The Ugly Duckling,...er, American

      It was difficult to watch the verbal beating of a country's leader, something most historians say was unprecedented.  From what I saw (and the response by the Ukranian president on Fox), it marked an embarrassing end to civility and humility by our head of government (but one that was praised by the Russian media).  Breaking down that word --civility-- one can discover "civil" in there, which the Cambridge dictionary defines as: ...relating to ordinary citizens and their concerns, as distinct from military or ecesiastical matters ("civil aviation").  With the massive firing of so many "civil" servants, it would appear that the current administration wants to drop the word entirely and just leave the word "servants."  So what the heck is happening?   

Photo: Alexey Nikolsky / AFP / Getty

     There was a time not long ago when the term "ugly American" simply described the drunk US tourist in another country acting arrogant or being too loud (the Merriam-Webster dictionary's definition is: "an American in a foreign country whose behavior is offensive to the people of that country").  This happened recently in the Mexican town of Ajijic when an expat wearing a MAGA hat got into a heated argument while at a concert, one where Mexican police were called and ended up arresting the man; outside the venue, local residents apparently waited with bricks in their hands, ready to pelt the hooligan, according to my friend who was there.  Ajijic is just one of many expat hideaways so I was surprised when my friend added that there was a rather large contingent of ultra-conservative expats living there (in addition to the full-time expats, the town adds 26,000+ more people in winter when Americans and Canadians come to escape the cold).  So quick question: how many of you are feeling less and less comfortable traveling overseas, or even visiting the neighboring countries of Mexico and Canada?  Simply go down the list: Egypt or Jordan, Costa Rica or Panama, Portugal or the UK, China or Greenland..  There was a time when you could feel quite welcome and safe traveling most anywhere as an American.  But these days travelers from the US may discover that fewer and fewer nations will be welcoming US citizens with open arms, especially in Latin America, wrote Bloomberg.  You may have read about the booing in Canada at a hockey game when the US national anthem was being played.  Then Reuter's reported: The EU's competition chief  [Teresa Ribera] says U.S. President Donald Trump has upended the "trustful relationship" between the United States and Europe, and that Brussels should focus on providing the predictability and stability that is lacking in Washington...Ribera has the power to approve or veto multi-billion euro mergers and also slap hefty fines on companies seeking to bolster their market power by throttling smaller rivals (the EU Commission coordinates trade policy for the 27-nation bloc).  It brought to mind the lyrics of Bruce Springsteen: Some brimstone, baritone, anticyclone, rolling stone preacher from the East says, "Dethrone the dictaphone, hit it in its funny bone, that's where they expect it least.

     Here was how Thomas Friedman viewed it earlier: It is important to remember that America is such an important player on the world stage that even small shifts in how we project power can have decisive impacts.  And it's this combination of shrinking American power in one part of the world plus the reshaping of the world more broadly by the accelerations in the Market, Mother Nature, and Moore's law that defines the era we are in today, which I call the post-post-Cold War world.  It is a world characterized by some very old and some very new forms of geopolitical competition all swirling together at the same time.  That is, the traditional great-power competition, primarily among the United States, Russia, and China, is back again (if it ever really went away) as strong as ever, with the three major powers again jockeying over spheres of influence, along golden-oldie fault lnes...in the Cold War, the biggest challenge for American foreign policy was almost always managing strength -- our own strength, that of our allies, such as the European Union and Japan, and that of our main rivals, Russia and China.  Today, the American president spends much more time managing and navigating weakness: the weakness of our allies in the EU and Japan, the weakness of an angry, humiliated, and economically frail Russia, the weakness of states that have disintegrated, and the economic weakness of American after 9/11 and the 2008 crash.  Managing weakness is an enormous headache...

     Sadly, this commentary appeared when Trump posted his AI-generated vision of the "new" Gaza: Within the American Imaginary, there is and always has been a subcategory of people in this world who are not only born to suffer but are habituated to it.  They come from the “shithole countries,” as previously defined by the president, during his first term.  This region has historically gone by different names.  The "Third World." "The Global South." "Arabia."  (And it can be extended.  It may soon include all of “Eastern Europe,” as President Zelensky is discovering.)  In these places live the “wretched of the earth,” as defined by Frantz Fanon, the Martinican psychiatrist-philosopher who, though he died in 1961, is one of the political thinkers most closely identified with our historical moment.  Fanon diagnosed all of this, long ago.  He understood that in the colonial imagination the wretched are a species apart, a special kind of desensitized people who do not mourn their dead as we do, and look upon their own poverty with the relative equanimity of those who can expect nothing better.  Collectively, the wretched possess what Fanon called “crushing objecthood.”  They are not sacred humans in and of themselves but rather elements of a stage set upon which the drama of Western power is played.  A berating as savage as the one at the White House...

                          

     What has happened to our basic moral structure of recognizing people as people?  All people.  And who exactly are the people taking this holier-than-thou attitude?  Wrote David Brooks in the New York Times: The president and Elon Musk are University of Pennsylvania graduates who are billionaires.  Pete Hegseth went to Princeton and Yale.  J.D. Vance went to Yale.  Stephen Miller went to Duke.  These are the highly educated right-wingers.  And I have been around these -- all these people all my life.  I used to be one.  And there are two types.  There are, one, people who believe in conservative governance.  And then there's the other type.  They're just anti-left.  They don't have a positive vision for conservative governments.  They want to tear down the institutions that they believe the left controls...In 2018 the organization More in Common released the “Hidden Tribes” survey.  It found that two groups were driving American politics, which it called progressive activists and devoted conservatives.  These groups are at opposite ends of the political spectrum, but they have a lot in common.  They are the richest of all the groups in the More in Common typology.  They are the whitest of all the groups.  They are among the best educated of all the groups.

     Such mental fury brought to mind the courtroom battle in 1925 in Dayton, Tennessee, more broadly known as the Scopes trial (made and remade into the movie, Inherit the Wind).  William Jennings Bryan vs. Clarence Darrow, creationism vs. evolution.  The judge denied Darrow (arguing for evolution) all of his witnesses (scientists) save one.  Here's how a piece in The New York Review put it: Many Americans of that era—above all, white Protestant men—felt threatened by the millions of Catholic and Jewish immigrants who had flooded into the country in the preceding half-century.  Women could now vote, and millions of them had recently come into the labor force—a flow accelerated by World War I—with employers sometimes finding them more reliable than men.  Many women no longer included the word “obey” in their wedding vows, and birth control, even when still illegal, was giving them more power over their reproductive lives.  Men sensed that their traditional status was menaced.  One sign of this is that the American divorce rate, although low by today’s standards, more than tripled between 1890 and 1920...Today the country is once again roiled by unsettling changes, and the fiercest culture warriors come from the parts of it that have lost out: regions like the Rust Belt, Appalachia, whose coal mines have shut down, and the southern and rural areas that have missed out on the tech boom enriching coastal cities like Seattle, Boston, and San Francisco.  And today, again, it is men in these parts of the country who feel most under threat, as the election has just shown us.  One big difference?  Both Darrow and Bryan were civil to one another (Darrow had supported Bryan twice in his campaigns to become President).  As the piece added: Why the difference in tone between today’s bitter cultural battles and the one that took place in Tennessee in 1925?  One factor, surely, was that no one was trying to turn the Scopes trial into a political campaign weapon.  Bryan had not given up hope of making a final run for president, but he was a fundamentally decent man who was not planning to reach the White House on a wave of venom against his enemies.*

    Do any of us really want this "venom" in our politicians, or even in ourselves and our outdoor gatherings?  The group mentioned earlier, More In Common, found in their studies that: ...1) A majority of Americans (72%) agree that we have a responsibility to connect with people who are different from us. 2). Many Americans express interest in engaging in activities across lines of difference, though levels of interest vary somewhat by outgroup and type of connection. 3). The more people think others in their community are connecting across lines of difference (the more “normative” this behavior seems), the more interested they are to connect as well.  This relationship is stronger for groups that are less inclined to engage, like the Politically Disengaged.  And as Pico Iyer wrote in his own recent book: ...the historian R.H. Tawney reminds me, humans were spiritual beings who, for prudence's sake, took care of their material needs; nowadays more and more of us are material beings who, for the sake of prudence, attend to our spiritual needs.

     Aaugh!  Enough.  I began searching and found solace in two movies, both neglected or at least not recognized by "the stars" (Kate Winslet's performance in Lee, also neglected, was outstanding), the true story of Gertrude "Trudy" Ederle and the fictional story of Melody Brooks.  Who??  In The Young Woman & the Sea, Ederle became the first woman to swim the English Channel, despite the belief that women shouldn't participate in sports "because their hearts would burst," and despite her male coach drugging her during her first attempt (he himself had failed to cross the Channel 22 times, drugging her 7 miles in as she appeared ready to complete the crossing), and despite all the press and sponsors telling her that she should abandon any further efforts in the chilly 55F degree water, and despite all of this happening in the same year the Scopes trial was happening.  Ederle went on to successfully swim the Channel, and broke the men's record by 2 hours, and received the largest ticker-tape parade ever for a male or female athlete (Ederle was from New York).  As for Melody Brooks, the film version of the best-selling books, Out of My Mind, depicts what a 12-year old with cerebral palsy has to endure, especially if that condition not only limits your physical movements but also prevents you from speaking.  Both films depict uphill struggles, but are also uplifting and show how civility and determination can still overcome so many odds.  Civility, decency, community.  Perhaps it's time to pull each of them out of the dust bin and place them back on the mantle.  As Melody Brooks says in the film, "I may need a push sometimes...but I won't be pushed around."  More In Common added: Stories and narratives can unite or divide us, and we believe in the power of stories of a ‘bigger us’ to counter the appeal of efforts to divide societies into ‘us-versus-them.’   The Ugly Duckling was a fairy tale, and as the song goes, "fairy tales can come true...if you're young at heart."  In 3 months, Trump will be 79...

The article noted that while Bryan "was not planning to reach the White House on a wave of venom": ...In today’s Florida, for example, Governor Ron DeSantis clearly hoped to do exactly that.  Besides his attacks on any discussion of global warming, he introduced a bill allowing parents to sue school districts that teach “critical race theory” (defined quite broadly), signed a law banning abortions after six weeks, and purged the leadership of the state university system’s honors college.  Reporters recently observed a dumpster on campus filled with discarded books from its now-closed Gender and Diversity Center.  The governor’s reach for the presidential nomination failed, but all over the country candidates for everything from the presidency to school boards have weaponized culture war issues like trans rights, library books, and vaccines.  By comparison, the Scopes trial looks as mannerly as a high school debate tournament.  DeSantis, whose 2nd term as governor of Florida is ending, is now promoting his wife to succeed him, reported ABC News.