America is Already Forgetting About Fascism — And It’s Going to Pay a Steep Price

America’s Minuscule Attention Span Has Always Been a Problem, But Never More So Than Now

The American Idiot is by now a legendaryfigureon theworldstage. Who else is as painfully dumb as Americans? Well, maybe Brits, who decided to destroy their own economy, with Brexit — but that’s not saying a whole lot. And if the American Idiot is a figure that strikes awe into the heart of the world — “How do we not end up like these guys?!” — then one of the key traits of the American Idiot is their attention span.

It’s miniscule, and that’s being kind. America’s attention span exists at the scale of a barely sentient being. A slug, or maybe that’s an insult to slugs. What happens in America is this. There’s a scandal, an outrage, a problem — usually a huge one— and then just 24 hours later, it’s forgotten.Poof. It vanishes. As if it never existed at all. In extreme cases, maybe, the attention lasts a full 72 hours.

All that’s left America an incredibly weird society. America exists in a kind of perpetual now. A state of constant grace. But nobody except maybe a saint deserves such a thing. A society surely can’t function that way. In America, history doesn’t happen. Memory is in constant social deficit. Nothing matters except right now. That’s also, by the way, what we’d say of a dementia patient. You need a memory, a sense of history, to make sense of the world around you, to assign things meaning. You can’t simply forget what happened yesterday every single day and hope to function in any sane or reasonable or thoughtful way.

If America’s a totally dysfunctional society, it’s in large part because it’s miniscule 24 hour attention span also means it can’t function as a mature, developed society. It expends more energy on forgetting than it does on processing. Think of all those dollars, hours, emotions, that are poured into the desperate act of forgetting yesterday’s trauma — whether it’s through Instagram trout-pout faces or designer cars or the 24-hour news cycle. And I haven’t even gotten to the guns, the fundamentalist religion, the Qanon, and so forth. If America spent half the human possibility it does on forgetting on processing, remembering, thinking — would it really be in such a dire state, all the time? Forgetting is the one thing America’s really good at.

I bring this up for a very simple reason. It seems to me that America’s forgetting all over again. But this time, we’re not talking about forgetting some kind of minor league scandal. We’re talking about fascism.

It was just a handful of days ago that Trump was acquitted by the Senate. Less than a handful of weeks — literally less than ten — since an armed “riot” stormed Congress, sending what seemed like death squads seeking to massacre their “enemies,” in an attempt to overturn a democratic election. It’s barely been days.

And yet it seems to me that America’s already busy forgetting.

Forgetting the way America does. Desperately. Deliberately. Willfully.Not naturally or gracefully or thoughtfully, which is to say slowly, integrating a traumatic period into a larger sense of self. But the way that drug addicts try to forget, self-medicating to numb the pain of their hurt. That’s the way America’s forgetting.

What evidence do I have? Societies have moods, atmospheres, moments. The Germans would call it the zeitgeist. Times that exist as feelings, culturally and socially. For these kinds of things, “evidence,” the way that Americans think of it, is often hazy — and so this way of thinking doesn’t really make inroads in America, which leaves America emotionally stunted, but that’s another story.

Still, I think if you’re willing to admit that societies have moods, moments, atmospheres in time — then right now, America’s in one of its great historical periods of forgetting, and the evidence is abundant. Think of any real reflection on what the last four or five years of American history mean. See it anywhere?

By that, I mean hard questions — genuinely tough ones. Like: Are we teetering on the edge of serious collapse? What does it mean that tens of millions of Americans are willing to back a man who puts kids in cages and camps? Are these people radicalised now at the same level as the Taliban or ISIS? Don’t they believe in a) extreme violence to b) bring about a society of the pure which c) is grounded in religious law? Isn’t all that fascism? Are the Biden years just a short grace period from all this — which, if Biden and Harris aren’t compelled to get it exactly right, will simply pave the way for a resurgence of fascism in America, only harder?

I don’t see many people asking those questions. Certainly not figures in mainstream media. I see them shying away from such questions, and mostly pretending that everything is going back to normal, if it isn’t already back to normal.

Nothing is back to normal.

Consider the following fact. Trump’s support amongst Republicans increased — significantly — after the attempted coup. After armed extremists stormed Congress, left five people dead, possibly led to two more committing suicide, organized themselves in death squads that seemed to be looking to massacre politicians, and stop the vote count. Trump’s support has gone up after seeming to inciting a hard coup.

So let me say it again. Nothing is back to normal. On the right, sentiments and attitudes are hardening. Violence has been legitimised on a mass social scale. Extremists beliefs have been completely normalised. The idea that democracy can and should be replaced by an authoritarian rule just because you don’t like the results is now a casual everyday reality.

That’s a far, far cry from even the relatively extreme attitudes conservative America held during, say, the Bush or Reagan years. Conservative Americans then didn’t back violence in their own country (well, at least against white people). They didn’t support the violent overthrow of democracy. They hadn’t gone all in on theocracy and authoritarianism as means to the ends of outright fascism, an ethnically cleansed homeland.

Now that’s less true than ever before. It’s barely true at all. A majority of Republicans back Trump still, even more so after the coup, just as Trump’s support among white people went up from 2016 to 2020, meaning after the camps, bans, raids, purges, and Gestapos. NAQSH FACT CHECK.

Does any of that sound remotely normal to you? It does to me, but only because I grew up literally being hunted down by fascist theocratic paramilitaries. If you haven’t experienced that, or don’t think that’s something to particularly want, then no, America is not back to normal.

These are ugly facts. Difficult, inconvenient truths. I don’t blame Americans for running away from them and burying their heads right back in the cool, cool sand. How much easier it is to be comfortably numb. But a society, like I said, can’t function that way. When the social function of memory is absent, what chance does a society have to ever grow, mature, evolve, wisen, ripen, expand in knowledge, truth, beauty, goodness, courage, strength? None.

There are obvious reasons why America’s attention span is nonexistent. The 24 hours news cycle, which is a disgrace, and doesn’t allow any issue to have the prolonged attention necessary for real social understanding, the time and room for genuine knowledge and truth to really spread and be absorbed. The culture of escapism that exists in America — “Hey, why are you reading books? Are you a dummy! Go learn how to shoot a gun or make some money!!” The social values of individualism and materialism, in which there’s no reward whatsoever for being a decent human being or an enlightened citizen, just social punishments, which also means, in America, at least, that “total assh*les rise to the top of everything imaginable, from media to politics to culture.”

But none of those obvious reasons make it OK. To forget. That America has just experienced a wave of very real social collapse, in the form of a hardcore fascist movement — one hardcore enough to storm the Capitol, hunt down members of Congress, hope to kill them, in order to stop the vote, for the sake of a hateful demagogue.

At some point, forgetting becomes complicity. Imagine that you walked down an alley every night, and you got mugged. And every morning, you woke up, and said to yourself, “I’m going to forget about last night. Phew! Let me go revel in some escapism. Maybe I’ll post some selfies or take some drugs or trade some stocks.” And by the evening, you had forgotten. So you walked down the very same alley…all over again…and got mugged. Whose fault would it be? Where would the responsibility lie? (Yes, with the mugger. But with you as well.)

Forgetting becomes complicity when it involves periods of violence, shame, ruin, collapse. That is what America has just experienced — and still is. The Republicans who think it’s OK to storm Congress with death squads haven’t gone anywhere. There are more of them today than there were six weeks ago.

Those are difficult truths to have to face. It’s easier to run from the discomfort, shame, fear, and terror, than it is to confront it. That’s what the bad guys want. To break you. To make you weak. In all the ways that count. Socially, emotionally, culturally, politically. As a human being with a sense of decency, civilization, who values truth, goodness, beauty, courage. All of which rely on remembering what matters, and what doesn’t.

When you forget, just because remembering is hard, you have become weak. You have given up your agency. You have let the Big Lie win. You have ceded your conscience. Your highest forms of power — moral, intellectual, relational — have all been surrendered. That is what the bad guys want. They want to terrorise you.

And when you forget is when they really win. Americans think terrorism wins when it frightens you. Wrong. That’s the small way. The big way? It’s when it frightens you so much you try your hardest to forget yesterday, every day. And in that absence, that vacuum, reality, truth, goodness, beauty, can’t exist. Nothing can. Time doesn’t exist. People don’t, democracy doesn’t, justice doesn’t. Nothing exists in the absence that’s left when you run away from remembering.

If that doesn’t make sense to you, imagine how OBL would really have won.Not just by knocking down the towers. But if America had been so frightened that it tried, and succeeded, to forget. That didn’t happen then. But it is happening now.

Let this then be a warning. The American fascists want to terrorise you.I can tell you that it’s working. Because most of you are already forgetting. Forgetting the abuses of yesterday, which have not stopped happening for a moment in the minds of those who still back them. Which barely stopped happening at all. Forgetting in this way is complicity. The bad guys are winning, because they have weakened America to the point that, like an abuser, they control it emotionally and socially and culturally.America’s fascists are terrorising it into wilfully ignoring, deliberately, desperately, foolishly forgetting the most difficult truths about Americaright now — and that is the biggest mistake, perhaps, a society can make.

Umair
February 2021