The sense of unease Catalogue picked up on is just the surface tension of US life. Working in DC with my brother et al could be brutal
@padraig (u.s.) , cap-police particularly harsh even compared to Philly. They’d regularly sweep Rock Creek Pk and Dupont Circle which could spill over all the way to venues like the 9:30 club at times. Can’t imagine it’s improved, all instituted from elements within structures who like to agitate
The escort network is deep as fuck, shocker, see GOP visa records and every foreign state and corporate intelligence service. Anywhere around the more Latino heavy gaffs in Colombia Heights and its layered buttress park off 16 St admittedly a free for all with addicts, dealers, guns, prostitution and homeless mixing was regularly blitzed. Even student-heavy Adams-Morgan could get pigged hard but the heaviest treatment was always saved for sex workers in Anacostia. HiV shaming, constant use of faggot by DC police as a slur, Marion Barry’s story was still in the air with its onerous racial overtones and nothing screams repressed homosexuality more than US state trooper attired polis pulling over dark sunglassed pentagon officials for cheating the beltway hov lane
This aspect of self denying repression is anathema even to Euro-Protestant remnants, who have alcohol to worship, another self-denying ingredient. Rightly or wrongly, Burroughs gets at elements of such worlds and shines a small light, which brings us to Control. I wouldn’t use terminology like US national psyche because that’s absurd, more a deeply repressive stamp that many here can’t envisage because of light police experiences, queerness and unfamiliarity with firearms beyond fiction
You can bootstrap and coordinate, the US is never short of industrious, capable, committed people but it also has an incredible ability to deny its own diverse nature through Control. It’s ingrained and unfortunately I see no way of effecting actual behavioural change beyond maintaining a sense of dignity in the face of ignorance and sustained legal support services, sexual health outreach clinics and multiagency approaches which chip away at the wall