Dear America,
When the worst thing our president can think to call murderers like the one who killed more than twenty people, including children, in Manchester, England is that he and his ilk are "losers," I am forced to question the caliber of his mind; there were so many other choices. He could have said that they were the perpetrators of atrocities for which the world will never forgive them. He could have said that they were monsters, if he had wanted to be simple and direct. He could have described them as genocidal murderers, homicidal maniacs...he could even have used the term he is seeking to bring into vogue, Islamic terrorists, which would have lacked the mordancy he was probably trying to project, but at least would have demonstrated some depth of comprehension of the depth of the vileness he was trying to condemn. He could have called them depraved fanatics or lunatics...assassins, perverts, amoral zealots or a host of other things we have come to identify with personal embodiment of evil, but no. He chose "losers."
Loser is the worst thing Trump can muster when searching for an epithet. It's what he calls antagonists in politics, business--and probably his personal relationships as well--as opposed to "winner," which is what he thinks of himself as being. That's what the world is to Trump: winners and losers, and that taxonomy of humanity trivializes everything we do as a species, either good or bad. When Trump called the perpetrators of indiscriminate violence against innocents losers, he demonstrated the lack of substance in the man who presumes to lead not just our nation, but the world, and that is the underlying problem with a Trump presidency. It raises the question, or at least should raise it, of what the world thinks of us when they see Donald Trump as the face of our nation, and I'm not just talking about our reputation. I'm not talking about bruised pride or reification of the odious notion of American exceptionalism. I'm talking about moral and spiritual vacuity. I am talking about the projection onto the world political scene of the idea that America is a nation of materialistic, narcissistic, prideful bullies who want nothing more than to throw their weight around and thump their chests. Donald Trump is undermining our status in the world as a nation that seeks to lead it in a valid and noble direction. Donald Trump is bad for America...not just the nation, but the notion as well.
Since the turn of the twentieth century, this country has been the country to which the world turns when no one else can suffice, and make no mistake about it, that is a dubious honor. We have spilled blood measured in millions of gallons, tossed into conflagration after conflagration fortune that could have fed the hungry and housed the homeless, cured the sick and provided for those in need both here and abroad. We have bourn the burden of the mantle of nobility of purpose for more than a hundred years without question...until now. We are not seeing America being made great again. We are witness to the laying low of America, once a great nation, but no more. We have become the mob led by a petty self-seeker, and our motives will be suspect in every instance of international interaction once Trump is through with us.
The fact that I have seized on one word may seem to be trivial in itself, but there is far more to it than Trump's lack of an adequate vocabulary to describe the world around him. When these same villains struck our World Trade Center, George W. Bush characterized that attack as the beginning of a "War on Terror," thus legitimating as an entity Al Qaeda and its affiliates as if they constituted a nation, and their epigones have seized upon that conceit in the form of the ISIL "caliphate." What was in reality a band of thugs and criminals who should have been hunted down like criminals was suddenly the subject not of international law enforcement but of primarily the American military as it would be marshaled against a country, largely because of the phrase War on Terror. What we call things matters, and this kind of malapropism changes history as well as our role in it. When Ronald Reagan dubbed a guided missile system the "peacekeeper," he was using a word to attempt to mislead both the nation and the world, which has to undermine our credibility as a nation. When the Korean War was referred to as a "police action," the true nature of the conflict was obscured and minimalized. When World War I became "The Great War" in common parlance, we deluded ourselves that we would never inflict devastation of such magnitude on each other again, and we were wrong. In reality, we do it with alarming frequency.
In my opinion, shallow minds like Donald Trump's are the reason.
Your friend,
Mike
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