New York and Perpetual War
When everyone goes to your house, they shoot up in your room
Most of them are beautiful, but so obsessed with gloom
I didn't come here lookin' for no fix, ah-ah no
I been houndin' your streets all night long, late baby
Just lookin' for a kiss
God love David Johansen
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New York is an amazing city, the Rome of imperial America. In the long history of nations, the US isn't young anymore. Though still quite impressive in many ways, it has a feeling of being very long in the tooth in many other. US roots lie in the Agrarian Age, our government structure beyond archaic at this point. Once key to American dynamism, our old republican institutions are now a drag, an ever more destructive force really.
New York was there at the beginning and as any good Arendtian can tell you, foundational freedom is the ability to begin. Funnily, coursing Manhattan, this was the first time I really was aware the history of the city flows, architecturally, north from the southern tip of Manhattan. This was a colonial seaport. Today, walking along the rivers, it's hard to imagine for most of its existence NY was a working port lined with wharves from top to bottom, now, as is recent practice across the globe, they are all turned into shops and entertainment.
Union Square, east/west in the middle of the island, has managed to stay open space from the beginning. It has four statues set in an ancient way to points on the compass. Washington - south, Lincoln - north, and strangely enough a fountain dedicated to health and charity, looking a lot like Virgin and child to the west.
However, on the east is the best figure, Lafayette, like a French Quetzalcoatl arriving from the east to bestow independence. I know my fellow Americans aren't much for history, but without French assistance, lord help us, we may still very well be part of Britain. This year is the two-hundred year anniversary of Lafayette's triumphant return tour of the republic he helped found. He insisted on visiting the Erie canal, the then young republic's first great public works project.
At the center of the square's compass sits a bronze replica of the founding declaration wrapped with a quote by its author, "Countrymen know what precious blessings they are in possession of and which no other people on earth enjoy." It was erected in 1926, when there were still numerous countrymen in the know, very few today have any reckoning of what they once possessed.
The growth of this small republic into global empire has never been less than historically exceptional, though not unprecedented. The Roman republic, history again, grew from the banks of the Tiber to control the whole Mediterranean, much of its last decades conquering the same Middle East territory the US has spent the last three decades blowing-up.
Lost to, or maybe its lost with history, is the lesson: the empire Rome conquered destroyed the republic. Most essentially, the imperial economy that grew and the politics it created gradually saw the old republican institutions fail completely in controlling, in holding power accountable in any way. In fact just the opposite, the empire the republic conquered – culturally, politically, and economically – crushed Rome's republican ways.
Today, the US encounters the same thing. One example, a completely out of control presidency, letting loose various rabid hounds of war across the globe. Each president is worst than the last, which is somewhat of a trick when you had Trump I, followed by an even worse Biden, and now a new bottom reached with Trump II.
We can't say we weren't warned about such matters. Madison wrote in Federalist 41, "Next to the effectual establishment of the Union, the best possible precaution against danger from standing armies is a limitation of the term for which revenue may be appropriated to their support."
This republic, not officially at war, or maybe more accurately at war with anyone deemed an enemy by the person who sits in the oval office, has a perpetual war budget now reaching over $1 trillion annually. It is challenged by no one in DC, no DOGE labeled corruption to be found here, in fact, for most of DC, it's the goose laying the golden eggs. Take for example Peter Thiel, another foreign born tech-scavenger, ripping at the putrid corpse of the American body politic. Sheesh, at this point, not even our natavist ICE can boot the right people. Peter who? Exactly. Yves has a good piece.
Mr. Lincoln's bloodily forged union isn't going anywhere soon. This republic, the of the people, by the people, for the people, that most democratic ethos Mr. Lincoln used to consecrate his most infamously cruel battle, well, let's say it's in critical condition.
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