Harsh paragraphs about the United States — are they accurate enough to act upon?

05 June 2019

I came across a few paragraphs recently, whose vitriol struck me as non-foolish

The first of these is former Colonel Larry Wilkerson's take on Democratic Party leadership.

Recall that Wilkerson was Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff:

[I]f I have any disdain for a particular political party in the Congress of the United States other than the Republicans, it is for the Democrats.

I have never seen such a feckless, cowardly, incompetent, inept group of people— from Charles Schumer to Nancy Pelosi— across the board in the Congress. They have no guts whatsoever, no courage whatsoever.

That’s one reason my party, which I don’t fault for courage and I don’t fault for ruthlessness, even disgusting ruthlessness, beats them all the time.

Mitch McConnell has no qualms about sticking daggers in people’s back and twisting them while he smiles, but the Democrats seem to have no courage, no ruthlessness, no “I’m going to get you” about them.

In American politics, that’s not a positive.

The second opinion, by Jaimie O'Neill, regards the entire United States.

Read it, as if you were living under American murder drones:

Trump seems like the spitting image of what our country has become.

[L]ike the nation he fronts, he's not shy about tooting his own horn, touting his exceptionalism and grandeur, even in the most ridiculous of ways ("best brain," "best words," "stable genius").

It's hard to fight the notion that he may be the best representation of what this country stands for these days, better than anyone else remotely imaginable.

He's ignorant to the bone, as we seem to be.

He's callously indifferent to most anyone who doesn't fawn over him, or favor anything that doesn't serve his personal interests, from tyrants to murderers.

He's crudely avaricious, insatiably greedy, corpulent, swollen, engorged, and flatulent.

He is belligerent and bellicose, always clamoring for a fight.

He wears that dangling red tie which bespeaks the blood shed daily in various parts of the world,

mostly in selected shitholes that once, like Iraq or Syria, were places where people could live and might live better than they are now, surely,

but for the avidity of American and international kleptocrats and arms merchant, agents of evil always on the lookout for places to foment discord and furnish guns and ammo to the discordant elements.

He is brutish, imperious, arrogant, uncultured, far beyond narcissistic, over-indulged, spoiled quite literally rotten, ugly of body, mind, and soul, an affront to goodness and decency, impregnably unreasonable, always spoiling for a fight, a putrescence of over-privilege, devoid of class, taste, charm, or the slightest concern for the damage he does, the pain he inflicts, the sufferings he engenders, the unnecessary struggles his attitudes--and the attitudes of those who share his favored slot in the hierarchy of obscene and undeserved wealth.

Doesn't all that sound pretty much the way our great nation has come to be in not much over two-hundred years of its history,

having betrayed every ideal and vaunted virtue,

a place where the Trump image, brand, and logo fit far too perfectly as a representation of what we--to our great shame--now are.

Depending upon whose cultural shoes you are in, persuasively arguing against O'Neill's perspective is challenging.

Thus, my concern about China's probably building advantage in exercising soft geopolitical power.

The moral? — Psychic decay has a complacent way of not seeing itself

It may be helpful, at least to some of us, to see our mirrored reflection in someone else's honest eyes.

Power corrupts.

PeteFree.com

Harsh paragraphs about the United States — are they accurate enough to act upon?