(id look up the quote, but it's funner to butcher ideas and re-arrange them in new language)

i feel like that's not just the US as a nation state, but Yankee culture and society in general. Like, I'm starting to think we're just not capable of incorporating new experience into our collective learned behaviors. Not even after COVID - the polite thing isn't to mask up or even hand-sanitize when you have cold or flu symptoms, it's to pretend like nothing happened (and AIDS barely gets talked about and only in the past-tense...)

Most of the art and music and literature getting remixed remade and referenced is from the 20th century, or has roots beginning in that time. In terms of infrastructure, very little built this century seems to have any amount of longevity in mind.

Geopolitically we're still doing Cold Wars and proxy-conflicts -- even when those have been rendered obsolete by our own fucking actions the previous (and first...) time there was a big Cold War. And we never stopped funding and arming settler colonialism, even with practically unanimous condemnation in the UN (take away our VETO for the love of all things good TAKE IT AWAY)

i don't know that i have a conclusion for this. On a personal level, living in the 20th century US but having 21st century tech reminds me way too much of Fahrenheit 451. It's maddening. Like I'm trying not to notice the great big Amygdalae on the Healing Church; there's no outlet for the Insight so it's just hovering there and i'm scared to walk too close to it for fear of how others respond.