It’s been ten months. Ten everlasting months since Donald Trump first announced his campaign for the American Presidency, and worst of all, the bastard might actually win. He’s used fear, and racism, and misogyny to build a platform from which he can march across America’s collective id clear to the finish line. But it wasn’t ten months ago that we reached any sort of tipping point that set off this chain of events, or seventy years ago. It wasn’t two hundred years, or even two hundred thousand. We weren’t playing chicken with any ledge. We got here step by step, on our long journey back into the sea. We’ve been doomed from the beginning, but as some consolation we have the beauty of Wintersleep’s new video for ‘Amerika’ to remind us of our bittersweet impermanence.
‘Amerika’ is the first single to come out of Wintersleep’s 2016 release ‘The Great Detachment’. It’s been eight weeks, six of which have been spent on the top of the Canadian charts, but as the video shows, none of that makes much difference. It is the momentary spark of life that serves no purpose but to emphasize the contrasting abyss all around it.
“Are you alive, oh my Amerika?/ Perennial with the Earth/ And freedom, love, and law, and life/ Perennial with the Earth/ My freedom, I don’t wanna die.”
Drawing from Walt Whitman’s poem ‘America’, the song is a lament for the ideals of a country that promised so much, and instead resulted in the ugly tribble-headed step-sister of Donald Trump, and ultimately nothing we produce will ever be as awe inspiring as a force of nature, universal truths, or the infinity of the cosmos.
The video features a speech by The Orange One in which he states: “So we have an incredible country, but we better be damned careful because we’re not going to have a great country for much longer if we don’t start to move, and move properly. You know, it’s very interesting, and very sad, but we don’t have victories anymore. Remember we used to have victories. We used to have great trade deals. We’d win. We’d always win. Now we never win.” The sort of small-minded us-or-them mentality that chooses to ignore the fact that we’re all scraping together an existence from something comparable to a layer of varnish over a bowling ball that’s hurtling through space.
It is a reminder that disasters comes in varying sizes, but inevitably they come for all of us. They are grand, and sweeping, and small, and personal, but whatever it is that gets us in the end, and it will, it’s still only a matter of time before this mortal coil shuffles us all off. Look to yourself, America. Your house is on fire. Will we survive Donald Trump? Maybe not, but as they say, none of us are getting out alive. Ashes to ashes. It’s what we do with the time we have left that counts.