Dispatches From Exile Weekly Mind Dump, 9/24-9/30, 2023: Back Down the Rabbit Hole - Returning to the U.S. from Europe is a Descent into Madness
“If you don’t know where you are going any road can take you there.”
“In that direction,” the Cat said, waving its right paw round, “lives a Hatter: and in that direction,” waving the other paw, “lives a March Hare. Visit either you like: they’re both mad.”
“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.
“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”
“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.
“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”
Having just spent a month abroad, returning to the U.S. for me is akin to Alice’s plummeting down a rabbit hole into a bizarre fantasyland where nothing is as it looks, nothing looks as it is, and nearly everyone is nuts.
I just returned from Berlin. A smattering of headlines from German news:
“What do the Germans Want? — A new study shows that the population is more unified than expected when it comes to major hot topics. It’s just that politicians haven’t understood this yet”
“Why Germany’s Economy Is Flailing – And What Could Help”
“The Basic Law is an Extraordinarily Successful Constitution”
Real snoozers, huh? Oh sure, there’s plenty of coverage of Ukraine, Russia and fellow European nations. But nothing to cause one to lose sleep. Yet anyway.
I returned home to see these headlines:
“Gen. Mark Milley Says He Has Taken ‘Measures’ to Protect Family After Trump Suggests He Should be Executed”
“Congress Averts Government Shutdown with Last-minute Scramble”
“House GOP Members Seek to Expel Gaetz Amid Renewed Threat to Vacate House Speaker McCarthy”
“DeSantis Doesn’t Rule Out Using Missiles Against Mexico”
“U.S. Grapples with Rising Threats of Political Violence as 2024 Election Looms”
“More than 1,300 Children and Teens Have Been Killed by Guns So Far this Year”
In connection with the last headline, the Washington Post reports on Texans and their guns:
Each morning, men here strap guns inside suits, boots and swim trunks. Women slip them into bra and bellyband holsters that render them invisible. They stash firearms in purses, tool boxes, portable gun safes, back seats and glove compartments.
Neighbors tuck guns into bedside tables, cars and trucks. They take guns fishing, to church, the park, the pool, the gym, the movies — even to protests at the state Capitol. The convention center hosts gun shows where shoppers peruse AR-15s and high-capacity magazines outlawed in other states. Texas billboards offer an endless stream of advertisements for ammunition, silencers and other accessories.
Texas, unsurprisingly, ranks number one among states in overall deaths by firearms, according to the CDC.
Meanwhile, House Republicans have launched an impeachment inquiry into President Biden based on no specific charge and zero evidence of “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” Their first session ended in fiasco as their star witnesses actually refuted the GOP’s undefined claims of corruption. Republicans have taken to heart the Cheshire Cat’s observation, “Imagination is the only weapon in the war with reality” and have adopted this as their defacto mantra. Indeed, warring with reality is what too many Americans and their political leaders seem to be engaged in these days.
A HarrisX poll reveals that more Republicans view Donald Trump as a “person of faith” than they do Mitt Romney, Tim Scott and Mike Pence.
A Washington Post and ABC poll released last month found that if the 2024 presidential election were held today, Trump would win 51 percent to 42 percent over Biden. Trump, of course, is facing 91 felony counts.
New York Times columnist David French notes that “In 2024, this nation will wrestle with Christian nationalism once again, but it won’t be the nationalism of ideas. It will be a nationalism rooted more in emotion and mysticism than theology. The fever may not break until the ‘prophecies’ change, and that is a factor that is entirely out of our control.”
On the subject of mysticism, incidentally, 69 percent of Americans believe in angels, two-thirds believe that UFO’s have made contact with earth and 40 percent believe in ghosts (20 percent report they’ve encountered one). In the realm of science, 40 percent of Republicans vs 3 percent of Democrats reported in 2021 that they did not plan to get vaccinated against COVID; a third of Americans express little to no confidence in Dr. Anthony Fauci, one of the nation’s leading immunologists who led the campaign for COVID vaccinations.
To put things in perspective, the U.S., with the world’s largest economy, ranks 51st among nations on the literacy scale, with 54 percent of Americans possessing a reading level below the 6th grade level. Only 13 percent of Americans know when the U.S. Constitution was ratified. Six out of 10 don’t know which countries the United States fought against in World War II. And less than a quarter know why we fought the British during the Revolutionary War, according to a survey conducted a few years ago. Oh, and two-thirds flunked the citizenship test which immigrants must pass to become U.S. citizens.
American society is afflicted with a mass pathology of Medieval dimensions. I and countless other writers have researched and written extensively on this, attributing our social and political malaise vicariously to income inequality, globalization, demographic change, immigration, racism, etc. But, to be honest, this writer remains stumped. As a refugee in Casablanca explained as to what was happening in the country she fled, “The devil has the people by the throat.”
I am nearly at a loss to explain our situation to outsiders. My German friends and Dutch in-laws pressed me to do so. “What in hell is happening in America? What’s going to happen?” they implore.
I can only fall back on the Cheshire Cat’s words of wisdom to Alice:
“If you don’t know where you are going any road can take you there.”