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samplegirl

(11,477 posts)
Mon Apr 27, 2020, 03:38 AM Apr 2020

What does America see when they look at the USA now???

Last edited Mon Apr 27, 2020, 07:39 AM - Edit history (1)

This is a long but very poignant read. I’m sorry it’s so long. It hit me like a ton of bricks!

Here’s what Ireland’s most respected mainstream political writer says.
Irish Times-April 25, 2020-By Fintan O’Toole

THE WORLD HAS LOVED, HATED AND ENVIED THE U.S. NOW, FOR THE FIRST TIME, WE PITY IT
Over more than two centuries, the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the US until now: pity.
However bad things are for most other rich democracies, it is hard not to feel sorry for Americans. Most of them did not vote for Donald Trump in 2016. Yet they are locked down with a malignant narcissist who, instead of protecting his people from Covid-19, has amplified its lethality. The country Trump promised to make great again has never in its history seemed so pitiful.
Will American prestige ever recover from this shameful episode? The US went into the coronavirus crisis with immense advantages: precious weeks of warning about what was coming, the world’s best concentration of medical and scientific expertise, effectively limitless financial resources, a military complex with stunning logistical capacity and most of the world’s leading technology corporations. Yet it managed to make itself the global epicentre of the pandemic.
As the American writer George Packer puts it in the current edition of the Atlantic, “The United States reacted ... like Pakistan or Belarus – like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering.”
It is one thing to be powerless in the face of a natural disaster, quite another to watch vast power being squandered in real time – wilfully, malevolently, vindictively. It is one thing for governments to fail (as, in one degree or another, most governments did), quite another to watch a ruler and his supporters actively spread a deadly virus. Trump, his party and Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News became vectors of the pestilence.
The grotesque spectacle of the president openly inciting people (some of them armed) to take to the streets to oppose the restrictions that save lives is the manifestation of a political death wish. What are supposed to be daily briefings on the crisis, demonstrative of national unity in the face of a shared challenge, have been used by Trump merely to sow confusion and division. They provide a recurring horror show in which all the neuroses that haunt the American subconscious dance naked on live TV.
If the plague is a test, its ruling political nexus ensured that the US would fail it at a terrible cost in human lives. In the process, the idea of the US as the world’s leading nation – an idea that has shaped the past century – has all but evaporated.
Other than the Trump impersonator Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, who is now looking to the US as the exemplar of anything other than what not to do? How many people in Düsseldorf or Dublin are wishing they lived in Detroit or Dallas?
It is hard to remember now but, even in 2017, when Trump took office, the conventional wisdom in the US was that the Republican Party and the broader framework of US political institutions would prevent him from doing too much damage. This was always a delusion, but the pandemic has exposed it in the most savage ways.
Abject surrender
What used to be called mainstream conservatism has not absorbed Trump – he has absorbed it. Almost the entire right-wing half of American politics has surrendered abjectly to him. It has sacrificed on the altar of wanton stupidity the most basic ideas of responsibility, care and even safety.
Thus, even at the very end of March, 15 Republican governors had failed to order people to stay at home or to close non-essential businesses. In Alabama, for example, it was not until April 3rd that governor Kay Ivey finally issued a stay-at-home order.
In Florida, the state with the highest concentration of elderly people with underlying conditions, governor Ron DeSantis, a Trump mini-me, kept the beach resorts open to students travelling from all over the US for spring break parties. Even on April 1st, when he issued restrictions, DeSantis exempted religious services and “recreational activities”.
Georgia governor Brian Kemp, when he finally issued a stay-at-home order on April 1st, explained: “We didn’t know that [the virus can be spread by people without symptoms] until the last 24 hours.”
This is not mere ignorance – it is deliberate and homicidal stupidity. There is, as the demonstrations this week in US cities have shown, plenty of political mileage in denying the reality of the pandemic. It is fuelled by Fox News and far-right internet sites, and it reaps for these politicians millions of dollars in donations, mostly (in an ugly irony) from older people who are most vulnerable to the coronavirus.
It draws on a concoction of conspiracy theories, hatred of science, paranoia about the “deep state” and religious providentialism (God will protect the good folks) that is now very deeply infused in the mindset of the American right.
Trump embodies and enacts this mindset, but he did not invent it. The US response to the coronavirus crisis has been paralysed by a contradiction that the Republicans have inserted into the heart of US democracy. On the one hand, they want to control all the levers of governmental power. On the other they have created a popular base by playing on the notion that government is innately evil and must not be trusted.
The contradiction was made manifest in two of Trump’s statements on the pandemic: on the one hand that he has “total authority”, and on the other that “I don’t take responsibility at all”. Caught between authoritarian and anarchic impulses, he is incapable of coherence.
Fertile ground
But this is not just Donald Trump. The crisis has shown definitively that Trump’s presidency is not an aberration. It has grown on soil long prepared to receive it. The monstrous blossoming of misrule has structure and purpose and strategy behind it.
There are very powerful interests who demand “freedom” in order to do as they like with the environment, society and the economy. They have infused a very large part of American culture with the belief that “freedom” is literally more important than life. My freedom to own assault weapons trumps your right not to get shot at school. Now, my freedom to go to the barber (“I Need a Haircut” read one banner this week in St Paul, Minnesota) trumps your need to avoid infection.
Usually when this kind of outlandish idiocy is displaying itself, there is the comforting thought that, if things were really serious, it would all stop. People would sober up. Instead, a large part of the US has hit the bottle even harder.
And the president, his party and their media allies keep supplying the drinks. There has been no moment of truth, no shock of realisation that the antics have to end. No one of any substance on the US right has stepped in to say: get a grip, people are dying here.
That is the mark of how deep the trouble is for the US – it is not just that Trump has treated the crisis merely as a way to feed tribal hatreds but that this behaviour has become normalised. When the freak show is live on TV every evening, and the star is boasting about his ratings, it is not really a freak show any more. For a very large and solid bloc of Americans, it is reality.
And this will get worse before it gets better. Trump has at least eight more months in power. In his inaugural address in 2017, he evoked “American carnage” and promised to make it stop. But now that the real carnage has arrived, he is revelling in it. He is in his element.
As things get worse, he will pump more hatred and falsehood, more death-wish defiance of reason and decency, into the groundwater. If a new administration succeeds him in 2021, it will have to clean up the toxic dump he leaves behind. If he is re-elected, toxicity will have become the lifeblood of American politics.
Either way, it will be a long time before the rest of the world can imagine America being great again.

18 replies = new reply since forum marked as read
Highlight: NoneDon't highlight anything 5 newestHighlight 5 most recent replies

DFW

(54,372 posts)
3. "How many people in Dsseldorf or Dublin are wishing they lived in Detroit or Dallas?"
Mon Apr 27, 2020, 04:04 AM
Apr 2020

Two for two.

I AM in Düsseldorf, and came here from Dallas. Actually, Dallas isn't bad (bit warm in the summer), but it isn't a few hours by train from Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris, Zürich. München or Berlin. Nor is it a mere hour's flight from London, Copenhagen, Warsaw, Krakow, Prague or Geneva.

LeftInTX

(25,311 posts)
4. Yeah, I'm in San Antonio
Mon Apr 27, 2020, 05:09 AM
Apr 2020

Summer sucks, but so far our covid rate is low. It's fairly strict here with rules. We are worried about Gov Abbott's future plan for the state. Abbott will supercede any local ordinance. Friday Abbott rolled out curbside for non-essential retail. This is a change for the better and the risk is super low. Non-essential stores are closed...curbside only. So far, so good, but no one trusts him. Testing is an issue, but we also have low positive rates. (10% positive when tests taken)

DFW

(54,372 posts)
5. I have no idea how it is with testing in Dallas
Mon Apr 27, 2020, 05:30 AM
Apr 2020

I haven't been back since January. I was scheduled to go back in April, and that one fell flat. Air Chance and Delta say they're starting up again in June with regularly scheduled transatlantic flights, but who the hell knows? There weren't many direct flights to North America from Düsseldorf to begin with, and for the moment, even if we CAN fly, our first destination is Boston. The LAST thing you want to do if you have to change planes on an intercontinental route is make the long flight first. After eight hours in the air, you don't want go through immigration, customs, change terminals, go through security again and wait for your luggage again. So, we try to change in Paris or Amsterdam or London or wherever on the way to the States, and then in Atlanta on the way back, since Delta flies nonstop to Düsseldorf from there.

Here in Düsseldorf, it is as good as impossible to get tested, so whatever statistics they are reporting for Germany, no one here believes it is as low as reported. My wife and I have tried repeatedly without success. Only if you have been declared dead, and your condition has not improved in a week.

samplegirl

(11,477 posts)
14. I'm in Ohio and still
Mon Apr 27, 2020, 07:53 AM
Apr 2020

fear that everything will open to quickly in Ohio.
Then the fear also of it in the fall.

a la izquierda

(11,794 posts)
10. I canceled my March trip to Europe...
Mon Apr 27, 2020, 07:08 AM
Apr 2020

and I’m regretting it ever since. Yes my movement would be restricted, but I’d have either been stuck in London or Rotterdam. 🤷🏻‍♀️ Heaps better than West Virginia.

DFW

(54,372 posts)
11. I have never spent any serious time in West Virginia
Mon Apr 27, 2020, 07:47 AM
Apr 2020

So, I can't speak from experience, but I suspect I'd rather be stuck in GB or NL myself. Actually, I don't get up to England much, either. We have an office there, and they don't need any language help from me. As the only American in my outfit who speaks Ditch well, I'm there every week--when the world has its head screwed on right, that is. I haven't been there in six weeks now, which is the longest single absence for me in many years.

a la izquierda

(11,794 posts)
13. I'm slowly learning Dutch. I can read it much better than I'll ever be able to...
Mon Apr 27, 2020, 07:51 AM
Apr 2020

pronounce those blasted "Gs" and "Schs"
I'm starting a law program in the UK in October (or whenever) and I have return tickets for June-August. I hope like hell I'll be able to get over to the continent, as one of the research archives in which I work in Berlin will be opening on 4 May. It's the only archive I have a chance of accessing at the moment and I have loads of research to complete.

WV is really beautiful. It truly is. But, I'm a city girl (born and raised outside of NYC) and really have a hard time with small-town, provincial life.

DFW

(54,372 posts)
16. Ah, yes, the Dutch-Danish mandatory throat disease
Mon Apr 27, 2020, 08:18 AM
Apr 2020

At the start of the invasion of Holland in World War II, the Germans sent fifth columnists into NL in Dutch uniforms. The Dutch, knowing full well what a hard time foreigners had with the language, had a key phrase which got you immediately shot if you were wearing a Dutch Army uniform and couldn't pronounce it correctly. 88 Sharpshooters from Schevningen: Achtentachtig Scheviningse Scherpschutters. Not too many non-Dutch can repeat that one correctly the first time around.

I had a funny modern day version of that recently. Last year, my daughter's boyfriend invited his sister to a weekend we were all having down in Stuttgart. She knew I was American, but just assumed (typical European) that I knew no German at all, and started in speaking English with me without even asking if I knew German. So, I played along and spoke only English with her. She remarked how difficult German was for Americans. I answered that it didn't seem all that difficult to me, so I said she should say something and see if I could repeat it correctly. Thinking she would baffle me completely, she said "Streichholzschächtelchen," which means "little match box." I immediately repeated it her, and said (in English), "what's so difficult about that?" After picking her jaw up off the floor, she stammered, "well MOST Americans can't say that." I said, "how do you know? Maybe you're just asking the wrong Americans!"

Another such story--that same daughter went to law school in the USA. One class on international law was studying some case involving VW in Wolfsburg. The students were asked to read aloud certain passages of the case and comment on them. As it happened the passage assigned to my daughter had, in italics, the full name of VW: Volkswagenaktiensgesellschaft. She just read right through it, correctly pronouncing the word without the slightest pause. The class and the professor let out a collective "WHOA!" and a few added "how did you do THAT?" She just stared at them and reminded them, "I'M GERMAN!" Since her English by that time was flawless and accent-free, they had forgotten about where she came from.

a la izquierda

(11,794 posts)
17. My friends tease me about Scheviningen
Mon Apr 27, 2020, 08:44 AM
Apr 2020

And Groningen. One of my best friends is from Rotterdam and has a super harsh accent. He tried to get me to say achtenachtzig Scheveningse scherpschutters. I’m pretty sure he accidentally spat on me 🤣🤣🤣

My German is getting there slowly. I need to spend more time in rural Germany so I don’t revert to English (or Spanish).

DFW

(54,372 posts)
18. Rotterdam is "street" Dutch
Mon Apr 27, 2020, 09:11 AM
Apr 2020

In both Rotterdam and Amsterdam, there is a particularly gutteral street slang that doesn't seem prevalent elsewhere. My office is just outside Utrecht, and they don't spit at all. My original man in NL was from the far north, so his native language isn't Dutch at all, but rather a regional language called "Drents." The advantage of this is that when he spoke Dutch, he spoke it with the clear pronunciation of a person completely fluent in his second language--sort of like the clear Castilian spoken by the Catalans. I picked Dutch up that much faster because he enunciated so clearly, I didn't have to ask him to repeat everything he said.

dewsgirl

(14,961 posts)
6. This jumped out at me:
Mon Apr 27, 2020, 05:31 AM
Apr 2020

They provide a recurring horror show in which all the neuroses that haunt the American subconscious dance naked on live TV.

Arkansas Granny

(31,516 posts)
8. What is truly frightening is the thought that Trump may be reelected.
Mon Apr 27, 2020, 06:13 AM
Apr 2020

Even though the polls are in Biden's favor now, we have seen that getting the majority of votes doesn't guarantee a win.

Bernardo de La Paz

(49,001 posts)
9. Thx for posting. I struggled with your title for a long time until I guessed remove "Em"
Mon Apr 27, 2020, 06:27 AM
Apr 2020
(I inserted paragraph breaks to make it more readable.)

Fintan O’Toole: Donald Trump has destroyed the country he promised to make great again
The world has loved, hated and envied the U.S. Now, for the first time, we pity it
Irish Times-April 25, 2020-By Fintan O’Toole

Over more than two centuries, the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the US until now: pity.

However bad things are for most other rich democracies, it is hard not to feel sorry for Americans. Most of them did not vote for Donald Trump in 2016. Yet they are locked down with a malignant narcissist who, instead of protecting his people from Covid-19, has amplified its lethality. The country Trump promised to make great again has never in its history seemed so pitiful.

Will American prestige ever recover from this shameful episode? The US went into the coronavirus crisis with immense advantages: precious weeks of warning about what was coming, the world’s best concentration of medical and scientific expertise, effectively limitless financial resources, a military complex with stunning logistical capacity and most of the world’s leading technology corporations. Yet it managed to make itself the global epicentre of the pandemic.

As the American writer George Packer puts it in the current edition of the Atlantic, “The United States reacted ... like Pakistan or Belarus – like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering.”

It is one thing to be powerless in the face of a natural disaster, quite another to watch vast power being squandered in real time – wilfully, malevolently, vindictively. It is one thing for governments to fail (as, in one degree or another, most governments did), quite another to watch a ruler and his supporters actively spread a deadly virus. Trump, his party and Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News became vectors of the pestilence.

The grotesque spectacle of the president openly inciting people (some of them armed) to take to the streets to oppose the restrictions that save lives is the manifestation of a political death wish. What are supposed to be daily briefings on the crisis, demonstrative of national unity in the face of a shared challenge, have been used by Trump merely to sow confusion and division. They provide a recurring horror show in which all the neuroses that haunt the American subconscious dance naked on live TV.

If the plague is a test, its ruling political nexus ensured that the US would fail it at a terrible cost in human lives. In the process, the idea of the US as the world’s leading nation – an idea that has shaped the past century – has all but evaporated.

Other than the Trump impersonator Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, who is now looking to the US as the exemplar of anything other than what not to do? How many people in Düsseldorf or Dublin are wishing they lived in Detroit or Dallas?

It is hard to remember now but, even in 2017, when Trump took office, the conventional wisdom in the US was that the Republican Party and the broader framework of US political institutions would prevent him from doing too much damage. This was always a delusion, but the pandemic has exposed it in the most savage ways.

Abject surrender

What used to be called mainstream conservatism has not absorbed Trump – he has absorbed it. Almost the entire right-wing half of American politics has surrendered abjectly to him. It has sacrificed on the altar of wanton stupidity the most basic ideas of responsibility, care and even safety.

Thus, even at the very end of March, 15 Republican governors had failed to order people to stay at home or to close non-essential businesses. In Alabama, for example, it was not until April 3rd that governor Kay Ivey finally issued a stay-at-home order.

In Florida, the state with the highest concentration of elderly people with underlying conditions, governor Ron DeSantis, a Trump mini-me, kept the beach resorts open to students travelling from all over the US for spring break parties. Even on April 1st, when he issued restrictions, DeSantis exempted religious services and “recreational activities”.

Georgia governor Brian Kemp, when he finally issued a stay-at-home order on April 1st, explained: “We didn’t know that [the virus can be spread by people without symptoms] until the last 24 hours.”

This is not mere ignorance – it is deliberate and homicidal stupidity. There is, as the demonstrations this week in US cities have shown, plenty of political mileage in denying the reality of the pandemic. It is fuelled by Fox News and far-right internet sites, and it reaps for these politicians millions of dollars in donations, mostly (in an ugly irony) from older people who are most vulnerable to the coronavirus.

It draws on a concoction of conspiracy theories, hatred of science, paranoia about the “deep state” and religious providentialism (God will protect the good folks) that is now very deeply infused in the mindset of the American right.

Trump embodies and enacts this mindset, but he did not invent it. The US response to the coronavirus crisis has been paralysed by a contradiction that the Republicans have inserted into the heart of US democracy. On the one hand, they want to control all the levers of governmental power. On the other they have created a popular base by playing on the notion that government is innately evil and must not be trusted.

The contradiction was made manifest in two of Trump’s statements on the pandemic: on the one hand that he has “total authority”, and on the other that “I don’t take responsibility at all”. Caught between authoritarian and anarchic impulses, he is incapable of coherence.

Fertile ground

But this is not just Donald Trump. The crisis has shown definitively that Trump’s presidency is not an aberration. It has grown on soil long prepared to receive it. The monstrous blossoming of misrule has structure and purpose and strategy behind it.

There are very powerful interests who demand “freedom” in order to do as they like with the environment, society and the economy. They have infused a very large part of American culture with the belief that “freedom” is literally more important than life. My freedom to own assault weapons trumps your right not to get shot at school. Now, my freedom to go to the barber (“I Need a Haircut” read one banner this week in St Paul, Minnesota) trumps your need to avoid infection.

Usually when this kind of outlandish idiocy is displaying itself, there is the comforting thought that, if things were really serious, it would all stop. People would sober up. Instead, a large part of the US has hit the bottle even harder.

And the president, his party and their media allies keep supplying the drinks. There has been no moment of truth, no shock of realisation that the antics have to end. No one of any substance on the US right has stepped in to say: get a grip, people are dying here.

That is the mark of how deep the trouble is for the US – it is not just that Trump has treated the crisis merely as a way to feed tribal hatreds but that this behaviour has become normalised. When the freak show is live on TV every evening, and the star is boasting about his ratings, it is not really a freak show any more. For a very large and solid bloc of Americans, it is reality.

And this will get worse before it gets better. Trump has at least eight more months in power. In his inaugural address in 2017, he evoked “American carnage” and promised to make it stop. But now that the real carnage has arrived, he is revelling in it. He is in his element.

As things get worse, he will pump more hatred and falsehood, more death-wish defiance of reason and decency, into the groundwater. If a new administration succeeds him in 2021, it will have to clean up the toxic dump he leaves behind. If he is re-elected, toxicity will have become the lifeblood of American politics.

Either way, it will be a long time before the rest of the world can imagine America being great again.

FakeNoose

(32,638 posts)
15. Yep, we're a shithole country now
Mon Apr 27, 2020, 08:10 AM
Apr 2020

Thanks Chump, you sure made America great again with that huge brain of yours!



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