an american tragedy

What is wrong with America?

It is now three weeks since the US presidential election, and more than two weeks since it became clear that Joe Biden had won, yet not only has the incumbent declined to concede defeat, he also continues to claim that he ‘won’, citing widespread fraud for his apparent loss. To anyone who has followed US politics during the past four years, such intransigence should not be a surprise, and neither should the widespread belief among his supporters that the election was ‘stolen’, echoing their hero’s preposterous claim. But why?

There are two distinct voting blocs who continue to support Donald Trump: right-wing working-class citizens and evangelical Christians, and both groups are predisposed to believe bullshit, which Trump spouts relentlessly, especially on climate change (“a Chinese hoax”) and the coronavirus pandemic (“drink bleach to kill the virus”).

I suspect that most people in the first group also believe the QAnon conspiracy theory, which postulates that a Satanist cabal of leading Democrats and Hollywood A-listers is running a child sex ring, and that Donald Trump is leading the fight against them. I can’t prove that this is nonsense, but I can say that if you do believe it, then you clearly have never heard of Occam’s razor.

The second group was notably anti-science well before Trump came along to reinforce their ignorance, reserving particular disdain for the theory of evolution. When I was a student in Manchester in the mid-1960s, I used to listen to Radio Caroline—a pirate radio station broadcasting from a ship anchored in the Irish Sea—whenever I was back in my lodgings. As a pirate station, it broadcast on an unauthorized frequency, and in the evening it was progressively drowned out by the big commercial stations on the continent, such as Hilversum and Radio Luxembourg, that were broadcasting on nearby frequencies. Consequently, it used to close down for the day at 9pm, and because music reception was already poor by 8.30, it ran a 30-minute talk segment under the title The World Tomorrow with Garner Ted Armstrong.

To be honest, I’ve no idea why I kept listening, because Armstrong went on and on, and on about the theory of evolution, employing an almost endless stream of utterly specious arguments to demonstrate the falsity of this theory. At the time, I couldn’t understand what he had against evolution, which only an idiot would think was wrong, given the vast body of supporting evidence, but in retrospect I now understand the motive for his tirades. Armstrong was a fundamentalist Christian, someone who believes that every word of the Bible is literally true. And evolution directly contradicts the version of creation recorded in Genesis. It’s a garbled version that doesn’t bear close scrutiny:

1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

Bear in mind that God doesn’t create the source of the light (the Sun) until the fourth day of his labours. And day and night cannot exist without the Sun! This is the belief system of a primitive tribe of nomadic herdsmen living 6,000 years ago that has no validity in the twenty-first century.

As evidence of this fundamental animosity towards and general ignorance of science, I present the following four quotations, which I culled from a Christian website several years ago, although I can’t provide a detailed attribution because I made a note of them purely for amusement:

Some things cannot be explained by science. Take for example, rainbows. Rainbows are a mystery and you cannot touch them, just like God. Despite this fact, they are still there even though there is no scientific explanation for them.

Yes. DNA can never be proven. Evolutionists are obsessed with it because they always say “chimps share 97% DNA with modern man” etc. That’s great, however you would then need to prove DNA is real.

If evolution was real, humans and animals alike would not need reproductive organs.

Let me see you take hydrogen and oxygen to make water? God can. But the smartest man ever to live can’t.

The woeful ignorance on display here is appalling. Give me unlimited supplies of hydrogen and oxygen, and I will make as much water as you want. And I’m not God!

And what about the ultimate Trump bullshit? All his ‘make America great again’ and ‘America first’ rhetoric cannot disguise the fact that he is actively working against the admirable ideal of America as a shining city on a hill, as expressed in Emma Lazarus’ poem The New Colossus, which was written in 1883 and inscribed on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty in 1903:

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

America may have been founded by disgruntled colonists, but it was built by immigrants, and it is now being destroyed by the descendants of those ‘huddled masses yearning to breathe free’.

At the beginning of this essay, I posed the question ‘what is wrong with America?’ This is my diagnosis. The first problem is with education, which, like healthcare, is seen in America as a money-making opportunity rather than a basic right. Consequently, if you can afford it, you send your children to a fee-paying private school, because America’s public schools are a disgrace. I would wager that the majority of Trump’s working-class supporters attended public schools, where they might have learned to read and write, and perform simple arithmetic, but they would not have learned how to construct an argument or how to separate fact from bullshit.

The second problem is with the constitution, in particular the first amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Freedom of speech is a noble ideal, but it is no accident that Fox News is banned in the UK, Australia and New Zealand, because it presents a biased, radical, right-wing take on events. But there are far worse outlets that are permitted under the first amendment. One America News Network (OANN) is now Donald Trump’s favourite news channel, mainly because he no longer considers Fox News sufficiently supportive. The problem is that people who watch these channels don’t watch any others, so their political views are constantly being reinforced in a perpetual echo chamber.

And what about Alex Jones’ Infowars channel, which focuses on promoting conspiracy theories like QAnon and the notion that the Sandy Hook school massacre in 2012 was a stunt staged by actors? Of course, the conspiracy theorist-in-chief is Donald Trump himself, who regularly accuses an imaginary ‘deep state’ of trying to undermine him and his policies.

At the same time, Trump constantly berates news outlets of which he disapproves, such as the Washington Post and New York Times, which have the temerity to point out that many of his statements are false, as ‘fake news’. Following his lead, Trump supporters then complain that responsible news outlets like these should not be criticizing his gross mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic but should instead be focusing on his ‘accomplishments’, of which there are none.

There are no easy remedies for the malaise that afflicts America, but Joe Biden can make a start by appointing someone who actually understands education as secretary of education rather than the present holder of that office, whose only credentials for the job were that her family has made billions of dollars running fee-paying charter schools. Although it is probably a bridge too far, I would also tear up the constitution, because a genuine democracy doesn’t need one. The American constitution didn’t prevent a self-regarding, narcissistic demagogue from becoming president. And fundamental human rights don’t need to be enshrined on a piece of paper. They should simply be understood.