What's the most widely held misconception about the United States of America that you know to be false?
Ron Wiseman (A Most Viewed Writer in Politics of the United States) answered, quoting a piece by Hamid Dabashi, Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Mr Dabashi's article, in full is a sobering read. Mr Wiseman has given me permission to use his answer here. Quotes from Mr Dabashi's piece are highlighted in the blue paragraphs, below.
The full article by Hamid Dabashi is: What if Donald Trump is What America is all about
What's the most widely held misconception about the United States of America that you know to be false?
Perhaps the belief that Donald Trump doesn’t really represent America's values. Perhaps he really does. Administrations from both parties have committed atrocities going all the way back to our American Revolution.
"Trump and Trumpism are as American as mom and apple pie - and an entire racist and xenophobic history of the US is there to verify it. And if the structurally corrupt Democratic Party under the leadership of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck Schumer are supposed to be the alternative to that truth, then the Afghans, Iraqis, Palestinians, and Yemenis brutalized identically under both Republicans and Democrats may have something to say about the matter."
Another relevant quote…
"One quick look at the red-blooded electoral map of the US after the midterm elections shows this, in fact, is certainly not - as liberals love to say - a divided country. It is a solidly and unmistakably racist, sexist, xenophobic and violent country obsessed with domestic gun violence and foreign conquest with a few pockets of wishy-washy liberal resistance here or there.
From Brazil to Saudi Arabia to Israel to the racist, xenophobic, proto-fascist parties in Europe - they all have a solid ally in all the three branches of the US government.
From the earliest stages of the rise of Donald Trump I have argued that contrary to the liberal contingencies of opposition to his brand of blunt and fascistic politics he is "the real deal": American politics stripped to its bare essence, shorn of all its democratic pretensions and neoliberal niceties.
For eight years Barack Obama was the face of the duplicitous politics of shedding public tears for schoolchildren being shot in the US, before retiring to a back room at the White House to send more arms to Israel and Saudi Arabia to slaughter Palestinian and Yemeni children."
America is what we do. What we do is take from the poor to give to the wealthy. What we do is incarcerate the highest percentage of our population than any other country. What we do is throw teargas at women and children who are running from a life of pain and squalor. And what we don’t do, is collectively feel bad enough to fix any of it. That is us.
