Image from YouTube (Video uploaded by MeidasTouch)
When I was a preteen, television was the essential escape vehicle, and the best rides were all made in America. Every afternoon I would race home from school for my daily two-hour outing on the all-American easy-watching super-sexy turbo-charged dreamtime machine. The US of A was just sooo cool.
I watched Fonzy jump the shark, fantasized about cuddling up to Jeanie, laughed at Gilligan, and helped outwit Colonel Klink almost every day. Australia was all about going to school, taking out the bins, and taking crap from everyone. But it was different in the land of the free.
In America everyone was interesting. They had a gun, or lots of guns, or they were a fast talker, or rode a big motorbike, or fought Nazis, or did organized crime, or battled supervillains. They could very well have a Genie, a supercool car, a rock’n’roll band and a perfect life in a big mansion with a pool. They will know cool people, do cool things, listen to cool music, and simply be naturally and effortlessly cool. Plus, in turn, they will be righteous, sexy, brave, wise, dangerous, outrageous, funny, brash, and flash. In other words, they will always be interesting. Not dull. Not deathly and almost unbearably dreary and plain and dull. Not mindbogglingly lifeless and eternally bland suburban blah. For the preteen me, in every important way, America was everything that urban Australia was not.
Then in my teens I became complicated like Kerouac. I lived hip like Ginsburg. I was as lean as Wolfe. I was transcendently cool. I would drag my feet through the negro streets at dawn. I inhabited tenements illuminated. I consumed electric cool-aid in seedy dives. I sat at the feet of wizened guitarists and shivered with rage as the street poets thundered. I dreamt the American dream vicariously yet nevertheless deeply and enthusiastically.
Now the salty bitch has betrayed us all. Most traditional American fiction and mythology has been rendered nonsensical almost overnight. Our common frame of reference has been butchered.
It remained possible to reconcile the evident gap between the professed ambitions of the rulers of the USA, and their actions, when they were professing stereotypical and recognizable political claptrap; but now everything that is occurring simply does not make American sense. According to the current crop of cashed-up leaders, Yankee-doodle and apple pie are passe, the civil war was misguided, miscegenation and diversity are faults, and the constitution got it all wrong. But at least the Supreme Court has kept up with the new political reality and its demands.
When the leader of The US of A is flogging sneakers and shiny techno-trinkets to the red-white-and-gullible from the Oval Office, the line between irony and reality has dissolved. When the writhing mass of those yearning to be free are described in official documents as ‘illegal aliens’ both comedy and culture are cheapened and set adrift. When the stereotypes and narratives that we have all jointly trashed and celebrated, for all of our lives, are suddenly redundant; what happens to the middle-class information bubble?
How can I believe in the Brady Bunch when the President is bonking porn stars? How will Scooby-Doo react when the teacher in the isolated community schoolroom is the enemy, and the corporate shyster trying to scare and defraud everyone is the hero? What happens to Law & Order when the prosecutors are in the dock and the convicted felons are running the Justice Department? This scream of cultural angst has been brought to you by the letter’s ‘G’, ‘O’ and ‘P’ and the numbers ‘19’ and ‘84’.
As a modern thinking Australian in the 21st century, I had learned to come to terms with the changing cultural landscape in the USA. Mainly by becoming psychopathically unconcerned with actual events in the country and instead lapping up the available propaganda. But now it is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain a viable level of doublethink. When watching American teevee, it now seems to come down to a choice between either ‘the news’ or ‘the rest’. Perhaps if I pretend that the last ten years did not happen then maybe, just maybe, I can get through an airing of MASH without bursting into tears?
Trump might not be having much of a direct effect on my physical wellbeing, but he sure has punched a huge hole in the side of the USS Happy Memories. Is it now possible to watch The West Wing without devolving into fits of hysterical giggling? Is Boris Badenov still a viable baddy now that Natasha is the White House Press Secretary? (At least Rocky and Bullwinkle live in the soon to be 51st State.)
My childhood is now a MAGA victim. Every time I see some familiar mindless American bubble-gum flavored crap that I recognize, I am jolted into the uncomfortable present. The bloody worries of the world at once become blindingly apparent. I am forced to resentfully acknowledge the actually fucked up reality within which I reside. Which is not why I watch mindless American bubble-gum flavoured crap.
Also by Dr Moylan:
Clenching my buttocks & keeping it short ‘n light
The art of living in interesting times
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View Comments
I thought Natasha was the Director of National security?
Sorry to tell you James that the US of television land in your teenage years was just another fantasy. Didn't exist in the real world and those who want to take the US "back" to those days are just kidding themselves. The US is good at projecting something that it is not but not very good at dealing with and fixing the reality that is their country. I was watching a video yesterday about porch pirates (in other words common thieves), it is estimated that 90,000 parcels A DAY are lifted from peoples porches by thieves. The US is a shitehole country, it has been for a very long time. Just my view and nothing that is happening now changes that view, in fact it reinforces it.
It's interesting that Trump is mirroring the narrative of some here regarding the Russia & Ukraine war.
But oddly (or perhaps not) there appears to be about zero commentary or scrutiny of this.
As we watch the Trump shenanigans, it’s all too easy to categorise this as right-wing rhetoric and showmanship. That would be a mistake.
Trump is certainly unpredictable and dangerous, but that alone does not make him a figure of the far right.
Let’s not forget that for most of his life he was a Democrat, and still has many close friends who are Democrats. His instincts are all liberal.
He’s all about business, about profit, and about doing deals.
That alone does not make him a liberal, but a consistent theme in his campaigning does.
One of the alleged virtues of liberalism is it’s regard for tolerance. But as I’ve pointed out several times in the past, that regard for tolerance only goes so far. Liberals will not tolerate threats, however minor, to their financial system.
They see these as threats to their ability to make a profit.
Even countries that want to go it alone with their own system, interfering with nobody, minding their own business, are attacked without mercy.
During his campaign and since his election, Trump has threatened economic warfare against countries that are considering moving away from the US dollar as the medium for international trade. This is not one of his “flooding the zone with crap” tactics. This has been consistent.
And his intolerance for alternative economic models makes him-- you guessed it -- a liberal.
All of the political mayhem and chaos that we see in an endless stream has a single cause. Frantic attempts to preserve a financial system that entrenches both privilege and poverty.
Liberalism is the problem.
That's hilarious!!!
Trump is a liberal!!
Amazing
Readers might find this helpful in considering Trump’s liberal background.
From wiki -- Over his first term, Trump reduced federal taxes and increased federal spending, both of which significantly increased federal budget deficits and the national debt. The positive economic situation he inherited from the Obama administration continued, with a labor market approaching full employment and measures of household income and wealth continuing to improve further into record territory. Trump also implemented trade protectionism via tariffs, primarily on imports from China. During Trump's first three years in office, the number of Americans without health insurance increased by 4.6 million (16%), while his tax cuts favored the top earners, and failed to deliver on its promises, worsened and eroded the country’s revenue needed to continue investment to critical programs like social security and medicine.
Erosion of critical programs? Tax cuts for the wealthy? How very liberal.
Eagle-eyed readers might find a couple of other "liberalisms" in that lot.
Since his election Chatham House says Ahead of the election Trump promised action in five main economic policy areas. He pledged tax cuts resulting in a stimulus of up to $8–10 trillion, to impose 10–20 per cent tariffs against all US trading partners and 60 per cent against China, to deport up to 11 million undocumented migrants, to unleash a wave of economic deregulation and to reform radically the federal bureaucracy, improving efficiency and cutting ‘enormous amounts’ of waste. He also promised to roll back the Biden administration’s pro-climate policies, to end the war in Ukraine and to double down on efforts to constrain China’s access to US technology.
So his outlook has not changed. The comment from Chatham House could just as easily be written about any Oz Coalition govt. Tax cuts, discrimination against asylum seekers, deregulation, improving efficiency and cutting waste (cutting social services), undermining pro-climate policies -- these are all typical liberalism options that have been utilised by the Coalition.
The only significant economic difference between Trump and liberals here in Oz is his use of tariffs as economic warfare. But then, we are not an economic powerhouse with delusions of global supremacy, so we do not have the power to go down that path.
Trump’s use of tariffs however, is still consistent with the most important plank of liberal policy -- the protection of profits and the system that produces profits.
Steve, you are a might confused.
You are misusing the term 'liberal' and confusing it with neoliberalism and corporatism.
More significantly, you do not typify a politician by what they say but rather what they do.
Both Adolf and I are both fond of using the word 'socialism' and talking about the need to empower those who have only their labor to sell. But that does not make me a Nazi or Adolf a socialist.
Moreover, even in terms of considering a formal Politics 101 appreciation of liberalism (as it emerged in the mid 18th century in the UK) Trump simply does not fit.
The main feature of the original iteration of liberalism was the definition and extension of basic civil rights via (the rather woolly proposition of) 'a social compact' with the citizenry. Thus social scientists often comment that the main benefit accruing to the modern age that flows from more than two centuries of liberal philosophy is not necessarily legislative but rather narrative.
Extemporization upon the philosophy of liberalism has provided us with propositions such as the social discourse and the idea of a differentiated audience. Our modern conceptions relating to each national 'pot' being culturally and epistemically diverse are born from the cultivation of a liberal view of society.
However liberalism - like the Woolly Mammoth - is extinct. It was one facet of the 'great society' period of social theorising when the social ethos and most consequential scholars were still largely wedded to the idea that society was perfectible.
We are in a post-liberal epoch where ideology seem to be the primary explanatory paradigm - along with those who simply despair quietly and eschew all of the simpler explanations for everything that seem to be a ubiquitous byproduct of our modern populist politics.
sigh...
cool JM
Patricia,
I have reread yr comment several times and still find it hard to respond in any adequate fashion.
Therefore, since I have obviously failed to describe my five decade long relationship with the mythical world of America in words (ie, above) I will now attempt the same in Interpretive Dance in the backyard. Although I only have my cat to assist me I am sure I will manage to craft a message that is powerful, nuanced, and impossible to grossly misunderstand. (Give me a few days...)
Astronaut JiMM
Peter Dutton isn’t a liberal either, in the true sense of the word.
R,
I would suggest that Dutton is an ideologue and a populist, but mostly a rather dull and uninspiring opportunist. I sorta get the feeling that he believes what he perceives to be most opportune thing to believe at any given moment. In the wild west he would have been selling quack remedies at the fair alongside Trump, but not nearly as successfully.