Lebensraum

The failures of systemic protection are spoken of by the language of “corruption”, as though there were some active evil committed in the countless cases spoken of by the journalist moralist. The American prejudice of bureaucracy has always been such, an arbitrary moral code externalizing common, everyday parts of doing business in any industry, at any level, as though they’re “not us”, the purview solely of the slavic and oriental despots, unspeakably foreign to the tongues and hands of the anglophone world. The obvious falsehood of this aside, the subjects interviewed are always speaking doubly within the text produced, pointing towards something which truly can be considered as corruption, though in a far different fashion.

The language of corruption here is one of a diseased other infection a healthy organism, an inky outside breaking in, flooded into a pure enclosure. Within however, the text speaks doubly as the subjects enclosed within the journalist’s intent, speak of corruption as a spreading plague of absence. The infection is never an alien ink substance, but a spreading of necrotic tissue through the corpus, cell death caused by one remote machination or another. The corpus degrades from within - tissue hallowed out to become spongious, the once solid now perforated with ever-growing emptiness of its substance, the exterior observer pushing on the surface only for their finger to sink in effortlessly.

The language of a positive plague isn’t quite wrong, however, though its truth is far above the heads of the journalistic commentators on the topic. The necrotic corpus sits heavy and burdensome over the landscape, the rotten body of the tyrant weighing, even in its weak, diseased flesh, barely able to move on its own, still present, resting heavy over what should be free and open for new life to flourish on the open landscape. 

Various philias afflict in cope at the stinking rot resting atop the homeland. The self-help section at any bookstore is a schizophrenic barrage of international promises, mainly Japan and Scandinavia, as the idols of “perfect living”. White Californians flee their genetic home to chase spectral stereotypes of Japanese tradwives and Korean boytoys, domestic institutions sit stinking and unused, medicine rotting in its blisterpacks as the sick flee across the ocean for the shit that really works. The necrotic flesh provides no comfort, delivers on no promises, yet it still takes up space, if only as an obstacle.

The American Dream is not dead, but those who chased it are. Manifested destiny now sits across the entirety of the land, territory divided up a century ago, the institutions built in an orgiastic spectacle of construction now settled in to gradually fail as they were always meant to, slowly dying, with no one to put them out of their misery. The condition of the current generation of youth is in endless contemplation of dead flesh, young people trapped in the waiting room, their lives put on hold until the petty middle class fortunes of their grandparents can be liquidated and used to start a life of their own. It’s not that America is lacking in wealth, but that the wealth is rotten and useless. A great agricultural bounty is spent on tacky breastaurents and video poker machines, the enormous infrastructure of the past century crumbling as more and more hands begin to desperately cling to it.

The desire of the youth is a desire for Living Space, in its properly continental-colonial usage. The promise of the United States, of great bounties of wealth never died, it’s not as though the ore deposits are all dried up and the farmland has all gone fallow, but its wealth is currently occupied by a great corpus of dead flesh. The need for American renewal is a need often confused with a desire for justice or revolution, every specific type of person having their own particularized narrative of violence suited to their identity, though this is masking the deeper desire of the youth - the death-drive of cleansing. In the dreams of every young person is a violent fantasy of soap, maggots, cauterization, excision - a dream of the beast of dead flesh being cleared out and the frontier being made open once again.