However, if you are asking yourself, as many people around the world are doing, how it is that Donald Trump increased his share of the national poll, I urge you to watch the video below of a US News Channel. I have no idea who or what the speaker Eddie Glaude is, but he explains it so well, so clearly and so powerfully. However, and this is perhaps even more important, he puts his finger inadvertently perhaps, on a problem that we in Britain share with the USA. Maybe it's an issue we bequeathed to the Americans, and that is the living of our lives inside myths about who we are.
This could be the most powerful 3 minutes you have seen in a long time.If you are struggling with how millions of citizens could vote for #Trump, please listen:pic.twitter.com/DfqZfJerzW#Trump2020 #TrumpRacism #TRUMP2020ToSaveAmerica #Racism #Antisemitism #Biden #Elections2020— US News Agency (@USANewsAgency) November 5, 2020
He says Americans are not unique in their sins and evils but where they are singular is in a refusal to acknowledge them and the "legends and myths we tell about our inheritance" - which strikes me as something that applies even more powerfully here in England. I don't say the UK because I think it applies to England specifically.
Later in the clip he says Americans can't blame the present plight of the USA in division, racism, hatred and so on, on the shoulders of Donald Trump because he (Trump) is "a manifestation of the ugliness that's in us."
Ain't that so right? And not just about Trump or the US either. It applies just as strongly here. Brexit and Farage and Johnson are all manifestations of the myths about England's past. From Runnymede to Biggin Hill through Agincourt and Waterloo and plenty of other places too. Shakespeare's talk of this "sceptered isle" and of the English as some sort of chosen people helped to build the myths.
When I was a child we looked up to Americans and admired and envied them. We watched their myths being manufactured in the studios of Hollywood by flawed idols, many of them with serious psychological issues, who presented a false picture of a past that they dare not confront truthfully. But now all I see is a nation that is on the descent. The shining city on the hill is now abandoned in the rust belt of hate that is the daily diet of Americans.
I worked for an American company for over twenty years and one American, a son of Dutch immigrants, use to give is slide shows about the US and I remember once him saying, in relation to their superpower status and specifically Vietnam, that they "mean well but often screw up." How true that is.
What has happened to America? I really don't know. Putin has helped to drive division but let's be honest, at least as honest as Mr Glaude, that the Russian dictator didn't invent it although he has helped to amplify what was always there.
Anyone who has read John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath will know what Americans are like when things get tough, as they did in the dust bowl of Oklahoma in the 1930s. If you haven't read it, I suggest you borrow a copy from your local library.
Well things are tough again for America, the rise of China is a challenge to their position as the most powerful nation on earth and their leadership of the west for the last century or more is coming under threat. Like Britain in the 1950s they are undergoing a profound change and it's so easy to blame others - like China, Putin, Trump - as we blame immigrants or the EU.
But we have to live in and adapt to the world as it is, not as it used to be or as we thought it was or should be. The problems faced on both sides of the Atlantic are the product of deep seated psychological issues surrounding the inability to recognise that circumstances have changed. Living with the myths and legends of the past will not serve us well in the future. Our problems are inside ourselves and only we can solve them.
But first we must recognise what they are. At the moment, neither we or the Americans have go that far.
