Is America Really The Greatest Show On Earth?

From the American world map (below) one might assume they are the ONLY show on Earth.

Click here to see the poster I made the above illustration from. One could argue that this was the greatest show on earth.

Map makers from other countries would beg to differ.

Above are maps of the world from several countries.

By Hal Brown

We hear a lot about American exceptionalism, mostly from Republicans. Wikipedia defines this as:

American exceptionalism is the belief that the United States is either distinctive, unique, or exemplary compared to other nations.  

Proponents argue that the values, political system, and historical development of the U.S. are unique in human history, often with the implication that it is both destined and entitled to play a distinct and positive role on the world stage.

Critics of the concept claim that the idea of American exceptionalism suggests that the US is better than other countries, has a superior culture, or has a unique mission to transform the planet and its inhabitants. 

I've written about Trump being a malignant narcissist. 

For example this web search turns up these among other blogs I wrote explaining why I considered Donald Trump to meet the criteria for being a malignant narcissist:

Two decades before John Gartner, writing about Trump, made us aware of what a malignant narcissist was the term was used on the TV show Luther

Nobody knows for certain how Trump feels except Trump

Dr. Justin Frank, author of "Trump on the Couch" gives us understatement of the decade about Trump's behavior

 Some election day psychology: A primer on narcissistic and antisocial personality disorders

Once upon a time shrinks like me warned about Trump's malignant narcissism

I think there's also a phenomena which could be accurately called American malignant narcissism. The crucial word here is "malignant" meaning malevolent. This goes far beyond patriotism and taking pride in what's good about the United States both historically and in the present. 

My impression (from watching international movies and TV) is that people in many countries to varying degrees think their countries are better than other countries.  By and large I see this as healthy narcissism, i.e.,  a positive sense of country similar to having a self-image that is in alignment with the greater good.

It's hard to imagine what those who live in democracies around the world think of the United States, especially those who live in coutries with a strong social safety net where it is a given that tax money should be spent to assure that the less fortunate are adequately taken care of.

We have the front runner in the GOP primary poised to either go to prison or the presidency running against a state governor who doesn't believe in having his state teach the truth in its schools, wants books banned, and thinks slavery taught slaves useful skills, and a rich guy hogging much of the news coverage of the Republican primary who never held a government position who has his own 10 Commandments:

• 1. God is real.
• 2. There are two genders.
• 3. Human flourishing requires fossil fuels.
• 4. Reverse racism is racism.
• 5. An open border is no border.
• 6. Parents determine the education of their children.
• 7. The nuclear family is the greatest form of governance known to mankind.
• 8. Capitalism lifts people up from poverty.
• 9. There are three branches of the U.S. government, not four.
• 10. The U.S. Constitution is the strongest guarantor of freedoms in history.

Then we have today's American news as covered by Aljazeera and the BBC (click images to go to articles):

Trump's mantra, Make America Great Again, and his raging against so-called globalists (currently attacking everyone as globalists at Fox News), I thinks are being read by our allies as giving them a metaphorical finger.

...

No doubt Putin's pleased with this. Consider what the defintion of a globalism is:

Globalism refers to various patterns of meaning beyond the merely international. It is used by political scientists, such as Joseph Nye, to describe "attempts to understand all the interconnections of the modern world—and to highlight patterns that underlie (and explain) them."  

While primarily associated with world-systems, it can be used to describe other global trends. The concept of globalism is also classically used to distinguish the ideologies of globalization (the subjective meanings) from the processes of globalization (the objective practices).In this sense, globalism is to globalization what nationalism is to nationality.

The term is now frequently used as a pejorative by far right movements and conspiracy theorists. False usage in this way has also been associated with antisemitism, as antisemites frequently appropriate the term globalist to refer to Jews. More from Wikpedia.

Make America great again? 

How about doing something about the fact that after car accidents guns are the next leading cause of death among children? How about addressing the rising suicide rate among children even as young as five? Mass shootings, often using assault rifles, have become weekly, if not daily events, but any efforts to enact gun control laws are dead on arrival in Congress.

Why don't anti-abortion zealots consider our infant mortality rates and look at why more infants die in southern states than in northern states, and that the infant death rates are higher among minorities? (Reference)

Just now being reported on MSNBC: We have a half million people in jail waiting trial, mostly Blacks and brown men, because they can't afford bail, often as low as $500.

Consider where the United States ranks among nations for the number of people who are homeless (interactive map).

Quote: While it is considered the leader of the world stage, the United States still has one of the biggest problems with homelessness, even when compared to more impoverished countries. With a homeless population per night of over half a million souls, the numbers are concerning. The volume of homeless increases every year - with many more living in makeshift tents and other dwellings that do little more than offer some brief respite from the harsh outdoor conditions, such as at nighttime or during the winter.

If anybody thought that United States could never outdo the KKK as an influential and dangerous social movement they didn't consider QAnon.

Various congressional districts have actually elected people who believe in the paranoid delusions espoused by QAnon.

Butcherman is the font for MAGAmerica where cruelty is the point

 By Hal Brown

Click above to enlarge image

The train of thought which led to me writing this began with reading this story in my daily mail from Yahoo News:

A Loud GOP Minority Pledges to Make Trouble on Ukraine Military Aid

Then I read 

Auschwitz film early favorite at Cannes

Examples of how the GOP is cruel went though my mind as I thought about their immigration policy and abortion bans. I thought about DeSantis and his war against what he calls woke, and how woke is really a synonym for having empathy for all, not merely some select, people.

I then thought about the phrase which has become a meme ever since The Atlantic writer Adam Serwer published his book of essays entitled The Cruelty is the Point: The Past, Present and Future of Trump's America. (You can read or listen to an interview with him here.)

Adam Serwer on Twitter:

It is just that so many people don't care about the hardships of others. It is that they actually relish knowing these "others" are suffering or, if they are policy shapers, making them suffer.

Thinking I might write something about this I did a web search of the phrase "the cruelty is the point" and scanned though a number of the articles (showing in illustration to this blog). I realized that I didn't have anything particularly original to add. 

Suffice to say that if empathy was a human gene which could be measured in a DNA test the results would show many Americans would come up woefully lacking. 

I wasn't up for writing about malignant narcissism which I've often addressed (here for example), or sadistic personality disorder for that matter...

What did occur to me to write about was how frequently I found myself using a font in blog illustrations which I don't see anybody else using, perhaps because it isn't in the standard lists of free fonts. The font is called butcherman and you have to search for it. I use BeFunky to add it to images I sometimes use in my blogs...

Google fonts and other programs also has it:

Click to enlarge and note the phrase Google uses.

The letters in butcherman are all bleeding.

 To me these letters represent those people who are literally or figuratively bleeding whether as a result on not being able to get an abortion, immigrants fleeing persecution, or in Ukraine where every day citizens know they may be killed. 

I think of those who can look at the misfortune of others  and not feel even a glimmer of empathy for them. The font is called butcherman, but these people are actually butcher men.

Addendum: 

Just another example: 2024 Republican Hopefuls Rush To Defend Man Who Killed Jordan Neely

Then there's this:

A first-grade teacher who spoke out against a Wisconsin school district’s decision to ban “Rainbowland” by Miley Cyrus and Dolly Parton from a spring concert is facing termination, USA Today reports.

and this:

The latest news is that Florida investigators want to interview some of Jenna Barber's fifth grade students. She dared to show a Disney film with a gay character and was suspended.

If you don't see Diquis comment section below click here.

The Humpty Dumpty Trumpty Republican Party

 The Humpty Dumpty Trumpty Republican Party, 

with due credit to Mother Goose and Lewis Carroll

by Hal Brown

Click above enlarge image

Read all of Chapter Six here.

More of the above excerpt:

And only one for birthday presents, you know. There's glory for you!'

'I don't know what you mean by "glory",' Alice said.

Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. 'Of course you don't — till I tell you. I meant "there's a nice knock-down argument for you!"'

'But "glory" doesn't mean "a nice knock-down argument",' Alice objected.

'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.'

'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many different things.'

'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master — that's all.'

If you don't recall the final demise for Humpty, here it is:

'I shouldn't know you again if we did meet,' Humpty Dumpty replied in a discontented tone, giving her one of his fingers to shake: 'you're so exactly like other people.'

'The face is what one goes by, generally,' Alice remarked in a thoughtful tone.

'That's just what I complain of,' said Humpty Dumpty. 'Your face is the same as everybody has — the two eyes, so —' (marking their places in the air with his thumb) 'nose in the middle, mouth under. It's always the same. Now if you had the two eyes on the same side of the nose, for instance — or the mouth at the top — that would be some help.'

'It wouldn't look nice,' Alice objected. But Humpty Dumpty only shut his eyes, and said 'Wait till you've tried.'

Alice waited a minute to see if he would speak again, but, as he never opened his eyes or took any further notice of her, she said 'Good-bye!' once more, and, getting no answer to this, she quietly walked away: but she couldn't help saying to herself, as she went, 'of all the unsatisfactory —' (she repeated this aloud, as it was a great comfort to have such a long word to say) 'of all the unsatisfactory people I ever met —' She never finished the sentence, for at this moment a heavy crash shook the forest from end to end.

Indeed the crash shook the forest from end to end. Democracy and truth loving Americans can only hope for such a story tale ending to befall (pun intended) Trump and his MAGA Republicans including all the Tweedledees and TweedleDums who like, in "Thorough the Looking Glass," never contradict each other, even when one of them, according to the rhyme, "agrees to have a battle". Rather, they complement each other's words.

Look closely, it does say MAGA on their caps.

Of course we have quite a few of these:

Don't get me going on who the Queen of Hearts would be. Hint: He screams a lot.

I'm not the first to compare the United States under Trump and his cult to being something even Lewis Carroll might have had trouble believing could happen in real life in his own England or the fledgling democracy across the ocean which had fought a civil war during his lifetime and was becoming one of the world's greatest democracies when he died in 1898. (He wrote Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in 1865) and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass in1871.)

I haven't given up on Elon Musk. Comic 6 is here.

Some thoughts about Putin's Russia and Trump's MAGAmerica

Some thoughts about Putin's Russia and Trump's MAGAmerica

by Hal Brown 

I used for a background this natural-color image which combines cloud-free data from over 500 Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MISR) orbits with shaded relief Digital Terrain Elevation models from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) and other sources. It shows an astonishing diversity of geological features, ecological systems and human landscapes. I meant it to show how from space there are no state lines.

I'll start with the comment I put on the following David Ignatious column in today's Washington Post (subscription):

The parallels between Russia under Putin and what the of MAGA part United States has become struck me. Even if Trump never gets a second term his MAGA cult will remain with us. They envision a United States chillingly similar to those who want Russia to be an imperial fascist country. The equation to describe these segments of the two countries looks like Russian First = America First. The remedy is the kind of transformation that occurred in Germany after World War II.  I don't know how this can happen without the resounding military defeat the NAZI regime suffered. It will require not only a victory of morality over immorality for both countries, but a moral awakening among a large portion of those who adhered to the belief that ultra-nationalism was their credo.

These are what I thought were the most important observations in the column. As you read them substitute how the Ukrainians view Russia with how you view MAGAmerica and how you think these MAGA cultists want the United States to be.

Through Ukrainian eyes, this terrible conflict has become a clash of civilizations. They argue that most Russians support Putin’s brutal war in the way that most Germans supported Adolf Hitler. Unless Russia as a nation abandons the imperial dreams that Putin has evoked, the conflict cannot be resolved through negotiations.

“Russia has to go through the same process that Germany did after World War II,” presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak insisted Saturday in an interview with me and the other members of a group organized by the German Marshall Fund, of which I’m a trustee. “If Russian society doesn’t understand what they’ve done, the world will be brought into chaos.” He enthusiastically predicts that postwar Russia will dissolve into five or six smaller nations.

The word "rebirth" below jumped out at me:

For me, thinking about how this war ends juxtaposes two conflicting lessons of the 20th century. Historians generally agree that the punitive peace imposed on Germany after World War I helped bring on the vicious Nazi quest for revenge. But historians also agree that the decisive outcome of World War II, with Germany and Japan pounded into unconditional surrender, allowed the miraculous postwar rebirth of both countries.

I would rephrase the last paragraph...

Surely, this is a war worth winning. I don’t want to see Russia destroyed, and I think any argument that it is forever an alien civilization is wrong. But the ideology that Putin represents, and that many Russians embrace, must be defeated.

 ... in this way:

Surely, the war against MAGAmerica a war that Democracy loving Americans must win. MAGAmerica can't be literally destroyed the way NAZI Germany as a military machine was. MAGAmerica is currently a country within a country. I think any argument that it is forever an alien civilization is wrong.  But the ideology that Trump and his cult represents, and that many Americans embrace, must be defeated. Those who "reside" in MAGAmerica can't be exiled. They have to be rehabilitated.

This will be a long arduous process which would ideally follow the kind of Democratic Party win in November which Michael Moore predicted (and I wrote about here). 

It would be too much to hope that Rupert Murdock fired his Hitler-Mini-Me money makers, in particular Tucker Carlson. It would certainly help if these ultra-nationalists didn't have a major television platform. 

Obviously it would help the most if Donald Trump, probably reinstated on Twitter, would at least develop severe chronic laryngitis.

We can't be naive. If Trump was indicted, tried, and found guilty of any crimes, and even sentenced to prison or home confinement this would have a huge backlash as his cult would believe he was a victim of the "deep state" and would make him into a living martyr. 

No matter what the January 6th Committee reveals, no matter whether that have incontrovertible proof as to Trump's culpability in more than inciting the attack on the Capitol but being part of a felonious conspiracy it won't matter to these MAGAmericans. They will take this as his being the most patriotic of all patriots.

Liberals like us see articles like this (top) and this (bottom) and hope for eye-popping revelations.

It won't matter because for the MAGAmericans "fascist" is simply a word describing the country they want to live in and the promotion of violence is laudable as long as it is their violence.

We see articles like “Utterly devastating”: Legal experts say DOJ filing “pulverizes all of Trump’s arguments” to SCOTUS on Salon but while this news pleases us, it hardly matters because show me a resident of MAGAmerica who reads Salon or even follows news about the legal peril Trump is in and I'll show you a  Where's Waldo where some prankster decided not to put Waldo in the picture.

By chance as I completed this David Ignatius was being interviewed about this column on Morning Joe. There's a good chance that if you are reading this you are a regular viewer of MSNBC and you may even read their website but we can't delude ourselves that any warnings about what Donald Trump's American fascism would look like in reality are even heard by residents of MAGAmerica. I summarized the David Montgomery Washington Post Magazine article "What Will Happen to America if Trump Wins Again? Experts Helped Us Game It Out" here. 

What is horrifying is that diehard MAGAmericans want the country to look like this.

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The blog archives are on the right at the top of the page. Here are the last three editions:

• The horror of a second Trump presidency
• Could Michael Moore be right again? Is he Carnac t...
• What does it mean when a former federal prosecutor...