth, the hard, ugly, beautiful, and completely inconvenient truth? Or do you want the steak? The beautiful, comfortable, and completely fraudulent lie that tastes so good on the way down?
I sit down with people, I show them the goddamn spreadsheets. The ones that prove if you don’t have a million dollars by the time you retire, you’re fucked. The ones that show you won’t be able to afford the healthcare, the nursing home, the quiet, respectable death they promised you. You’ll be a burden. You’ll die in a shithole, smelling of piss and regret.
And they look at me, with their quiet, clear, and completely dead eyes, and they say, “I’m okay with that.”
Just like Cypher in the goddamn movie. They know the steak isn’t real. They know it’s just a program, a simulation fed into their brain cells. But it tastes good. And they want to go back.
Take me back into the Matrix. Plug me back into the machine. Let me eat the steak.
And that, my friend, that’s the final, beautiful, ugly, and completely heartbreaking answer to your question.
What’s wrong with America?
We’ve fallen in love with the lie. We’ve chosen the blue pill. And we’re slowly, quietly, and respectably dying in our sleep, dreaming of a steak that was never real in the first place.
