The World You Were Born Into Is Ending

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America signed its Suez at a dinner table in Versailles, then threw itself a birthday party where the ice cream melted, the arch was cloth, the crowd fit in a guitarist's sunglasses, and the Brooklyn Bridge caught fire.

The internet named the era before I could: "Hello, I am refugee from american century of humiliation." So let's take the meme seriously. The US fought a ten-week war it couldn't convert into anything, handed Iran the keys to Hormuz in a page-and-a-half confession, tore the paper up three weeks later, and answered all of it with tall ships and a $150 million party that House Democrats allege skimmed its own donors. Britain ran this exact play in 1956. Ask them how it went.

Here's what I'm actually saying, from my seat on the other side of the longest undefended border in the world: the empire was never the country. The careers that died at Versailles belong to the foreign-policy blob; you just paid the bill. And underneath the flag there was a different America the whole time. The Black Loyalists whose freedom ran through the British side. The Redneck Army at Blair Mountain. Every person who read "all men are created equal" and set out to make the country mean it.

Empires drop everything they're carrying when they fall. Somebody gets to pick it up. It should be you.

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