Good manners hide all sorts of evils — Margaret Kimberley's comparative assessment of the Trump presidency

© 2017 Peter Free

 

06 July 2017

 

 

Pertinent to this year's just passed celebration of the United States' Independence Day (04 July)

 

There is an important conceptual difference between (a) President Trump as a gesticulating indicator of American rot and (b) him as the devil who created it.

 

Political activist Margaret Kimberley pointed this out:

 

 

The list of reasons to be embarrassed about America is very long and it existed before Trump was inaugurated. He has surely added to that ledger but legitimate cause for concern shouldn’t be pushed aside in favor of phony outrage about optics.

 

President Trump is an ill-mannered, impulsive, happily uninformed bigot. Most of his predecessors were better behaved and followed rules of public relations. But they filled the jails, ended the right to public assistance, killed millions of people abroad, kept wages low and used a variety of schemes to make the rich even richer.

 

Despite his obvious shortcomings Donald Trump is not the worst among them. And that is the most embarrassing fact of all.

 

© 2017 Margaret Kimberley, America’s Embarrassment, Black Agenda Report (04 July 2017) (paragraph split)

 

 

The moral? — Ours is an institutional and cultural illness, not a personal one

 

Part of our cultural disease is our eager willingness to distract ourselves from accurately seeing its nature. Which, of course, prevents us from changing society to more justly treat America's "common people".

 

Do you think that the Powers that Be encourage this self-deluding tendency in us because it benefits their grasp on power and looting?

 

When we flap the American flag around on the Fourth of July, just what are we celebrating?

 

Hmmm?