America Through a Twisted Lens

A petty and mischievous pleasure in being a foreigner in a strange land is the opportunity to indulge and expand the locals’ misconceptions about your distant homeland. An Australian in America is apt to hear, for example, how “everything Downunder wants to kill you”, an observation which signals your interlocutor has been watching too many nature documentaries featuring our unholy trinity of spiders, sharks and snakes. Given that five months ago I was roused from slumber in a Tennessee meadow by a large black bear beating the heck out of my Esky, ill-advisedly left outside the Quadrant van, well you just have to laugh. It’s purely personal, but given the choice of a tiger snake eager to avoid human contact or 300 hungry pounds of teeth and claws, I’ll take the former every time.

Bill Wyman (above), not the Rolling Stone bassist but an American journalist living in Australia, is a kindred spirit when it comes to feeding gullible locals myths and legends about his native land. The difference, though, is that while I limit the bullshitting to late night bars, his pulpit is the opinion pages of the Nine comics, which appear to no longer employ editors capable of raising an eyebrow. His latest column is broken into italic snatches and  reproduced below, with the needed corrections and queries that would have sprung to the mind of any half-competent copy taster.

And just for the record, it’s no mere pettiness that inspires this exercise but the expectation of what lies ahead for America on and after the November 5 election. If Trump wins, Australians fed a diet of untruths and distortions will wonder how that could ever have happened. If he loses, they know will nothing of the massive frauds that are part and parcel, despite official denials, of American politics.

As an American living in Australia, there is one question I get asked more than any other. Put bluntly, it’s “What the f— is going on in the US?” The underlying issue: How does a hateful, lying, criminal, vulgar and chaotic person like Donald Trump remain a viable presidential candidate?

Give Wyman credit for wearing his hate on a sleeve, less so for not mentioning why Trump remains a “viable” candidate. As Ronald Reagan put it, “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party left me.” Going  by the 2020 election results, a lot American voters feel the same way. But wait, Wyman offers his own explanation:

… the Democratic Party, over the years, has allowed itself to be culturally branded in a way that makes it very difficult for it to make inroads into big parts of the US population.

 Ah-ha, so it’s a question of “branding”, not petrol being $4 a gallon, that 11 million undocumented aliens have been encouraged to pour across the Mexico border, or bitter memories of Biden administration’s ill-managed and catastrophic exit from Afghanistan.

I grew up in the very red state of Arizona…

Yes, it’s so very, very Republican red that Joe Biden claimed the state and its 11 Electoral College votes in 2020.

… among conspiracy theorists, soi-disant psychics, antisemites and more (and that was just in my own family).

Could it be, as with many of your more ardent leftoids, Wyman has been working out daddy issues by going hard left? Good manners suggest that question be left to the columnist and a competent mental health professional.

I then spent a career…

A career with National Public Radio (NPR), which can best be regarded as the rough US counterpart of Their ABC. The difference, hard though it might be to imagine, is that NPR is even more brazen in broadcasting its biases — so much so that a senior and disgusted staffer, old school liberal Uri Berliner, went public with criticism of his employer’s betrayal of “journalism and the public’s trust”. For telling the truth Berliner was promptly suspended without pay, with this alert sent to listeners:

NPR has formally punished Uri Berliner, the senior editor who publicly argued a week ago that the network had “lost America’s trust” by approaching news stories with a rigidly progressive mindset.   

You can read the 25-year NPR veteran’s lament,  now an ex-employee, here. 

… in places like San Francisco, Chicago and Washington, DC…

San Francisco, Chicago and Washington, eh? Well that explains a lot.

San Francisco, where they crap on the streets.

Chicago, with the highest murder rate in the country.

Washington, which hates prosecuting criminals and drops charges against 67 per cent of those arrested

All three cities are long-term Democrat citadels, San Francisco having not seen a Republican mayor since 1964 and Chicago since 1931. As for Washington DC, not only can it boast of never having a Republican mayor, since 2009 there has not been a single Republican with a seat on the city council.

Then, for family reasons, I moved back to Arizona – and was reminded what real America is like …. people were Republican, culturally. Everyone knew that Democrats were free-spending, weak on defence, anti-religion, and overly concerned with black people (particularly black people on welfare, which in this world was almost a redundant phrase). I could go on, but you get the picture. There was an inbred suspicion of the Democratic Party.

For the record, Arizona has one of the lowest black populations in the US, just 4.5 per cent. The hunch that Wyman is citing his kin — “conspiracy theorists, soi-disant psychics, antisemites and more (and that was just in my own family)” – just lifted a notch.

It’s not like the Democrats don’t have material to work with! Republican presidents (Reagan, Bush, Trump) run up deficits, and Democratic presidents (Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden) come in and try to bring deficits down.

Try they might, but they never succeed. Here are the three presidents Wyman cites as deficit busters and the percentages by which their administrations lifted the national debt: Bill Clinton: +28.6%; Barack Obama +64.4%; Joe Biden: +16.7%

… Voters turned their backs on the Democrats (particularly in the Midwest) and elected a calamitous president, in Trump. We heard that Ronald Reagan was a “Happy Warrior” whose optimism contrasted with his opponents’ doom and gloom. Let me tell you: Hillary Clinton ran an optimistic and positive campaign, too, against a dark and vengeful Trump, and we know how that turned out. 

Here’s Hillary being optimistic and positive:

♦ “We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.”

♦ “Some of those folks [Trump voters] – they are irredeemable. But thankfully they are not America.”

♦”You could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? They’re racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic – you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.”

Well, dear Hillary, they were sufficiently American, and in large enough numbers, to deny you the White House. No wonder you’ve tagged them as deplorable. But back to Wyman

“Republicans regularly talk about crime. Why doesn’t every American know that they are a lot more likely to get murdered in rural red states like Oklahoma and Arkansas than they are in New York City?”

Well, yes, a little, a very little, credit where it’s due – like a broken clock, Wyman sometimes gets something sort of right. While it’s true Oklahoma is marginally less prone to violent crime than New  York (14^th and 15^th respectively on the FBI’s national list), Arkansas’ killers and rapists have a solid lock on third place. Well done, Bill!

…Tim Walz, Kamala Harris’ vice-presidential nominee, offered a deeply felt argument for school children to get free breakfast and lunch. The trouble is, to a big section of America, that just means “feeding poor black kids with my money”. 

Funny that Wyman mentions Walz in the same breath as hungry kids because the Minnesota Governor has presided over a monumental $250 million fraud. But let the Minneapolis-based Powerline bloggers explain: 

“The Feeding Our Future scandal is the largest known Covid-era fraud, coming in somewhere between $250 million and $500 million. It was extraordinarily brazen: various nonprofits pretended to feed many hundreds of thousands of nonexistent children, and billed Minnesota’s government. The money was federal, but the program was administered by Tim Walz’s Department of Education. Many criminal prosecutions have followed.”

How many of those alleged charities tossed a few dollars into Walz’s campaign coffers, do you reckon? They certainly had plenty of loose cash to splash. When the first of the Feeding Our Future figures went on trial earlier this year, a Somali woman knocked on the door of the only black juror’s juror’s home and insisted she accept a bag containing $120,000 in cash, the promise being that there would be a lot more if she used her influence to foil a guilty verdict. To her credit, the juror immediately contacted police and turned in the loot. Five criminal indictments followed in short order.

So maybe, just maybe, it’s not filling the stomachs of hungry kids that irks American taxpayers, it’s the scams filling the pockets of politically connected crooks.

Having loped through a litany of errors, the garrulous Wyman wraps it up with this climactic paragraph:

How crazy is it that, to a large part of the country, the Democratic Party is simply not seen as an attractive alternative? More than anything else, that failure has enabled Trumpism.

The bio at the foot of the column mentions the author “teaches at the University of Sydney.”

 That figures.