The American Culture (Part 2)

May 12th 2025

Dear Gabriel.

Thanks so much for your thoughts. In the last few weeks, I have been thinking about some of the things you wrote, especially the links between this time and other times in history, the similarities and differences, but also all kinds of blind spots that occur and how we deal with this partial, contemporary blindness. What do we NOT see? What is impossible for us to fathom, just because we´re standing too close to it. Trumps wish to remake colonialism, as you write, and the difficulties in not only understanding his motives and actions, but in trying to grasp what an empire is, how it acts when cornered, when given strength, when collapsing or panicking. Capitalism has been a kind of semi-hidden way of colonization – I mean hidden because capitalism needs to erase the connection between things; wealth and misery, eternal growth and the laws of physics, monopolization and concentration of power and powerlessness – why do you think the rhetoric of today seems to be regressive? What are the connections between poverty and anger, and how has this anger been hijacked by demagogs, oligarchs and dictators? What is the transaction here? It´s easy to blame Trump supporters (or FRP-voters) for being stupid and politically inept, but aren´t things like knowledge, education and conscience privileges? I mean, the complexity of politics, economy, history – how can one expect a poor, uneducated person in a low-income job be expected to have the time to dwell, study, think about and understand such complexities? If you don´t think about unions, laws, the tilted power relations between owners and workers – connections – then what you see is: Someone took my job. They´re Mexican. Must get rid of Mexicans, then.

You write about everything that´s under the surface until it isn´t. Your country – and all our American continent – is a place full of guilt and debt. Old things left behind. I would love to hear more about the relationship between the legacy of slavery, settler colonialism, genocide and human trafficking. How are these things implanted in the DNA of the US? How do you, as a nation define yourselves in relationship to these things? What are the educational guidelines, and how are they changing?

So many things to talk about, my friend. Fear. Echoes. The role of art, of critical thinking, of how history moves.

The sun is shining, today I’ve been listening to this strange live album by Adrienne Lenker, one of my favorite songwriters. The novel is coming to an end, I think, hope. I try to keep an eye on what´s going on, but there´s so much tension, so much cruelty and grotesque gestures everywhere. I play drums, make music, sing. It helps. Yesterday I read some paragraphs from GG Marquez The Autumn of The Patriarch and stumbled upon this:

(...) and yet we didn’t believe it now that it was, and not because we really didn’t believe it but because we no longer wanted it to be true, we had ended up not understanding what would become of us without him, what would become of our lives after him

and I thought about why our continent is so enamored with dictators, strong men, landowners, power figures: Estrada Cabrera, Somoza, Pinochet, Varela, the Batistas, the Duvaliers, but also the Hearts, the McCarthys, the Pedro Paramos that have reigned, big or small, throughout the Americas for such a long time.

A big hug from Askøy, Gabe.

P

10th of June 2025

Dear Pedro,

Thank you sincerely for your patience. I am so sorry that it took me so long to get back to you. Even though I couldn't reply, your letter was on my mind the whole while. Here's the reason this is so late: At the beginning of May I was gripped with a foreboding that things here could fall apart very quickly, making it somehow impossible to see my family and friends, scattered rather far and wide in the country, and I wanted especially to see my daughter in Los Angeles before some catastrophe barred me from doing so. It felt urgent.

So I dropped everything (including this correspondence and several other translation and poetry projects) and for the past four weeks I've driven in my hybrid car about 13,000 kilometers across much of the United States to visit friends and family, sleeping in my car, hiking on mountain sides and in river valleys, once sleeping in a sister's driveway with her fig trees, and talking to people in forests and cities. I drove from Illinois down to the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina in the southeast of the country, then up to Minnesota and the Dakotas in the north, and across the plains of Montana in the Rockies and Sawtooths of Idaho and out through the Cascades and then into the Olympic Mountains in the northwest, camping and hiking that whole way, then down the Pacific cordillera on the west coast through the mountains and coastal towns of Oregon down the Klamath River and Redwood Highways, all the way down the Sierras into the canyons and streets of Los Angeles, camping and sleeping in national forests and state parks and Walmart parking lots and the occasional airbnb (and sister's drive).

And then on the way back to Illinois I drove back across the Rockies and up into the Black Hills to visit an Indigenous holy site that people have loved for ten thousand years, all the while just trying to talk to as many people, and as many kinds of people, as I could, feeling what it felt like in rest stops and gas stations, trying to get a sense as to what people were experiencing and feeling. And here's what I want you to know: I've never been so fucking frightened to be in America in my whole life. And this is one scary place in any given year. I went armed on this trip -- as in I took a semi-automatic handgun (for which I'm licensed) and kept weapons close in places. And not because of [the racist stereotypes about] people of color [and crime] but because of white people. White dudes. White people are unusually weird and scary right now. And it's not surprising to me.

Part of my decision to set off on a road trip was informed by the possibly magical hope that somehow if I could stitch my body through many different places across this country, I could also, to disrupt that metaphor a little, slip inside some shroud of understanding about whatever the fuck is happening here.

And I got back home only a few nights ago and have since then been resting and trying to understand all that I saw and experienced. Because it was a lot. And I've never been more scared to be in America: it feels bad right now. So that's what I've been up to -- and I just wanted briefly to tell you what that journey was like. Just as a weird artsy older white guy who likes people and hates what whiteness does to people. Whiteness is a really bad condition. Supremacists think it's an actual thing that needs to be defended. What's wrong with this country is whiteness itself. The thing that is wrong with this country is the very thing that people like Trump think the country needs more of. There is no other cure for what's wrong with America except killing the idea and practice of whiteness. I straight up agree with Kehinde Andrews, whiteness is a pathology.

I say this because, as it happens, I left Los Angeles a week ago after a once-in-a-lifetime visit with my daughter Clio, who is in her mid-twenties and who works for a union as an organizer on a campaign to unionize Warner Brothers studios, trying to organize the last class of laborers in Hollwood still without union representation. And Clio showed me around her bustling and pedestrian and very gay West Hollywood neighborhood, from Santa Monica Boulevard to Runyon Canyon (where we talked with a German-accented music producer named Rolf) and the stunning art collections at LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art). And only two nights ago upon my return to Illinois, in the center of the country, a week after leaving LA, I learned that Trump just ordered 2,000 National Guard troops and doubled that tonight after adding 700 Marines to that contingent yesterday, all onto the streets of LA in the pretense that the city is a lawless brown cesspool. And as a result of those provocations protestors in LA are now burning Waymos on Arcadia and Alameda not far, from my perspective, from where my daughter lives. She promises me she will not go to a protest without taking adequate precautions ... and will not go alone.

Anyway, I hoped that as I traveled to see friends and family, before whatever curtain seems like it might fall across American life soon, I could also somehow, by driving around the countryside and talking to people, fathom or understand the mood or moods of the people, and in that way possibly assuage, or somehow put into perspective, some of the terror and rage that I and others have been feeling.

Because it's been terrifying and disorienting here to watch the dismantling of the world's largest economy from the inside: watching the effects of the inane tarrifs put in place by an incompetent madman with a fundamental misunderstanding as to how human trade works, or human commitment and relations work, watching the roads emptied of shipping, watching prices rise and hundreds of thousands of skilled and necessary workers being laid off from federal jobs, watching the gutting of critical departments regulating many aspects of our public lives, including the environmental safety standards that protect our food and water supplies, watching the defunding of the arts (except those that "celebrate the greatness of America"), watching the diminishment of the bodily sovereignty of women, the defunding of scientific research of all kinds, the closure of laboratories, the removal of billions of dollars in funding from major and minor research universities, using AI scrapers to detect and then detain and/or deport students who write pro-Palestinian articles for student newspapers, the purposeful incitement of paranoia about being surveilled, the revoking of student visas en masse (which has affected my university and countless others seismically), using AI to scour electronic communications to determine who is pro-Trump and who anti-Trump, throwing tourists in prison "accidentally" -- just the utter chaos and incompetence of it all, the unbelievable disregard and arrogance, the stupidity of it, and now the brazen pretence at urgency in order to deploy military forces against mostly brown and Black US citizens, which is happening now in Los Angeles, such that Trump is even now threatening, as of yesterday, that "We're gonna have troops everywhere." Everywhere. Tell me this will not incite people to rage. It's enraging just to think about. And he knows it. You bet I'll be in the streets, and so will my 92 year old mom.

But as I was driving, Pedro, before a lot of this stuff had happened in LA, I thought a great deal about this particular part of your letter: "What do we NOT see? What is impossible for us to fathom .... the difficulties in not only understanding his [Trump's] motives and actions, but in trying to grasp what an empire is ...."

Because, as you seem to suggest, an empire is most effective when its people are blind to its workings and its histories, blind to its cons, its misdirections, and blinded and tantalized by its spectacles. You ask "why is our rhetoric of today so regressive?" and I cannot help but notice that when a government is captured and becomes a system for privatizing public wealth, its rhetoric must camouflage that effort. Hence a sexist and alcoholic Fox Entertainment propagandist (Pete Hegseth) is placed in charge of the world's largest and most lethal military, while a former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment, whose most memorable innovation was the mass marketing of wrestling action figure dolls for children, is placed in charge of the Department of Education, and an antivax crank and anti-scientifc charlatan (Robert F Kennedy Jr) is put in charge of the largest bureacracy ever to fund and support the world's most extensive efforts at medical research. All of this is so unbelievably enraging to anyone paying attention, which, weirdly, amounts to about only a third of the adult population in the US: about 2 out of 3 adults in the United States watch Fox News. That's the other thing that I've come to feel among many people I ran across in my travels: it's not so much that people are stupid, but it's clear that many of them are victims and targets of profound and extensive informational and ideological warfare. I met several Trump supporters this trip ... and they were ALL glued to their phones in a kind of a wraith-like way. Golem and precious.

And so as I drove and hiked and woke up blinking in Walmart parking lots, I thought of your letter in light of the miracle and the necessity and the difficulty of human organization, and how the ways we organize ourselves as human beings in relation to one another (whether as subjects or objects, indigenous or colonizers, cooperators or competitors) are dependent on how we conceive of what a human being is, and as I considered your letter and your questions about empire and the United States, I kept thinking about Edmund Husserl's student Edith Stein's Gesellschaft / Gemeinschaft distinction, and how in the United States, for the most part, what we have is chiefly Gesellschaft with some smattering, here and there, of Gemeinschaft.

In a Gesellschaft, as a social collection, people treat one another as objects, and their relationships to one another are instrumentalized and transactional: they see one another as means to an end, not as ends in themselves. And that is what we have in the United States, an economy founded historically on the instrumentalization of human beings: not simply in the past with human slavery, but even now, to this day, 150 years after the forced demise of slavery, we as citizens are still instrumentalized: our very desires for health and education are extorted by our very own government. We here in the United States are not taken care of, we are taken from. Since the mid-1970s there has been in America a predatory student lending structure that today generates about 40% of all government revenue: 40 percent of all the money coming into the government as a revenue maker is made by using predatory and fraudulent student loans. That is a stunning fact that no one seems to be able to fathom. Biden moved to forgive them all. It was blocked. Unbelievable.

I mean, what is more fucking Gesellschaft than purposefully using government mandated predatory student lending to entrap people in debt for the rest of their lives? That is what happens here. That is partly why Trump is in power. Trump denied ALL of the public service loan forgiveness recipients: they were public servants, that was part of the contract: we serve ten years, it's all forgiven. Trump: break contracts, demand payment. What is more Gesellschaft than having no universal public healthcare system, such that literally 40% of all Americans are hampered by medical debt? I have several friends and family members with massive medical debt, where having a baby at a hospital can cost tens of thousands of dollars. It costs us more as a society to not have universal health care than would cost to have it. A few years ago a close friend of mine got sick (you know her, C***), well, C***i got sick because she has an auto-immune disorder, and she had to be hospitalized for three-days as we visited with each other in Madison, Wisconsin, and she was put on an antibiotic drip. That stay cost her $45,000 after insurance.

In a Gemeinschaft, according to Stein, human beings encounter one another as subjects and are linked by a "bond of solidarity." Members of a Gemeinschaft are open (geöffnet) toward one another and let their "attitudes and evaluations penetrate one another" and exercise "their mutual influence on each other."

That is not what we have in the United States. In the United States, our very government extorts our health and our education from us. The private corporations that were seconded by the federal government to run these student lending programs have bilked and defrauded and overcharged students for decades, tens of thousands of dollars per student, I was overcharged $125K -- as in was forced to pay that -- on a $33K loan. And would have had to pay $57K more except it was then forgiven by Biden.These student loan companies have lost tens of billions of dollars in lawsuits brought by former students in recent years -- but for those corporations, being sued by citizens is still worth the cost, because though they have lost tens of billions in those lawsuits, the industry has ultimately defrauded hundreds of billions, if not trillions of dollars, from former students in the last 40 years. So, crime pays. I have my own personal horror story here about student debt, as does nearly every friend and colleague I know in America. I lost my house to student loan debt fraud and went out of my way to ensure that my daughter would have no such debt. To be American is now, almost by definition, to be saddled with massive debt and to be afraid and insecure and always feeling on the edge -- the precarity is the point -- and we are told that it's our fault for getting sick or wanting an education. Like, it's raw neoliberalism of the early nasty German kind.

So, to your point: What you are all watching happen in the United States is a direct result of our history of colonizing ourselves, treating ourselves as objects, as instruments of revenue. Yes, capitalism wants a colony of cheap workers. Yes, it wants to immiserate people so they will work for a pittance. But it also, in order to work at peak efficiency, needs to convince the people trapped in its system, that the problem isn't the structures in which they find themselves trapped: the problem is rather their inability to pull themselves out of the holes they've each been placed in. It's their fault. It's WILD to see the psychological distortions that certain economic systems cause. This tawdry economy that Trump has inherited and then tried to renovate doesn't work because Trump (and the right wing) doesn't understand that an economy isn't competition, it's cooperation.

I saw recently hanging on a public wall on a bulletin board in an elementary school (for students ages 5 to 11) here in America, in the small rural prairie town of Heyworth, Illinois, a little row of hand mirrors at about the height of a child's face, and beside each mirror was a little sign that read, "This is the person responsible for your success."

The evil of that lie is so sweet, so encouraging. So much emphasis is placed on individual toughness here that when people fail here (because they are ill, or poor, or children, or Black or brown or female or trans or simply human) we tell them it is their fault or their parents' fault, and when people succeed here they are encouraged to convince themselves that their success isn't because they are wealthy or had the privilege to grow up with peace and quiet and the time and solitude to concentrate and to think and study and as a result were better in school and maybe they were white or male or otherwise lucky, or because their father gave them $400M, but instead they are encouraged to believe it's because they are just innately better, they are smarter and genetically superior and somehow just worked harder for it. We are trapped here in fundamental attribution error. And the most violent ones in this system are the people who have no easy excuse: when white men fail they don't have an excuse that doesn't break their ideological framework (that it's the capitalism, stupid, the whiteness stupid), so instead they blame the freeloading people of color or socialism.
So everyone here in America right now, it seems, has to deal somehow with this implicit imperative here to be tough and competitive, not thoughtful and cooperative. Rural white men here often buy "glasspack" devices designed to cause their cars and motorcycles to make a roaring sound, so traffic here in towns of all size now sounds like lions and bison. The iconic American vehicle, the Harley Davidson motorcycle, a machine so cherished by right-wing men that they don ritual costumes in order to ride it, is so loud that it damages the hearing of its riders. People here try to scare others so as to feel less afraid themselves. It's like everyone here -- and this is how it feels in west Texas and Wyoming and the Dakotas -- has a swagger right now and it's super creepy. During my trip I kept seeing on the roads and highways, especially in rural areas, the Marvel Comics "Punisher" logo on the rear windows of pickups: the Punisher logo is a scary-looking skull-shaped logo meant to evoke a white vigilante named Frank Castle, who uses torture and extra-judicial murder to avenge himself and put things in order, and the Punisher logo resembles the Nazi SS Totenkopf symbol. This death's head image, the Punisher logo, is everwhere here. I saw it everywhere on this trip. I saw it on cars, on t-shirts, on baseball caps, and on military special forces patches.

And that is frankly the thing I felt most on this road trip: fear. Everyone's. I felt more afraid on this road trip than I have ever felt traveling in the US. I'm not a gun lover but I was relieved several times that I had a pistol with me in my car. And that's as a weird white man of Scandinavian descent: think about what it is like to be a person of color here, or a woman, or a trans person, or anyone who looks or acts different. There's a far more bullying atmosphere here, all over, now. Significantly, I felt most afraid in Wyoming, in the Dakotas and in Montana, all in rural areas whose history is most defined by white male aggression and crime, by resource extraction and genocidal massacre, regions which are currently filled with "man camps," which are large camps composed predominantly of white men working in remote areas as employees in resource extraction industries, especially oil and gas. Man camps are all over the Dakotas and Wyoming and Montana, and they are associated with human trafficking and the rape and murder of Indigenous women. The MMIW (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women movement) arose in response to the advent of man camps in these areas.

Because of this pervasive atmosphere of fear here, people don't do strange or relaxing things in public much anymore. They used to. That's one thing I have noticed. It's rare to see people eating at rest stops or doing yoga or exercising at rest stops or reading at campsites or in campgrounds now. Which are all reasonable things to do. I rarely see people flying kites in parks anymore. People at rest stops travel hastily from their cars to the rest rooms and back to their cars. The use of public space here has declined markedly. Just being outside of a vehicle in certain places in public can make someone feel vulnerable here. In certain regions in America, due to how fear functions in different landscapes, the American human being feels something akin to nakedness when it is outside of a vehicle or a building, but I know without a doubt that there are places where one's whiteness or non-whiteness make it impossible to feel safe. White people here will sometimes remark how "it's a cultural thing" that people of color don't go camping and hiking very much. No, it's not a cultural thing. It's that people of color here are literally afraid of getting lynched or attacked or are just tired of being called names.

That is not an exaggeration. One of my heroes is Devin Brown of Minneapolis, Minnesota, a Black woman who is determined to paddle the length of the nearly 4,000 kilometer Mississippi River by herself in a kayak, starting in Lake Itasca, Minnesota, at the edge of the White Earth Reservation, near to my home town, the largest Indigenous reservation in Minnesota, and ending in New Orleans. She has tried a few times now. In an interview published in May 2024 she tells a Minnesota journalist, "I have been called racial slurs on the river. Most recently, I was doing a race in Mora, Minnesota and someone just outwardly yelled 'You don't belong here'. And for them, I absolutely belong here."

So it was a scary trip, even for a white guy it was scary. I felt safest in West Hollywood with my daughter and where everyone was gay and it was awesome and Minnesota and the Olympic peninsula in Washington state. I felt the least safe in northeastern Wyoming and certain parts of Montana and the Dakotas. I was always glad I had a gun. And that is not normal. I don't go around carrying a gun. But this trip I did. Just seemed prudent. And it proved comforting.

Anyway, I hope this helps you understand what's going on here. This place is a wreck. It feels riddled with a weird white anger. It's wealthy but rotten with bad ideology and has been thoroughly corrupted by oligarchs since 2010 (Citizens United v FEC) through and through. And we chain ourselves to debt economies, wherein our debt itself becomes a major source of revenue for the government ... I mean, it's not good if our collective immiseration redounds to the profit of the US government. We are being preyed up, quite blatantly, by oligarchy and whiteness, and it's been this way for a while. It's always been here but it gets louder at different times and it's pretty loud right now.

I wonder when it is that those little kids looking in the mirrors near Heyworth, Illinois first start seeing the Totenkopf / Punisher image when they look at who is responsible for their success.

Anyway, thank you for this conversation, Pedro, and your questions.
Warmly med vennlig hilsen y abrazos,

Gabriel