Robert McCrum: A ‘tyrant-clown’ has destroyed my love affair with America

By Dilip -
Once upon a time, at the start of the last century, PG Wodehouse declared, with the fervour of the convert, that to live in America was “like being in heaven … without the bother and expense of dying”. America used to do that to a certain kind of Brit, and to those who saw themselves as Greeks to the Americans’ Romans: we’d fall hopelessly in love, however much they abused the relationship. My own long affair with America, as an idea as much as a reality, began in the bicentennial year, 1976, with a graduate scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania. 

Among the lovely red brick of old Philadelphia, I maxed out on the promise and possibilities of the American revolution, its majesty, optimism and rhetoric. Those pioneers of radical political self-expression, Jefferson, Franklin, et al, became idols of deep faith. For instance, years later, on a return visit to the Constitution Center, I was brought to tears by a video devoted to that love letter to democratic principles, the US constitution, and the eternal magic of “We, the people”. Today, after the pre-election convention season, it’s almost impossible to imagine such emotions. Like many Europeans who once looked across the Atlantic at a great democratic experiment, I’ve quit. 

 Somehow, I must cultivate indifference to disguise the end of a long love affair. It’s become an agony to express this disillusion, but I have to try…
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/06/a-tyrant-clown-has-destroyed-my-love-affair-with-america

Sankarshan Thakur - Compliant and complicit: Indians are living the funereal carnival of their own dispossession
Jonathan Freedland: Trump is destroying democracy in broad daylight // Chauncey DeVega: Vigilantes are preparing ‘to launch a coup’
HARRY BLAIN: America’s Wars always Come Home
George Monbiot: Ayn Rand - A Manifesto for Psychopaths
Tom McTague: The Decline of the American World
America isn't breaking. It was already broken. By Andrew Gawthorpe // Why This Time Is Different. By Dahlia Lithwick
Black and Unarmed and Killed by the Police…an incomplete list…This is America….
Houston Police chief to Trump: Please, keep your mouth shut if you can't be constructive
Donald Trump and American carnage // Will Urban Uprisings Help Trump?
May 1968 - June 1989. It's been five decades since 1968, and things are somehow worse
Justice in America: Authorities are Cracking down Hard on Black Protesters while Treating White Supremacist Reopeners with Kid Gloves
Protests in USA over the death of unarmed black man George Floyd at the hands of police - 25 cities have imposed curfews
Mukul Kesavan - Donald Trump and the global equalization of awfulness
Karl Marx: Letter to Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of America; 1865

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