Donald Trump, American Idiot
Donald Trump, American Idiot
How Ignorance, Rage, and Fear Became the Ruling Principles of American Life
https://eand.co/donald-trump-american-idiot-1571f3606ea4
“Hey, Umair. Did you inject yourself with Lysol yet?”
Ben, the London copper, shouted from across the dog park.
I looked up, confused.
Massimo, the Italian doctor, grinned, and cried: “Maybe he drank it already!”
“Wait, what?” It was too early for this. I’d just woken up. Snowy looked up at me, smiling, too. I grumbled, irritated.
And then they told me, shaking with laughter, unable to contain themselves. My jaw dropped, and I laughed, too.
You’ve heard, by now, I’m sure, the statement that most of the world greeted with shock and hilarity. Donald Trump suggested…to fight a deadly pandemic…people should…drink disinfectant…or maybe inject it. LOL, what?
That of course led to numerous manufacturers of disinfectant urgently telling people, no, please, please, don’t drink it, and certainly don’t inject it.
There’s a comedy of errors, and then there’s what you might call the slapstick comedy of idiots. Donald Trump, my friends, exemplifies a certain kind of person, renowned the world over: the American idiot.
Immortalized in a song by a SoCal punk band, the American idiot is a figure everyone knows — and Americans, too often, don’t want to admit exists. When I say everyone, I mean everyone. Everyone in my dog park, everyone in the world.
Consider, for a moment, the actions of the American President since the beginning of the pandemic.
— Denying there was one
— Passing an inadequate stimulus bill
— Obstructing any kind of national strategy
— Encouraging “lockdown liberation” protesters
— Cutting funding for the WHO
— And finally, telling people to…drink Lysol
That, my friends, will be remembered as one of the textbook examples of what it means to be an American idiot.
So what does it mean, really? This morning at the dog park, I got ribbed by Massimo and Ben for the above. Yesterday, when I was at the dog park, I got asked, puzzled, by Wolfgang, the funny and gentle German, if it was really true: did Americans carry guns to Starbucks? I looked at him like a deer caught in the headlights of an approaching freight train. Then I nodded and shrugged. “But why?!” he asked, astonished.
He had a point. The point is made to me every single day now, in baffled conservations, in bewildered questions, in shocked and stunned observations: what the hell is wrong with Americans? Are they really this crazy? They can’t be. But they keep on…so are they? What the?
The world, you see, looks at America, and sees something very different than Americans do. It doesn’t just see a lunatic demagogue telling people to drink Lysol after cutting funding for the WHO. It sees a nation of people quicker to carry a gun than read a book, who’ll happily deny their neighbor’s kids healthcare but go to church every Sunday, who predictably, consistently vote against any improvement to their standards of living…which by now have reached standards that people in most of the rest of the world literally don’t believe, and neither do Americans.
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