(No apologies to Lloyd Bridges, who, wherever he is now, can be satisfied with producing and starring in the best-titled short film of all time.)

Getting called a doomer in 2021 (or 2022, perhaps?) seemed weird.

Once our social betters had figured out how to protect themselves from COVID-19, they’d unleashed it on the rest of us. It would eventually kill at least seven million people, while our leaders hawked horse paste and herbal medicine and let the bourgeoisie steal billions of dollars that rightfully belonged to us as a society.

When scientists and researchers and doctors working under tremendous pressure came up with one of the most miraculous technological advancements in human history, the idea that they might get stuck with a needle drove millions of supposedly grown-ass men and women into the arms of open fascism.¹

All of which is to say, we who were paying attention to the state of the world had some pretty good reasons to be down on its future. That’s without getting into the fact that most of the people insisting some of us just wanted to be “shut-ins” or “mask cops” got to work at their computers in apartments and empty offices, while I trudged off to teach the children of antivaxxers and denialists five days a week in an unventilated room.²

The other reason it was surprising is because just a few years before, during Trump’s first term, “lmao we’re all going to die” was the dominant mood of those underemployed, downwardly-mobile posters who would make up the bedrock of the notorious dirtbag left.³

None of that is why I’m writing this, though, or at least it’s not the proximate cause.

Rather, I’m getting real tired of USians finding new and exciting ways to disclaim any responsibility for fixing the majestic mess they’ve made of their empire, especially since those same social betters decided it would be good for their short-term bottom lines to drop tons of explosives on another Middle Eastern nation.

When the Trump regime kidnapped Nicolás Maduro, some lefties with decent followings decided the appropriate response was to go after other countries for not doing enough to stop the United States. As we all know, it’s an easy choice to attack the country that’s already acting like a five-year-old and also has a nuclear arsenal its dipshit President and his dipshit Vice President and their dipshit Secretary of Self-Medication and his dipshit hand-picked generals would love to drop on some brown people, so they can feel like men for a microsecond.

Certainly, taking the United States on would be the morally correct choice, and no one would welcome the massed armies of the world and greet them as liberators more than I, but it’s not an easy choice.

I bring this up because a few months later, when the United States killed one hundred Iranian children without any aim except wanton death and destruction, the rest of the world exploded in anger at the people of the United States for not cleaning their own house like they’re constantly flogging themselves for doing back in 1783.

Conscience-bitten USians, who a few months ago wanted Mark Rutte to cowboy up and lead NATO against its own biggest funder, responded with a truly prodigious array of explanations:

1. We’re too far apart;

2. We could get fired;

3. We have to make rent;

4. We’ve been disempowered by our government;

5. Our cops have guns and prisons are really bad;

6. Really, it’s your fault for not stopping him first.

If you can’t see what the problem is with #2 through #6 on that list, let me spell it out for you: they’re all true for a fairly broad swath of the world’s countries⁴ and yet, for many of them, protesting is the minimum bar.

Right now, a former South Korean president is sitting in prison for life because a bunch of old dudes who remembered the military dictatorship and decided they weren’t having it.

Iranians—who have very recent experience with their police gunning them down for speaking their minds—nonetheless put themselves directly in the way of the civilization-ending bombs the Blasphemer-in-Chief of the United States threatened to lob at them.

You have to understand, of course, that USians saw people scolding them in English and assumed they could pull the tu quoque colonialism card.⁵

Unfortunately, it turns out they were actually arguing with Brazilians, Mexicans, and a whole host of other people who have every reason to expect that USians are just (and justly) afraid of the imperial boomerang.

While it turns out that the real nadir of this sorry tendency happened days before I caught wind of it, I still managed to work my way backwards to its especially disgusting core.

Behold, Dutch-Egyptian games developer Rami Ismail pointing out the extremely logical consequences of the criminal actions of a United States government that, freed from such inconveniences as constitutional legitimacy, can pursue being the purest distillation of the United States’ collective id.

The number of people who responded to this with some variation on the excuses above, clearly unaware that they were telling the assorted victims of United States imperialism that they don’t get to be mad at you because you’re just little guys, was greater than zero. That’s horrifying.

Here’s the thing: other people are getting banished from their lands, beaten, wounded, sickened, maimed, killed, disintegrated, all by the hundreds and thousands, because the ghouls in charge of two countries think people other than them don’t actually exist.

By placing your disempowerment above that of Iranians, Palestinians, Cubans, Venezuelans—by insisting that you get to be angry at other countries for not solving your problem, but they don’t get to be mad at you for not taking out the garbage—like it or not, you are confirming the exact view those ghouls have.

If you’re not going to do anything about it (and there are plenty of understandable reasons why you can’t, shouldn’t or won’t), then your job is simple:

Keep your fucking mouth shut.

I know that’s antithetical to every USian’s need to center themselves in every situation, but it’s also how you avoid puncturing message discipline. I know you know what that is, because when it’s an issue near and dear to your heart, you don’t like it when other people squirm about helping.

Let’s put that moral disaster aside and deal with this in terms of pure politics. Even then, you’ve got a real problem on your hands. To quote Bret Devereaux:⁶

In practice, if Iran wants future presidents not to repeat this war, the precedent they want to set is “attacking Iran is a presidency-ending mistake.” And to do that, well, they need to end a presidency or at least make clear they could have done.

There’s just one problem: how, exactly, is attacking Iran supposed to end a presidency when the only population actually capable of doing that⁷ will immediately disclaim any responsibility and throw the buck in the vague direction of an imaginary someone who suffers less from the same precarity rending all our lives apart?

In short, if I’m a doomer, it’s because I have no reason to think that USians will stop treating the rest of the world like a particularly realistic video game: beautiful to look at, perhaps even emotionally resonant, but ultimately an object that puts absolutely no moral obligation on you as its interactor. The moment it makes you feel bad about yourself, you’ll whine and kick it to the curb. You signed up for The Sims, not Spec Ops: The Line.

Is this why you need your political comeuppances to come from your professional athletes—and why it’s eternally shocking when a bunch of men who consider themselves self-made Supermen identify with the equally delusional rentiers, rather than you and me?

You are, as the man said, not serious people.

With rare and short-lived exceptions, the United States has not stopped treating the rest of the world as a playground for their tanks and their bombs and their guns and their drones since roughly 1846.

During most of that time, USians had a reputation as valorous and even honorable on an individual level, if also sometimes boorish and usually self-absorbed.

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but that would almost be an improvement.