The American dream now chokes with anger
The American dream, a piece of modern mythology no presidential speech has ever failed to invoke, seems hollow as never before.
Already brought to its knees like a Third World country by Covid-19, the said dream now chokes with anger across cities—from Minneapolis, its epicentre, up near the Great Lakes, to Miami down the coast. Both pandemic and social unrest spread like fire, wilting away the shiny slogans of the world’s most powerful democracy, exposing the warts that lay underneath.
The ex-monitor of the world, already eager to recuse itself from the onerous part of that job, now looks as if it itself needs monitoring.
A global commission on Social Freedoms and Humane Laws in America may be in order. So starkly outside the arc of justice and compassion do the racial minorities and the less privileged (often the same) seem to be—read that in terms of healthcare or law enforcement.
Consider the dark analogy between African-American George Floyd dying under the weight of the leg muscles of a white cop, pleading for air to breathe, and innumerable patients on ventilators doing the same.
Covid-19 deaths surpassed 1,00,000, a terrible milestone, around the same time as that grim marker of white supremacist politics was recorded in Minnesota.
Both also bookended the disparate value American lives have, depending on race, age or class. We were even served the spectacle of the sitting US President Donald Trump actually tweeting a phrase with a racially charged history—“when the looting starts, the shooting starts”—and being upbraided by Twitter Inc for foretelling violence! Washington DC saw some of the worst—a church burnt, journalists attacked and handcuffed, one of them blinded with rubber bullets.
That American society and polity held a deep racial bias was always known, but what we now see is America, stalked by disease and a tinpot presidency, joining the rest of our 21st century dystopias.