Spiegel Online’s “President of Disappointments” spreads sweeping culpability of a nation mindlessly in peril
Excerpt, editing, end comment by Carolyn Bennett
Poor,
oblivious, careless, and clueless
The fiscal and social systems are still designed for a
superior economy that derives its prosperity from constant growth in
consumption, Ullrich Fichtner, Marc Hujer and Gregor Peter Schmitz write.
“But the old days in which everything worked out somehow
thanks to the sheer energy of a great country are drawing to a close and America
has no plan for its future as a nation still powerful but no longer superior.”
Many problems are simply ignored. Los Angeles, for example,
is the biggest Thai city outside Thailand and the world’s third-largest
Spanish-speaking city. Three-fourths of all children in the giant Los Angeles
school district speak Spanish.
The obvious question— is this or is this not a problem — is neither
asked nor answered.
U.S. East/West
vs. center-divide
The “spirit of multiculturalism” that prevails in Atlantic and
Pacific-coasts cities “is not shared by all.
“In the forests, deserts and mountains, and in states along
the southern borders, a new sense of anxiety — and a new racism — is taking
shape in the form of new, crude immigration laws.
“Local ethnic conflicts heating up in southern California,
Texas, Arizona, Alabama and Florida are hardly ever mentioned in national
debates. But these conflicts will not disappear of their own accord.
“The United States is a poor country — at least in much
larger parts of it than the world suspects.” Its unsophisticated backwaters are
populated by people living in huts and in run-down mobile homes, people lacking
the bare necessities and; even more often, lacking so much as an elementary
education. There are an estimated 11 million immigrants in the country, about
half of them Mexicans. Almost one in four teenagers is unemployed.
“There is no question that America needs a new plan.”
Government malfunctions
“The 112th Congress of the United States has been the most
unproductive Congress since the end of World War II.”
Major national projects and monumental global tasks are sidelined
or neglected “because domestic sports scandals or sexual improprieties capture
the headlines, because lunatic pastors decide to burn Korans, or because new
statistics are released showing that three-fourths of all Americans are
overweight, more than 46 million live in poverty and gunshots kill more than
30,000 people a year, suicides included.”
Media collude
In a country where an American television personality’s 72-day
marriage or the authenticity of the president’s birth certificate can have a longer-lasting
impact on the news in the United States than any environmental policy initiative,
that high gasoline prices (less than half the price of gasoline in Germany) are
so important to so many people that they could decide an election, that 52
percent of Republicans in Mississippi believe the president is a Muslim, or where
46 percent of Americans believe that man was created precisely as is written in
the Bible—can render political debates extraordinarily tedious, boring, mind-numbing.
Media feed flames of vacuous controversy and “controversy gets
people watching” the idiot box. If people are angry, they will turn on the television
to get angrier. “Confusion is produced where clarity ought to prevail” and a result
is further division and disconnect.
Disconnect ensues
People from people
Government from
government
Government from governed
“Americans gossip and chatter but no longer talk to one
another.” The country’s infrastructure is crumbling. Public schools and large
segments of the education system are in disastrous shape, as are many cultural
institutions. U.S. administration, especially federal governance in Washington,
is in urgent need of renewal.
Compromise is essential yet everyone “gets into the game of
painting things in black and white” and because it is difficult to come up with
catchy campaign slogans for America’s extremely diverse society, attempts to
reach people are getting increasingly crude on all sides.
Watching a show of warring opposites, calculated failure to
compromise, wedging (arms, abortions, marriage: god, guns, gays) one against another
other, politics reduced to a “black art” whose objective is to suppress truly
important issues and focus on the unimportant—a confused people loses interest
in public affairs. Many Americans “no longer want to discuss politics.”
If a nation or people entrench themselves long enough in the
status quo, they can only trend backwards. The Spiegel Online writers are right.
The United States of America does indeed need a new plan and
a new project. But it also needs new blood, a new intelligence, a new ethos, a
new consciousness, a new courage. And, sadly, nothing in current Washington—in
any branch of government or among their allies and partners — measures up or rises
to the critical global and domestic imperatives of our time. It doesn’t have to
remain this way.
Sources and notes
“The President of Disappointments: How Obama Has Failed to
Deliver” (Ullrich Fichtner, Marc Hujer and Gregor Peter Schmitz, translated
from the German by Christopher Sultan), Druckversion – Spiegel Online - News –
International, June 14, 2012, http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/president-barack-obama-has-disappointed-in-his-first-term-a-838648.html
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