It’s impossible to know exactly what chicanery is being inflicted on the common American, though it does seem reasonable that our news cycles are loaded with content whose sole purpose is to distract attention away from the real matters of the day.
As suggested at left, the central news item is transitioning the United States from a democracy and a staunch supporter of democratic states around the globe to an oligarchy, in the style of Russia.
During the Biden presidency, Trump had four long years to prepare his attacks on the U.S. government and the people it served. How to destroy public education, healthcare, rule of law, relations with allies, and environmental regulation. How to further enrich himself and his billionaire donors at the expense of the American people.
As suggested at left, part of the reason for his success thus far is that he sprang all these traps in a matter of less than two months from the moment he took office, using the element of surprise to overwhelm us.
The answer to the question posed at left isn’t incorrect, but it’s rare, and perhaps even weird.
We all “live here,” but that’s not the reason most people in the early 21st care about the Earth’s capacity to support life. After all, very few relatively affluent Americans are personally threatened by environmental collapse.
The probability that you or I will suffer and/or die prematurely due to some issue associated with human society’s apathy to climate change, ocean acidification, and loss of biodiversity is very low. On the other hand, the probability that future generations will face unprecedented suffering from these phenomena is close to 100% We either care about these people, or we don’t.
There are a ton of indicators as to how pathetic American society has become. One is that people actually care what Elon Musk thinks about what the Japanese and Italians should do.
Jack Daniels’ home county in Tennessee voted overwhelming for Trump (obviously), but how happy are these people today?
The whiskey-maker’s largest customer, Canada’s province of Ontario, just cleared its shelves of their product and returned it without payment. The result (thus far): 650 lost jobs.
Normal people do not elect leaders who inflict extreme damage on the voting base. What’s going so wrong with these folks?
Trump’s lack of interest in learning about the workings of the world around him does, in fact, render him incompetent. He has essentially zero knowledge of the geopolitics that are required for his job, and that’s just fine with him.
Yet that’s not the true problem with the current U.S. president. Rather, it’s that the only things that matter to him are those that serve to make him wealthier and more powerful. What that translates to at this point is an ongoing set of ridiculous decisions that damage the lives of the common American, and destroy the nation’s standing on the world stage.
We didn’t have something specifically called “Civics” when I was in elementary school, but by the time we were in 5th or 6th grade, every single kid in our class understood that the United States government consisted of three co-equal branches.
Fast-forward 60 years, and what do we have? Well, here’s one Ruth Jones offering some of the most intense ignorance imaginable.
Let’s be honest. Very few Americans dispute the assertion that “Trump is a monster.” Almost half of U.S. voters approve of Trump’s aggression in cutting spending on Ukraine, NATO, education, environmental protection, disease control, etc.
I can hear his support base echoing, “Yes, he’s a monster, but this is what it takes to Make America Great Again.”
The author of the meme at right puts this concept nicely.
At left are opposing views on the subject of human empathy, including one from German-American historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt, one of the most influential political theorists of the twentieth century.
What Elon Musk says on the subject is reminiscent of the philosophy of Ayn Rand, who really was a “thing” in the mid-20th Century until people realized that caring for one another was an essential part of what it means to be a human being, as opposed to, say, a tiger shark.
Sadly, we’ve seen a resurgence of this “mentality,” at least in the last decade here in the U.S. Almost half of American voters favor the dismantling of our government’s capacity to deal with disease, hunger, environmental collapse, ignorance, and corporate criminality. It appears that 250 years of government of, by, and for the people is no match for the Musk/Trump machine.
In an earlier post, Destroying America, I speculated that it is the decline in U.S. educational standards that is responsible for our electing “a conman with the IQ of a jar of mayonnaise.”
At left is a slightly different take on the subject, in which Mark Twain discusses the role of international travel in the development of people with “broad and charitable views of the world.”
There are two main problems with applying this principle onto present-day America, however:
• The growing chasm between rich and poor means that fewer people can afford to travel overseas than there were before the onset of “trickle-down economics” 45 years ago, and
• People steeped in bigotry, prejudice, and narrow-mindedness have very little interest in changing their character.
