John Chuckman
COMMENT - SOME REALLY NOTABLE THINGS ABOUT AMERICA REVEALED THROUGH TRUMP
Trump has lost support according to several recent polls. The remarkable thing is that he commands any support.
We’ve had more than three years of incompetence at the highest level, blunder after blunder, erratic policy turns, laughing about theft, insulting people, displays of callousness, giving away other people’s property, serving America’s One-Percent slavishly while ignoring everyone else except in empty slogans at political rallies, and a long series of stone-stupid statements on any number of topics, from the coronavirus to the riots in Minneapolis.
Not a single solid achievement and not a campaign promise kept. How can there be anyone who supports him, much less something around forty-two to -five percent approving of him in polls?
It was one thing to support Trump when he first ran, when you may have thought that, despite his many grotesqueries, he might be able to achieve a few worthwhile things, as outsiders or mavericks occasionally do. But this man has achieved nothing, except piling up bodies both at home and abroad and shaming civil society.
This does say something disturbing about Americans, a good many of them anyway. I don’t know whether it has something to do with poor education and ignorance or just lowdown meanness. I suspect a bit of both.
There is a lot of meanness and brutality in America - as perhaps few people abroad realize, still under illusions created by glossy magazines, attractive television series, and Hollywood movies - as we can see by what happened in Minneapolis, the kind of gruesome display that has happened many times.
And there was the President, virtually applauding official murder, done in the most sadistic fashion as by a death-camp guard, and threatening deeply upset protesters.
Of course, accomplishing all that killing and horror abroad as America does, none of it having anything remotely to do with defense, requires a good supply of cold-blooded killers. And there are the countless corrupt and vicious police, the country’s suburban sprawl creating a weird expanding universe of jurisdictions, each requiring its own inadequate, poorly-trained and -disciplined police force.
There’s the small army of prison guards in a penal system with an international reputation for brutality. Where else do you find the Nazi-like concept of super-max prisons and the widespread, common use of the torture of solitary confinement? A small army of prison guards, indeed, because America has the highest incarceration rate on the planet, as well as some of the most unforgiving laws, including the common one of three relatively minor convictions automatically imposing a life-sentence on someone.
The country’s galaxy of seventeen huge, intrusive security agencies, respecters of no rights, certainly is not staffed by choirboys.
America is often a violent, Ill-informed, and nasty place – a few steps from tyranny - and Trump is the true champion for those constituencies, bringing out their best, as it were.
