As seen by the German magazine Der Spiegel (translation courtesy Harper Magazine’s Scott Horton; bold emphasis mine):
“Africa is a country. The Taliban rule in Libya. Muslims are terrorists. Immigrants are mostly criminals, Occupy Wall Street protesters are always dirty. And women who claim to have been sexually molested should kindly keep quiet.”
Welcome to the wonderful world of the Republican Party. Or rather: to the distorted world of its presidential campaign. For months it has coiled through the country like a traveling circus, from debate to debate, from scandal to scandal, contesting the mightiest office in the world — and nothing is ever too unfathomable for them… These eight presidential wannabes are happy enough not only to demolish their own reputations but also that of their party, the once worthy party of Abraham Lincoln. They are also ruining the reputation of the United States.
They lie, deceive, scuffle and speak every manner of idiocy. And they expose a political, economic, geographic and historical ignorance compared to which George W. Bush sounds like a scholar. Even the party’s boosters are horrified by the spectacle…
Platitudes in lieu of programs: in serious times that demand the smartest, these clowns offer blather that is an insult to the intelligence of all Americans. But as with all freak shows, it would be impossible without a stage, the U.S. media, which has been neutered by the demands of political correctness, and a welcoming audience, a party base that seems to have been lobotomized overnight. Notwithstanding the subterranean depths of the primary process, the press and broadcasters proclaim one clown after the next to be the new frontrunner, in predictable news cycles of forty-five days.
As Horton notes, the real takeaway from this is what the Republican primary circus is doing to seriously damage America’s reputation abroad. One of Barack Obama’s biggest accomplishments has been the normalization of US foreign policy and bilateral relationships after eight years of the profoundly alienating ignorance and arrogance of the Bush administration. (It hasn’t made US policy much less bloody on the ground, however.) Now, without even holding high office, eight clowns are dragging the US back into that Bush-era image morass, and actually doubling down on it, with the eager complicity of a stenographic US media that would never, ever, ever lay it out like this.
The article has a nice summary at the end also:
http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/0,1518,800494,00.html
My attempt at translating is:
So. A beautiful club. A club of liars, debtors, cheats, marriage breakers, overreachers, pharasees and ignorants. No wonder that David Remnick, the chief editor of the New Yorker sees in them the decline of America. ( http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2011/11/14/111114taco_talk_remnick )
The Tea Party movement does not share this assessment. They encourage the worst candidates the loudest, only to watch them fail as expected, one after another. That shows that this Fox News sponsored “peoples movement” was never interested in governing (or in intelligence and intellect, which these times require). But only on the marketing of their selves, their quotas and millions. (?)
The US election campaign as reality show – as a pseudopolitical counterpart to the Paris Hiltons, Kim Kardashians and the casting candidates, which have poisoned television: The more crude, the more ridiculous, the more stupid – the more lucrative. Before all of them, the TV broadcasts of Fox News, of which the Fairleigh Dickinson University found out now that its spectators are less informed than people, who watch no TV news.
Perhaps that would be the solution: Simply ignore everything, up to election day. But the docudrama is much too enticing, with its soap opera capers. The newest rumor concerns a candidate, who seemed to have fallen out long ago. Who however could enter the scene of chaos perhaps again. Her name: Sarah Palin.
.
“Stupid people are ruining America”
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence.".
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."The average intelligence…the average accurate perception of the reality in which we live…of American citizens is not very high when compared that of the citizens of many other countries.
Why? How?
Genetics as much as anything else.
We are largely a nation of losers. Of descendants of losers.
Sorry, but there it is.
There we are.
“Wretched refuse” indeed.
Brave losers, though. Aspiring to something higher. Like the people of Israel, only much, much more numerous. “Never again?” In spades. For several centuries.
What happened to those aspirations?
What happened is that the winners among those losers trampled them. Just as it’s always been; just as it’s always been.
“One more time once,” as Count Basie used to say.
Those “losers” wanted more. They struggled upwards. They sent their children to school. They watched as those children grew and learned and prospered. They watched in pride as those children built a new land, the strongest, most prosperous country in the world, as they marched off to fight against the kinds of people who had chased them from their homelands in the first place. Fought and won. As they fought against their own worst tendencies. As they learned to accept the differences of others. As they tried to correct the wrongs that had happened during the earlier years of the growth of this country. Racial wrongs. Social wrongs.
But then something happened. It all reverted to form. The same kinds of people who dominated those losers in their native countries won out. They took control of the information services. They took control of the educational system. They took control of the government. And the descendants of those brave losers just sat there and ate their execrable fast food.
Watched their foolish reality shows.
Voted for their idiot representatives.
They acquiesced.
And here we are.
There is a saying among horse racing people.
“Class tells.”
You know what it means?
It means that even if a horse the lineage of which is not very stellar wins a few races, eventually that horse is going to start losing.
And here we are again.
Losing.
So it goes.
What to do?
Damned if I know.
Leave?
The temptation arises.
Try to get through to these people? Try to tell them the reality of their situation? Try to wake them the fuck up again? Try to warn them that this time there will be no place left to run?
I dunno.
Apparently Ron Paul can’t, although he is making a truly heroic effort at doing so.
I certainly can’t.
They just sit there, chewing away on their nutritionless Bachman burgers, their Cain pizzas, Romney turnovers and Obama half smokes, oblivious to everything except whatever the hypnomedia tells them is happening. Dumb to the world.
Reverting to form.
Here’s what a wise man once said about this sort of thing.
Servitude.
The consequence of the crime and the punishment of the guilt.
Too big to fail?
Maybe it’s more like too dumb to succeed.
That’s what I’m seeing today, anyway.
Bet on it.
My mother served in the Royal Canadian Air Force during the Battle of Britain. She and my father were Americans, but they essentially eloped in 1939 to join the RCAF and go fight the Nazis. He flew Spitires and she was a radar operator, both in Great Britain. Neither one of them liked to talk much about what they did or what they experienced during that time, but one thing that my mother often said was that she developed a real loathing for Americans after the US joined the war effort in 1941. She used to tell stories about how civilized the Brits were, what a good time was had in the pubs before the Americans descended on the scene and what louts the Americans seemed after a couple of years with the Brits. “Smashing glasses and grabbing after the girls” was her capsule description of the American troops.
Maybe what we are seeing is just another example of “class tells.” Maybe the initial success of America was more a testament to its vast, untapped natural resources than it was to the quality of its settlers.
Maybe the US is simply finding its true level.
That’s how it looks from here, anyway.
So it goes.
Just as it’s always been.
Just as it’s always been.
“One more time once.”
And so it goes.
And here we go again.
Down like a motherfucker!!!
Sad to see.
AG
America, Beacon of Freedom and Liberty? The Truth of the Matter.
AG
If your reputation argument is true, I still don’t think it necessarily will end up sullying America’s name long-term. Look at Germany and Japan after World War II. Reputations suffer for years, but they don’t remain negative forever.