I received a link from my friend Aubrey to a piece written by a former resident of Chile remarking on the wicked irony of seeing Americans traumatized by Russian interference in our elections more than 40 years after his own country was ravaged by the bloody toppling of a democratically-elected Chilean government – that of President Salvador Allende – by the American CIA. The writer took no pleasure in the awful observation. But he also refused to spare we Americans the agony of the irony.
It reminds me of this podcast in which a Trump voter voiced her terrible sense of violation at seeing a community of Somali immigrants take over, from her point of view, an entire neighborhood that she and other enraged whites felt they intrinsically owned. She had not a clue about the wicked irony of her bitterness at losing "her" territory in a land where Native Americans know that very experience with far more gruesome familiarity than she will ever fathom.
That is the obscene, comic, tragic absurdity of the consciousness of tens of millions of scared American white voters: Their own tribal legacy on these shores is exactly, and I mean exactly, what they shriek for Trump to defeat in fetishized brown invaders: primitive ignorance, carnivorous violence, savage thievery, amoral entitlement.
It’s all right here in the making of a country that – over its few centuries of incompetent occupation – whiteness momentarily claims as its own.