Sunday, November 27, 2016

What Kind of Country Elects Donald Trump?

A country that has transformed its primary and secondary schools into dreary exercises in standardized test-taking.

A country that has transformed its colleges and universities from schools of rhetoric, science, and the arts into job training centers that leave new trainees with no guarantee of employment and often with crushing debt.

A country whose most recognizable heroic role models come from comic books written for newly pubescent males.

A country that eats, as its primary diet, addictive fake food, and, as a consequence, has tens of millions of citizens who are chronically ill.

A country that regularly advertises and airs human cage-fighting on its major television channels, during primetime family programming.

A country that enjoys, as its definitive leisure-time entertainment, a grandiose art-form that regularly propagandizes fascist values—the glories of violence and militarism; the sexiness of centralized corporate-nationalist power; the moral goodness of physical beauty—and that regularly stylizes, to its delight, images of its own apocalypse.

A country that has re-labelled decency, civility, and kindness as "political correctness."

A country that has been erotically dulled by the newly ubiquitous presence of joyless, loveless pornography.

A country that claims as its favorite sport a brain-destroying gladiatorial battle, run by a multi-billion dollar corporation, in massive arenas, between drug-enhanced, heavily-armored, faceless members of its poverty class.

A country that no longer turns to professional journalists for news and information but relies upon a single corporation's personalized "newsfeed," which has been specifically designed to reinforce the particular beliefs of each reader.

A country that refuses to see a commonly-organized, commonly-shared defense against illness and accident as a social good.

A country that uses science to create vast wealth, extraordinary luxury, and unprecedentedly long lifespans, while openly and unapologetically dismissing the most important scientific discovery in its history: that its lifestyle is rapidly destroying the global ecosystem.

A country that represents 4.4% of the world's population yet incarcerates 22% of its prisoners—and that, as a matter of legal practice, regularly executes some of those prisoners.

A country in which its college-aged population spends, on average, eight hours a day looking at a cellphone screen.

And, lastly, ironically, a country that rejects, for the only political office beholden to the general population, the actual vote of the general population, and relies instead upon a Constitutional gimmick put in place at its founding to secure the support of those citizens at the time who practiced human slavery.