"Civilization": 1925, 2025

F. Scott Fitzgerald had Ugly Americans in His Sights

“Civilization’s going to pieces...I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read ‘The Rise of the Colored Empires’ by this man Goddard? Well, it’s a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be — will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved...It's up to us who are the dominant race to watch out or these other races will have control of things."

Overheard at Mar-a-Lago? Was I added to a Signal chat with petty fascist in chief Stephen Miller? A recorded podcast where Tucker Carlson opines with dimwitted conviction and Joe Rogan nods along thoughtfully, two bros solving all the world's problems?

Nope. From the first chapter of The Great Gatsby. We haven't even met the Big Guy yet and Fitzgerald—who has everything ugly about America in his sights—is already showing us where the real rot (and power) lay: these smugly oblivious inheritors of vast fortunes, able to do anything, or nothing at all, but because in some dark recess of their dark hearts they understand how little they've done, how little they're actually capable of doing, how easy the world has been made for them, and rather than pay it forward, or have the honesty to acknowledge it, they take it out on the poor folks, the ones without connections, without family crests on their blazers, the ones who don't sit around shitfaced at the country club bitching about the wage earners whose taxes help pave and patrol the highways. The very worst of us, personified by Tom Buchanan; the guy who, unlike Jay Gatz, didn't have to remake himself because he never had to make himself in the first place: his identity and his world was already made for him, paid-in-full before he was born, all in the name of "Fuck You, I got mine."

Look at the current administration and it's chock full of these same cretins, and they are all virtually identical in word & deed: the only people who want to rule the world because they feel it's the least the world can do for them; because they haven't anything better to do. And the totally mediocre hacks who surround and enable them, the assistants and deputies and directors, exhausted from all the faces they've stepped on scrambling up that rotten ladder, these indefatigable soldiers who wake up every day needing to make everyone feel as small and miserable as they are. That's who we are fighting against; it's who we've always been fighting against. True in 1925. True in 2025. True in 1625, and it'll be true in 2125—should we still be around or if anyone still bothers to read novels and sees their world revealed to them as only artists can render it.

(More on The Greatness of the Gatsby, very soon…)