This is altogether one of the most challenging columns I have committed to here, which I want you to know is offered with sincerity and hope.
Sincerity because I have thought very carefully about what I want to share, and hope because I have little or no agency over how it might be received or reacted to. I should perhaps also say that what I will share is done so in good heart and in all earnestness, in what I know is an inflamed situation, and is intended to help and heal, not harm in any way.
Flippantly, I might say that this last week has been enough to turn anyone into a ‘MAGA’, as in Make America Go Away, with the seemingly endless coverage of which I was, of course, a part with my 15-hour livestreaming marathon, undertaken blithely in the spirit of viewing a history-defining moment and all-American spectacle.
For the preceding as-long-as-I-can-remember, and now over a week later – even though much of my interest in the process has now waned – the President-elect continues to dominate the news agenda AND wreak unholy havoc, whether we like it or not.
Don’t get me wrong. I know this appointment, this result, is significant, controversial and divisive, and therefore rightly in many ways claims airtime and attention, but I can’t be the only one who is sick of the ceaseless neurotic noise and gnashing of teeth. Clearly, the days of electoral candidates shaking hands after a protracted, nail-biting contest are well behind us, not to mention their followers burying the hatchet (and not into each other’s heads).
No, the culture war continues, and politics in the (now awkwardly named) United States is no longer the simple matter of choosing public servants, but more a massive psycho-therapeutic drama, where personal issues are now public matters, and the governmental gloves are off in a grievous, apparently irredeemable stand-off. It looks bad enough viewed from here, thousands of miles away, but sadly that expat matter of “wherever you go, there you are”, clearly applies as much to political acrimony as it does to all else.
My dismissiveness may seem callous to some, especially those who liken their electoral enemy to the worst the world has ever known and fear his intention is to wipe them or their demographic from the face of the earth, or that part of it. I realise also that I may not be able to connect, understandably, with anyone who truly fears for their life, political or actual. It’s “too soon”, I wouldn’t understand from my position of privilege, and there are limits to the paradox of tolerance, they might say.
I may not be ingratiating myself with the ‘winners’ either. For them, any effort to show compassion for their ‘deranged’ opponents is unwarranted where all is fair in a democratic system, where the best man clearly and overwhelmingly won – in all three administrative machines of their nation state. I get it, I honestly do, and anyone who knows me, knows that I am people first, not politics. And my ongoing endeavour to hear out, process and seek to understand every angle of the political spectrum is literally a matter of public record, or at least YouTube.
But – yes, there’s a but – and it is this that ails and motivates me as I write. It would seem any sense of reasonableness is being drenched with the fuel of righteous emotion to which the US’s mainstream media is applying a naked (read shameless) match – on the hour, every hour. What chance do the shredded nerves of our American cousins have when this is the predicament in which they find themselves, losing sight of everyday practical humanity, and instead having hideous caricatures of each other, taunting them over cable, satellite, print, web and so-called smartphone. What Noam Chomsky once called ‘manufactured consent’, in his analysis of how it all works, has lately degenerated into fabricated dissent, or fermented hatred.
And here it is, miles away from home, perhaps amplified in that strange way that expats do, bringing the fear and loathing into the very place, where they thought they had escaped to and, irony of ironies, to where they thought they had escaped from the ‘other’.
In this pathetic, pretty pass, I have been told that if I feature certain guests with particular political allegiances, on my daily morning show, “I will never watch your show again”. This, in itself, is not a big loss, and I’m all for freedom of choice and speech, wherever it remains respectful and legal. However, that it has come to this, and in easy-going, good-natured Portugal, where I moved for peace, pleasure and permissiveness, in the sense of live and let live, saddens me.
Now let me say, too, that the additional irony of me, a foreigner, complaining about the behaviour of other foreigners, in this foreign (to us) land, has not gone unnoticed, or quietly chortled about. So, by way of apology to and acknowledgement of our hopefully not long-suffering hosts, how about we look at this like they might? The Portuguese, it seems to me, have a healthy contempt for their politicians that fits nicely with a grudging respect for the political system in which they operate and the country’s ennobling constitution. “It’s not perfect,” I have heard many of them say, but right now, they must have some small measure of strange pride, looking across the Atlantic, at the USA’s pig’s ear of a political system, and systemic failure.
Add to that the starry skies above that I just thanked as I took a breather from putting this essay together; the pinky-blue sunset over my seaside town, enjoying its namesake late summer this evening; and the convivial café culture comprising of gentle townsfolk who couldn’t care less who you voted for, that I enjoyed earlier today, and you might relax a little. American politics is terrible and it has terrorised the very people it set out, once upon a time, to serve. So, well done if you moved here and left it behind.
I can’t begin my concluding plea with “My fellow Americans…” as this is nationalistically untrue. I will instead, for the purpose of gravity and seriousness, say: “My American fellows, my friends at the leading edge of the Western culture we share, please – for the love of God, and for the sake of us all – put it away and pack it in. British idioms, which I say to you in the spirit of loving, grandfatherly chastisement!”
You didn’t move here for more of the same; you came here to be more sane. Take a few breaths, stop looking for trouble, and get on with it.
By Carl Munson
Carl Munson is host of the Good Morning Portugal! show every weekday on YouTube and creator of www.learnaboutportugal.com, where you can learn something new about Portugal every day!
