Cheers, Post-America!

 

“Civil War” was trending on Twitter a few hours ago, as it sometimes does these days – an apt occasion to say something about Andrei Martyanov’s recently published work, Disintegration: Indicators of the Coming American Collapse. Martyanov, a Russian transplant to the US who served in the Soviet Coast Guard and has worked in the aerospace industry, blogs at Reminiscence of the Future and is the author of two previous books, Losing Military Supremacy: The Myopia of American Strategic Planning and The (Real) Revolution in Military Affairs. Martyanov writes of America’s “disintegration” – economically, militarily, culturally, and demographically – not just as something beyond the horizon, but as an already evident and daily observable process.

Much of the book approximates the experience of reading typical articles at Russia Today, with the awesomeness of Putin’s Russia juxtaposed with the embarrassing dysfunction of the arrogant and putatively hegemonic US. For Martyanov, American supremacy is at this point in the country’s history largely hype, with the US lagging behind in energy, shipbuilding, aviation and missile technology, and various other measures of its economic competitiveness and capacity for power-projection. Given, however, that Disintegration was published by the progressive Clarity Press, the book is surprisingly frank about the specifically anti-white orientation of the reigning elites and the “ethno-religious” distortion of American foreign policy, with racially incoherent “America” falling short of the definition of a genuine nation. Martyanov also devotes significant space to what he characterizes as the moral and intellectual degeneration of the country’s managerial class.

Martyanov, notwithstanding his contempt for so much of American policy and pop-cultural expression, writes from a position of sympathy with the common American, arguing that Russians, having experienced the collapse of their own empire in the Soviet Union, are uniquely situated to understand the agony of (white) Americans as they witness the US empire’s rot and gradual demolition. Though the discussion tends to be panoramic in encompassing vast economic and geopolitical processes, it also accommodates more personal and informal reflections, as in the following passage – one of my favorite bits in the book:  

I recall how, in the early-to-mid 1990s, whenever I flew between Russia and the United States, each time I returned from Russia, which at that time was a ruined country run by criminal gangs, my routine upon arrival, was always the same. I would get to a nearest airport bar and, having usually very little luggage with me, would order fried chicken wings, beer and then light my cigarette. For some reason, most of the time, and there were many of those times, whenever I get to those bars, the TVs hanging there would show Cheers. I never got into Cheers, but the opening tune and the whole aura of Cheers was at that point in time so counter to my Russian life experiences – many of which were terrifying, to put it mildly – that it captivated me, with its peacefulness and good nature. It was pleasant to feel oneself in the safety and peace of an America which still was experiencing the high of the 1980s. American television projected a free and decent people, a pop culture but a culture nonetheless, and very American. It was […] an America that doesn’t exist anymore – most TV shows or films, or music, today have no moral to their story, nor often the sign of any talent or basic likeability – now they have an agenda. It is this agenda which ruins the remnants of that America. A long time has passed since my Cheers transitions from one world to another. America is different today. The country has lost the spirit which made it so attractive and this loss is even more menacing than its catastrophic deindustrialization.

Martyanov could have benefited from a more thoroughgoing editor, but the author’s incomplete grasp of the proper use of determiners in the English language lends the book a distinctively Russian flavor.

As the title declares, Disintegration concerns itself with indicators rather than descriptions of what Martyanov suggests is a probably inevitable collapse, so there are no specific predictions of what the political breakup of the United States would mean militarily, in terms of potential secessionist chaos or distribution of the country’s nuclear arsenal, what would happen to power grids, people’s pensions or Social Security, etc. These more speculative problems await treatment or dismissal in some future book.

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

Rainer is the author of Drugs, Jungles, and Jingoism.