This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper …
Do Americans understand that they are all — each and every one of them — personally and individually responsible for the coming into existence of that abortion of a human being who now sits in the White House and who they call the President of the United States — whether they voted for him or not, or whether they voted at all or not? The man who gets into the White House does not merely get there because he won an election: he gets there as the result of a confluence of circumstances, just like a wave that eventually breaks on the shoreline but actually originates in the deep ocean and gets pushed and pulled to that shoreline by virtue of tidal forces, weather patterns and the combined gravitational forces of this planet and the moon. Each and every American, by virtue of his or her own personal thoughts and actions, constituted some tiny fraction of the force which eventually pushed this disaster of a human being over the finishing line of the race called the American Presidential election.
They can blame the NRI, or Big Business, or the Klu Klux Klan, or the denialists of climate change, or those who are proud to call themselves the Deplorables, or the Islamophobes, or any other small or peculiar interest group who the non-members of that group want to blame, but the fact is that they are all — all — responsible, and they are responsible as individuals, and they cannot hide behind any group identity.
And the real tragedy is that those of us who are not Americans and who live elsewhere in the world, we are all affected by what went on there, because America has so much power in the world. If that were not so we wouldn’t give a fig and it wouldn’t matter to us at all. But because it matters to us, we are all obliged in one way or another to pause and give thought to how the Americans, and how we, got to this pass — and to ask ourselves what sort of future this is going to take us in to. First off, does this take us closer to or further away from global nuclear war? A collapse of the world’s economy? Global poverty? World morality? A world in turmoil with regional wars in every country? Climate change so radical and devastating that the planet no longer supports life of any kind at all?
Did we get it wrong? Is democracy a failed concept? Up to now we have assumed — universally — that democracy is an unassailable ideal, and vast numbers of people have fought and died for it over the last few centuries. But democracy brought us Adolf Hitler, and Donald Trump, and in Africa we have this cynical joke (which unfortunately has proven to be true from time to time): “One man, one vote — one time”
Democracy is founded on several assumptions about human nature, not all of which may be correct — amongst them the belief that most people are basically good (an un-Christian belief, incidentally, since Christianity assumes that all people are sinners until saved — and that may be uncomfortably closer to a truth which non-Christians do not want to hear); the belief that most people are sufficiently intelligent to make good choices; the belief that most people, given the opportunity, will actually get off their backsides and go and exercise those choices; etc., etc.
But historical experience constitutes a challenge to those beliefs. Historical experience makes us cynical. Are we good? Are we moral? Are we intelligent? And most importantly, do we care? Do we even want to ask ourselves these questions?
So here we are, with the most powerful country in the world being run by a slumlord with a mail-order bride and worshipped by a group of people who constitute the lowest common denominator in that country. And Bernie Sanders, the visionary who should have run the country, is relegated to being a voice in the wilderness. And this is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper …
