Driving Blind into the Heart of Darkness: How DOGE is steering American into a ditch
If Facebook is good for anything—that is, and always has been, an open question—I’ll say the one thing that’s been consistent across almost two decades is that it affords everyone (especially “older” folks) an otherwise unavailable opportunity to keep in touch, stay abreast of developments within social circles, and live vicariously through communal experiences (the good, bad, ugly, and especially the painstakingly curated and crafted photo ops from fancy dinners, special events, cries for attention, and so on.). It also, for light users like myself, presents simple pleasures like the daily “memories” feature, a digital throwback to what I was doing on this day last year or ten years ago, etc.
All of which is to say, I was recently reminded of my trip to Mexico in 2023, and two things—one familiar, one that occasioned further thought—occurred: first, wow, two years really flew by (insert soundtrack to Pink Floyd’s “Time” and all other cliches here), and second, America is truly racing toward becoming a surreal combination of broken empire and third world country we’ve often pitied (and, until recently, offered financial assistance and resources to).
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I would be the last person to describe myself as well-traveled, but I’ve been overseas a few times, and visited places in America where the devastating poverty functions as a rejoinder to the natural beauty of its surrounding landscape (the story “Philippi” from my collection This Kind of Man explores this bizarre, depressingly symbiotic relationship). When I spent time in the Bahamas, during college (an experience, now that I think of it, that informs a short story from my forthcoming collection), it was the first time I recall being struck by not only the beauty and lack of material wealth, but the ways this dichotomy was compressed into towns like Bimini, which are, of course, designed to attract tourists (and their wallets).
(Seeing this, in real time, helps disabuse even the most patriotic American of the fiction that we simply lack the resources to make meaningful changes (in infrastructure, health care, education, etc.); we simply lack the will. Worse, there’s no will because the super wealthy (corporations and the people who run them, traditionally and still mostly white males) won’t allow it, because doing something, anything, might impact their bottom line by a fraction of a percentage point.
Elon Musk has unwittingly become the avatar for so many things (all of them awful), it’s at once difficult and pointless to itemize them (I mean, for anyone sentient, you just watch the guy for a few seconds and it’s all there, laid out unfiltered the way any gifted satirist would die to describe in a novel). Still, the fact that with a single gesture—one that would impact his portfolio less than the average American would feel dropping a penny in a homeless person’s hat—he could radically change the entire world, for the better, and instead spends his time shitposting on the social media platform he overpaid for and destroyed, and not only chooses not to (I would prefer not to, he says), he burrows, like the best example of a late-stage capitalist psychopath, in the exact opposite direction (more money, more destruction, more ME), is something future students will study in history books, assuming such things are allowed or imaginable a century or decade from now.)
Todos Santos is everything I figured it would be, only more so. It’s beautiful, it is very much off the grid, and it’s near the Pacific Ocean. I was awakened by a family of roosters, every morning at approximately 4:00, all of whom sounded like they lived only to continue an argument that never ended. These were not proud beasts strutting and announcing the arrival of another day, they sounded like petty, angry, unconsolable toddlers screaming just to be heard. I had no choice but to admire their commitment to the role. The streets in and around the town were scarcely paved, and all the side streets were dirt (the dust that accumulated, everywhere, was at once impressive and onerous, a metaphor for the effort, time, and money involved in man’s ceaseless attempt to tame the wilderness or, more accurately, impose order on nature that otherwise operates on its own ancient, immutable logic).
The highlight of the week was my daily excursion to the ocean—a four-mile round trip that provided exercise and views of the unfiltered, mostly unchanged countryside. This involved traversing a sandy road shared by cars, pedestrians, and animals (I saw wild horses, chickens, a donkey, and many dogs). There were also the occasional compounds, which were quite literally hidden fortresses, surrounded on all sides by immense concrete barriers. Needless to say, it hits differently, seeing this kind of arrangement not in a posh suburban neighborhood or a picture from the Hollywood hills; to behold such sequestered opulence—paranoid, necessary or perhaps both—in the midst of bucolic wilderness. It was jarring, on aesthetic and logical levels, but the message was unmistakable: such measures would not be taken if it was not imperative to separate those with (on the inside) from those without.
I felt perfectly safe, during daylight hours, although I’d been warned (cab driver, shop owner where I got my morning cups of joe, and the dude who ran the diner where I ate fresh seafood for lunch every day) to avoid going anywhere alone—inside and definitely beyond the outskirts—after dark. I never felt unduly threatened, keenly aware of my status as white man with means, but smart enough to know this made me a potential target. Nevertheless, seeing the dozen or so mansions encircled by walls (in some instances augmented by barbed wire), it was impossible to deny what was in front of my face, and what’s happening just about everywhere in the world, all the time, though great pains are made to deflect, distract, or deny open acknowledgment of it.
Here's what I thought, revisiting these photos from 2023: this is where America is headed, at light speed: a place where wealth is steadily concentrated in an increasingly exclusive, grotesquely privileged portion of the population. A new and not great country where the American Dream—that rusty, well-traveled jalopy that, until 2025, has taken us from catastrophe to triumph, weathering the beatings of recessions and a Big Depression, but at least ostensibly tracking toward some destination at once forever in the future and the present tense that promised: you can have all this, too; you too can be wealthy and free from the shackles of idiotic employers, meddling government, overreaching regulations, etc.—is breaking down, by design.
America, punch drunk and hijacked by maniacal stewards of late-stage capitalism, is being steered into a ditch, figurative, certainly, but also, inconceivably, literal—particularly in red states most in need of the services they giddily (if obliviously) voted to have slashed & burned. And at a certain point, as with all empires, the obvious fictions finally fall away and reveal the reality: you're not only never, ever going to acquire what TV and media sold you, you’d better keep quiet and remain content with whatever you still can get your filthy fingers on (and hold on tight because even that’s only on loan, until someone decides they want it more than you), and if you can't do what you're told, there will be consequences. There will be walls. You will never see the inside; you will remain where you're meant to be: on the outside, considered too dangerous or insignificant even to stare longingly through the windows. At the mercy of a world that is and always has been a jungle, and everything that lives there spends every second of its existence either killing or trying to avoid being killed.
It's the Heart of Darkness, and it's the Dark Heart of where America, by the slimmest of margins, voted to head in November 2024. Are enough people, now officially entering the “find out” phase, going to wake up, make some noise, help the rest of us tap the brakes before a chainsaw wielding sociopath slices up our country, discarding large chunks of it to starve and rot in the sun? We shall see.
Some Things Considered with Sean Murphy is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Some Things Considered with Sean Murphy is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
About Sean Murphy
I’m Sean Murphy, and you might have heard me on NPR’s “All Things Considered” or seen my name in The New York Times or The Huffington Post, among others. As a contributor to outlets ranging from The Good Men Project and PopMatters to The Village Voice and The Weeklings, my aim has always been to connect, provoke, and celebrate the stories that define us.
I founded 1455, a non-profit dedicated to celebrating creativity and community, and I direct the Center for Story at Shenandoah University, but I’ve been telling—and savoring—words for as long as I can remember. Since I first began writing, I’ve been obsessed with the ways powerful narratives explain our world while creating new possibilities, how art broadens awareness and builds empathy. I think we’d all agree that understanding how storytelling works—and why it’s important—has never been more critical, for our collective and individual well-being.