You understand why I’ve been in dispose from blogging for a brief stretch here. I’ve had a few, lighter Finnish-centric topics clicking in my head for weeks, but I really can’t write about them at this moment, and for good reason. It’s the same reason you perhaps haven’t read my blog lately, or your work emails, or slept much lately, or showered lately, or made dinner for your family lately. Something kind of big happened this week, and I’m not talking about just in America. The world celebrated a new US President. When London shoots fireworks and the church bells ring in Paris over a change in the American president, and other such celebrations around the world—not to mention the celebrating WITHIN the United States—this election has vividly become about something more than America and its problems.
Uncle Sam had an intervention and everyone is thrilled he’s agreed to seek therapy. But let’s be clear, that’s all he’s agreed to. The therapy is the important piece, and therapy is HARD. You have to ween yourself off the drug you love.
I feel this post is going to be more for the Finnish readers than American, because let’s face it, I’ve probably lost any right-leaning American as a reader long ago, but if you are a right-leaning American, by all means, hear me out. For you Finns, I’m going to try to exhibit why I may have lost the right-leaning reader and place this in context to American political melt-down and my experience watching all this from Finland.
This is the first US election I’ve observed from abroad. As I’ve written before, avoiding American media up to this week has brought greater peace to our daily lives here. But as the votes came in all week, we tuned in to American media to follow along as the in-person early counts felt like 2016 déjà vu; as the absentee votes—ours included sent over a month ago—and mail-in ballots started to reflect the composition of people who’ve had enough of the crudest, most-divisive president; I, along with much of the rest of the world, began to feel a glimpse of humanity in America again.
I try very openly to highlight that my blog is opinion and not journalism. I understand journalism is hard work, I’m not a trained journalist, and I should not misinform anyone on matters about which I have not thoroughly done much more than rudimentary survey of the internet. So, what I'm writing is a perspective; an opinion.
Finns in general are likely paying a limited amount of their attention as interested observers of the circus that is the American political arena. I have the impression perhaps most or many Finns don’t generally know and probably wouldn’t believe how frequently and obviously Donald Trump lies—substantiated lying too—while in the office of the Presidency. Politicians are famous for lying, but never in the course of history has a US President so wantonly lived in and painted an alternate universe that bends to his will like Trump has. Not even close. The Washington Post started a fact-checker count of confirmable lies that stood at an average of over 50 lies per day for his Presidency, a rate at which the Post said they could barely keep up with.
I don't know that Finns realize how many days and how much federal money he has spent on his security, to golf. or how much his businesses have profited from his presidency--something that is forbidden in the Constitution and adhered to by Presidents prior to Trump. I’m not sure they’ve seen him make fun of a journalist with a disability, right out in the open, even before he was elected in 2016. Or at worst, his numerous dog-whistles towards racism. The offense is so often and great, but if you've only paid half attention, you might not catch the gravity of his foulness. To overlook these huge flaws in his character is forgivable when it’s happening far away from your daily reality in a different language, but it is not when looking for a stable, national leader, in a crisis.
When it doesn’t seem to affect you personally, you can and might shrug it off. But Van Jones and a huge swath of Americans, including most famously, George Floyd, and far too numerous others, who have had to live, suffer, and even die, under the inflammatory racial environment that Trump has fanned the flames of in his America, simply cannot shrug off Trump. His rhetoric and that of at least a portion of his supporters, confronts their existence and dignity in a fundamental way that is frightening. Van Jones is a smart, strong man. Watch that clip again. Those who support Trump but genuinely might not support all of his rhetoric, I think miss that their support of him for whatever other reason, is overshadowed in a huge way by these issues. Hey, Hitler had a GREAT economy out of a horrible one... Just sayin'.
So in the vast gap between someone in Jone’s shoes, and those wearing MAGA hats, or maybe not even going that far, but just filling the dot black next to the name Donald Trump on a ballot, I think many over here might wonder how that happens. It's certainly complicated and I don't rightly know. If it was widely known, I think we'd be handling it better.
If I had to guess at a few things, I'd hold up human dignity, identity power structures, and information, as the fundamental differences from Finnish life, to life in America right now.
I think Trump rightly tapped into a lack of dignity felt by many white, rural voters who are less educated and feel left behind by the modern economy, with no clear path to it. I think race and skin color absolutely play into the dynamic too, with a greater number of white Americans than ever feeling some of the dings to their personal dignity that have defined the minority experience in the US forever. They see Mexicans willing to and doing the work they won't, as bending rule of law to "steal" their former lives, even if they don't want those lives. They see international students who have taken education much more seriously in their home countries, filling university seats and high-paying tech jobs with a global scale. This is terrifying, because on both ends, they are "being replaced." Meanwhile, we've given China manufacturing. Where and how do these folks get ahead now?
I think we've devolved into a society that has for better or worse placed education as a wedge, class issue that threatens less-educated white citizens comparatively more prominently than it historically has for minorities who faced greater barriers to education as simply part of their plight. I don't know whose "fault" it is, but it certainly isn't immigrants' faults, as Trump is trumpeting. But I noticed this difference over 20 years ago as I travelled as an athlete in Europe. I remember thinking when I was in Germany and Sweden in the '90s, that the butcher, the baker, the electrician, the painter, the cafe and shop owner, all seemed to carry a greater sense of dignity within their cultural communities, and they even seemed financially better off than those same professions might carry in America. I think in Finland by comparison, dignity is much freer here, much more accessible, but Finland has also placed a premium on education of its people, if by no other measure than teachers' pay.
So, why might a significantly-laid-off labor community in the US identify with Trump today when they identify with the Democratic Party for a century? I think it feels more dignified to have someone hear you and acknowledge you, even if their policies don't, than to feel patronized by those who might be selling policies that could help, while it feels they're looking down their educated noses at you. When that party makes you feel stupid, racism might not bother you, and scapegoating a bit might even feel like a good place to place your frustrations. It's worked before! Human dignity is a powerful political force, especially in a majority population.
I sense it might start there, but then the media comes into it and besides trying to keep viewers glued to the news cycle to sell ads, the media entities began playing to demographics several decades ago. The Finns don't have anything like what's happened in the US on this front. Fox News literally delivers different news to Donald Trump’s America, than the AP and Reuters, who land at the top of reporting factual journalism while falling most in the middle of this Market Watch diagram of how media skews left and right in political ideology.
If you want to have effective dialogue about what is best for a country, say, in the situation of a pandemic, where might the news best come from for the country’s citizens’ health interest? Probably somewhere at the top and in the middle, right?
Now what if you’ve been raised your whole life or you’ve spent half your life getting all of your news from somewhere not anywhere near the factual top of the heap, and skewed one direction, left or right, on this chart? The issue with information becomes very clear why America has this political breakdown when you consider that almost half of America gets its news from Fox, way down on the right bottom-half on the line between the orange “unfair interpretations of the news” box, and the red “nonsense damaging to public discourse” box.
My case in point would be that anyone digesting Fox News regularly would have just accused me, while reading that above sentence, as being brainwashed by the "liberal, mainstream media." I like AP and Reuters, and I like the BBC and PBS because I feel like I get news from them. Those don't pop up into my Facebook feed though. I get a lot of Daily KOS, Huffington Post, and Occupy Democrats click bate (see where they are on the grid?), and I have to catch myself and consider not re-posting from those sources, even though they play to my sensibilities. I actually get some click bate from the Daily Wire, New York Post, and National Review, after I've clicked on something right-leaning to see a conservative viewpoint. You see how the polarization of American discourse is happening though.
YLE feels very much in the realm of the BBC, Reuters, and the AP. Besides MTV3 News, that’s kind of it for Finns. Nobody is trying to scare you with attention-grabbing headlines meant to get you to click again so someone makes money on an ad. Anyone getting news like you still do, might observe the US right now in great wonder.
I don’t like Fox News, and I don’t even like MSNBC nor CNN all that much either as they program their content from what I see as a counter-measure to Fox’s bias of misinformation. This technique, I feel, hurts their own ability to spread truth, and with it, growing greater public discourse. Ultimately, it's about making money though, and there's the problem. Even though CNN and MSNBC fall in the yellow box of “fair interpretations of the news,” I think “interpretations” of the news are our country’s addiction as we go to therapy. Interpreting the news might bring more viewers who agree with you to the screen but it doesn’t bring us closer. It divides us just a bit more. I think Rachel Maddow is whip smart. I find her exhausting. I think Chris Cuomo is too, and Anderson Cooper, but I cringe at their vilification of Fox News when they tint their own broadcasts with similar tones on the other side of the spectrum. I think Shepard Smith honestly tried journalism at Fox and he was overwhelmed in the end.
The bottom line is AP, BBC, Reuters, and PBS come across as boring to Americans, and so would YLE if they could understand it. YLE would suffer in America. It’s just reporting. As long as the facts are boring or uninteresting to Americans, the United States will struggle politically. As long as they matter in Finland, I think it will help keep what you have going, which is a really nice place to live.
The poignancy and absurdity of this electoral moment each played out in real time as the news networks took the data they had to call the election, the same way they’ve used data in real time in past modern elections to project a winner. Even Fox called it. The fact that Kamala Harris was elected first ever female and person of color as Vice President was celebrated. Meanwhile, the beast they helped create continues in the Oval Office, in a state of false reality--in denial--that it's even possible he lost without being cheated. Even Fox sees it. We all do, except those who have been become entrenched in opinion as news; interpretative narratives that feed and support a view that isn't based in reality. What happens when your reality cracks? Some are even turning on Fox because even Fox can only go so far from reality. What follows, we're about to find out. The stew is still hot.
I’m a fan of the HBO comedy series, Veep, which for those unaware, “Veep” is short speak for VP or Vice President. The show stars one of my two comedic crushes, Julia Louis Dreyfus (second to Kristen Wiig) as the doofus Vice President/President Selina Meyer. It is a hilarious show of an inept, liberal , Selina Meyer political team of total bumbling political idiots who fumble their way to the top of American politics. This show began well before Trump ever was elected, and warning, is laced with profanity, which might be one of the most accurate aspects of the show's portrayal of American politics. After Biden and Harris were projected by the networks as winners of the election, Louis-Dreyfus tweeted, tagging Kamala Harris, that “Madame Vice President” is no longer a fictional figure--a bit of levity from the female comic parody of American politics.
Meanwhile, in a Philadelphia back lot to Four Seasons Total Landscaping, between an adult bookstore and a cremation service, Rudy Guilliani was holding court as Trump’s legal team leader, in what can only be something the writers for Veep might have dreamed of. Philadelphia doesn’t have a Trump property but there is a Four Seasons Philadelphia luxury hotel, who informed the public over Twitter that Trump’s initial announcement of a big press conference by his legal team would NOT be happening at their property as Trump’s initial tweet suggested. What followed would have made Veep's knucklehead politician Jonah Ryan proud. Says Giuliani, "...networks don't get to decide elections, courts do."
Um, no, Rudy. Actually, voters do. The writers at Veep got upstaged in Philly by the real thing.
And now back to enjoying Finland. Sorry for the disruption.
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