Consider this the macabre gift of COVID-catalyzed reality exposure. From Uncle Sam's escalation of proxy war with – and threats to bomb – Iran, to the maintenance and tightening of an epidemic exacerbating worldwide sanctions regime, and to the Wild West bounty hunter vigilantism of the current Venezuela policy, it is increasingly clear that Washington's callousness knows few bounds.

Empires in decline behave badly, and the late-stage U.S. model has proved no exception. Such imperiums sabotage themselves, ultimately implode, and drag their people into the abyss. In the end, victimizers, too, become victims. This much, a long dead young female sage once observed; and warned.

A Simone Weil Moment

The great Albert Camus called her "the only great spirit of our times." Simone Weil knew something of empire, and of suffering. She was a citizen of the former (France) and philosopher of the latter; a pacifist who fought on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War; and a socialist who nearly caused a physical fight by denouncing Stalin's crimes at a local Communist Party meeting. Her love of humanity and lifelong distrust of patriotic platitudes undoubtedly informed one of her bolder assertions from a 1938 letter:

I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted upon her.