Opinion: Defending the Indefensible, Explaining the Inexplicable

SÃO PAULO, BRAZIL – For this gringo, a long-time and happy resident in Brazil, a “quasi-Brasileiro” as my friends say, answering the question: “What the hell is going on in the U.S.?” becomes harder and harder. Even fans of Jair Bolsonaro ask how he could possibly wish to be called the “Brazilian Trump”.

It’s a mystery, all right.

Until recently, Brazilians were big fans of my country or at least neutral. That doesn’t mean they liked everything we did, but on balance, their leanings were in the direction of respect and admiration.

They saw America as a serious and responsible world leader, a place to go for higher education, interesting jobs, and a symbol of true democracy.

“How can the U.S. continue to celebrate equality and lecture the world on human rights when its president is a racist and discrimination was endemic; isn’t that the height of hypocrisy?” I’ve been asked this over and over.

The best I could do was answer that the election and perhaps, more importantly, the reelection of an African American, Barack Obama, to the U.S. presidency proves the advances that had been made in law and practice and demonstrates progress in the right direction.

If clearly less than perfect, it serves as a reminder to my friends that “perfect is the enemy of good” — just look at Brazil and its many cultural contradictions.

This past weekend’s double shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, which have left more than thirty dead, is another example of the unexplainable.

Crazed young white men, one voicing Trumpian racist white nationalist rhetoric and using military-grade weapons readily available to Americans under the Constitution’s “right to bear arms” clause, committed yet another murderous outrage. According to CBS broadcasting, “the amount of mass shootings across the U.S. so far in 2019 has outpaced the number of days this year.”

How could the generous country of peace and prosperity, the country that gave the world the Marshall Plan to rebuild a ravaged Europe after World War II, that sponsored the United Nations, a “nation of immigrants” whose iconic Statue of Liberty proclaims:

Give me your tired, your poor,
your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Treat today’s immigrants as criminals, ripping children from the arms of their parents and call our long-time allies, enemies? How could we have become so stupid and made such awesome mistakes?

And how could we have elected as president Donald Trump, a vulgar, dishonest, egocentric reality show host and real estate mogul whose promises from the get-go make snake oil salesmen seem legitimate and turn lying into the new truth, not only to others but worse, to ourselves?

It’s a most difficult question and one which deserves far more attention than it gets. David Masciotra, writing in AlterNet, has gone to the heart of the issue. Provincialism, a kind of egocentricity so evident in Trump, combined with an astonishing lack of knowledge of the world, is increasingly dangerous.

He writes: “American provincialism also functions as insulation of the brain, preventing the average citizen from seeing and hearing the warning signs that history offers into the transformation of democracy into despotic rule. Fascism is not an overnight development, and when your country is earnestly debating whether its treatment of immigrant and refugee children qualifies for the term “concentration camp”, you have already taken a few large steps down that deadly road.”

If America’s political culture possessed some semblance of literacy, its voters would collaborate to consign Trump to the political garbage disposal.

Come November 2020, and perhaps Trump will be yesterday’s nightmare. But it is no sure thing any more than my friends in Brazil can predict with confidence what this country will be like if all Bolsonaro’s edicts become law and are carried out. Dare we imagine that Trump’s outrages are contagious and will infect Brazilian culture?

Charles Blow, one of America’s most respected journalists, recently wrote: “There are tanks in the nation’s capital and concentration camps on its border. The slide of this nation into a nearly unrecognizable state continues unabated. Donald Trump is recreating America in his own image: an abominable one.”

There are more and more days now when this gringo wants to stay at home in São Paulo, talk only to his dog and not have to answer all these disturbing questions. But my Brazilian friends tell me not to worry.

Watching a noisy demonstration on the Avenida Paulista thin out, with protestors dispersing into local bars, suggests that political activism also contains a certain festive element so beloved of Brazilians.

The problem for gringos like me who believed (still believe but to a lesser extent) in the basic goodness of my fellow Americans is that the current repetition of mindless acts has become nearly impossible to defend, however much our native patriotism pushes one to try.

As I watch in horror as American democracy morphs towards authoritarianism, I’m doing something I’ve never done before. I’m hiding and wishing it would just go away.
Political hibernation seems one damned good idea.