a bad day for America

the master of farting around?

There has been much discussion over the past couple of days, here in Baroque Mansions and elsewhere, about the state of Americans. That the discussion was intended, by Ms Baroque, actually to be about casual prejudice among Britons* is neither here nor there at the moment, because the anti-American feelings were simply too strong a force to be quelled.

It has long been held by Ms Baroque that to be an American in Britain - even in London - is no easy thing at times.** This is truer in the Bush era than ever (Ms B, like some of the more resilient dinosaurs, has been here through at least three if not four eras, including the Jurassic).

Oddly, I was once welcomed with open arms as a guest reader at an exiled poets event - & no one more surprised than me, as my (technically; I have long repudiated it with my feet) government is helping is many of these people's governments to commit the atrocities that have landed them so far from home - because the exiled poets recognised that the American people are suffering under the oppression of the Bush administration, its lies, its erosion of civil liberties, its smokescreens, its insistence that if you aren't part of its solution you are the problem. In short, they accepted me as an exiled poet. It was the strangest feeling. I felt like a fraud.

Well, there are Americans who are intelligent, travelled, cultured, clear-thinking, humane, and articulate in their opposition to the present situation. But there is one less now, because Kurt Vonnegut has died. I suppose it had to happen sometime, and he was 84. But it is sad news.

Here are extracts from an extract, published in the Guardian last year, of his memoir of the Bush era, A Man Without a Country:

"It so happens that idealism enough for anyone is not made of perfumed pink clouds. It is the law! It is the US Constitution.

But I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened instead is that it was taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d'état imaginable.

I was once asked if I had any ideas for a really scary reality TV show. I have one reality show that would really make your hair stand on end: 'C-Students from Yale'.

George W Bush has gathered around him upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka Christians, and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or PPs, the medical term for smart, personable people who have no consciences...."

"There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don't know what can be done to fix it. This is it: only nut cases want to be president. This was true even in high school. Only clearly disturbed people ran for class president..."

"In case you haven't noticed, as the result of a shamelessly rigged election in Florida, in which thousands of African-Americans were arbitrarily disenfranchised, we now present ourselves to the rest of the world as proud, grinning, jut-jawed, pitiless war-lovers with appallingly powerful weaponry - who stand unopposed.

In case you haven't noticed, we are now as feared and hated all over the world as Nazis once were.

And with good reason."

editing in: there's a post over at The Elegant Variation with lots of different Vonnegut links.

editing in again: Oliver Kamm has written an interesting critical piece on Vonnegut, which appears both in the Times and on his own blog.

* There was a link in my mind, if nowhere else, between the ease with which people told, and excused, "stupid American" stories and the rising tide of anti-semitism, also increasingly socially acceptable, which is also usually denied and/or justified when brought to light.

** Not that I usually make a big thing of being "American"...in fact, there's no need to.