Merriam Webster & Oxford Dictionary meaning of Trum•pery (n) — Late Middle English (tromper — to cheat), Middle French (tromperie — deceit), 1425–1485. Worthless nonsense, to deceive, swindle, something without worth or value, rubbish, trash, fraud, foolish talk or actions, showy but worthless finery, attractive articles of little value or use, gaudy.
Synonyms — baloney, bamboozle, bad, bum, inferior, low-rent, mediocre, miserable, poor, rotten, common, cheap, trashy, wretched, falsehood, malarkey, bogus, garbage, scroungy, mangy, mean, sleazy, small-time, ordinary.
The 45th president of the USA is arguably the most unpleasant character in America: jealous, petty and greedy; an unforgiving narcissist; a vindictive ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic racist; a serial liar; sexual predator; and proud of it; an islamophobic; sociopathic megalomaniacal demagogue; a capricious bully and self-serving nepotistic con artist without a shred of conscience.
How on earth has America stooped so low that the rest of world looks upon us as a second rate, third world bottom feeder and completely failed state? We have become nothing short of an embarrassment, and when I speak with my friends and colleagues from around the world from UK, France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Singapore, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Taiwan, and many African nations and beyond they are not only shocked beyond comprehension but deeply worried for the future of America. The cracks are showing and we are in free fall the likes of which we’ve haven’t seen since the inception of the USA.
Failed ideology, self-delusion, greed, and exploitation has made America the world’s first poor rich country. And these past four years of the Trump presidency has brought the onslaught to the surface.
50% of people working “low-income” jobs that’ll never go anywhere…75% who struggle to pay the bills…80% who can’t raise a tiny amount for an emergency…all of them, more or less, will die indebted — buried under debt they have never been able to pay off. Who do they “owe” to? A tiny handful of men who are richer than kings or dukes or barons of old.
The average American dies in debt now precisely because he never has enough money to pay the bills — and that’s because a tiny number of people are so ultra rich, the Bezoses and Buffetts and Zuckerbergs, that they could fund the entire education budget…multiple times over…all by themselves. Everything you need to live a decent life is in shortage in America: medicine, money, retirement, and so on.
Consider what it means to live a life where you know that if you lose your job, you’ll lose your healthcare, that even if you have it, if you get seriously ill, you’ll probably lose your home, that if you want to keep a roof over your head, you have to keep your head down and be abused and demeaned by someone called a “boss” for an unfair share of what you produce, that if you want to educate your kids and retire, that’s an impossibility. All those things are forms used as a mechanism of what sociologists call “social control”: to keep people obedient. Weary. Afraid quite literally for their and their loved ones’ lives, health, sanity, safety. So they never step out of line. Americans don’t understand it, but tying health care to jobs, being made to choose between medicine and your life savings, being forced to pay off un-payable debts forever.
A perfect example is the recent antibody cocktail given to Trump that costs $100,000 dollars. If every new COVID-19 case gets the treatment as Trump promises, at 50,000 cases a day it would cost $5 billion a day or $300 billion for November and December. Republicans won’t give the unemployed $600 a week, they won’t give you this “cure”. Absolute hypocrisy!
Americans have to “crowd-fund” — beg each other — for basic medicine that’s free in most of the rich world. They never retire, because there’s nothing to retire on. There’s nothing to retire on because nobody has enough money. Nobody has enough money because the mega rich became the ultra rich, and they’re hoarding it all. More money simply can’t be created, because crackpot economists “advise” the government. But the government turned into a clique of lunatic fascists anyways, since people growing poorer finally exploded in rage, despair, and hate. And what’s left of any intellectual class hems and haws about all of the above, wondering whether it’s because Americans don’t work hard enough or make enough wars or hate their already hated minorities enough.
Do you know how much the International Monetary Fund’s capital reserves are? $1 trillion. How can an institution as poor as that do…much of anything? Even a simple pandemic cost vastly more than that to fight. So how about climate change? Eco collapse? Flood, famine, plague, ruin?
We haven’t understood yet: how deep “we have to take care of each other” really goes. What it means. What kind of world it calls on us to build. That, by the way, is why the extreme right is winning, around the world. It’s the embodiment of existential nihilism — and existential humanism isn’t thinking big, bold, true, or beautiful enough right now to fight it. So the idea that “we should exploit each other” is simply taking control of our minds, politics, societies, worlds.
We’re stuck here together. We didn’t ask to be. We don’t know why or how. You, me, here, now, together — us. All of us. We’re stuck here. What are we to do? Shall we prey on each other, exploit each other, demean each other, dehumanize and subjugate each other, like Americans? That way lies only collapse — because we eat away our own economies, systems, culture, morality, ethics, confidence, optimism, common sense.
The only place that any sensible way of thinking begins right now is here, given all the evidence, the current state of human knowledge. We must take care of each other. We must always be trying fiercely to find ways to take better care of each other. We must always be redrawing the boundaries of empathy, generosity, beauty, goodness, compassion, fairness, decency. That is what it really means to be “civilized.” Then a strange miracle happens: we rise, together, instead of falling apart.
This astonishingly simple and impossibly beautiful idea isn’t hopeless sentimentalism or useless idealism — which is what American pundits and intellectuals still think. It’s the sharpest cutting edge of human knowledge. It built the most successful societies in human history, most recently. It’s opposite — we must exploit each other — ruined the most powerful and richest country in the world, in a short matter of decades. What does that teach you?
If any civilization wants to survive, thrive, prosper, it must do one thing: learn from its mistakes. Existential nihilism — the American way of exploitation, cruelty, violence, greed — is modern history’s greatest self-inflicted disaster. We must build a world where we take care of each other, in greater and truer and stronger ways. All of us, each of us, every life, from the smallest to the biggest. That is the future of our civilization. The alternative? That’s life, right about now. Lockdowns, demagogues, weariness, anxiety, despair, death. The alternative is that we don’t have one.
This is what a collapsing society looks like, America, here and now. The story of American collapse is a grim and strange one. America’s simultaneously the globe’s laughingstock, bully, nightmare, villain, tragedy, and bad joke. And yet the strangest part of it all is how little Americans understand their own collapse — or whether the world has really learned the lessons therein. The American collapse is the most spectacular global event since the Soviet collapse. The implosion of one of the world’s great powers, into lunacy, despair, catastrophe. The cataclysmic, bizarre, surreal suicide of a society.
We are living in very dark days and I fear this is just the tip of the spear.