How a tennis match, a suicide, and a tray of food taught me everything I needed to know about empire
I want to tell you about something that happened to me yesterday. It won’t change the world. But it says something about it.
It was the Wimbledon Ladies’ Final. Iga Swiatek of Poland versus Amanda Anisimova of the United States — a young woman making her first ever Grand Slam final. I rooted for her from the first serve. And I want to be clear about something:
Anisimova is undoubtedly a great tennis player. She deserves all the accolades she’s already earned and the ones she’ll get in the years to come. She’s talented. She’s battled mental health issues. She made it to the biggest stage in tennis.
But this post isn’t really about her.
I grew up British. Born in 1974. We idolised America. The music, the movies, the myth. The land of the free, where the good guys always won. Even when Thatcher was sinking ships and starving miners, America still felt like the dream we could at least point to.
So when I heard this BBC segment before the match, telling Anisimova’s story of overcoming personal struggles, something in me softened. The underdog story. The fightback. The redemption arc. We love that, don’t we? We need that. It’s quintessentially British to root for the underdog.
And she was playing Iga Swiatek — multiple Slam winner. Stone-cold killer on court. You don’t back Goliath. You back David. Especially when David’s been through hell.
She lost the first set six-love. And by the time she was three-love down in the second, I found out: she was American.
And that was it.
The compassion collapsed. The warmth evaporated. And something in me — automatic, involuntary — went, “Come on, Swiatek.”
Now look: I don’t want to feel that way. I don’t want to hate America. I don’t want to hate on Americans. But I do. Every day. Not because they’re uniquely evil, but because the country they live under has done so much uniquely evil in their name. And in mine.
And I want to be clear about something else, too: I’ve seen the best of America.
In 2008, I spent three months there, staying with a friend I knew through the online poker scene.
I was a professional player at the time; he was training to be a dealer. His mum had passed away the year before and left him around 20 grand. He was excited about life, although still grieving over his late mother’s passing. He used the money for a house deposit and bought a Ford Mustang.
He was trying to build something.
Then the financial crash hit. His $200,000+ mortgage was now on a house worth $60,000. Everything his mum left him — the last part of her he could still hold onto — vanished in an economic illusion. He was broken. Six weeks later, he shot himself in the head with a .357 Magnum. His wife was lying next to him in bed. I was in the house. The police arrived, flicking their holsters as if I was the threat. I only wanted a cigarette. I was traumatised.
But what I remember just as much is what happened a day later.
Across the street lived a Mexican family. My friend had said some truly vile things about them in the weeks before — the kind of casual, cruel racism I didn’t expect to find so openly in California. He believed the worst of them.
And yet, the morning after his death, they turned up on the doorstep with trays of food. Three of them. Big ones. They didn’t speak a word of English, but I understood every emotion they brought with them. Compassion. Respect. Love. No questions. Just help.
I wish he had lived to see that. I wish he’d known the people he feared were the first to show kindness when it mattered.
And that, to me, is America. Not the fantasy. Not the flag-waving bullshit. The real people. The pain. The grace. The contradictions.
I never want anything I say to detract from that. The American people are good people. That’s what makes the betrayal of their system so hard to watch.
That girl on court has never dropped a bomb or sanctioned a starving child. She’s likely a good person. She battled mental health problems, fought back, made it to a Grand Slam final. But I couldn’t hold onto my empathy once I saw the flag.
And that’s not her fault. That’s empire’s fault.
Because when a country wraps every injustice in its flag — every drone strike, every vetoed ceasefire, every journalist tortured, every coup, every starving child in Gaza — that flag stops meaning freedom. It starts meaning something else. Something I can’t cheer for.
And maybe that’s the saddest part. Because I was emotionally invested. I wanted to care. But 6–0, 6–0 later, all I felt was this hollow, melancholy shrug. A player I was ready to cheer for got annihilated, and I felt nothing.
This is what I mean by Crisis of Country.
Not just the fall of governments or the lies of ministers. It’s the slow, bitter corrosion of belief itself. The moment you find yourself withdrawing empathy from someone who deserves it, just because of the system they were born under. The grief of losing the ability to connect.
Because that’s what America’s power has done. Not just to the world, but to its own image. Its soft power is spent. Its flag doesn’t inspire now — it suffocates. It doesn’t carry hope. It carries grief.
And what hit me hardest today wasn’t the result on the scoreboard. It was the human cost of that lost connection. A 20-something woman stood alone on Centre Court, facing one of the greatest players alive, trying her best, carrying her story… and I couldn’t even root for her.
That’s not normal. That’s damage.
And I know I’m not the only one who feels it. Because I’ve seen it. In the Global South, that feeling toward America? That’s how they feel about Britain. We were the dress rehearsal. The dry run. The blueprint.
They don’t hate us because they’re bitter. They hate us because they remember us. And now we get it. That quiet, subconscious recoil. That refusal to clap. That blankness in place of solidarity.
It’s not about tennis.
It’s about what empire takes from everyone.
Even the ones who never chose it.
And here in Britain, we’re not exempt. We might like to think we are, but we’re not. We exported this model of empire before America perfected it. We taught the world how to build prisons out of borders and call them nations. We left scars on maps that still bleed. And we still walk around as if history stopped happening when the Queen died.
I haven’t flown a British or English flag in years. Not because I hate my country, but because I can no longer pretend that what it stands for is honour. It’s memory loss. It’s denial. It’s waving the butcher’s apron and pretending it was ever clean.
And to my American readers, I’ll ask this plainly:
Do you still believe your country is a force for good?
Because the world doesn’t.
That reflex you see from the rest of us — that coldness, that distance — that’s not hatred. That’s trauma. That’s what happens when hope dies over and over again beneath your flag.
And I know there are Americans who feel this too. Who look at their own flag and feel the same unease, the same heaviness, the same grief. Who know deep down that something has gone badly wrong.
“We stole countries with the cunning use of flags! Just sail halfway around the world, stick a flag in.”
— Eddie Izzard, Dress to Kill
We conquered the world with that joke. And then we passed the baton to America.
I know I’ll be in the minority for saying this. I know plenty of people will roll their eyes, call it unpatriotic, say I’m too hard on the West. But I also know there are others out there — quietly, privately — feeling the exact same thing and waiting for someone to just say it out loud.
So here it is:
I don’t want to lose my ability to care.
I don’t want flags to smother empathy.
I don’t want stories of courage and struggle to be filtered through whether or not I can stomach the nation they’re draped in.
But here we are.
That’s the crisis. Not just in America. Not just in Britain. But in all of us who are finally waking up, and wondering what’s left to believe in.
The Double Bagel and the Death of Belief
How a tennis match, a suicide, and a tray of food taught me everything I needed to know about empire
I want to tell you about something that happened to me yesterday. It won’t change the world. But it says something about it.
It was the Wimbledon Ladies’ Final. Iga Swiatek of Poland versus Amanda Anisimova of the United States — a young woman making her first ever Grand Slam final. I rooted for her from the first serve. And I want to be clear about something:
Anisimova is undoubtedly a great tennis player. She deserves all the accolades she’s already earned and the ones she’ll get in the years to come. She’s talented. She’s battled mental health issues. She made it to the biggest stage in tennis.
But this post isn’t really about her.
I grew up British. Born in 1974. We idolised America. The music, the movies, the myth. The land of the free, where the good guys always won. Even when Thatcher was sinking ships and starving miners, America still felt like the dream we could at least point to.
So when I heard this BBC segment before the match, telling Anisimova’s story of overcoming personal struggles, something in me softened. The underdog story. The fightback. The redemption arc. We love that, don’t we? We need that. It’s quintessentially British to root for the underdog.
And she was playing Iga Swiatek — multiple Slam winner. Stone-cold killer on court. You don’t back Goliath. You back David. Especially when David’s been through hell.
She lost the first set six-love. And by the time she was three-love down in the second, I found out: she was American.
And that was it.
The compassion collapsed. The warmth evaporated. And something in me — automatic, involuntary — went, “Come on, Swiatek.”
Now look: I don’t want to feel that way. I don’t want to hate America. I don’t want to hate on Americans. But I do. Every day. Not because they’re uniquely evil, but because the country they live under has done so much uniquely evil in their name. And in mine.
And I want to be clear about something else, too: I’ve seen the best of America.
In 2008, I spent three months there, staying with a friend I knew through the online poker scene.
I was a professional player at the time; he was training to be a dealer. His mum had passed away the year before and left him around 20 grand. He was excited about life, although still grieving over his late mother’s passing. He used the money for a house deposit and bought a Ford Mustang.
He was trying to build something.
Then the financial crash hit. His $200,000+ mortgage was now on a house worth $60,000. Everything his mum left him — the last part of her he could still hold onto — vanished in an economic illusion. He was broken. Six weeks later, he shot himself in the head with a .357 Magnum. His wife was lying next to him in bed. I was in the house. The police arrived, flicking their holsters as if I was the threat. I only wanted a cigarette. I was traumatised.
But what I remember just as much is what happened a day later.
Across the street lived a Mexican family. My friend had said some truly vile things about them in the weeks before — the kind of casual, cruel racism I didn’t expect to find so openly in California. He believed the worst of them.
And yet, the morning after his death, they turned up on the doorstep with trays of food. Three of them. Big ones. They didn’t speak a word of English, but I understood every emotion they brought with them. Compassion. Respect. Love. No questions. Just help.
I wish he had lived to see that. I wish he’d known the people he feared were the first to show kindness when it mattered.
And that, to me, is America. Not the fantasy. Not the flag-waving bullshit. The real people. The pain. The grace. The contradictions.
I never want anything I say to detract from that. The American people are good people. That’s what makes the betrayal of their system so hard to watch.
That girl on court has never dropped a bomb or sanctioned a starving child. She’s likely a good person. She battled mental health problems, fought back, made it to a Grand Slam final. But I couldn’t hold onto my empathy once I saw the flag.
And that’s not her fault. That’s empire’s fault.
Because when a country wraps every injustice in its flag — every drone strike, every vetoed ceasefire, every journalist tortured, every coup, every starving child in Gaza — that flag stops meaning freedom. It starts meaning something else. Something I can’t cheer for.
And maybe that’s the saddest part. Because I was emotionally invested. I wanted to care. But 6–0, 6–0 later, all I felt was this hollow, melancholy shrug. A player I was ready to cheer for got annihilated, and I felt nothing.
This is what I mean by Crisis of Country.
Not just the fall of governments or the lies of ministers. It’s the slow, bitter corrosion of belief itself. The moment you find yourself withdrawing empathy from someone who deserves it, just because of the system they were born under. The grief of losing the ability to connect.
Because that’s what America’s power has done. Not just to the world, but to its own image. Its soft power is spent. Its flag doesn’t inspire now — it suffocates. It doesn’t carry hope. It carries grief.
And what hit me hardest today wasn’t the result on the scoreboard. It was the human cost of that lost connection. A 20-something woman stood alone on Centre Court, facing one of the greatest players alive, trying her best, carrying her story… and I couldn’t even root for her.
That’s not normal. That’s damage.
And I know I’m not the only one who feels it. Because I’ve seen it. In the Global South, that feeling toward America? That’s how they feel about Britain. We were the dress rehearsal. The dry run. The blueprint.
They don’t hate us because they’re bitter. They hate us because they remember us. And now we get it. That quiet, subconscious recoil. That refusal to clap. That blankness in place of solidarity.
It’s not about tennis.
It’s about what empire takes from everyone.
Even the ones who never chose it.
And here in Britain, we’re not exempt. We might like to think we are, but we’re not. We exported this model of empire before America perfected it. We taught the world how to build prisons out of borders and call them nations. We left scars on maps that still bleed. And we still walk around as if history stopped happening when the Queen died.
I haven’t flown a British or English flag in years. Not because I hate my country, but because I can no longer pretend that what it stands for is honour. It’s memory loss. It’s denial. It’s waving the butcher’s apron and pretending it was ever clean.
And to my American readers, I’ll ask this plainly:
Do you still believe your country is a force for good?
Because the world doesn’t.
That reflex you see from the rest of us — that coldness, that distance — that’s not hatred. That’s trauma. That’s what happens when hope dies over and over again beneath your flag.
And I know there are Americans who feel this too. Who look at their own flag and feel the same unease, the same heaviness, the same grief. Who know deep down that something has gone badly wrong.
We conquered the world with that joke. And then we passed the baton to America.
I know I’ll be in the minority for saying this. I know plenty of people will roll their eyes, call it unpatriotic, say I’m too hard on the West. But I also know there are others out there — quietly, privately — feeling the exact same thing and waiting for someone to just say it out loud.
So here it is:
I don’t want to lose my ability to care.
I don’t want flags to smother empathy.
I don’t want stories of courage and struggle to be filtered through whether or not I can stomach the nation they’re draped in.
But here we are.
That’s the crisis. Not just in America. Not just in Britain. But in all of us who are finally waking up, and wondering what’s left to believe in.
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