The land of the free and the home of the brave is no more. Overrun by the delusional and fearful, it has sold its soul to megalomaniacs and succumbed to oligarchal manipulation.
I’m not talking about the 2024 Trump election victory. I’m talking about the slide of America over the last 25 years post-9/11 into a country consumed by fake political news, hidden religious extremism, xenophobic obsessions, and finally drunk and addicted to whatever political scare suits their pseudo-religious, blatantly conservative and scare-mongering odd-ball theories about every other culture on earth.
America has always had a violent penchant for the bizarre.
From Ripley’s “Believe It or Not” to the extravagance of Liberace, it made exploring the strange and unusual a profitable business industry.
For the last 70 years, it has given us movies, television shows, books and entertainment that exploited human naivety and took the world to the edge of irrationality. Like the movie, The Truman Show, it has lived an existence produced by and for television, bravely and freely, and told the rest of the world that this was reality.
For many of us, it was clear that America was more movie-set than reality. We saw the props and the acting. We saw the “everything is bigger and better in America”.
Like the Truman Show, there is a thin little screen between the movie set and the dirty hard boards of the studio. The American dream has finally ended, and the nation’s 345 million people are all gathered, unawares, in a studio, waiting for instructions from its director. The underbelly of tyrannical conservatism has finally broken through the green screen.
As the Michael Smerconish poll found: 83% of Americans believe that Donald Trump has revealed America, rather than changed it. Conservatives find comfort in security. They believe lies easily. Especially scary political lies. They don’t question or scrutinise.
No matter how many Jordan Klepper reels they may watch, if someone they trust says it, no matter how bizarre it is, they will believe it with deep conviction.
Like the Bible-belt crowd who believe that John Biden is dead, that Obama runs the government, and that January 6 was a peaceful protest.
Trump’s hold over the American people is total: he is a master at tapping into their fears and exploits every one of them. This is the last 20 minutes of every scary movie where things go horribly wrong, but the hero is on his way. Only in this case, it’s real. It’s no longer a movie.
And the hero that Americans are waiting for, is Trump. He is supported by a bunch of oligarchs, several of them beneficiaries of education in Apartheid South Africa, who cannot wait to control the truths you hear and read.
The Democrats are unfortunately not the good guys either. Dubious on human rights and democracy, fuelling the USA war machine and accommodating any populist and divisive extremism, it has alienated millions of voters. They should have retired an ageing Joe Biden as their presidential candidate.
They gave a competent but low-key Vice President Kamala Harris only 107 days to campaign for the Presidency, when Trump has been doing it since January 2020. It was no contest.
The truth is that America has finally become the movie it always sold to the rest of the world. Terminator, Red State and The Manchurian Candidate all combine in 2024 to give us the horror of America today.
Christian fundamentalists finally have their eschatological strongman pseudo-peacemaker, while businesses have its brazen capitalist exploiter. This is America’s new security. Maybe Margaret Atwood was a prophet after all.
* Lorenzo is a leader and veteran in the social development space who has worked for decades to address SA’s stark inequities.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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