Chocante! Um jornal irlandês publica uma avaliação do presente governo dos EUA com relação ao Corona Vírus. E o pior é que num país de pobretões, logo abaixo da potência americana, um outro idiota copia as falácias da besta, o asno que nos governa! Vale a leitura. Deus nos salve!
Irish
Times
April 25, 2020
By Fintan O’Toole
THE WORLD HAS LOVED, HATED AND ENVIED THE U.S. NOW, FOR THE FIRST TIME, WE PITY
IT
Over more than two centuries, the United States has stirred a very wide range
of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and
contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never been directed
towards the US until now: pity.
However bad things are for most other rich democracies, it is hard not to feel
sorry for Americans. Most of them did not vote for Donald Trump in 2016. Yet
they are locked down with a malignant narcissist who, instead of protecting his
people from Covid-19, has amplified its lethality. The country Trump promised
to make great again has never in its history seemed so pitiful.
Will American prestige ever recover from this shameful episode? The US went
into the coronavirus crisis with immense advantages: precious weeks of warning
about what was coming, the world’s best concentration of medical and scientific
expertise, effectively limitless financial resources, a military complex with
stunning logistical capacity and most of the world’s leading technology
corporations. Yet it managed to make itself the global epicentre of the
pandemic.
As the American writer George Packer puts it in the current edition of the
Atlantic, “The United States reacted ... like Pakistan or Belarus – like a
country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders
were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering.”
It is one thing to be powerless in the face of a natural disaster, quite
another to watch vast power being squandered in real time – wilfully,
malevolently, vindictively. It is one thing for governments to fail (as, in one
degree or another, most governments did), quite another to watch a ruler and
his supporters actively spread a deadly virus. Trump, his party and Rupert
Murdoch’s Fox News became vectors of the pestilence.
The grotesque spectacle of the president openly inciting people (some of them
armed) to take to the streets to oppose the restrictions that save lives is the
manifestation of a political death wish. What are supposed to be daily
briefings on the crisis, demonstrative of national unity in the face of a
shared challenge, have been used by Trump merely to sow confusion and division.
They provide a recurring horror show in which all the neuroses that haunt the
American subconscious dance naked on live TV.
If the plague is a test, its ruling political nexus ensured that the US would
fail it at a terrible cost in human lives. In the process, the idea of the US
as the world’s leading nation – an idea that has shaped the past century – has
all but evaporated.
Other than the Trump impersonator Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, who is now looking
to the US as the exemplar of anything other than what not to do? How many
people in Düsseldorf or Dublin are wishing they lived in Detroit or Dallas?
It is hard to remember now but, even in 2017, when Trump took office, the
conventional wisdom in the US was that the Republican Party and the broader
framework of US political institutions would prevent him from doing too much
damage. This was always a delusion, but the pandemic has exposed it in the most
savage ways.
Abject surrender
What used to be called mainstream conservatism has not absorbed Trump – he has
absorbed it. Almost the entire right-wing half of American politics has
surrendered abjectly to him. It has sacrificed on the altar of wanton stupidity
the most basic ideas of responsibility, care and even safety.
Thus, even at the very end of March, 15 Republican governors had failed to
order people to stay at home or to close non-essential businesses. In Alabama,
for example, it was not until April 3rd that governor Kay Ivey finally issued a
stay-at-home order.
In Florida, the state with the highest concentration of elderly people with
underlying conditions, governor Ron DeSantis, a Trump mini-me, kept the beach
resorts open to students travelling from all over the US for spring break
parties. Even on April 1st, when he issued restrictions, DeSantis exempted
religious services and “recreational activities”.
Georgia governor Brian Kemp, when he finally issued a stay-at-home order on
April 1st, explained: “We didn’t know that [the virus can be spread by people
without symptoms] until the last 24 hours.”
This is not mere ignorance – it is deliberate and homicidal stupidity. There
is, as the demonstrations this week in US cities have shown, plenty of
political mileage in denying the reality of the pandemic. It is fuelled by Fox
News and far-right internet sites, and it reaps for these politicians millions
of dollars in donations, mostly (in an ugly irony) from older people who are
most vulnerable to the coronavirus.
It draws on a concoction of conspiracy theories, hatred of science, paranoia
about the “deep state” and religious providentialism (God will protect the good
folks) that is now very deeply infused in the mindset of the American right.
Trump embodies and enacts this mindset, but he did not invent it. The US
response to the coronavirus crisis has been paralysed by a contradiction that
the Republicans have inserted into the heart of US democracy. On the one hand,
they want to control all the levers of governmental power. On the other they
have created a popular base by playing on the notion that government is
innately evil and must not be trusted.
The contradiction was made manifest in two of Trump’s statements on the pandemic:
on the one hand that he has “total authority”, and on the other that “I don’t
take responsibility at all”. Caught between authoritarian and anarchic
impulses, he is incapable of coherence.
Fertile ground
But this is not just Donald Trump. The crisis has shown definitively that
Trump’s presidency is not an aberration. It has grown on soil long prepared to
receive it. The monstrous blossoming of misrule has structure and purpose and
strategy behind it.
There are very powerful interests who demand “freedom” in order to do as they
like with the environment, society and the economy. They have infused a very
large part of American culture with the belief that “freedom” is literally more
important than life. My freedom to own assault weapons trumps your right not to
get shot at school. Now, my freedom to go to the barber (“I Need a Haircut”
read one banner this week in St Paul, Minnesota) trumps your need to avoid
infection.
Usually when this kind of outlandish idiocy is displaying itself, there is the
comforting thought that, if things were really serious, it would all stop.
People would sober up. Instead, a large part of the US has hit the bottle even
harder.
And the president, his party and their media allies keep supplying the drinks.
There has been no moment of truth, no shock of realisation that the antics have
to end. No one of any substance on the US right has stepped in to say: get a
grip, people are dying here.
That is the mark of how deep the trouble is for the US – it is not just that
Trump has treated the crisis merely as a way to feed tribal hatreds but that
this behaviour has become normalised. When the freak show is live on TV every
evening, and the star is boasting about his ratings, it is not really a freak
show any more. For a very large and solid bloc of Americans, it is reality.
And this will get worse before it gets better. Trump has at least eight more
months in power. In his inaugural address in 2017, he evoked “American carnage”
and promised to make it stop. But now that the real carnage has arrived, he is
revelling in it. He is in his element.
As things get worse, he will pump more hatred and falsehood, more death-wish
defiance of reason and decency, into the groundwater. If a new administration
succeeds him in 2021, it will have to clean up the toxic dump he leaves behind.
If he is re-elected, toxicity will have become the lifeblood of American
politics.
Either way, it will be a long time before the rest of the world can imagine
America being great again.
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