All of the tolerable jokes about Chinese spy balloons have already been made. I don’t have any new ones.
What I do have is a strange sense of unease. Several people whom I trust and respect predict that things could get spectacularly nasty with China around 2024-25 and that the fate of Taiwan will be on the line. I don’t like predictions myself — most of my more horrible ones have come true in recent years, and instead of being happy about that I am, well, horrified — but I am good at reading tension, and I would be a fool to say it isn’t there.
Even the memes about spy balloons and other objects recently shot down have an edge to them. Lack of information has not just inspired conspiracy theories — my favorite so far is that “this is all a distraction from developments in the Jeffrey Epstein saga” — it has also raised questions that are headache-inducing to people in national security circles. Namely, “If this spying program has been going on for a while now, what exactly have we done about it?”
The standard answer is that, “Everyone is always spying on everyone else. Calm down.” Fair enough, but when a spying program is so glaringly exposed, this means that there has been a chain of fuck ups. Fuck ups are the flipside of luck, which is angelic and unpredictable. Unpredictability is always worrying, but especially in the Year of our Lord 2023.
Talk of aliens is comforting in this context. It’s more easily turned into a joke.
Other smart people I know insist that the only thing that can inspire human beings to stop warring with each other is an alien invasion, which would unite us all as a species — and they are not joking. Of course, they hasten to add, any alien civilization advanced enough to drop in on us is likely to have far more superior weapons. What an irony it would be, to unite as a species for a few brief moments before annihilation.
These are not the kind of thoughts that endear you to people in Washington D.C. and its surroundings, where people are mostly concerned about budgets. Nevertheless, I’ve found it important — to live close to the beating heart of American power, as I love this country very deeply and fret about its future. I fret about domestic policies as surely as I fret about our foreign policy. I am a fretter, it’s what I do best.
Fretting itself can be an act of hope, though. It means that you still feel empowered to potentially change something.
When I lived in accursed Moscow, on the other hand, the impossibility of change sat on top of everything like a glacier. It was in Moscow that I once saw a very good and very loose adaptation of “An Ideal Husband” by the director Konstantin Bogomolov. It was a dark satire about how Russian power slowly but surely turned fully fascist, because fascism was the only ideology that could justify wanton, obscene corruption. At one point, one of the main characters delights in his ability to change the fates of numerous people, simply because he is rich and can sign a particular document.
Power with no constraints collapses on itself and turns into a black hole, feeding on the universe. The Founding Fathers had some ideas about that, which was why the U.S. government is supposed to have its branches ideally balance each other. That arrangement is constantly being tested, and I think the greatest tests are still ahead of us.
Image: Sailors assigned to Explosive Ordnance Disposal Group 2 recover a high-altitude surveillance balloon off the coast of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, Feb. 5, 2023 by U.S. Navy
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