BBC: The time when America stopped being great

[arenean]

Interesting read from the BBC website....


A year ago Donald Trump produced the biggest political upset in modern-day America, but were there historical clues that pointed to his unexpected victory?

Flying into Los Angeles, a descent that takes you from the desert, over the mountains, to the outer suburbs dotted with swimming pools shaped like kidneys, always brings on a near narcotic surge of nostalgia.

This was the flight path I followed more than 30 years ago, as I fulfilled a boyhood dream to make my first trip to the United States. America had always fired my imagination, both as a place and as an idea. So as I entered the immigration hall, under the winsome smile of America's movie star president, it was hardly a case of love at first sight......

Full article: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-41826022

[Nay]

1. This was excellent. Thanks for posting. nt

[eppur_se_muova]

2. Wow, I was just about to post this myself. It's a long, but really good read.

some more excerpts:

Trump's America

Over the past few months, I've followed that same westward flight path to California on a number of occasions, and found myself asking what would an impressionable 16-year-old make of America now. Would she share my adolescent sense of wonder, or would she peer out over the Pacific at twilight and wonder if the sun was setting on America itself?

What would she make of the gun violence, brought into grotesque relief again by the Las Vegas massacre? Multiple shootings are not new, of course. Just days before I arrived in the States in 1984, a gunman had walked into a McDonalds in a suburb of San Diego and shot dead 21 people. It was then the deadliest mass shooting in modern US history.

What's different between now and then, however, is the regularity of these massacres, and how the repetitiveness of the killings has normalised them. What was striking about Las Vegas was the muted nationwide response to a gunman killing 58 people and injuring hundreds more.
***
What would she make of race relations? Back in 1984, black athletes such as Carl Lewis, Edwin Moses and Michael Jordan were unifying figures as they helped reap that Olympic golden harvest. Now some of America's leading black athletes are vilified by their president for taking a knee to protest, a right enshrined in the First Amendment. These athletes now find themselves combatants in the country's endless culture wars.

What would she make of the confluence of gun violence and race, evident in the spate of police shootings of unarmed black men and in the online auction where the weapon that killed Trayvon Martin fetched more than $100,000?
***

[StevieM]

3. It's a great article but I disagree that Trump's victory was a historic upset. He was heading

towards a decisive defeat. Then the FBI intervened--again--to destroy the Democratic nominee so that the GOP would win the race. They rigged the election many times, and it wasn't even until the final rigging, with 11 days to go that they were able to rig it successfully enough to get even Donald Trump elected.

[edbermac]

4. k&r

Was going to post this in GD. Very good read.