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\u00a9 CBS News<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a disgrace, there\u2019s never been anything like that.\u00a0 You could take third-world countries, just take a look, take third-world countries.\u00a0 Their elections are more honest than what we\u2019ve been going through in this country.\u00a0 It\u2019s a disgrace.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n So spoke<\/a> President, now almost Ex-President, Donald Trump at a rally at Washington DC on January 6th<\/sup>. \u00a0This was before the rally\u2019s attendees launched an assault on the US Capitol while members of Congress were meeting there to certify Joe Biden becoming the 46th<\/sup> president and Trump\u2019s successor.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Bravely, Trump used the pronoun \u2018we\u2019, which normally means \u2018me\u2019 as well as \u2018you\u2019, when he declared: \u201c\u2026we\u2019re going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue\u2026 and we\u2019re going to the Capitol\u2026\u201d\u00a0 Then, bravely, he didn\u2019t<\/em> accompany his supporters when they marched off to confront and fight their way past the Capitol\u2019s police force (many of whom, as it happened, were suspiciously reluctant to do their jobs).\u00a0 Instead, bravely, Trump headed back to the White House where, bravely, he watched the ensuing carnage on TV.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n In his speech, Trump claimed that November 2020\u2019s presidential election, when Joe Biden won 72 more electoral college seats and 7,250,000 more votes than he did, and which everybody from the Supreme Court to the Department of Justice \u2013 not to mention the judges who chucked out 60-odd lawsuits filed by Trump in protest \u2013 agreed had been held fairly, was even more fraudulent than an election held in a third-world country.\u00a0 Even more!<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I guess I should credit Trump for using the term \u2018third-world countries\u2019, which is an improvement on his previous term for less-well-off parts of the planet, \u2018shithole countries<\/a>\u2019.\u00a0 I doubt, though, if he\u2019ll ever evolve to the point where he refers to them as \u2018developing-world countries\u2019, or even less-patronising terms<\/a> like \u2018low-and-lower-middle-income countries\u2019, or \u2018the global south\u2019, or \u2018the Majority World\u2019.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n As somebody who\u2019s spent much time living in (what I\u2019ll call) low-and-lower-middle-income countries, I have to say I\u2019ve never seen a spectacle as humiliatingly ridiculous as the one in the Capitol following Trump\u2019s rabble-rousing speech on January 6th<\/sup>.\u00a0 I\u2019ve lived in North Korea under Kim Jong-Il and Libya under Colonel Ghaddafi, dictators whose perpetual self-aggrandisement led to some ludicrous sights indeed.\u00a0 But nothing I saw in those places compares to last week\u2019s scenes, where American politicians fled from their chambers while doors buckled, windows imploded and police and secret-service officers were pushed back by an inexorable, invading tide of white supremacists, Nazis, militiamen, crackpot conspiracists and MAGA nutjobs.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n It resembled the start of a zombie-apocalypse movie \u2013 the bit where a live TV broadcast, announcing the emergency and urging calm, is interrupted by the studio staff looking into the lobby and screaming off-camera, \u201cThey\u2019re here!\u00a0 They\u2019re here!\u201d\u00a0 Though this wasn\u2019t so much Dawn of the Dead<\/em> as QAnon of the Dead<\/em>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u00a9 Sony Soho Square<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n And during my time in what Trump thinks of as ‘shithole countries’, I\u2019ve never seen performers from such a theatre of the absurd as those who were centre stage in the Capitol when, temporarily, the mob occupied it.\u00a0 The QAnon-shaman guy with the buffalo furs and horns and the painted face, resembling the figure on the cover of the 1993 Jamiroquai album Emergency on Planet Earth<\/em> after it\u2019d spent a night sleeping in a skip.\u00a0 The other guy with the furs, plus glasses and a dead beaver on his head, looking like the world\u2019s shittest Davie Crockett.\u00a0 The guy in the bobbled \u2018Trump\u2019 hat who walked off with Nancy Pelosi\u2019s lectern, now under arrest and subject to a thousand jokes on social media about when he\u2019ll \u2018take the stand\u2019.\u00a0 The guy with the Santa Claus beard and the \u2018Camp Auschwitz\u2019 T-shirt, whom one right-wing idiot later tried to deflect criticism from on social media by suggesting he might actually be an ‘Auschwitz survivor\u2019\u2026\u00a0 Hold on, though.\u00a0 Someone celebrating Auschwitz in 2021?\u00a0 That\u2019s not absurd.\u00a0 That\u2019s frightening.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Indeed, after the initial absurdities broadcast on the initial news reports, there came more frightening accounts of what\u2019d happened.\u00a0 A police officer died of injuries sustained while being bludgeoned by a fire extinguisher.\u00a0 Another officer, a black man, had to offer himself as bait and lure a racist mob away<\/a> from the senate entrance, so that those inside got a few extra minutes to evacuate.\u00a0 (While these things were happening, other officers, clearly sympathetic to the mob\u2019s intent, were dismantling barriers to let them pass and posing for selfies with them.)\u00a0 Journalists were attacked.\u00a0 A makeshift noose was strung up outside.\u00a0 Masked figures roamed around carrying zip-tie handcuffs, apparently planning to take hostages.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Meanwhile, there was the jaw-dropping contemptibility of Republican politicians such as Ted Cruz, the Texan cowpat, and Josh Hawley, a man who physically and spiritually resembles Miguel Ferrer\u2019s scumbag executive<\/a> in Robocop<\/em> (1987).\u00a0 Even after the insurrection, they kept on parroting Trump\u2019s honking-mad claims about election fraud and they voted against Biden\u2019s certification.\u00a0 Obviously, this is because they want to secure the support of Trump\u2019s deranged base when they launch their own bids to become president in 2024.\u00a0 With Cruz and Hawley, it\u2019s not so much \u2018we the people\u2019 as \u2018me<\/em> the people\u2019.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I suppose I should react to this with schadenfreude<\/em>.\u00a0 The USA has a long history of promoting revolutions and insurrections in other countries.\u00a0 The most notorious of many examples were the overthrow<\/a> of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, which the USA and its little sidekick the UK orchestrated in 1953 (and which begat the Shah of Iran, which begat the 1979 revolution, which begat the Ayatollah, which begat the Iran we know and fear today), and the 1973 coup d\u2019\u00e9tat<\/a> it engineered against President Salvador Allende that resulted in the murderous, fascistic rule of General Pinochet.\u00a0 Now it\u2019s embarrassingly fallen prey to an attempted coup of its own.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Still, all the sanctimonious blather about the USA being the mother of democracy and the shining light for other nations to follow, often propagated by Hollywood movies, does worm its way into your consciousness no matter how hard you try to resist.\u00a0 So although the idea of American democratic righteousness is more myth and propaganda than reality, seeing its political heart get trashed by Jamiroquai-shaman guy, beaver-on-head guy, lectern-guy, etc., was rather sad.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n From twitter.com \/ schwarzenegger<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Incidentally, if the notion that the USA is the great champion of democracy is cheesy guff, it was appropriate that a few days later Arnold Schwarzenegger, one of cinema\u2019s greatest proponents of cheesy (though enjoyable) guff, went viral in a video in which he praised American democracy.\u00a0 Arnie even likened its resilience to the sword of Conan the Barbarian.\u00a0 The sword’s blade, he explained, becomes stronger the more it\u2019s tempered by punishment.\u00a0 (Sorry, Arnie, but I seem to remember Conan\u2019s mantra<\/a> being to \u2018crush your enemies, see them driven before you and hear the lamentations of their women\u2019.\u00a0 Which doesn\u2019t sound terribly democratic to me.)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n But returning to the topic of low-and-lower-middle-income countries\u2026\u00a0 From 1999 to 2001 I worked in Ethiopia.\u00a0 When I arrived there, most Ethiopians\u2019 experience of the outside world was via an antiquated TV set kept in a wooden cabinet in the neighbourhood coffee shop or bar, which gave them access to two terrestrial channels.\u00a0 The channels\u2019 output seemed to consist mainly of clips of traditional Ethiopian dancing, English football matches that\u2019d taken place three weeks earlier, and reruns of Jake and the Fatman<\/em><\/a> (1987-92).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Within two years, however, satellite TV had arrived with a vengeance.\u00a0 Suddenly, those same people were being exposed daily to dozens, if not hundreds of channels crammed with glossy adverts and pop videos dripping with opulence \u2013 fancy cars, penthouses, jewellery, designer clothes.\u00a0 It was all phoney nonsense, of course.\u00a0 Most people in other countries didn\u2019t live like that.\u00a0 But how was your average Ethiopian expected to know?\u00a0 And how, I wondered, would this impact on the psychology of a people whose country was then, and still is today, pretty impoverished?\u00a0 (In 2018 its GDP per capita was ranked<\/a> 167th<\/sup> in the world.)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n As it turned out, I should have been more worried about the Americans and how they\u2019d<\/em> cope with rapid advances in communications technology and especially with the sudden arrival of social media.\u00a0 For now we have vast numbers of Americans taking Trump’s twitter ravings as the gospel truth.\u00a0 Also, vast numbers of them believe the insane drivel that is the far-right QAnon conspiracy theory, whereby Trump is battling a worldwide network of paedophilic, baby-eating Satanists who control everything, especially everything that\u2019s liberal.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Whoever Biden appoints as a successor to Betty DeVos, Trump\u2019s wretched Secretary of Education, will urgently need to promote 21st<\/sup> century skills like critical thinking<\/a> and digital literacy<\/a> in the nation\u2019s schools.\u00a0 Otherwise, thanks to social media and the Internet, the USA will collectively disappear down an extremist rabbit hole or get locked into a far-right echo chamber.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Ironically, Trump, so disdainful of \u2018shithole countries\u2019 in Africa and elsewhere, is probably closest in his vanity, bluster and puffed-up preposterousness to some of the infamous dictators who ruled certain African nations after the end of colonialism.\u00a0 I\u2019m thinking of Zaire\u2019s Mobutu Sese Seko<\/a> who, while most of his subjects lived in poverty, built a palace that became known as \u2018the Versailles of the jungle\u2019, travelled using a fleet of costly Mercedes-Benz motor cars and hired Concorde for shopping trips to France.\u00a0 What Trumpian things to do.\u00a0 I\u2019m also thinking of Uganda\u2019s Idi Amin<\/a>, described in 1973 by his country\u2019s American ambassador as \u2018racist, erratic and unpredictable, brutal, inept, bellicose, irrational, ridiculous and militaristic.\u2019\u00a0 That sounds like Trump down to a T.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n By the way, talk of Idi Amin makes me think of the 2006 movie The Last King of Scotland<\/em>, based on the 1998 novel by Giles Fodden.\u00a0 In that, a hapless, vain and dim Scotsman, played by James McAvoy, cosies up to Amin, played by Forest Whittaker, at the start of the latter\u2019s career and soon gets more than he bargained for.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u00a9 DNA Films \/ Film4 \/ Fox Searchlight Pictures<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Thinking of The Last King of Scotland<\/em>\u2019s imaginary scenario, I\u2019m somehow reminded of the real-life scenario here:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u00a9 Daniel Biskup \/ The Times \/ News Syndication<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Anyway, America, one week has passed since the Capitol insurrection.\u00a0 You\u2019ve got just one more week to go before Biden gets inaugurated and the Orange Blob, hopefully, is cast off into powerlessness and obscurity.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n You\u2019re halfway out of Crazy Town.\u00a0 Hope you make it.\u00a0 Good luck<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u00a9 CBS News \u201cIt\u2019s a disgrace, there\u2019s never been anything like that.\u00a0 You could take third-world countries, just take a look, take third-world countries.\u00a0 Their elections are more honest than what we\u2019ve been going through in this country.\u00a0 It\u2019s a disgrace.\u201d So spoke President, now almost Ex-President, Donald Trump at a rally … <\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/bloodandporridge.co.uk\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/J-EOPE.png\")
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