....this piece appeared in the Irish Times:

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.
--
MAGA - Manipulating America's Gullible Assholes

Cool story, bro...

Keyser Soze
....this piece appeared in the Irish Times:

Irish Times

April 25, 2020

By Fintan O’Toole

bs snipped

On 4/26/20 11:10 AM, Tim wrote:
Cool story, bro...

Keyser Soze
...this piece appeared in the Irish Times:

Irish Times

April 25, 2020

By Fintan O’Toole

bs snipped


Maybe you could have Trump read it aloud to you...shouldn't take him
more than two hours, eh?

--
MAGA - Manipulating America's Gullible Assholes

On Sunday, April 26, 2020 at 10:19:26 AM UTC-5, Keyser Soze wrote:
On 4/26/20 11:10 AM, Tim wrote:
Cool story, bro...

Keyser Soze
...this piece appeared in the Irish Times:

Irish Times

April 25, 2020

By Fintan O’Toole

bs snipped


Maybe you could have Trump read it aloud to you.

why?