Presidential Debate Perfectly Embodied Rapid Decay of American Empire

The sham the "elections" have become is so open, that Biden and Trump may as well have turned to the cameras and spit directly in every voter's face.

As the farcical presidential debate spectacle unfolded between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, one truth crystalized with devastating clarity - the American empire has entered its terminal phase of putrid degradation. There could be no more damning indictment of a civilization's rot than these two decaying, cartoonishly unfit figures jousting for the role of emperor.

Amidst the most catastrophic global crisis in generations, with millions of lives lost and entire nations ravaged, the pressing issue uppermost on the minds of humanity - the genocidal massacre being inflicted on Gaza - was barely an afterthought relegated to a few fleeting remarks. Yet even in those few seconds dedicated to the Palestinian genocide, each candidate spewed vitriol vile enough to render them eligible for prosecution as war criminals.

Biden brazenly admitted to bankrolling Israel's child-killing apparatus through weapon transfers, openly conspiring in genocide. Trump chillingly urged Israel to "finish the job" of ethnic cleansing - a call for blatant, irreversible crimes against humanity. Both arrogantly proclaimed the right to unilaterally decide if a Palestinian state should exist, trampling the sacred norms of international law the US repeatedly and hypocritically flaunts.

Spitting in the voter’s face

Every passing moment laid bare the degradation of American ideals. Biden essentially confessed that the proxy war in Ukraine amounts to little more than a money-laundering operation transferring tax dollars to the military-industrial complex. His vacuous brain, visibly disintegrating before our eyes, is the most apt avatar for a comatose empire still swaddled in nostalgic delusions of its long-extinguished grandeur.

Trump, mascot for ascendant corporate fundamentalists hellbent on America's total retrenchment from the world stage, merely represented the other tectonic power faction holding the populace in undisguised contempt. Their puppetry of the public was so brazen, so open in its mockery of the sham these "elections" have become, that they may as well have turned to the cameras and spit directly in every viewer's face.

It was, in sum, a master class in how staggeringly far the land of the "free" has plunged into humiliating disrepute and decline in the eyes of a world that has collectively awakened to the soul-decaying plagues of American imperial arrogance, brutality and avarice. In an exquisite insult, the entire proceeding amounted to little more than two geriatric vessels violently polluting themselves in public as the global majority marveled at just how far their abusers had fallen.

Karma

For the great maligned, butchered masses of the global South and Muslim world, the shared disgust beamed from that debate spectacle reverberated with karmic glee. How they must have delighted in this garish exhibition of the ruling empire's degradation, now mired in the same ethnic, sectarian violence and societal corrosion it arrogantly unleashed on their homelands.

Indeed, the horrors America has inflicted upon the people of the global South and Muslim world over generations is breathtaking. Bombs dropped on their lands, invasions and military occupations of their territories - all waged in an attempt to forcibly reshape the world into a depraved mirror image of America's own messed up society. The nearly incalculable trauma of families incinerated, homes and cities reduced to rubble, women and children raped, spirits and futures crushed under the cruel yoke of industrialized domination all in service of the American imperial vanity project.

Finally, the perpetrators had been robbed of their delusions of supremacy, their shroud of exceptionalism shredded as the world watched the icon of "democracy" reduced to a pathetic joke - one decrepit pervert bluntly boasting of fueling genocide while the other openly called for extinguishing a people's very existence. It was the most searing repudiation imaginable of America's farcical human rights posturing, a terminal humiliation of its hollow moral credibility.

And just as the empire perpetually projects its most malevolent traits onto its victims, demonizing entire populations to enable genocidal violence, so too was the American populace itself this time deprived of agency. Both candidates openly mocked the very notion that domestic public opinion should influence policy direction on issues as existential as genocide, occupation, and warfare. The American people were not just ignored but outright humiliated in the most telling on-air remarks - a grotesque spectacle of two aged gladiators trading blows over who is the better golf player while auctioning off who will greenlight Israel’s next spasm of genocide with more enthusiastic zeal.

The message of this debate was unmistakably clear: Your voices no longer matter, your supposed democratic consent is revoked. The state has permanently redirected its priorities from even the theatrical promotion of its citizen's prosperity toward self-cannibalizing all-out service to the corporate sovereign totalitarianism of the ruling kleptocratic class.

As America completes its transition into the latest totalitarian capitalist horror show, the world can take solace that every struggle endured under the heel of its viciousness has reached its bitter crescendo. The real dance of death occurred long ago; the reckoning now is but a protracted victory shuffle over the smoldering ashes of an expiring empire's ominous presence on the world stage. The global majority whose very existence this malign force portrayed as an affront to its supremacist aspirations can finally move toward exorcising the haunting traumas of cross-generational terror systematically inflicted under America's criminally sadistic ‘rules-based order’.

We came, we saw, it died

Empires rise, overextend, then inexorably burn themselves out. What we witnessed in this debate was the long-overdue funereal pyre of America's precipitous collapse into ignominy, and the cathartic dying embers of a moral perversion whose demise the world had impatiently awaited. Our collective birth toward a new, more ethical, pluralistic international order may finally commence, hopefully unimpeded by the pathological despotism that preceded it.

Laugh, America, for the rest of the world has already begun celebrating its deliverance from your sociopathic reign of horror. For the very first time in our lives, we can meet your self-immolation with unrestrained, visceral joy. At long last, liberty is in sight.

- Karim