Introduction: A Lament for a Dying Empire
The United States, cloaked in the illusion of democracy, stands as arguably the most corrupt nation in modern history...a hypocritical empire built on genocide, slavery, and exploitation, now collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions. On Donald Trump's birthday, as militaristic pageantry filled the air, the accompanying dirge...the mournful music of lamentation...served as an unintentional eulogy to a once-invincible empire now in its death throes. The soundtrack was fitting: not a celebration of national pride, but a sorrow for a soulless, faltering nation spiraling into decay. As Malcolm X foresaw in 1963, “The chickens have come home to roost.”
Malcolm's Truth: America's Unhealed Wound
Malcolm’s piercing metaphor of the knife...
“If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, that’s not progress…”
...Remains one of the most vivid illustrations of America's fraudulent narrative of racial reconciliation. The United States has yet to truly confront the wounds it inflicted. It refuses even to acknowledge the knife embedded deep in the backs of its marginalized citizens, let alone offer healing.
Yes, legislative reforms have been made, and symbolic milestones achieved...but these are merely shallow gestures on a festering wound. Until America reckons with the full legacy of its crimes...slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, mass incarceration, and continued racial and economic exploitation...there can be no healing, only pretense. Malcolm was not being rhetorical; he was diagnosing a fatal condition in the American psyche: a refusal to see the humanity of those it has historically dehumanized.
The Illusion of Progress and the Reality of Decline
To reduce the visible forms of oppression without dismantling the structures that uphold them is not liberation; it is cosmetic. True progress would mean an America where racial, economic, and social equality is not aspirational but foundational. Yet today, Black Americans, Indigenous peoples, immigrants, and the poor remain systemically marginalized. America continues to operate on the fuel of white supremacy, capitalist greed, and militaristic imperialism.
Dr. King warned us that:
“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”
That death is now visible. The corpse is twitching, but rigor mortis is setting in. In that context, Donald Trump isn’t an anomaly...he is America’s Frankenstein, a creature molded by centuries of systemic hate, ignorance, greed, and delusion.
America’s Frankenstein: The Birth of Trumpism
Trump’s rise is not the sickness; it is the symptom. He is the embodiment of everything this country tried to bury: racial resentment, toxic nationalism, anti-intellectualism, and brute capitalism. Baldwin once said,
“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
Yet America has refused to face itself, preferring denial to accountability, myth to truth.
White America, in particular, has long benefitted from a system rigged in its favor and is now reeling as that system shows signs of strain. The panic, the rage, the desperate grasp for “greatness” is not about progress...it is about power, and the fear of losing it. Trumpism is the ideological ghost of Manifest Destiny, Jim Crow, and McCarthyism all rolled into one grotesque resurrection.
A Tale of Two Falls: Rome and the United States
The fall of the Roman Empire offers a striking parallel. Rome collapsed under the weight of internal rot...corruption, economic decline, political chaos, military overreach, and a fractured society. So too does the United States now teeter at the precipice, echoing the same harbingers of decline:
- Political Instability: Like Rome, America is plagued by infighting, partisan gridlock, and an eroding faith in its governing institutions. The Supreme Court has become an ideological weapon; Congress is paralyzed by obstruction; executive power swings like a pendulum between extremes.
- Economic Injustice: Wealth inequality has reached obscene levels, with billionaires amassing fortunes while millions struggle to survive. America’s working class, once the backbone of its industrial might, has been gutted. Economic mobility is a myth; debt is the new slavery.
- Imperial Overstretch: The U.S. military has a footprint in over 70 countries, draining resources while infrastructure crumbles at home. Rome fell when it could no longer sustain its far-flung conquests; America, too, has built an empire it can no longer afford.
- Social Fragmentation: As Rome was divided along class and cultural lines, so is America fractured by race, class, gender, and ideology. Tribalism replaces unity. Hate is normalized. Truth itself is contested.
The Reckoning
What we are witnessing is not just political dysfunction or economic hardship...it is the moral and spiritual unraveling of a nation. A reckoning long delayed is now at hand. America’s soul, if it ever had one, is now exposed...raw, bleeding, and afraid.
Stokely Carmichael warned us:
“In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none.”
That absence of conscience is precisely what makes reform so elusive. The failure to confront history, to apologize, to repair, to change...not cosmetically, but fundamentally...has led us here.
Conclusion: Will the Empire Learn or Burn?
James Baldwin once said,
“The civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.”
The collapse of Rome was not due solely to barbarians at the gate, but the barbarians within. Likewise, America is collapsing not just from outside pressure, but from internal rot...apathy, cowardice, and a refusal to confront its truths.
History doesn’t just repeat...it punishes. The United States is not exceptional; it is following a well-worn path of empires that believed themselves invincible. But there is still a choice. Empires fall, but people can rise. If America is to survive...not as a dominant force, but as a just and moral society...it must heed the warnings of its prophets and the lessons of history.
But if it continues on its current path?
Then let the dirge play.
Let the empire die.
Let the chickens come home.
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