The Matrix Has Always Been Real in the US
Yesterday's final vote on the Big, Beautiful Bill of bulldozing social welfare is the nth example
Congress did what it has mostly done over the past 237 years — capitulate to the demands of a president, or vested, monied interests, or their own craveness, bloodthirst, and greed, or all of the above. That’s how slavery survived as an institution for nearly 90 years after Jefferson wrote “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” That was how a nation could mercilessly expand from its Eastern seaboard and Appalachian Mountain beginnings all the way to the Pacific, slaughtering millions of Indigenous and nearly wiping out the American buffalo in the process.
Congress was why the Second New Deal and the Social Security Act of 1935 didn’t include sharecroppers (two-thirds of whom were white folk, by the way), domestic workers (two-thirds of whom were Black women), and waiters and waitresses. And it’s why yet another round of tax cuts for endlessly greedy rich folk and megacorporations will be offset with the steepest rollback of social welfare programs since before the federal government had enacted the Social Security Act of 1935.
All of this is part of the latticework that is the real-like Matrix of the United States. I have written about this parallel for years between The Matrix movie franchise and the history of the US, pretty much since 1999. I reference the movie multiple times in Spinning Sage’s Gold, including here:
Olivia is right. I am obsessed, with The Matrix (mostly the first movie in the franchise) and with the Matrix of the US and the West. Especially with how the US and the West have expended enormous sums and energies in both maintaining their racists and other -ists systems of oppression while also trying to hide the full depths of their oppression.
But these days, they aren’t trying to hide it at all. Trump has emboldened this motley crew of moronic, misanthropic misfits to show how wicked they truly are, and with pride. Congress and the Supreme Court have turned this July 4th week into their version of rich, white (male), and straight pride day, a day of stomping on migrants and the marginalized with all the weight of their -isms and political power.
Like so many USians and Westerners, they believe they can continue to run their Matrix without any repercussions. And the handfuls who recognize the possibility of everything from nonviolent protests to violent revolution in resistance? They will be much more concerned with maintaining quiet, autocratic repression in the name of “law and order” or “peace” than they ever will be with a better US or a better world.
Folks, this is not a time for throwing up your hands while sighing, “It is what it is.” It is a time, though, to consider next moves, including whether the US is worth saving, or if the US was ever worth the efforts of our ancestors in the first place.