AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.

The thing with "Gulf of America" – presumably everybody involved knows this is stupid, including Trump. It is deliberately stupid and fake. It's the kayfabe esthetic from pro wrestling. It's obviously fake, even the rubes know its fake, that is part of the point. Everybody is in on the game of fooling themselves. The stupidity is the point.

I can’t stop thinking about the proposed renaming of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. The word "gulf" itself is fitting—not just in the geographical sense, but in its deeper meaning as a vast chasm, a yawning abyss. It feels apt, almost prophetic. America is not just entering an abyss; perhaps it always has been one. Maybe we are only now realizing it, trapped in the great soul-sucking void at the heart of the country.

This sense of an engulfing darkness reminds me of David Lynch’s imagery—a car driving down a desolate highway at night, its headlights cutting through the void, illuminating only a tiny fragment of the road while the vast, unknowable darkness stretches infinitely beyond. We exist in that tiny illuminated space, barely aware of the abyss surrounding us.

Or take Moby Dick, where the whiteness of the whale becomes a symbol of the universe’s terrifying emptiness—pure, blank, indifferent. A similar void haunts White Noise, a world where meaning is always slipping through one’s fingers, consumed by static.

And then there’s Trump, the human embodiment of that void. His presence doesn’t just reveal the emptiness at the center of his own being but exposes the greater nothingness at the core of America itself. It’s tempting to call him a fascist, given the tactics he employs, but the label doesn’t quite fit. Fascism, as monstrous as it is, has an ideology—a twisted belief system, a vision of power. Trump has none. He is the perfect nihilist, believing in nothing, valuing nothing beyond the transaction. To him, sincerity is for fools. He is a fascist of convenience, adopting its aesthetics and rhetoric when useful, but utterly indifferent to any deeper structure of belief. At least the old fascists were sincere in their horrors; Trump is simply opportunistic.

This void, this Gulf of America, is nothing new. America has always been a great emptiness, an open space that outsiders projected their fantasies onto. A blank canvas for European settlers, a landscape of reinvention, a place where myths of manifest destiny, the frontier, and the self-made man took root. But beneath those myths lies the abyss.

In the end, perhaps America is best defined by two figures: the dreamer and the grifter. The dreamer builds, the grifter exploits. But maybe they are really the same person, flipping back and forth depending on the moment. Trump, after all, is both—the carnival barker and the con man, selling snake oil to those desperate to believe.

So maybe the Gulf of America isn’t a coming disaster but a long-overdue realization. The void has always been there, waiting. We were just too distracted to notice.

Introduced something I didn't say and would never say (Trump as a "dreamer"), also it has blandified my voice, and what's the point of writing anything if not to express your voice?

Gulf of America

21 Jan 2025 - 11 Feb 2025

"Gulf" can mean a large gap or abyss, as well as the more common topographical use. So, yes, very apt, America is about to enter into an abyss, or perhaps it always has been one and we are just due to realize it, discover we are trapped in the great soul-sucking void at the heart of America.

This void has been the subject of art. David Lynch's shots of driving at night down a road in the middle of nowhere, with the headlights picking out a tiny spot that just accentuates the vast darkness surrounding everything. Or Moby Dick, his whiteness a symbol of the vast void blankness of the universe. Also a central idea in White Noise.

Trump's personal hollowness reflects the greater voidness at the heart of the country,. It feels so wrong to call him a fascist, despite all the fascist ideas that he employs. He's a perfect nihilist, believes in nothing, all relations are transactional and only morons would believe otherwise. He's a fascist of convenience, and the one thing you can say for the old fashioned kind, they were sincere in their beliefs

Verdict