AMERICA'S "METAL/MENTAL FATIGUE"

The gun violence in the United States is relentless. The moral abdication is structural. Republicans are on the payroll of the National Rifle Association. Some Democrats are too. When they try to come up with a clear condemnation, they mostly triangulate. The Second Amendment curse (like the electoral college) is exchanging the moral currency for Bitcoin profit.

Trump reluctantly read the words of others from a teleprompter and his "intervention" might as well have been written by Stephen Miller--all about anything, but guns! Some Democrats and commentators rose to the occasion but few were able to rise to the emotion. 

For almost three years now, racism and radical conservatism roam free. After a brief lull, from the Bush years to Obama, a foul headwind is again covering the land. The Trump rallies are a frightening spectacle, a Mad Max-type of ritual wherein adepts of a weird cult can spew freely their beans and ketchup bile under the baton of the president. 

In their latest debate, most Democrats looked like exhausted baby-boomers. Uninspired, they found nothing better to say than to go after Obama, accused by stealth of having been too soft, too aloof, while he has an approval rate among Democrats of 90%. The younger set--O'Rourke, Buttigieg--showed skill in holding on to the high ground. In this turmoil, Biden looked dignified, but almost too polite, for the occasion.

Someone said that the current depression in America is produced by the fact that Trump is a "phenomenon" without antecedent, and with no foreseeable successor. He has been linked to mad Roman emperors and to Europe-made arch-villains. In fact he is totally home-grown, like corn flakes on steroids. America was always better at making fads rather than styles. This current craze will end but the negative over- achievements will be hard to roll back. Not that they are sophisticated, on the contrary. They are fed by short-term gain: money, prejudice, ersatz salvation! This president spoke in his inaugural of the American disaster, and he intends to remain the preacher and the owner of the perverse instincts unleashed.

Fatal mistakes or rage could plunge this failing superpower abroad in a miserable landscape on life-support. The moral, intelligent majority stays home and prefers to watch Tarantino on Netflix, rather than to be confronted by it, live. Broadway used to belong to a sophisticated mindset. It is now overtaken by a Moulin Rouge collage without any merit. The current overproduction of great fiction results from an intellectual greenhouse effect. Many Americans prefer now to read in some form of seclusion, home or on a tablet, because, if unprotected by fiction, they might experience that in a fortnight the Soweto police dogs took over their neighborhood.