Time to be embarrassed again
First, a disclaimer. When I say it’s time to be embarrassed to be an American again, I do so mostly tongue-in-cheek. I refuse to answer to the world for Donald Trump. I didn’t vote for the bastard. In fact, to date I have written more than 2,000 articles condemning, mocking, disparaging and warning people about the son of a bitch. The fact that 77 million morons who voted for him were born on the same part of the planet as me isn’t my fault.
That said, from now on and for a while, those of us who were born in America will have to deal with embarrassed silences and uncomfortable looks when we tell foreigners where we’re from. I’m used to that anyway because I was born in Utah, the only state that automatically comes equipped with a question: “So, are you a Mormon?” No, I am not a Mormon. Now people are going to wonder if I’m a Trump voter. No, I’m also not a Trump voter.
I’m used to receiving the world’s current attitude toward America. When I first came to England in December of 2001 that attitude was uniformly friendly, sympathetic and consoling. George W Bush had yet to squander the world’s universal goodwill, a goodwill that fell into our laps after 9/11. It took an amazing amount of stupidity to turn that goodwill into disdain, but Bush’s shocking incompetence eventually carried the day. So by the time I moved to England to live here permanently in late 2003, anti-war sentiment and universal disgust that Tony Blair was “George Bush’s poodle” was the emerging sentiment.
Then along came Barack Obama and the world forgave us again. Everyone that mattered loved us. Those who didn’t matter, the racists, the fascists, the congenitally stupid, glowered at us from their darkened corners. Barack and Michelle Obama were enormously popular over here — even more than in the US — and Americans abroad basked in their reflected glory.
Then the world got its greatest shock of all, up to that time anyway. Trump was elected in 2016. It was largely perceived as an aberration, final proof that America’s antiquated and racist electoral college system was deeply flawed, so much so that a man who lost by nearly three million votes could win anyway. I was once again called to account, and I had nothing to say about it except that I voted for the email lady.
With the election of Joe Biden we were seen as sane again. With the re-election of Trump? Well, that’s probably going to be final proof that something is very wrong. It even looks like Mother Nature herself is rebelling. The temperatures in Washington DC will fall to -5 degrees Celsius (22 degrees Fahrenheit) on Monday — too cold to conduct the “inauguration” of the disqualified traitor outdoors.
Trump will undoubtedly spend the next four years bragging about how huge the inauguration would have been had they held it in the open air. That’s going to be the very least of our problems. The world’s attitude toward us will be the least of our problems. Trump is about to become everyone’s problem. We are all called to activism. Our job is to fight, resist, hang on and hope that in four years’ time we will have a nation to take back once again.
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Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.