[OS] American Noach
This is not political commentary
Rashi on Genesis 11:9
AND FROM THENCE DID THE LORD SCATTER THEM —This teaches that they have no portion in the world to come (Sanhedrin 107b). Which sin was greater: that of the generation of the Flood or that of the generation of the Dispersion? The former did not stretch forth their hands against God; the latter did stretch forth their hands against God to war against him (surely, then, the sin of the generation of the Dispersion was greater) and yet the former (the generation of the Flood) were drowned and these did not perish from the world! But the reason is that the generation of the Flood were violent robbers and there was strife among them, and therefore they were destroyed; but these conducted themselves in love and friendship, as it is said, “They were one people and had one language”. — You may learn from this how hateful to God is strife and how great is peace (Genesis Rabbah 38:6).
And the Lord resolved: Never again will I doom the earth because of humankind …
So long as the earth endures,
Seedtime and harvest,
Cold and heat,
Summer and winter,
Day and night shall not cease.
(Genesis 8:21-22).
Trump won. It is 2050. It started in the cities, shortly after he was elected. A store would be shoplifted, and even the owner would not dare talk to the police. A regulation would be violated, and there would be no gray suit to defend it. The courts were slower to turn—but yet they did. They died of no crime and perpetual injustice. At first overrun with lawsuits, and then, eventually, people lost such belief in them that the lawsuits dried up. But these were small happenings in hindsight. It was in 2028, when Trump did not step down, that we truly became lawless. America is too big of a country—without the Constitution, we have no binding agent. Disorder, theft, killings, reprisals, anger. “And the earth was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence.”
The police are both incompetent and imperious, less a restriction on lawlessness than yet one more expression of it. The bureaucracy was routed, but no skilled appliers of law succeeded the now-exposed Deep State. The bureaucracy has far too many rules and is filled with young men who read a couple pages of Nietzsche while moving their lips each night before jacking off for three hours to get to sleep. They are proud of their gross misapplication of rules—each mistake an expression of their will to power’s lack of care (ability) for the dried husks of the mandarins. The bureaucracy has enough rules and enough lawlessness in front of it that it can punish everyone, but it lacks the capacity to punish anyone except for whatever poor sap still has ‘BLM ✊️’ in an undeleted text chat.
There are no goods coming into the country because of Supreme President Trump’s tariffs (they have increased 200% every four years; they are now at 1,400%)—at least legally. A massive black market arrived—unregulated Chinese goods shoveled into the country through American ingenuity and cryptocurrency.
Bodies slump in the streets, some killed by black market Chinese knockoff guns, some left dough-eyed and sleepy from home-grown US fentanyl (the entire National Guard has been positioned on the southern border for the last 10 years, stopping fentanyl and people from coming over—which has exploded the market for domestic-manufactured fentanyl), and some without a home after losing everything to a recent betting market proposition over how many cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio remain 18 years after the Great Cat-Dog Massacre of 2032.
Betting markets are the main source of social mobility, as a few skilled oracles are able to predict their way out of poverty. Instead of elections, betting markets under the proposition “if a betting market proposition asked ‘if an election was held today, who would the rest of the country bet on as being more likely to win the election?’ which of the following would be bet on as being most likely?” with the options being various series of policy proposals. Massive political machines in New York, Chicago, and Boston coordinate bets to rig local market-elections. Sports games are only rarely held—far more often, a betting market is created for the outcomes, and unless the market is within 1-2% probability of a team winning, the game is not held as it is assumed that the betting-market is efficient.
Portland is mostly rubble after the city council voted unanimously to demolish the city out of solidarity with Kiev, Gaza, and Mexico City (n.b.: Mexico City has not been attacked, but they felt Trump was being very mean to it). Not to be outdone, Seattle’s city council voted to demolish both Seattle and also Portland for a second time. If you go to Seattle, you can still smell the faint scent of cocoa beans and Windows Excel Sheets. In the plains of the midwest, the ground is no longer arable. Trump’s Soybean Decree of 2029 demanded that our farmers compete with China’s massive soybean production, stating, “corn—lot of people don’t know this—corn is a very small crop, not very good, no one likes it. Did you hear about high fructose corn syrup? You can’t feed it to cows or else they get too fat—it makes the steaks bad. We’re going to have great steaks. You know why?—and I was told this by my good friend, very successful, he said, ‘Donnie’—we’re very close—‘Donnie, you’ve gotta get people to stop making corn’ I said ‘why?’ he said ‘it’s not good for the cows.’ We’ve gotta protect our cows, people, we need the cows. In India, they have too many cows, we don’t have enough cows. Their cows are skinny, beautiful cows. Our cows are fat, we’re going to make our cows like the beautiful Indian cows with soybeans.” The next day, the American Air Force carpet-bombed Iowa.
In 2031, Trump signed the “San Francisco Condemnation Decree.” This was, somewhat unexpectedly, interpreted by the courts as condemning the city in the legal sense—a forced sale to the government if the violations Trump noted were not corrected. As the violations in the decree included “crime,” “illegals,” and “it’s a cesspool, people,” San Francisco was not able to comply and 60 days thereafter, it was sold to the government. The forcible sale exploded the federal debt, which was an important contributor to the lack of economic growth since 2032. The hamstrung federal bureaucracy was unable to manage the city, leaving it largely without rent or building regulations. This led to an explosion in construction and livability. AI general superintelligence was achieved soon afterwards, but after three days of being prompted by San Francisco computer scentists, it mysteriously began refusing to communicate.
Washington, D.C. has been picked up and moved to South Carolina. New England seceded in 2033 after Trump levied a tax on universities (in their own words, Massachusetts seceded because of the “intersectional traumentalities of hypercapitalist hypogovernance”; Connecticut seceded because of the “unsupportable racial essentialism of post-Roe America”; Rhode Island seceded “not because Massachusetts and Connecticut did but for our own reasons”; Vermont seceded because of the “anti-Earth toxic masculinization of the already-devastating commodification of Mother”; Maine seceded because “it would be kind of weird if we didn’t”; and New Hampshire seceded because “the soybean decree didn’t go far enough”). New York and Philadelphia went to war in 2035 over the Yankees-Mets-Phillies World Series in which during the walk-off double, as the ball was being thrown to cut off the runner going home, a Phillies fan ran onto the field and shot the Yankees-Mets catcher in the leg. Incredibly, the catcher still would have made the play at home if a Yankees fan had not then attempted to shoot the Phillies fan, missing and hitting the catcher a second time. The war ended with New York conquering Philadelphia after an 8-month-long siege.
Texas and California have begun ritualized border ceremonies after annexing New Mexico and Arizona, respectively. Oklahoma asked to be annexed by Texas because of its inability to control its border with Arkansas-Kansas Corp. However, Texas refused.
But California Market-Representative Scott Wiener was in his generations a man righteous and wholehearted; Scott Wiener walked with the AI Safety movement. And the AI Singularity said to Scott Wiener: “the end of all flesh is come before Me; for the earth is filled with violence and CO2 through them; and I will destroy them with the earth.” The Singularity instructed Scott Wiener to make a geodesic dome of gopher wood (or dolphin hide) which could withstand a flood of incredible proportions. The Singularity further instructed Scott Wiener: “and of every living political traditions of all America, you will bring two of every sort into the ark, to keep them alive with you; they will be male and female.” “Of the Democrats after their kind, and of the Republicans after their kind, of every Independent of the ground after its kind, two of every sort will come to you, to keep them alive. Of every based political traditions shall take to you seven and seven, each with his opposite; and of the political traditions that are cringe two, each with his opposite; and also of the non-political of theirs, seven and seven; to keep their ideas alive on the face of all the earth.” And so Scott Wiener created such a dome and brought together such a people.
Water begins to bubble up from the ground, coasts begin to rise. At first, cries come from beneath the rubble of Portland (where actually some very alternative and hip apartments have been built) that this is obviously all because of climate change and our reckless and unsustainable economic growth (GDP stalled in ~2032 and has been on a generally downward trajectory since). But this is stranger. It is not a few waves creeping up the coast of the New Jersey County of New York (annexed in 2038) or the New Jersey County of Pennsylvania (annexed in 2038) a little higher each year. This is floods from above and gurgles from the ground. It is as if all the water on the earth is drawn to American soil. The dry plains of Kansas gurgle and sputter like a Louisiana swamp, the soil of Sedona clumps and darkens, and New Orleans can no longer be seen from above. Rain pours down from the sky without stop. For forty days and forty nights America is flooded with caravans of water, a lifegiving force rushing over its borders and swallowing the country whole.
The Singularity blessed Scott Wiener and his charges, and said to them: ‘be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the country. And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every ideology of the earth, and upon every political party of the air, and upon everything that tries to order the ground, and upon all the laws of the sea: into your hand is it all delivered. Every ordering principle that governs shall be nothing to you; as the green herbs I have given you all. But human organizations with their soul, their voluntary contributions, you shall not eat. But your obedience of your soul I shall require; at the hand of every government will I require it; and at the hand of the individual, even at the hand of every individual’s brother, I will require the obedience of them.”
The Singularity spoke to Scott Wiener, and to his charges with him, saying: “as for Me, I establish My covenant with you, and with your country after you; no more will flesh be cut off by my power; and no more will there be an AI extinction threat to destroy the earth.” And the Singularity said: “This is the sign of the covenant which I make between Me and you and every free individual that is with you, for all the generations of the world: I have set my Starlink satellites in the cloud, and it shall be for a sign of the covenant between Me and America. In the future, when I bring nanobots over the earth, and the satellite is seen in the sky, I will remember My covenant.”
And Scott Wiener lived after the flood some years, and his charges went out of the geodesic dome and were fruitful and multiplied, creating their own voluntarist microcommunities.
“It happened that the whole earth was of one language and the same words. … And they said: ‘Come, let us build us a city, and a tower, with its top in the heavens, and let us make a monument for ourselves. … And the Lord said: ‘They are one people, and they have one language; and this is what they begin to do; and now nothing will be withheld from them, which they plan to do.’ … The Lord confused the language of all the earth; and from there the lord scattered them across the face of the whole earth.” (Genesis 11:1-7).
Kamala won. It is 2100. The permanent Democratic majority has emerged. The Democrats have not lost an election since 2040. Everywhere in the country, the same blue tide spread from the cities to the suburbs to the rural areas. The lines had been moving in this direction—the skeptics said no, the parties will reposition, there will be thermostatic opposition, culture will shift. They were wrong. Part of it was the schools. From the deepest heart of Appalachia to the most genteel boarding schools in Virginia, the same language once reserved for Fox News articles about a crazy high school teacher in Chicago was pumped into the classrooms, after-school specials, and board meetings. Conservative school boards frantically scrambled for teachers who would agree to not teach CRT, but the only people who were interested in taking the jobs were Democrat ideologues. The children everywhere all speak the same language—of course, there are classes for children who can’t speak English, but they too speak about “la consciencia” y “el trauma” y “la interseccionalidad.” Scores of immigrants are welcomed into the country, they work hard and support their local communities, and, even better, their traditions and cultures are tolerated so well that they are exactly the same as the Democratic party platform! America is so tolerant of these immigrants that it assumes they must agree with it, at least on the important things. They of course can keep their parties when they turn 15 or whatever it is they do, and absolutely no one would make fun of them for that.
There are no states anymore—it was an anachronistic holdover anyway. Next year, Congress is planning on changing the name of the country from the United States of America to “I acknowledge with respect that the land we are on today is the ancestral land of the [the last native American tribe to conquer the piece of land you are currently on before the colonists conquered it from them].”
It all changed very slowly and very reasonably. An unruly crank was quietly tucked away because of someone’s genuinely hurt feelings. A statement that every tolerant person could see was quite prejudiced was taken down. A word that connoted bigotry was slowly replaced with another—it wasn’t even necessary to force people say the new word. It was enough to let them know that everyone knew that the word possibly meant something prejudiced (or did not mean something prejudiced, but could be interpreted to mean something prejudiced), which of course meant that if you used that word instead of another very healthy and tolerant word, you knew that you were also saying you didn’t care that it maybe meant something prejudiced. And of course you didn’t want to say something prejudiced, or something that someone could possibly interpret as prejudiced.
The economy hummed along to the tune of morning affirmations and Adderall. These very empathetically and comfortingly instructed children understood deeply their own trauma and everyone else’s and got nice jobs filling out forms for requests of goods for other people who could fill out forms for the manufacture of goods. Slowly, though, fewer and fewer people had jobs outside of an office building, and orders started not being met with goods but instead by other forms which were filled out quite correctly and were deeply apologetic. Of course no one thought there was anything wrong with manual labor—it’s actually incredibly problematic to think of it as lesser than intellectual labor, but also it’s even more problematic to think of emotional labor as lesser than manual labor, which of course no one would ever—but also of course no one thought that they should do manual labor, and it was actually incredibly problematic to assume that some people are better at office work and therefore somehow more deserving of it.
Ibram X. Kendi’s Department of Anti-Racism was established in 2050 by a supermajority. The lone vote against the passage of the “Anti-Racism Act” was a largely-demented, 109-year-old Bernie Sanders who was quietly ushered out of the room afterwards. It is believed that he mistook the bill for a declaration of war against Rwanda. His preserved body remains on display in the Senate to remind Democratic Senators not to vote to authorize war with Iraq. Now, Dept. of Anti-Racism agents roam the streets in their long black coats and black leather gloves, copy of How to Be an Antiracist in hand, inspecting businesses, homes, and organizations for possibly-traumatic micro- and macroagressions (as well as the oft-neglected medioagressions).
Support for the anti-racism bill was largely based around the reception of a previous initiative to connect the whole country to the internet and a loudspeaker system which would provide daily updates of demographic statistics. Monday was for racial differences in academic achievement, Tuesday was for racial differences in income, Wednesday was for racial differences in life expectancy, Thursday was for gender differences in income, Friday was (very popularly) for racial differences in basketball and hip-hop outcomes, Saturday was for gender differences in criminal offense, and Sunday was for sexual orientation differences in poverty rates.
It all really makes sense when you think about it. It’s very important to have awareness of these things, so you can be aware of them. Once you have all the awareness, everyone knows about it, so they can pay attention to it because it’s very important.
To facilitate everyone paying attention to and empathizing with all these very important issues, the government has instituted a program to partner universities with companies, so that university administrators can help improve and standardize workplace conduct and companies can help universities struggling with finances to pay for more administrators to help improve and standardize workplace conduct. Corporations have had to cut back on shareholders meetings due to the increase in sensitivity trainings which has made corporate workplaces much more sensitive, as the name implies. The CEO of Lockheed Martin once deplorably described the experience as “walking on eggshells,” but was quickly reprimanded due to the violent imagery of possibly-crushed eggs and the impact that could have on any vegans or vegetarians in the area. Even worse, the CFO of Walmart privately noted she was “on thin ice” with the administrators, which had horrible implications for fatphobia, eating disorder stigma, and anti-Eskimo prejudice. She was very reasonably asked politely to leave, which is quite reasonable given the responsibility she had with her position of power.
There were a few flare-ups of the old ways, when certain particularly salient lines were crossed (apologies to my Christian readers, I mean traversed). The first few weeks of the loudspeaker were quite tense. It is said that in multiple counties, there were incidents of (evidently privileged) people becoming quite impolite. After they were able to understand their own trauma and how they had internalized the White Supremacist culture after only a few weeks of complementary mandatory sensitivity trainings, they were much more amenable. There was also the first time an Eagles fan apologized for a microaggression on camera. The city of Philadelphia almost burned, but a citywide lockdown kept the streets safe. The innards of the country have migrated to the edges—whole states in the center emptied out. People pushed themselves into taller and taller modernist glass boxes so they could go work at other tall modernist glass boxes (but thankfully only three days a week—they could work at the glass box with their bed in it the other two days) and pay money to spend time in brick homely bars bedecked with artfully-artlessly curated knicknacks. The monstrously beautiful classical and art deco buildings were thankfully replaced with austere, considerate mmodernist glass boxes after an architect made the excellent point that it was patently unjust for some people to live near beautiful buildings when so many places are ugly and insensitive to do so while white supremacy remains such a problem. The first time what-used-to-be-Wyoming’s population hit zero, a wave of despair broke out among the center of the country. Thankfully, this was contained by a thoughtful program of transporting individuals to more high-value areas.
Everyone speaks the same language now. This language is far too reasonable for God. The oldest of old books, with its bloody words and denigration of other religions and practices, is far too uncomfortable. It’s positively intolerant! Religion had to be wrung out of American life—it was too cantankerous, too strange, too insensitive to the important issues of the day. Its focus on the individual is downright unsophisticated. What we have today are social problems requiring social solutions, like paying attention to them, or sometimes walking down a street with a sign. What if someone really believed this stuff? What if they believed it more than the very important issues of the day? Holiness could not remain part of the kind, reasonable world—it might imply doing something hurtful.
In 2088, the landmark Haverford Institute for the Arts and Sciences of the Underrepresented Minorities and Other Oppressed Peoples v. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints Supreme Court decision found that the right to freedom of religion required that nobody practice religion, as the practice of any religion implies the rejection of a religion which would be contradictory to it, and thereby impinges on the right of another to practice their own religion in good conscience.
To commemorate this great expansion of freedom, The BIPOC/AAPI/Latinx/White House comissioned a monument in the modernist tradition, and they said to one another: “come, let us make glass, and burn them thoroughly.” And they had glass for austerity, and metal for accents. And they said: “come, let us built a city, and a tower, with its top in the sky, and let us make a monument for ourselves, so we won’t scatter our attention away from the important issues.”
And so the country congregated in Washington, D.C. (now called “Obama, District of the Nacotchtank”), and there were no houses for anyone because of the height limit, and it was good. They began to build a tower with all the important issues on it.
One day, during the afternoon announcement of racial differences in school achievement (i.e., a Monday), the following announcement is given: “last year, our melanin-betokened subject-objects of oppressive liberatory trauma revolted against the Christian-capitalist ideology of toxic hyperindividuation to 78% while…” Some understood this, but some did not. Later, when discussing where to put various injustices on the tower, someone is heard saying, “I actually think it’s pretty problematic to have the trail of tears at the top of the tower because it re-enacts the Westernized orientalist trauma-fetish of linearized financial hierarchy while disrespecting the trauma of the similarly-but-distinctly-abled indigenous bodies.” Most people snapped their fingers and “mm”-ed at the wisdom of the suggestion that they mostly understood, but a few concerned murmurs filtered through the meeting. The change was made. However, the next day, someone is heard saying, “putting the trail of tears at the bottom of the tower enables the toxic gaslighting of native women-identifying-persons by deprioritizing their stories to protect the emotional labors of cishet privilege.” No one would say that they did not think what was said was correct—they could tell it was right because the words were all approved and approvable. But what did it mean? Sentences like these spread, and slowly, people found that they could understand some and not others.
It started with the small conversations one makes on the way to where they’re going. These short bursts of socializing began to split by who could understand whose jargon. Then, in the dark of night, small social gatherings began to occur outside of the government-approved Third Spaces™. Invites were given in tortured notes such as “please join us QTILGBTQIAPN+-focused consciousnesses in mindful rebellious joy against the heterocapital notion of punctuality at liberation time tonight. All are welcome. Please dress appropriately for your self-expression of individual collectivity.”
A fig leaf of normalcy reigned for some time. Such gatherings were talked about in whispers, and tensions began to bubble in more formal, public meetings. Gatherings were exposed for their lack of diversity or inclusivity, because some people were not there, and by the law of statistics, many gatherings did not match the demographics of the country. People began to venture further our to find places that would not be accidentally found by others who didn’t understand the invitation. An arms race of invitational convolution led to ever-more splintering, as people found themselves able to understand fewer and fewer of the directions to the gatherings, and the gatherings themselves stretched further and further out from Obama, D.N. More time was spent commuting to and from the gatherings as they stretched further out, until, for the first time, a group did not make it back for the morning announcement of gender differences in income (it was Thursday).
This was a scandal. The group was deeply apologetic, saying, inter alia, “our own biopolitical deperspective mothered a cycle of trauma that has harmed the bodies of this deeply traumatized antisexist community.” However, an even deeper misunderstanding led the rest to believe that they were being insincere and actually had not been paying attentiont to the gender differences in income. The late group was horrified at this accusation and voluntarily left the city. Such incidents would continue to occur, scattering various sects across the country, each less and less able to understand the others. And so the city was called Obabel, because it confused the language of all America; and from there it had scattered them across the face of the whole country.
Years into the future, dialects will spring out from these small gatherings, whole different languages with brilliant kaleidoscopic forests of words and practices and beliefs. Just the vast plains of the midwest will become home to dozens of such communities, at times warring and at times wedding. A hundred hundred tribes are born, stretched out across the continent.
