Fellow citizens Hi: History punishes more than it rewards. And its judgments appear arbitrary and groundless to those punished.
If you haven’t felt the weight of History’s judgment on your conscience these past few years, I envy your delusional sense of hope. For the rest of us, misfortune has taken a parasitic hold on our collective psyche. At least in this rare instance the crime is clear: your consent, or maybe just resignation, to being governed by us.
If you’re hearing this, then said government is nearing its termination following a valiant, but clearly ineffective, struggle for survival. I am transmitting this from an empty motel on the Turnpike that was probably never fit to stay in many years before we could ever do anything to it. I don’t consider myself marginalized so much as I am on the exterior of events. That leaves only time to think about the choices that brought you there.
I look at our condition as being like a quilt: each square of the quilt represents a single error. Taken altogether, our quilt might equal one of those sheets used to cover houses for fumigation. Most of those errors, despite our strenuous and brazenly dishonest measures, couldn’t be hidden for very long. And though what follows are admissions that, in an evidentiary sense, are rooted in decisions the government made and implemented, quilts of the sturdiest and most refined quality are not made in solitude, but with the complicity of the quilt-maker’s enablers. I am sure you are as tired of hearing about them as I am in being told how much worse they are getting by our negligence. Rather, running a government in free-fall after so short a time in operation compels wistful thoughts of what could have been, what we’d left unfinished, and, most poignantly, those things that slipped our memory.
Without wasting any more of your time, here are a few things we forgot in trying and failing to forge our nation.
We forgot to write a constitution. Our “charter” was binding to the extent that anything written on a bar napkin can be. It left more questions than answers. Such as: Will our improvisation-friendly approach to governing one day be vindicated? Will a school of political science emerge having an amenable attitude toward a legislature as a rubber-stamp machine for executive decrees designed to put out fires started by the previous decrees? It’s possible. No one said anything that led up to it was.
We forgot to levy taxes. Our fiscal situation would always be touch-and-go. I quote a Treasurer’s memo in full: “Seems bad.” Not that many of us took much account of it. Though our taking of power caused a notable emptying of the suburbs, the mentality of the suburbs made a safe home in the government, in which financial logistics took on a dizzying abstraction while our coffers being well-supplied at the most crucial moments was met with the most imperious nonchalance.
We forgot to solve education. Not that any available monies went to the one thing I assume a broad consensus of people under our control most wanted and would have put a lot of stock in our functionality if we put it there. I find it hard to imagine anyone of schooling age learning anything in these circumstances. Most colleges, I think, operated seamlessly not long after we took over. But they became such hotbeds of dissent and outside subversion that they proved untenable in their traditional form. Public schools at all levels were deprived of a level of support typical of more stable situations. Though it seems if there was a will there was a way. Places likely to be untouched by violence—church basements, youth centers, old hospitals and warehouses—made for suitable makeshift classrooms, we’d been told, and teachers and students braved dangerous obstacles to meet semi-regularly. I’d be grateful to see how the consequences of our dereliction unfold.
We forgot to achieve justice. The consequences here, I imagine, are less worth considering. No constitution meant no clear framework for binding laws, nor any means of judicial enforcement. Judges, unconnected from any larger system, assumed fiefdoms from their benches. Judicial anarchy was complemented by carceral tyranny. Few wanted to be a soldier, but many many people wanted to be a cop, with a veritable menu of bespoke ordinances to impose on citizens. If one police force appeared to overstep its jurisdiction, civilians formed a new police force to police the police, who devolved into the sort of piracy that made life much easier for the enemy. Furthermore, if schools moved to warehouses, prisons moved into the schools. Where space was entirely unavailable, streamlined, and often public, corporal and capital punishment sufficed. The only optimistic note is that reform may have been possible with military success as the advantages of so exacting and randomly cruel a system were not as pronounced as they would have been in the enemy society.
We forgot to support the troops. You’d think in a war situation that this would not be the case. But we’d failed them in manifold ways. This is a shame. The zeal of the early conflict brought us sufficient success to baffle the enemy momentarily. The zealous soldiers took our mission seriously, regardless of differences of conception one soldier had of it from another. Those soldiers were few in number to begin with and got themselves killed with as much zeal as when they killed others. This is not to disparage or blame the auxiliaries, whose causes for desertion weren’t necessarily unjust. Indeed, it’s hard to justify enthusiasm when you can’t supply them or treat their injuries consistently or bury their corpses adequately, and when feeding them came through unseemly measures (more on that directly). And this is before the issue of treason arises.
We forgot about certain people. We never took a census, so we can’t know for certain how many of you we actually governed. And even if we did, certain gaps would make a complete count impossible. Isolated enclaves of citizens emerged some time in the course of the conflict that assumed a sub-social if not antisocial character. Some malcontents took to calling them [Tiber]villes, though I preferred to call them ShopRite Price Plus Clubs. To rectify food shortages among the soldiers we not only nationalized the venerable grocery chain but absorbed it into the Department of Defense, as a military necessity. Civilian shoppers found them obstructed by armed fortifications. I can only deduce that, rather than go to Wegmans, they headed for the hills and assumed a feral existence.
We forgot to write a new national anthem. This is just as well. There was neither a power ballad rousing enough to distract from nor a funeral dirge dissonant enough to capture the trajectory our nation ended up taking and the values it ultimately stood for.
We forgot to boost morale. To be sure, a motto did circulate. It was closer to an inside joke, but it adequately expressed the attitude into which our feelings had hardened. In this state, no honest means of instilling morale among soldier and civilian alike was possible. A population in a defensive war is marked by fear and death, both of which are soothed most effectively by hatred of the offender who fosters one by reigning the other. But national antipathy must be replaced, ideally on the wave of military victories. When those waves fail to crest, antipathy must be replenished, if it is not replenished it exhausts and the antipathetic citizenry is either consumed by it or is brought to and beyond the brink of psychic fatigue.
In addition to History being punitive, it is also not very reliable. Often it has a way of making you feel that you are harmonious with its rhythms. Then History changes its mind. This would probably be where I’d say that I was honored to have led you in this effort and that the cause for which we sacrificed a lot was a just one. But I don’t know if I am and I’m not sure that it was. To believe and say otherwise just makes us the mirror-image of our enemy, which I’d rather we’d not have been.
I suppose what’s left is the personal satisfaction of taking action as opposed to complaining off to the side, perverse as that seems. That the actions took on the proportions of nightmares and the satisfaction is felt amid total devastation is beside the point. We find every literal indication of defeat. Our example has not confused its definition. Yet this still feels like a victory in ways I can’t explain with any lucidity. I happily admit guilt; but I won’t plead for forgiveness.
Good luck and godspeed.
Best of luck and see you at the war crimes trial.
Take care.
👻