We’ve completed the circle. We Americans have gone out into the world, seen what we’ve seen, come rushing back home slammed the door shut and fitted out the house with surveillance cameras, automatic machine guns, potbellied camo boys with tattoos that scream like John Prine’s* waitress, “Make America Great Again”, a moat slithering with crocodiles and snakes and a steel wall.
We are ugly Americans again. Led by Mr. Uggers himself, DJT. His Pestilence is assisted by a black shirted, Seig Heiling immigrant who fled Apartheid not because he opposed it but apparently because he sensed the USA’s soil was more fertile for such diabolic Dogebags** as he.
They say JFK read the novel The Ugly American and felt shame. Soon afterwards he announced the Peace Corps. And created USAID. Not so every child in Asia could have cotton candy every morning but because he and his bros believed the USA could win friends by being decent.
Now his nephew sparks outbreaks of measles in small Pacific Island states.
We’ve completed the circle. We Americans are ugly again.
* His 1972 song, Rocky Mountain Time, goes:
I walked in the restaurant
For something to do
The waitress yelled at me
So did the food
**A brilliant turn of phrase from Jon Favreau, former speech writer for Obama, who coined it to describe the youngsters tearing down the Republic.
Missionaries, Mercenaries and Misfits 
Just being honest, did I miss a minute? When weren’t we ugly? The first year or so of the Carter administration? Uhm…lessee…well, no, hmmm, but maybe….nah…OH! Wait, ne’er mind.
So, less ugly-v-uglier, mayhaps, but, well trained by the Britlish & French (props as well to the Belgian, Dutch & Portuguese), the US of A is pretty thoroughly drenched in blood. Happy to be guided to what I am missing and how. But our track record, as it were, is pretty abysmal, the ugliness paid for by our tax dollars impressive in scale and scope, tone & tenor.
Sorry. We are at a moment when things seem destined to get worse before they get…worse. I think there’ll be an inflection point, likely with the next election, and then a lot is gonna be up for grabs. If the bad guys do better, they keep it up or even double down, if the “good guys” (that feels relative at the moment) do better (as in Germany or 1973 in Chile), we find out if the twisted pig fuckers* are paper tigers or it’s Reichstag fire time and the passports my girls and I have may really be of use. It feels deeply insane that I am grateful that we I have German passports and Germany is none to pretty at the moment, Musk doing his best to help burn that down too; I tell myself they are EU passports. At this very moment, I think it is all about giddily inducing fear & chaos and, props to them, it’s working; should James Carville (I confess I’m not a fan) be right (for the first time in a while) that they’re gonna punch themselves out and warmer weather will draw Trump back to the golf course. We shall see. But my grandparents almost waited too long and I feel like I know how this movie (usually) ends, with slight variations in tone & tenor, terror for many of us.
Here’s hoping in a year or so y’all will be making fun of this silly post and my overreaction from deep in the heart of the Lower Colorado River Authority Greater Wetlands Resource Area and Balcones Escarpment hellscape, Dèyè mòn, gen mòn”
LikeLiked by 1 person
No you didn’t miss a thing. Agree, American hands and soil are soaked with blood. I do feel though that the Kennedy-Carter era was a short little era where the ruling class felt it was important to and supported an image that was at least (can’t find the right word; positive? friendly?). Since Reagan the gloves have steadily been removed and now we are back to naked fisticuffs. No attempt to acknowledge that ‘better angels’ even should exist.
It is ironic that your escape plan is to Germany! But yeah, that is pretty stuffed up too at the moment.
Carville is overly optimistic. His once radical stand is now largely mainstream DNC stuff. I don’t see the warm weather doing anything to lessen Trusk then Trump advised us it would lessen Covid. Remember that? I fear, you are right. It will get worser and worser. I have to say, when it comes to relative sanity, I see the EU as a beacon, one of the only things that can counter the bile oozing from America.
Who’d a thunk it? Can’t happen here, right? America isn’t a banana republic.
LikeLike