The Spy in the Sandwich

Sunday, April 27, 2025

9:00 AM | A Spectacle of Unraveling

It’s kind of frightening to see how fast America—supposedly the most powerful nation in the world—is unraveling these days. It’s also kind of frightening that Americans themselves allowed this to happen, that they voted for all these to happen. [My friend, the poet Bino Realuyo who is based in New York quickly tells me in a rejoinder: “Well, 31% voted for [Trump]. But 36% didn’t vote at all . Question is—how far will the 2/3 tolerate this stupidity?”]

I remember once watching a Fourth of July parade on cable television, the kind with high school marching bands and brass instruments blaring Sousa, confetti cannons flaring red, white, and blue. The commentator was breathless with patriotic pride. “This is America,” he said, as though the idea was enough to inspire the gods into applause. I was perhaps thirteen, and I believed him. In my young head, like many Filipinos, America was always the center of everything—of hope, of culture, of democracy, of dreams. I remember Jessica Zafra once quipping: “The greatest Filipino dream is to be an American.”

Fast forward a few decades, and that glittering image has rusted at the seams. Something is decaying in the state of America, and the rot is loud, unruly, and voted in.

I say this with the reluctant love of a former believer. Like many in the Global South, I grew up with a default reverence for all things American. The accents in the movies, the sitcoms, the endless brands, the smiling Disney promise of happily ever afters—they crept into our consciousness as omnipotent truths. America was the future, and the rest of us were catching up.

But the future got here, and it’s a mess.

The images we now get are of insurrections and incoherent speeches, of politicians with no grasp of science or decency, of book bans and culture wars, of schools riddled with bullets, of billionaires playing space cowboy while millions can’t afford insulin. All of it unfolding in real-time, the way a house burns while the owners argue whether fire is even real.

It’s a strange kind of horror, one that feels cinematic and absurd. Like The Purge franchise, but real. And yet, what’s truly terrifying isn’t just the collapse—it’s the consent. They voted for this. Again and again. With red hats and furious Facebook posts and voter suppression laws polished to look like patriotism. America, for all its claims to moral supremacy, seems to have walked willingly into its own undoing.

And I wonder: what do you do when the empire forgets its own mythology? When it willingly dismantles the very tenets it once exported with missionary zeal?

We have always been told democracy was sacred. That the press was free. That justice was blind. That the arc of the moral universe bent toward something good. And yet here we are, with courts stacked like rigged decks, with news dismissed as fake if it dares speak truth, with minorities demonized, with women fighting for rights their grandmothers had already won. There’s a recklessness to it all. An arrogance, too.

Because America is used to being the hero in its own story. It doesn’t know how to be the villain. So when the cracks appeared, it doubled down on denial. The climate? A hoax. Racism? A relic. Income inequality? Bootstraps. Mass shootings? Thoughts and prayers. Rinse and repeat.

It’s a madness dressed up in freedom.

And what does that mean for the rest of us, those watching from across oceans? We used to model our democracies after America’s. Our leaders have studied in their universities, we spoke their language, we echoed their dreams. And now? Now we scroll through headlines and see echoes of our own fragilities mirrored back at us.

Because here’s the uncomfortable truth: America’s unraveling is a mirror of what happens when a nation stops listening to itself. When grievance overtakes governance. When nostalgia becomes a weapon. When truth becomes negotiable. It’s not just an American story. It’s a cautionary tale.

And I find myself thinking of empire—not as something distant in time, but as something always on the edge of implosion. Rome had its bread and circuses. America has Fox News and TikTok. Both distract while the government burns.

Still, I don’t say this with schadenfreude. There’s no joy in watching a giant stumble. Especially one whose footprint stretches so far across the world that its missteps send aftershocks everywhere. The fall of America—if that’s indeed what this is—won’t be clean. It won’t be cinematic. It’ll be slow, spiteful, noisy, and lived. And it will affect us all.

And yet, part of me still hopes.

Because some myths die hard. And because somewhere in the noise, there are still people marching, resisting, organizing, dreaming. There are still artists making sense of the chaos, writers speaking truth, teachers holding the line, kids growing up not buying the lie. Maybe that’s what resilience looks like: not a return to old glories, but a stubborn insistence on not going quietly.

Still, it’s frightening.

Not just the speed of the fall, but the willful blindness that preceded it. The fact that this didn’t happen overnight. That it was courted, invited, elected.

That’s the part that haunts me.

Because if the mighty can vote for their own collapse, what’s stopping the rest of us?

Labels: america, issues, politics