That was Hunter S. Thompson’s line in Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 discussing the Nixon/McGovern mashup. He correctly foresaw that Nixon’s victory would be a blowout and concluded “we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable. The tragedy of all this is that George McGovern, for all his mistakes and all his imprecise talk about “new politics” and “honesty in government,” is one of the few men who’ve run for President of the United States in this century who really understands what a fantastic monument to all the best instincts of the human race this country might have been.”
That’s a lovely aspiration. It’s echoed in the closing of the Necrotic Toddler’s State of the Union (“And our future will be bigger, better, brighter, bolder and more glorious than ever before.”) but the Toddler and his party, unlike Thompson, can’t bear to look at the dark side of America: slavery, misogyny, segregation and currently the ratcheting power of the super-rich to take over everything. Hell, those are the things they like about this country; legal equality and freedom for all are what they hate.
The Toddler’s speech invokes the idea of American exceptionalism, but as I’ve said before, American exceptionalism is cheap grace. The people who believe in it most see it not as a mission statement — let’s make America awesome! — but as a salve for their ego. They live in the greatest country on Earth, all you other people in shit-hole countries can suck it!
There are countries that can go a year or more without a mass shooting; we can’t manage a week. There are countries where police killing someone is a rare event; not here. Brazil and South Korea both jailed a president who tried to overthrow the government. China’s developed a 700 MPH bullet train; here even NYC’s successful congestion pricing program for using roads generates screams of outrage.
A big part of the problem is our commitment to hierarchy: whites, men, Christians who can’t let go of their desire to be at the top of the heap. They don’t want to earn it, they feel they should be recognized by default (i.e., Pete Hegseth) as a superior being. Like I said, even the limited steps America has already taken towards equality make them hate this country in favor of the fantasy WASP male-ruled America in their heads.
Another is money. Elon Musk buys Twitter and turns it into a right-wing cesspool; David Ellison buys CBS and now CNN and does the same. The gun industry blocks any effort at gun regulation; the auto industry propagandizes that mass transit is just a step towards putting us all in government chains. And that for all the struggles, in many ways life in the US is so good for many of us it’s easy to think it just happens naturally.
Fixing it will be a long hard struggle, and I don’t know the path to get there. But then, the same can be said of the women, POC and gay activists who looked at a country absolutely opposed to their rights, and won an impossible fight (even if they’re now having to fight it all over again, as are we all). I’ll close with the words of Andrea Pitzer: “My advice to you is that if you want to live this next year in a more beautiful world, go make that world. Make it where you are right now, without waiting for things to get worse before you decide to act, or assuming that they will get better without you taking part.”
No, wait, I’ll close less poetically but amusingly with an event in Texas. High school students staged a protest walkout over ICE. A local man attacked one of the girls. The kids kick his ass.
