Su queste modeste pagine qualche anno fa parlai dell’incontro con una persona di notevole spessore, americana, scrittrice innamorata dell’Italia e, al tempo, proprietaria di Bed and Breakfast vicino ad Acqui Terme.
Democratica, ha distribuito in questi giorni ai propri lettori una lettera dove parla della vittoria di Trump alle elezioni. Copio ed incollo la sua lettera. Spero di non infrangere alcuna regola di copyright, è uno scritto troppo ben fatto per non essere salvato, ed è esattamente quello che penso e che io non sarei mai riuscito a mettere su carta.
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I’m celebrating Donald Trump’s reelection
Won’t you please join me?
Diana Strinati Baur
Nov 8, 2024
I interrupt my regularly scheduled post for the following:
Welcome, friends! It’s been a wallop of a week!
I’m celebrating Donald Trump’s re-election in a myriad of ways. I hope you’ll join me. It’s a party you won’t want to miss.
I’m celebrating Donald Trump’s reelection by internalizing the knowledge that people vote with their wallets and their deepest fears. It’s time to review Maslow’s hierarchy theory (my personal favorite of favorites) once more, kids, because it once again proves there is no way anyone’s going to care about your social issues if they can’t buy enough food.
“You can’t get to green and purple without having taken care of red and yellow.” a management 101 professor at Penn State whose name I forgot after the final.
Red: physical needs, like food and shelter
Yellow: safety and security
Was there misogyny and racism behind this rout? Of course. Did that make up the totality of Trump’s votes? Absolutely not. Democrats who thought this race would be won on the culture wars need to take an an ice bath.
You know who else voted with their wallets and their fears? The Germans did, in 1933. Years of unbridled inflation, starvation, and the national socialists’ ability to hone in and create fear around the radical left (the Bolsheviks) gave Hitler not a complete majority, but enough of one to coalesce with another nationalist party, and then succeeding to shut down all political parties except his own within weeks.
Hitler could really read a room in those heady early days. His ability to have done so might only be superseded by our current President Elect. Let’s give the man credit where it’s due.
We always wondered, us lofty-thinking Americans, how Germany could have slid into a murderous dictatorship like it did, right? Well, now we know.
I’m celebrating Donald Trump’s reelection by sheepishly and painfully acknowledging that the Democratic Party is now officially the party of left liberal elite, and has lost touch with people in poverty and the working class. And reality. There is nothing Clooney or Oprah or Beyonce can do for us anymore. I really just wish those people would just go back to Como or Chicago or wherever they have a palace.
If we can’t at least fucking see that insurmountable debt, hideously low wages, runaway prices, pernicious capitalism, corporate theft of the rental market, insane house prices, poisonous water, even more poisonous food, insane medical costs, rising cancer and chronic illness levels, climate-caused natural disasters and the catastrophic destruction of everything everywhere are what every single working class human being and a large swath of the middle class are facing right now? We won’t win again for a very long time. And the Hitlers and the Trumps will always thrive, like mold, in a Petri dish created for populists, dictators and nazis.
I’m celebrating Donald Trump’s reelection by understanding that Kamala Harris wasn’t given a fair shake, because she didn’t go through the primary process, and people felt they didn’t know her, and her billion dollar campaign machine focused on all the wrong things that all of us liberal elites thought were important. We felt emboldened by making Trump’s instability, misogyny, felony criminal record, narcissism, adjudicated rape, baby faced bigot of a running mate the messages she should lead with. We bobbed our heads up and down. We really believed our own bullshit.
Kamala Harris had an economic plan, but that plan did not sufficiently speak to the country being on fire, which it is. She was hamstrung by loyalty to Biden, the octogenarian who promised us to be a transition president, and then proceeded to lead us to this moment.
Is he a bad guy? No. Just another old white dude who couldn’t let go. It just so happens that this time, Biden’s not letting go means we’ve slid perilously close to a dictatorship.
Under his watch, inflation caused by Covid, the supply chain debacles, Trump’s tariffs and monetary policies eventually has declined. But try telling that to people (oh, right, we tried that – the economy’s good, stupid) for whom prices will never recover – these are people couldn’t afford anything before this inflation cycle. Now?
Oh right. We didn’t have an answer for starvation and homelessness knocking at the door.
Our bad.
Can we please please learn that people cannot hear anything about culture when they are in crisis? That the only thing to penetrate fear and uncertainty in people with no resources are populist words like, “I’m going to fix this”? Even though “I’m going to fix this” means tariffs that are going to be paid by people’s maxed out credit cards?
Can we please please learn how to talk to the suffering?
I am celebrating Donald Trump’s election by remembering that any American that has one month’s expenses in savings is privileged. Most Americans are broke. They’ve chained themselves to the Trump notion that buying as much stuff as a credit card can handle is the priority. Most Americans are victims of the biggest swindle in the history of the planet – late stage capitalism. We choose, as a country, to believe it is 100% American to make oligarchs more billionaire-y at our own expense, because they’ve instruct us to believe we wear and drive are the default by which we are to bankrupt our children’s future.
I am celebrating Donald Trump’s reelection by not sinking into the sofa and watching cycle after cycle of CNN like I did in 2016, but rather getting up and creating art and making sure my life is an example of how to live aligned with good values. By being healthy and grateful and fully grasping the level of privilege I have.
I’m celebrating Donald Trump’s reelection by reading and internalizing Kirsten Powers on point post. Buy a month with her to read it – it’s worth it.
I want to believe the US can recover from this – that we process and understand what’s just happened and react with strength and integrity when it all starts to go south. Until then, we need to focus on those who are likely to be decimated – women, children, LBGTQ+, immigrants, the economically disadvantaged. We need to hold these people up in any way we can. Only then can we move on to the social and cultural nightmares ripping our country apart.
I hope it’s not too late.
Love,
Diana
