I've lived nearly all my life here. Most of my life was spent in California, land of eternal sunshine, surf, mountains, beaches, deserts, and unaffordability. I was able to stay there for as long as I did because I lived with my parents until they died, taking care of them on their deathbeds. I'll probably die in the Pacific Northwest, because it looks to me like the least-ruined portion of the country.

Cornelius Castoriadis, the Greek-French philosopher, had a concept which will prove quite useful when dealing with the United States, avatar of violent pseudo-democracies. Castoraidis' concept was pseudo-rational pseudo-mastery. It's rational mastery, but it's fake.

At any rate, it appears that that most USian of attitudes is that of pseudo-rational pseudo-mastery: thinking that you are purely rational and that you have mastered the world, whereas in fact you are insane and your pretensions of mastery make you a slave. And if you are not obviously a slave of some other person, then you are a slave of money, booze, ego, your PTSD from encounters with your parents or with the cops, from having been raped, or from having been shellshocked by participation in one or more wars, or perhaps today you are merely the slave of the cash being channeled into your accounts by Zionist billionaires. For all your pretensions of pseudo-rational pseudo-mastery, then, you will, in the politically screwed-up world of America, be mastered by someone or something else. US elites, then, especially the Zionist billionaires, are the vanguard of pseudo-rational pseudo-mastery.

When I was a student of literature at UCSC in the Eighties, I thought little of American literature, preferring the literature of other countries. Sure, I took the department course in Mark Twain; but Twain was an attempt to canonize laughter, his early stuff having some humor to it while he really didn't understand the native peoples of this land and eventually drifted into a sort of Dreiser-like pessimist realism.

When I was at Sonoma State University getting a Master's degree in English at the beginning of the Nineties I saw a course in the schedule: "Alcoholism and literature." Now there was a deft move: bundle up a bunch of canonical literary figures so you can say, "yep! Booze." Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Cheever, and so on. The moral of all these stories is plain: America is screwed-up, get drunk. In such an environment Carsie Blanton showed relative mental health:

The Transcendentalists, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman and the like, maybe there's some pathos to it but it's basically religion without Jeezus. The best of USian philosophy is pragmatism, a glorified half-measure. Pragmatism was delivered its best critique by a comment Aldous Huxley made in his 1927 big essay on education: learning by doing is good, as long as the doing itself is doing good. Otherwise no.

There are exceptions! Henry David Thoreau for instance. Read Walden! Thoreau knew what pseudo-rational pseudo-mastery was.

I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in. Who made them serfs of the soil? Why should they eat their sixty acres, when man is condemned to eat only his peck of dirt? Why should they begin digging their graves as soon as they are born? They have got to live a man’s life, pushing all these things before them, and get on as well as they can. How many a poor immortal soul have I met well nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture, and wood-lot! The portionless, who struggle with no such unnecessary inherited encumbrances, find it labor enough to subdue and cultivate a few cubic feet of flesh.

But men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon plowed into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It is a fool’s life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before.

Or the Beat poets, though with the way Jack Kerouac ended up one might as well put him in the bin labeled "alcoholism and literature." There is certainly something to be said, though, for Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Diane DiPrima, Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg. In philosophy: Lewis Mumford, Emma Goldman. These were people who did not think that pseudo-rational pseudo-mastery was the ticket to eternal happiness, and thus they enjoined the search for the exit door.

I want to add to this essay something about the search for the exit door, the search for an alternative to life in the US, the imperial hegemon, as embarked by those who are trapped within its confines. The world of today was in an important sense made by the US, and finding the new and better world will not entail leaving the comfort of Earth's magnetic field.

So there must be a third option, just as, in US politics, there must at some point be a third party. It cannot just be Trumplandia or the fantasy of outer space.

At this point in my diatribe one must be hearing that typical US refrain: if you don't like it, live somewhere else. My response to America love it or leave it would be M. Shahid Alam's rebuttal, speaking as a native of Pakistan: the US is the only country I can live in that hasn't been colonized by (or we might add, attacked by) the US. And, seriously, would you want to live in Russia, or China, or Iran? So in the Pacific Northwest I stay.

I would like to conclude with a discussion of some election run-up propaganda from the Republican running for my State Senate seat here in Oregon: Brad Hicks.

Here is the Brad Hicks complaint about his Democratic Party opponent, Denise Krause:

Tina Kotek, one-party rule, and Salem special interests have broken Oregon.

• Highest individual income tax burden in America
• Highest state unemployment rate in the nation
• 47th in affordability
• 50th in fourth-grade reading and math

Responses to this cherry-picked complaint come easy:

1) Oregon has no sales tax. That's a good thing. So some of Oregon's other taxes are higher than in other states. So what.
2) Republicans are not going to hire anyone. There are decades of evidence to show that Republicans, like Democrats, believe in more debt, not working-class income.
3) The affordability problem in Oregon is weighed down by Portland, where rents and property values are too high for the working class. Brad Hicks is running for the State Senate in District 3, in the other part of the state.
4) The education problem is, per the analysis above, a problem of the mental health of the residents of the US, not of reading and math test scores for fourth graders, who do not care anyway and who would not care if we punished the schools some more, which is what Republicans do. And if people are no longer reading, this is because they are addicted to their cellphones, not because of any politician.

I am not going to go over the non-promises of Hicks' opponent Denise Krause. The hard fact is that elections in the US are based on fooling people, pseudo-rational pseudo-mastery, the Duke and the Dauphin of Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn writ large. We need, then, to be looking for a way out, as Thoreau and the Beat Poets looked for a way out.