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Detached from America? It depends
On Twitter, our friend Claire Berlinski (I could have just said Claire, and you’d know, but I used her whole name as a bat signal in case she gets an alert that I’m talking about her tweet) wrote:
Yes and no.
The problem with “Yes” is that different people have exactly opposite opinions.
For some: yes, they believe the country is on the brink of authoritarianism, and also there is not enough authoritarianism when it comes to masks and vaccines. The country is threatened by right-wing white supremacists who want to destroy Our Democracy; we’re always one day away from 1/6, and also, the riots of 2020 were regrettable but righteous and understandable. An astroturf cohort of “concerned parents” are violently attacking school boards in an attempt to keep schools from teaching about racism and the history of slavery.
On the other side: yes, because our expectation of minimal competence among the managerial class in government, always grudging and grumpy because they’re so sure of themselves and what’s best for us, has been demolished by two years of flat-footed mismanagement coupled with no diminution in their estimation of their abilities and importance. The current administration is empty at the top, indifferent to actual problems, intent on forcing things on the populace that the populace does not want, incapable of addressing lawlessness and public disorder, and hostile to the Moorlocks in the hustings with their retrograde ideas (like single-family zoning or the desire to buy a pickup.)
But. No, inasmuch as the real world is not the fret-fest of social media, where you stick your head into the yowling maelstrom of the tremulous and neurotic, or the locker-room of boisterous bros who bleep-post to own the libs. In the actual America people are going to bars and restaurants and grocery stores and getting along just fine, bearing up under the new problems, gritting our teeth, and holding doors open for people behind us without worrying who they voted for. Bad ideas come and go in cycles. We’ve been through worse.
Responses:
Uh huh. Comptroller of the Currency nom wants to bankrupt the energy industry, wants the nationalization of the banking industry, the FBI raids journalists’ offices, racial essentialism is the required intellectual posture in the circles of power, commerce, and education, but the real worrisome thought is ending up like Hungary.
Takes a lot longer slog to get out from under nationalized banks and no carbon-based energy sector, I think.
And:
Again, there was this thing called “The summer of 2020” when city after city, including my own, had spasms of leftist political street violence (with some assistance from opportunistic apolitical miscreants and alt-right morons) that burned down blocks, killed businesses, and increased crime; the reaction of the bien-pensants was to justify the Uprising and attack anyone who seemed to point out that property damage was bad. We have a record number of carjackings in our city, and I guar-an-damn-tee you there’s not a soul driving around worried that MAGA types are going to bracket their car and drag them out at gunpoint.
But yes, sure, Trumpian fascism is right around the corner. Be on guard! Also, report your co-worker for saying something approving about Dave Chappelle. It made you feel unsafe.
Published in Culture
And I think her mother lives (lived?) in Seattle, so she visited there occasionally.
I visited Kerala. I have no idea what’s going on there. I admit it — I feel detached from southwestern India.
What, STILL???
Does Claire consider herself an American? Maybe it’s just me… but a big part of not feeling detached from one’s country (unless I’m missing something) would be to live here and have an actual stake in what happens.
For a brief portion of a second, I thought she was going to explain her plan for reattaching herself to America.
I’m afraid the patient would reject the transplant.
Or the other way around.
Don’t they have drugs these days to suppress the immune system?
For Claire, or for America?
Bqhateverw.
Yes.
My grandmother died awhile ago. She had an open casket funeral. I think all my grandparents had an open casket funeral.
So, everybody gets in a line, walks by the casket and then sits down in the funeral home in a small rural community and catches up.
What do you feel, when looking at a corpse of a loved one? Existential dread as you consider your own mortality? Nothing? Its not really grandma. Its just a husk. Grandma isn’t there.
Based upon the behavior of our institutions (and the downright insane behavior of some punditry) the past 10 years or so, America is dead, and the husk is just a husk that just hasn’t decomposed yet.
Just by observing claire we can see how Nazis happened, and lez-be-honest is happening now.
That is the rare fair criticism of Trump. In his defense, I think Trump was trying to keep the public calm and the economy open, but he was up against a Democratic-Media-Complex that was absolutely hysterical with panic porn and hated him to begin with. Even if he had kept his messaging serious and consistent, it would have been drowned out in the cacophony of “We’re all going to die! Stay tuned for details.”
A smart Covid plan would have avoided the lockdowns except around the elderly and sick. I thought at the time a smart move would have been for the Government to lease empty big box stores (your former Kmarts, Circuit Cities, and Sports Authorities) and outfit them as Covid testing and treatment centers, leaving the hospitals open for normal operations. I mean, people were so SUPER IMPRESSED when the ChiComs built that Potempkin Hospital in four days. Even if they ended up doing as little business as those army field hospitals and Navy ships, it would have been something people could latch onto.
When I really want to understand the pulse of America it is always illuminating to seek out the opinion of someone who hasn’t lived there for many years.
Claire is an inverted de Tocqueville and any distancing she is feeling towards the country she no longer lives in is largely due to her literal distance from that country.
She used to be pretty on target but now she’s overGaulified.
She railed about Trump like he was the devil himself. Maybe she is in a twilight, politically speaking, thinking this new world order that is unfolding here and across the world is some sort of Enlightenment Period 2.0. The French didn’t revolt for nothing! She better look around beyond Paris, as one country after another in Europe is starting to lock down and segregate the vaccinated from the un-vaccinated, and get a clue.
Let’s do it for Schlitz and kiffles!
When the US military stations their people overseas, the send them back to the states at least yearly for this very reason.
FL has too many East Coasters. Come to AZ. I’ll buy you a bourbon and we’ll talk about the snow you don’t have to shovel.
Your last point, plus the response of local governments. I wasn’t impressed with Trump’s response, and no I’m not talking about bleach-drinking or any other canards. The messaging was scattershot. I don’t think he was the guy you want setting the tone when everything’s in flux, no one knows what’s around the corner, and repeatedly telling everyone “it’ll go away” sets up erroneous expectations.
None of that matters when compared to Operation Warp Speed, which counted more than anything.
Just wanted this to stand alone.
Claire Berkinski – not exactly Selena Zito, is she?
Not Schlitz. There aren’t many beers that I avoid, but Schlitz is one.
You could have Black Label instead…
The house-operated beer vending machine in my frat sold Black Label for 25¢ each. The house cleared 8¢ per bottle.
It’s both. Hungary has old school Catholicism and big families, they limit refugees and are not particularly open to refuges. This calls into question the Franco-German idea of a civilized modern country (few, if any, children, secular and over-run with refugees dependent on welfare.)
Claire is like many exPats I’ve known in France. They come to loath us uncouth Americans, you know, with pasty complexions, dunlop disease and a chronic lack of self-awareness.
To answer Claire’s question, I am not detached from America. I am very detached from the federal government and social media.
Claire reminds me of many loved ones who have found themselves denouncing the right despite believing in many of the same things we believe and also accepting the left despite being skeptical of much of what they believe. Many of these folks are the best of us. Loving, compassionate, tender-hearted, intelligent folks who in many cases have been deeply wounded. Wounded by broken homes, failed institutions and quite commonly by a lack of true faith in God.
They feel adrift and insufficiently prepared to fight through the trials of life. They fear authorities but also deeply feel that not having them may be even worse. They like the thought of liberty and true justice but they can’t bring themselves to trust these ideals to the likes of politicians, especially the likes of Trump.
They detach and listfully write prose in Parisienne flats surrounded by cats or maybe sit in suburban couches watching the Hallmark Channel, etc.
We’ve failed. These were folks we should’ve embraced and supported and invested in. Instead, we became defensive and attacked them and pushed them away. They are now seeing the event horizon of the slippery slope they’ve chosen. I doubt very many would be willing to accept our hand if we were to offer it. Is there still room for grace and forgiveness and humility on either side?
Perhaps you missed several years of discourse here. I know I did, but that was after Claire seemed to stop posting and editing here.
The split in the party is people like Mitt Romney, John McCain, Paul Ryan, and their supporters/henchmen Jen Rubin, Mona Charen, Bill Kristol, et al who have simply walked away from Joe Six-pack. They openly despise us, and machinate to win without us.
I do not advise any Republican ever to reward tantrums of dissociation. When you reward a thing, you get more of it. Let those who slam the door come back in humility, and not be carried in by the despised.
With you, I figured you had a strong wall between you and the Federal government and social media!
This is yet another example of a progressive sprinting far beyond where the mainstream of America wants to be, and then bemoaning the fact that there’s such a gulf between her position and that of the rest of us.
The Great Divide in America has been created by a relatively small fraction staking out a position far removed from the rest.