Heart of the Empire's Darkness

"The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest. The flood had made, the wind was nearly calm, and being bound down the river, the only thing for it was to come to and wait for the turn of the tide..." -- Joseph Conrad

Looking back, it's striking how so much of early to mid-20th century US science-fiction, as well as a great deal of 19th century British fiction, obsessed over the catastrophic end of Empire. By contrast, the hallmark of the US-UK mass media during the neoliberal era was an arrogant, preening superiority, a refusal to think historically combined with ever more spectacular (and speculative) consumerisms. Conrad was talking about Belgium's rogue colonialism in the Congo, of course, but you get at least a hint of the mass famines of British colonial India in Kurtz' gaunt frame. Nothing of the sort is permitted a moment of air-time in the latest Star Trek, Batman or Ironman movies. The totality of the neoliberal lie has become totally delusional.

I suspect this lack of historical consciousness has unwittingly accelerated the rot of the US Empire. The British ruling elites, with their Oxford educations, knew what happened to Rome; the gang of war-mongering thugs, health insurance vampires, and credit-derivatives gangsters running America into the ground simply want to steal anything they can get their tentacles on.