I don’t imagine those pining for Pinochet-like rule are those who still don’t know what happened to their family members. The people who want Pinochet back aren’t asking for their careers to be nobbled or their outspoken daughter kidnapped from her university and tortured.
I’m not pitching left or right here. To me it’s a right or wrong equation.
It’s almost like the way the spirit of the Blitz is invoked or misused to support Brexit. It’s a nostalgia for something that fewer and people lived truly experienced. It’s an invented nostalgia, often for a country that never existed.
We get it here to a degree about the 70s, forgetting the oil shocks and the inflation, the difficulty of travel and how little consumer choice there was.
It’s like the much quieter nostalgia held by some for Apartheid South Africa when vast wealth channeled to a few. But it’s the same principle, but with a clear racism at the front to make its distaste easier.
People are happy for other people to sacrifice again, to get their privileged position back. Or what their TV told them they are entitled to- this election was stolen, my job was stolen, we had it all in the glorious time before x,y or z.
That Humpty Dumpty wasn’t put back together again well or at all in some places, doesn’t justify what came before it.
But perhaps that’s the problem with Trump also, that it is so easy to demonise other groups of people to the point where you don’t mind extra-judicial killing, imprisonment without charge or trial, issues with the rule of law and so on. The genuine solidarity between people against tyranny has broken down.
The other difference is that we’re talking about the US, that doesn’t have a history of military rule and that nations it compares itself to in culture are supposed to be the international role models of democracy. They dine out on being the heroes of the ‘good’ war.
A general taking over in a coup is one thing, but a candidate drawing support and promising to disembowel and remake US democracy in his own narcissistic image is another. For him, in the US, to openly float clouding the line between military and civil leadership and to threaten to use the military to get personal revenge is just wrong and hideous beyond anything previously precedented.
For the candidate to have his former chief of staff and a general in an army of a democracy call him a fascist is shocking. For it not to move the lever at all is terrifying.
I’ve honestly been trying not to think about this election, because it seems like an issue can’t be solved at the ballot box and must be solved within the soul of the Republican Party or by a splintering within the two-party system, which might leave things worse.
You’re all heading into summer so I guess it’s easier to be hopeful! I feel a tui (the bird, not the beer) and a mince and cheese pie would deal to a lot of this angst or at least help to get back to denial until the results are out.
I’m not pitching left or right here. To me it’s a right or wrong equation.
It’s almost like the way the spirit of the Blitz is invoked or misused to support Brexit. It’s a nostalgia for something that fewer and people lived truly experienced. It’s an invented nostalgia, often for a country that never existed.
We get it here to a degree about the 70s, forgetting the oil shocks and the inflation, the difficulty of travel and how little consumer choice there was.
It’s like the much quieter nostalgia held by some for Apartheid South Africa when vast wealth channeled to a few. But it’s the same principle, but with a clear racism at the front to make its distaste easier.
People are happy for other people to sacrifice again, to get their privileged position back. Or what their TV told them they are entitled to- this election was stolen, my job was stolen, we had it all in the glorious time before x,y or z.
That Humpty Dumpty wasn’t put back together again well or at all in some places, doesn’t justify what came before it.
But perhaps that’s the problem with Trump also, that it is so easy to demonise other groups of people to the point where you don’t mind extra-judicial killing, imprisonment without charge or trial, issues with the rule of law and so on. The genuine solidarity between people against tyranny has broken down.
The other difference is that we’re talking about the US, that doesn’t have a history of military rule and that nations it compares itself to in culture are supposed to be the international role models of democracy. They dine out on being the heroes of the ‘good’ war.
A general taking over in a coup is one thing, but a candidate drawing support and promising to disembowel and remake US democracy in his own narcissistic image is another. For him, in the US, to openly float clouding the line between military and civil leadership and to threaten to use the military to get personal revenge is just wrong and hideous beyond anything previously precedented.
For the candidate to have his former chief of staff and a general in an army of a democracy call him a fascist is shocking. For it not to move the lever at all is terrifying.
I’ve honestly been trying not to think about this election, because it seems like an issue can’t be solved at the ballot box and must be solved within the soul of the Republican Party or by a splintering within the two-party system, which might leave things worse.
You’re all heading into summer so I guess it’s easier to be hopeful! I feel a tui (the bird, not the beer) and a mince and cheese pie would deal to a lot of this angst or at least help to get back to denial until the results are out.