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"States only administrate, while democracies govern."
-- Chairman Apo



What exactly has happened?

Is it an isolated and temporary deviation?

Can blame be placed solely on an inglorious narcissism?

I have played in the e-USA for a long time. I have travelled the New World far and wide. I have written many articles. This e-country often induced in me, a friend and lover of its every city, tree, lake, mountain and prairie, and of all its tribes and people, a sense of vertigo.

I have a simple, and somewhat worrisome, observation that I'd like to share at this juncture.






The story begins long ago.

Upon hearing it, one might start to ponder that the position of thinking that a "self" or "avatar" as a USAnian in the New World means a unique kind of player, perhaps, reflecting our national aspirations, perhaps as an upholder of democratic values in a gaming context, or even as a loyal friend of those who are maybe in default for abandoning the ideological quest for a world-historic horizontal anarcho-syndicalism across national boundaries, in the manner of our own Bookchin. None of this has ever been quite "natural" for the strange country that is called, somewhat bombastically, America nor for its e-reflection.

It is easy to miss the fact that the inclusion of the e-USA was a major event in shaping and framing the New World. Its appearance back in Beta, with it numerous States, was a virtual reflection of the great linear movement from east to west once called universal history, in the real world.

That was as Real as Saint Paul's claim on the cult of the Resurrection, as ominous and glorious as that hawk hovering over my garden plot, and it brought with it an expectation of a denouement in the inexorable course of nations, and thus of e-nations, as told through the lens of its battles and conquests and settlements and colonizations and civil wars, through its contradictions faced and overcome and festering, and with its profound schisms, reconciliations, heroic acts, and its negativities rooted in the very rhizomes of the Grand Republic, which developed into a deep rootstock as this nation-state (and its e-) was born, as it grew, as it withers.

Here's the thing: a reservation about its nature has been there for some time. A sizable one, to wit: it's just too big. Mostly empty in fact. A country where land seems like the sea and its people-players like sailors contending with waves of sand and rock and grass. This spatial immensity imposed its own law on its rambunctious shepherd-people, who roam with their virtual flocks to the sounds of a long-ago lonesome song that bears more resemblance to a sea shanty than to a country ballad or corrido.


Our shared hallucination is the mirror-image, the stranger things on the other side of the Great White Whale: an expanse of vales, a cascade of blue hills, a rolling prairie hiding wave after wave of hidden emigrant bodies, internal refugees and freed slaves wading through its amazing verdure, looking for a place.

Ours is a state of perpetual motion, a migration with no final port-of-call, a destination where it is never possible to get one's bearings. Nothing lasting will ever be built here.






The e-American lands and their e-ontology, like the endless ontics they reflect and sometimes try to make sense of through this dark Schmittian hall of mirrors called eRepublik, has a summary and uncouth aspect. It is fragile and temporary. Like a camp or a caravan.

American hamlets make you think of interrupted visits, of settlements living on borrowed time. They have no center. Though the roots growing here are complex, the soil is not dense. We expect them at any moment to be dismantled and relocated. Likewise the nation -- and the e-nation -- is not able to find the conditions required for a stable foundation.





And yet the Land of Lincoln became in every way the continuation of the human condition, the quintessential country of the future, destined to hold in its hands the destinies of half the world and to become the face of the universal, the Real Pauline state if you like, but... only eventually. Not yet mature. Still unsuitable. Still insufficient. Only partly the uppercase universal of Mind. America, and e-America, can only be half-imperial because we are only half-affirming. We are unsure of ourselves.

eUSAnian players were brought up on stories of strength and power, of victorious wars. This nation-state which encompasses this e-nation has given birth to artists, writers, thinkers, whale hunters; and to heroes and monsters, to slaves and masters who battle each other without mercy.

But when all is said and done, it lacks splendor born from the brilliance and grandeur of true self-confidence. Despite the comical protestations of our little men, we have seldom shown much interest in nor capacity for the imprimatur of total authority.





Phoenix Quinn first came across this view of the USA just before the tumultuous events of 1968, before most of you were born I suppose. It was when he'd first met a tired, cynical but still defiant old Communist (now gone) and a charismatic young Maoist (whom he later married), who of course detested each other. And he knew an old philosopher of history back then, and a poet too, and an astronomer. All of whom were very sure of themselves.

At that time, for those in the know, rigor was related to rebellion. The canons of knowledge, once they were uncovered from beneath the smallpox-soaked historical blankets of reaction and genocide, seemed like guarantors of a yearning and desire for revolution. A halo of metaphorical meaning provided a secret code for the cognoscenti. Beneath the epistemological break PQ and friends discerned the proletarian revolution. They saw the nearly-exhausted old black cat of the IWW transforming into a technologically-advanced Black Panther.

When they heard the old philosopher describe the Real half-baked-but-extraordinary nature of America, as I outlined above, they jumped on it -- sideways -- as a confirmation of the dubious character of populists and less-than-r-r-r-r-revolutioanry trotskyists, who saw a multi-tentacled, diabolical, all-powerful imperial Uncle Sam as the source of all possible evils in the world. Such an hysterical style of condemnation, that utter demonization and malignant hypostatis of an inner, ontological America that is described as wholly enscribed by the frame of indigenous genocide and the bloody shadow of chattel slavery, and has nothing to say, for example, about Rosa Parks, struck PQ then -- and me now -- as a lazy kind of thinking.







Still, Hiroshima.

The neoliberal project that brought about fascist dictatorships in Chile and Brazil, and ruin to much of Latin America.

The napalming and mass bombing of Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia.

And now. The revised Nazi-Klan slogans of "America First" and "Make America Great Again". Do these things weigh more than rescuing Europe -- twice? Was the long, cold struggle against deadly-bureaucrat-communism utterly meaningless, McCarthyism its only tell? Was opposition to ethnic slaughter in the Balkans and to religious fundamentalism in West Asia and elsewhere only an inexplicable, lighter-than-air sprig of irony to be understood exclusively in terms of the price of oil?

Oh. And once upon a time there was a defense, albeit in a half-baked way, when nobody else would do it, of Kurdistan.

Could PQ honestly say, despite his Maoist upbringing, that the United States has done more harm than good? I won't try to answer that for him now that he is gone, baby, gone. But I will tentatively assert that it is an honest question and a valid proposition in the realm of mind and truth.






Perhaps it is not too much of an exageration to say that the United States was the first country in human history to become the most powerful nation in the world without actively having sought it. It is a strange kind of Empire: bemoaned both for intervening and for not intervening. Malraux famously condemned Nixon, for example, for not intervening on behalf of Bengalis against their massacre by Pakistanis. The USA -- and I argue, by magical extension, the e-USA -- came into the world, and into the e-world, in an adventure of being and spirit which condemns it to wield only a semi-assertive power.

Ours is a recalcitrant empire and a reluctant nation. This affects peoples thinking who are raised inside its narratives. Our nobility has always been to balk at imperialism. This feeling of bitterness against the blood and gore of war and conquest, captured so well in Mark Twain's The War Prayer, when the stranger's words explaining the meaning of their prayer "smote the house with a shock".

Our inheritance is an adolescent power. Sometimes obscenely so. Consider the unbelievable Freudian slip of naming the Hiroshima bomb "Little Boy".

If we want to pull ourselves together, we'd do well to re-read Twain's ironic reading of the war prayer from time to time.






The law, at the end of the day, both in the Real of American ontology, and in the real of e-American absurdity, is both political and metaphysical.

You could see it when abandoning of Rojava to the evil kings hurt everyone, no matter their favorite political words.

The secret sauce of America (and of e-America) lies ever in its roilng sea of contradictions, casting up the occasional gemstone, in its historical determination to roll back Nazism, and in the fortitude of its Rosa Parks, more so than in the caprices, character flaws and tragic errors of its clown princes.