Patrick Gathara's comments on a North American failed state
In 2016, the Republican candidate for president, Donald Trump, may
have exaggerated somewhat when he declared: “The world is laughing at us.
They’re laughing at us, at our stupidity.” No longer. As counting in the
crisis-racked North American state entered its 10th day, around the world
it had become the butt of many jokes. After decades of
enduring its hubris and condescension, many are happy to see the self-anointed
“shining city on a hill” and self-proclaimed “greatest country in the history
of the world” knocked down a peg or two....
The chaotic US election has undoubtedly been the biggest story in the world in the last two weeks. Watching it unfold from over 13,000km away in Kenya, the election itself – the long queues, the delayed and disputed vote count, impugned credibility – was disturbingly familiar. Our own elections follow a near-identical pattern. The media coverage, not so much. Gone were the condescending tone, the adjective-laden labels and the expectation of violence and malfeasance so often applied to “foreign” elections. In its place was an easy familiarity and assumption of competence.
The media did not feel it necessary to depict the US as a
crisis-racked, oil-rich, nuclear-armed North American country with armed terror
groups roaming its ethnically polarized restless interior. But these were
exactly the sorts of descriptors that have traditionally allowed western
audiences to identify with and follow events in distant, “exotic” places. It
seemed to me that the rest of us deserved the same consideration. And so I
decided to offer this perspective in a Twitter thread….
John Harris: The dream of going 'back to normal' is a huge distraction from the need for change
