Why Things Fall Apart
Sometimes reaction to things is worse than the things
I.
It was during my tour as a combat planner for operations on the African continent that someone introduced me to Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart.
It’s a classic. It tells the story of how a society’s value system, structure of norms, and social unity are broken down by the imposition of foreign religious and social traditions. It is also unflinchingly honest in its portrayal of what existed in rural Nigeria before colonialism, and why the British felt morally justified.
One of the morals of the story is that morality is an expression of cultural norms. What one culture finds repugnant, another considers totally normal, and vice-versa. Introducing disparate cultures to one another comes with a health warning. Too much too soon leads to chaos. Excessive timidity leads to sectarian silos and Balkanization.
Borrowing from W.B. Yeats poem The Second Coming about the loss of moral order during The Great War, Achebe illustrates how and why “the center cannot hold” when the legal and religious customs previously serving as foundational pillars of society are crumbled into dissolution by too much external influence infused too rapidly.
It’s a powerful enough story that once you’ve digested it, there is a risk of seeing it everywhere you look.
And therefore being wrong much of the time.
II.
We’re not the first to worry that culture clash might impair sources of stable expectations. We’re not the first to develop collective hysteria about holding onto our identity in the face of rapid change. We’re not the first to fear dilution of our belief system by the idea of outsiders roosting en masse within our perimeter.
But we are unique in experiencing these sensations without foundation.
Sometimes, things fall apart because the center cannot hold under immense external pressure.
Other times, things fall apart because our fear of the external becomes emotionally flammable. Because threats are credibly portrayed as multiples more massive, dangerous, and imminent than they actually are.
Sometimes, we choose to blow things apart that would otherwise have held. We act on our fear, setting in motion an insanely synthetic chain of reactions and counteractions that make our fears real.
We pull the temple down. All the while bleating about what someone else is doing to us.
III.
The answer to the question “why doesn’t immigration get fixed” seems complicated.
But it can be boiled down to a single word: interest.
As in, leaving it broken serves many interests, to include providing a playing field for theatrical skirmishes that fund election coffers. Because we’ve allowed elections to become about coffers instead of competing visions.
To include providing an emotive distraction from failed or failing governance in other areas, like jobs and the economy.
To include giving artificial political mobility and muscularity to a movement that otherwise struggles to attract broad-based support with its policy platform.
To include stoking irrational and unfounded fears that keep wallets open, funding a gradual transition from “Land of the Free” to “World’s Biggest Penitentiary.”
Scaring the bejesus out of people with exaggerated and twisted claims about drug trafficking, rape, and terrorism perpetrated by evil interlopers keeps them out of rational decision mode and acting on emotion.
This keeps them acting contrary to their own interests, until they wake up one day and realize the walls are not keeping others out so much as keeping them in.
To include, of course, overheating and falsely enlarging legitimate concerns about the sustainment of traditions and cultural norms.
But none of those or the other reasons not listed have the clear materiality of one particular reason. The one most responsible for not only keeping immigration broken, but breaking the Republican party into two warring factions.
Immigration is economically crucial to the US.
IV.
Immigrants are the labor that allows farmers to clear their fields and hit their yields.
They are the scientists, developers, analysts, and inventors who keep American tech thriving despite a generational gap in STEM education.
They are the pickers and packers in Amazon warehouses who ensure you can get Chinese-manufactured flammable pajamas, in the color of your choice, on your doorstep by 10 o’clock if you order while in stuck in traffic on your afternoon commute.
They are the short-order cooks, baristas, and Big Mac builders who keep us all fat and giggly as we choke down an industrial diet that only gets more artificial and toxic as farming loses viability.
They do the jobs Little Johnny and Little Sally America won’t do for wages they would never accept. Because we spent decades telling our kids to work with their brains more and their hands less. And God help us, as they sometimes selectively do, they listened.
Industries like farming are survival-dependent upon immigrant labor. Which is why, for a long time, Republicans focused on developing humane and orderly systems and laws for immigration.
Fund border control. Sort the earnest from the dangerous. Deport those who show us they are not interested in assimilating to the rule of law. Fund courts and administrators to speed dispositions and understand clearly who is legally residing.
And then sit back and collect the tax surplus that flows from the immigrant population when we calm our emotions and do what makes sense.
Immigrants pay more in taxes than they receive in benefits. By about double. So next time you hear about mass welfare fraud by dog-eating migrant terrorist fentanyl kingpins, ask for the facts to support that narrative.
Because that’s what it is. A narrative. Not reality. Not proportionally relative to reality. Perpendicular to reality.
The Obama and Biden Admins deported more unlawful immigrants than any Republican administration, including Donald Trump’s in his first term. They funded courts, funded border control, and did what worked. They took it in the neck from many on their own side of the aisle for it, while those on the other side of the aisle simply made up narratives contrary to what occurred.
This gap between fact and story reflects the reality no one wants to fix it, while showcasing the competing motives and palace intrigue that make it a perpetual engine of negativity. It’s starting to make us turn on one another in newly vicious ways, and to gun down our own citizens for being civically active, which is exactly what all Americans must do if they expect to continue self-governance.
V.
The late Samuel Huntington took a lot of flak for the theory he laid out in “Clash of Civilizations,” which predicted that conflict in the post-Cold War order would be less about state interests and more about collisions of cultures instigated by the mass immigration that comes with regional instability.
I don’t know whether Huntington was influenced by Things Fall Apart, but his theory always struck me as an example of assigning far more causality to cultural friction than the facts would suggest.
Most of the flak he took was warranted. His theory wasn’t based on clear reasoning and was mainly wrong, if not a little wacky.
But he was right about one thing.
It’s not immigration that would cause conflict per se, but state reactions to it. Cynics would have a new tool in their arsenal to trigger national inflammation, padding narrow interests but inflicting mass harms.
Two things made this come true in America.
First, the Republican Party as we knew it died. It lost mass appeal as American values shifted and it refused to adapt, excessively beholden to theocrats wish casting for an Enlightenment roll-back. Entropy accelerated until it could no longer survive in its environment.
Rather than lay it to rest and revive it in a new body politic, grand poohbahs chose to keep its zombified corpus going by any means possible. Shock paddles. Robotic prosthesis. Bleaching of the brain.
It is now undead.
The creature we now behold is not conservative, prudent, or fiscally responsible. It has no grasp of values or traditions. It is no longer even religious or remotely moral. It is dishonest in all things, including the degree to which it tries to understand itself.
It is a condemned political soul searching for deliverance, howling and clawing like any ghoul in such a predicament.
Party leaders looked at demography. They realized the zombie would be slain by shifts in electoral reality. So they sought to define an alternate reality that would allow the zombie to continue raging.
A reality where denting immigration might ease the demographic disadvantage, and a reality where a segment of the voting public might reverse themselves and love the zombie.
Because they are told the zombie is not the problem. It’s those danged furriners.
Second, there arose by the alchemy of O.J. Simpson’s trial, Bill Clinton’s shenanigans, and Rupert Murdoch’s commercial genius a new market for paid propaganda masquerading as news.
Enough money to raise and make ambulatory an entire zombie legion could be made ten times over, it turned out, by punching people in the amygdala 24 hours every day, addicting them to anger and resentment while pumping sludge into their skulls until they couldn’t discern shit from oatmeal.
Social media injected that business model with digital meth, then invited foreign actors hostile to American interests to join in.
We’ve all lived the result, which needn’t be recounted here.
VI.
78% of voters in America’s 444 farming counties voted for Donald Trump in ‘24. In the past year, farmers have learned that they can’t pay their bills by owning the libs. Nor can they feed their families with dank memes. They will need someone to blame after betting the farm on populist narratives and losing. They may well turn on Republicans this fall as a result.
But that will only add another branch and sequel to a story so convoluted and senseless that not even the actors remember the point of the plot they’re enacting.
It’s like The Big Lebowski as a national story. No one knows what’s happening. Random shouting, gunshots, rugs getting pissed on, fake ransoms, and hapless bowlers dying too young.
Underneath the sound and fury lies the domain of interest. When we decode interests, we understand broken immigration as a narrative joust between warring factions of a zombified political movement.
Historically, these moments branch into one of two further sequels.
Either an uplifting tale of political Renaissance powered by transcendent values, restored purpose, and rare leadership -- often partially powered by the presence of an external, unifying threat;
Or a zombie horde swarms the land, laying waste to everyone and everything before collapsing and starving when there are no more brains upon which to feast. Future generations will read in their history books how dumb we had to be to surrender to the classic pitfalls of collective action.
Which we see playing out will come down to a collective choice between fact and fear.
I’m not remotely sure which will happen. But I plan to continue adhering to a strict alcohol regimen to keep my mind limber in the meantime.
Tony is an independent writer.
Shack!!!!