America Swallowed the Bomb

You can leave America, but you can't leave the world America made

Lena Dunham wrote a piece this week in The New Yorker called “Why I Broke Up with New York,” reflecting on her decision to leave the chaos of NYC for a quieter life in London. Overwhelmed by the intensity of the city and the scrutiny that came with fame, she sought a place where she could prioritize her mental and emotional well-being. In London, she’s been able to slow down and find space to focus on her mental and emotional self-care.

The idea that one can escape the chaos of a place like New York City or broader America by moving to somewhere “calmer” like London or continental Europe is, increasingly, a real and appealing option. It’s not a fantasy — people are doing it. But it’s a luxurious illusion. The very conditions that make such an escape possible were created by the highly unique, geopolitically random, and potentially temporary global order that’s been held in place by the United States for 80 years.

To understand why, you have to understand what America is — and what America is not.

America is often treated as something entirely separate from the “old world” of broader Eurasia — a brutish and chaotic outlier characterized by “magical thinking” and “fantasy,” as posited comprehensively (and hilariously) by Kurt Andersen, who wrote Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire a few years back.

But here’s another take: America is not separate at all. America is a direct outgrowth of the “old world.” An offshoot. A corporate spinoff. Imagine this analogy… Europe is a large, boring conglomerate but has a particularly unruly, experimental division — like a skunkworks — that it funded but which outgrew its control. So it cut it loose, sent it off to a new market — aka the “new world” — and gave it more space to grow, while still retaining a minority stake.

That’s what America is. It was born from Reformation and then Enlightenment ideals, fed by waves of European migrants, and shaped by “old world” trauma baggage (world wars, ethnic strife)… and ultimately tasked, perhaps unknowingly or begrudgingly, with building something new, faster, and more extreme.

That’s exactly what America did. That’s what we did — the old and new world together, collectively. It’s still one big corporate ecosystem.

For a fleeting moment in history — post–WW2 and especially post–Cold War — the world has been overseen by this American spinoff. America didn’t just project military dominance throughout the world’s oceans and from far-flung bases stacked with hardware. It also exported a value system, soft power. Liberal democracy, free markets, global integration, music, art, moxie, swagger, ways of thinking. All of our ideals trace in some way back to Europe — it was the radicals and extremists who founded the original colonial projects. The investment group behind the Mayflower journey was literally called the “Merchant-Adventurers.” That was the name of their company. So, 400 years later, America has since expanded those ideals to their most radical, industrialized, and performative expression (so far) imaginable.

Yet this global order — what some call the "Pax Americana" — didn’t come for free. It had to be enforced. Funded. Sustained. To keep the world’s chaos at bay, America had to swallow it — internalizing entropy rather than letting it run wild externally. Like that scene from The Mask where Jim Carrey’s cartoonish Loki character defuses a bomb by swallowing it and letting it explode inside his own body. America absorbed the world’s chaos and metabolized it into its own cocktail of internal disorder.

To do this, America had to become a machine of relentless productivity (see: The Religion of Progress). A humongous cement truck drum swirling around innovation, economic reinvention, and cultural volatility — and then dumping it haphazardly onto loose, virgin soil. America had to generate endless economic activity to pay for the infrastructures, alliances, and security guarantees that stabilized the world.

America transmogrified global disorder into domestic productive chaos.

Of course, this chaos comes at a cost. The internal economic and social dynamo demands a culture of extreme work ethic and constant iteration. The line between person and profession blurs. Identity becomes inseparable from output. Those who can’t or won’t keep up are effectively left behind. We see this tragedy in America’s epidemic of burnout, addiction, obesity, depression, and social disconnection. People are breaking down — or opting out entirely.

Despite this chaos and disorder, the world still looks to America as both the source of its dysfunction and the guarantor of its continued “safety” and “order.”

Meanwhile, those who leave — moving from the “chaos” of America to the “calm” of Europe where it’s possible to “slow down” and “enjoy life more” — are simply retreating into a peace made possible by the very chaos they were escaping. The roads are paved. The costs are subsidized. The threats are distant. But the system making that tranquility possible doesn’t originate in Brussels or Den Haag. It flows directly from a lovable bomb-eating lunatic across the Atlantic.

So, even if you leave America physically, you're still living in the world America made. (h/t to Robert Kagan, author of the book of the same name).

You never really leave. In truth, you don't really want to.

It’s a good deal — for now. But it might not last forever. As Kagan writes in yet another one, “The jungle grows back.”

And when it does grow back — perhaps that’s what’s happening now — someone, somewhere, has to hold the line.

Where that line is … is anybody’s guess.