What I am about to write might very well be a strawman, it might be very unfair, and anyone who wants to can skip it. But it has been a long month five weeks, and some of this stuff, however exaggerated, needs to be said.
An intertrashionalist is a believer in intertrashionalism, which basically boils down to a type of amoral sophistication. Intertrashionalists believe that as long as a country has a functioning airport and a couple dozen blocks of bars and restaurants, that it is a full-fledged part of the international community.
Here are a few more bullet-pointed features and habits of the intertrashionalist:
- They basically view autocracy and repression as just another cultural choice, and something that it is rude to comment on. Americans who don't understand the importance of dictatorships and autocracy are just unsophisticated boors, because understanding about the necessity of repression is just like understanding soccer and the metric system.
- As much as they do have values around communication, it is about dialogue, the idea that everyone just needs to talk more, and express themselves, and engage in endless expression, but that at no time can it have anything critical in it or that might hurt the delicate, fragile feelings of autocrats and their supporters.
- Along with that, intertrashionalists are happy to laud dictatorships for being "socially progressive" about things like environmental preservation, social openness, or cultural preservation. And the fucking Ted Talks. Don't get me wrong---some of those things are good, but when a dictatorship sets aside a nature park for Western tourists, while they continue to abuse their natural resources, it is a form of propaganda.
- Intertrashionalists are often libertines who can safely engage in behaviors with sex and drugs that would not be possible for the residents of those countries. Conservative autocracies that criminalize homosexuality or even extramarital sex for their own people, as well as drugs or alcohol, often allow, either explicitly or implicitly access to those things for foreign tourists who can spend lots of money. Foreign workers and visitors to places like the Gulf States can report back about all the partying they did, and ignore the draconian laws that people in those countries have to live with.
- Related to that, they often don't know what the rest of the country is like because they only see the airport and a few square miles of places where people visit.
- There is a good chance that the intertrashionalist will romanticize aspects of a country's culture or history that are painful to the people involved. Remember how the Fyre Festival bragged about how they were hosting on an island that was owned by Pablo Escobar? To the people of Colombia, Pablo Escobar is not a romantic folk hero, but someone who brought misery to their country.
- Actually, just, the Fyre Festival. That is a pretty condensed version of what intertrashionalism is all about.
- The intertrashionalist's personal beliefs range from intensive anti-establishment views to the most crass type of techbro capitalism. They tend to be both cynical and gullible. They will tell you about being an anarchist and try to con you into a cryptocurrency scheme in the same conversation.
I could expand upon the concept, but it is probably already familiar to some readers. And to others, it might seem like I am flailing at a straw man.
The bloodthirsty and barbaric invasion by Russia of Ukraine has probably silenced (at least temporarily) many of the believers in our intertrashionalist future, but there are still people who will insist, even as Russia bombs hospitals for the hell of it, that the main point is that free people can't say anything that will hurt the delicate feelings of Russians, who are just a bunch of swell people who accidentally found themselves involved in aggressive war, and that before long we will be back to going to Ted Talks and drinking 10 dollar bottles of Stella Artois in Moscow. Every day, and every week, that goes by, shows just how empty that attitude is.
Because, at the core, the intertrashionalist believes in the style of the modern world, while ignoring its substance. And such a world can not exist for long.