The Greatest Jackass the US Has Ever Produced

Long before Donald Dumb appeared on the political stage, I had a conversation once with "pure-bred" US-born East Coast Americans whom I expected would be open-minded liberals who were not afraid of self-criticism. They argued that other countries are elitist and vertically-stratified socieites, while American democracy is more resilient and laterally structured, which is true to a certain extent. On that basis, we agreed that while mediocrity can be found across all human societies, it is much more prevalent, or at least more visible, in the US, to which I added the caveat that there are real dangers in allowing mediocrity to rise to social standings, cultural prominence, and positions of power and responsibility.

For the many decades I spent as an immigrant in the US, I rubbed shoulders and worked alongside US-born Americans, and couldn’t help but notice the social shallowness and ignorance of the average white American, which I attributed to the short history of the country and its paucity in historical references. As descendants of poor peasant immigrants from the boonies of Europe, white Americans have an innate dislike for elites, intellectuals and people who use their brains more than their muscles. Through the cultural trash they regularly dump on the world, Hollywood and corporate America ceaselessly demonstrate this paradigm to us. Hatred of intellectuals and freethinkers is, ironically, something Americans share with totalitarian societies. On the other hand, most Americans I met socially spend excessive time talking about sports and physical ability, and have innate physical skills at using weapons, tools and machines to fix and build things and kill native Amerindians, skills that 17th-18th century immigrants needed to clear forests, cut down trees, build houses, plough land, and ethnically cleanse the land of its indigenous population. But why do they hate anything and anyone unlike them, including new immigrants? 

I believe it is because their own immigrant background and mindset have them stuck in the past. Biologists tell us that when a new species enters a new environment, the evolutionary pressures of the previous environment cease to exert their adaptive influence. There is a lag time that is needed during which to forego the previous envrionment and understand the new one. So the species stops evolving for a while. It freezes in a limbo between the old and new environments. Which is where America is today. It is an incomplete experiment in which humans, though already detached from their former environment, have yet to reach an adaptive evolutionary steady state in their new environment. Hence the wild contrasts between the various communities that constitute this country, and the adolescent immaturity with which America always rejects the international community's efforts at setting universal standards: The refusal of the US to adopt the international metric system is a perfect example. Another example is the awkwardness with which Americans deal with people who otherwise appear just like them, but speak with an accent: They either deal with it from a position of inferiority, or they hate it and find it highly suspicious.

Today's immigrants don't need skills to cut trees and clear land. The world has changed. The world today needs scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs.... And there is where the anti-immigrant sentiment of old stock English and Anglo-saxon America comes from. "Middle" America, as it is often called, is essentially that of 17th-18th century English (and some Anglo-saxon, German, Irish, etc.) peasants who remain stuck in that historical timeframe, unable and unwilling to adjust to the modern world. These are Donald Dumb's followers; as change pressures them to adapt to changing realities, these American peasants react violently, unable to transcend their 17th-century frozen mindsets.

Since they were the founding stock of American society, these peasants have imposed their own register of cultural attributes: Sports and athletism over intellectual achievement, brawn over brain, God over science, etc. In addition, there is a deliberate and generalized tendency in America to bring down everything to the lowest possible common denominator. They don't want to think too much or learn anything beyond the infamously misspelled three "R"s - Readin', Ritin', and Rithmetics. In contrast to the rest of the world, street signs in America are often fully written texts ("Do Not Walk") rather than symbols. In schools, American educators teach “down” so that everyone gets a minimum education, rather than teach “up” to higher standards that not everyone can achieve. I still meet certified teachers and educated people who cannot write proper or correct English, or whose general education is limited to an inward-looking history of America, with all the fallacies and myths built around it, that makes everyone rally around a couple of central tenets. Imagine that in the land of the free, schoolchildren are forced every morning to recite a "Pledge of Allegiance", just like their North Korean counterparts. Have I already mentioned totalitarian?

Some readers might counter-argue that there is no such thing as “proper” or “correct”, and that it is more important to raise a majority of emotionally well-adjusted, albeit educationally-lacking individuals, rather than produce a few high achievers otherwise tagged by normal Americans as athletically-challenged brainy “nerds”. Perhaps this is why these "emotionally well-adjusted" American highschoolers, imbibed with Hollywood violence, go on shooting rampages almost every day. Perhaps this is why American highschoolers graduate with the need to catch up in a “freshman” year of college that focuses on general knowledge, and believe me, I have taught in US universities and incoming students don't even understand their own language. In most other countries, students finish high school already equiped with that general knowledge and go to college ready to specialize.

With this background, I am not bewildered at the immovable popularity of Donald Dumb, a mafioso crook, failed entertainer and businessman, who has no substance and is only driven by appearance and show-off, who is a bigoted liar and a serial adulterer, and is yet adulated by Middle America, particularly by its so-called Christian evangelicals. Donald Dumb is an illiterate bum who struggles to read an English sentence on a teleprompter that other people have written for him. Given the popularity of such a lowlife, and with his rise to become president of the US, I feel vindicated in my judgment that while mediocrity does indeed exist in all cultures and countries, only in America does it rise to the top. A price to pay for democracy? Perhaps, but too steep a price as Donald Dumb's current destructive antics clearly show. Most other democracies almost never bring dangerous and criminal idiots and morons to power.

Donald Dumb often makes spelling mistakes in his social media grunts, his latest being to moan that he is being “Indicated” (in lieu of “Indicted”). Another one I remember from his early political forays is “Unpresidented” (rather than “unprecedented”). Not even the spellchecker would come up with such inanities; Donald Dumb's vocabulary and language rate at 3d grade English. I must therefore assume that half of the country that adulates him is also made up of mediocre morons, "deplorables" as Hillary Clinton called them, who are poor spellers and who believe his asinine “Make America Great Again” slogan. Deep down, they are fine human beings, I am sure, like everyone else on the globe, but I suspect they think that the preamble of the constitution – All men are created equal – applies only to white men, i.e. them; they, and only they, are created equal. The rest of humanity is scum that they don’t want to learn anything about, don’t want to deal with, and definitely not allow to enter and stain their America. Donald Dumb's followers are the peasants, some of them urbanized, of America whose major contributions are to grow corn, raise pigs and worship in ultra-pagan megachurches. Those who truly make America great are its immigrants: Close to 60% of American scientists, doctors, engineers and entrepreneurs are foreign-born immigrants, and without them America would be a technological wasteland of corn, pigs, and barbaric religion.

The disasters that the Supreme Moron Donald Dumb is inflicting on the United States are ample proof that some elitism may be a bulwark against the rise of mediocrity to positions of power, and that democracy-enabled mediocrity should never be a license for anyone to become president of the United States. 

Hanibaal Atheos