An American Abroad

Last night in the surreal cocoon of the Executive Lounge, I heard an Australian ask an American “So what do they think of Trump in the US really?”

Impossible to answer, since we love him and hate him, and love to hate him, and hate ourselves for loving him. He’s a train wreck we can’t stop watching. And even if we could stop, we won’t be allowed to because CNN and Fox and even NPR are all rolling in the Donald-catnip (that’s an image for cat people… for dog people it would be rolling in a dead something discovered by the side of the road) (which I think is more apt).

The Yank’s answer wasn’t satisfying as I continued eavesdropping, because if you’re here in the Executive Lounge I don’t think you can understand the appeal of a Trump… you might even have dealings with a Trump company if you’re sitting here, but you’re certainly not expecting him to make your life better by Taking on the Washington Establishment or Using Tough Talk.

My liberal friends, which is to say most of my friends, point to the rise of Bernie Sanders at this point in the campaign as proof that the system works; that an outsider candidate, long on the fringe of his own party, can come along and speak truth to power, and that the righteousness of his ideas will carry him past the Mainstream Candidates into the halls of enlightened power. 

My liberal friends, which is to say most of my friends, point to the rise of Donald Trump, an outsider candidate long on the fringe of his own party, as proof that the system is broken; that any buffoon with enough money can buy some short-term attention from the fawning media and the benighted citizenry will support him for a while, no matter how offensive he is, but since he’s obviously not electable he’ll eventually fade away.

Those two positions seem somewhat at odds. But I hope my friends are right… and then again I hope they’re wrong, because what I really want is for the candidates to formally acknowledge that the technocrats in the shadows are the people actually running things: the Fed and the Joint Chiefs and Bill Gates and Sheldon Adelson. That way, I could enjoy the carnival without wondering quite so much about fingers on buttons in bunkers.

update 9/15: today’s International New York Times includes two articles that resonate against my thoughts from the other night… I can only conclude that they read this blog, which is awesome! The opinion piece called “losing faith in the process” by Roberto Foa and Yascha Mounk goes into some detail on sentiments and research about people who actually consider whether representative democracy is as inevitable as it has seemed to me throughout my lifetime. One in six Americans are at least willing to tell a surveyor that they question the value of our entire system. Yikes. On another page, a column called “examining who runs America” by Anand Giridharadas describes something known as the “deep state,” which is those same technocrats in the shadows I mentioned earlier in this post.