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.
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.
Verdict
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?
Oh well it was a (slightly diabolical) experiment, urged on by a prompt from vgr