adminVukani Madoda: The Sharpshooter
On July 26, 1920, the now defunct Baltimore Evening Sun, which was the largest daily afternoon newspaper in the American state of Maryland back then, had an interesting excerpt from one of its leading journalists, Henry Louis Mencken.“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron,” it read in part.
And so it came to pass in the just ended American elections. Americans wanted democracy and Americans got a perfected democracy. It was a democracy that reflected the inner soul of the America people – truly as they are not as we have often perceived them to be. In that historic election, for the first time since the July 4, 1776 American Independence – exactly 240 years later – the American people finally reached their heart’s desire on November 8, 2016 and achieved democracy when they elected that downright moron, Donald Trump, to adorn the White House. The Americans stopped pretending about the real meaning of democracy, they stopped pretending about what race should stay at the White House.
Americans had to endure as Barack Obama and his family ‘polluted’ the purity of the White House for eight years.
For eight years they let him taint the whiteness of the White House but last Monday, they had had enough. They searched their souls and dug deep into their hearts to find the true meaning of what they call democracy. The Americans have led the way in showing the world that democracy is the freedom to choose whoever stands by the majority’s desires.
Donald Trump does not like migrants and so does the Americans. Trump does not like Mexicans and black people and that is the same inclination of the Americans. They do not like those who are not of their kind and finally they have someone who can stand up and shout in public what he does not like. If the majority shares those sentiments, that’s democracy for you. Love it or hate it, democracy is the attitude and philosophy that the majority live by.
Trump and his Americans do not like women, they despise women and can never allow a woman to become president.
The result of those democratic feelings was the election of Trump as the 45th president of the United States of America.
To sum it all up, Isaac Asimov once had this to say:
“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
Indeed, democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. No one in this world has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office by the same measure.
Ironically, Trump understood this basic philosophy and played on the whims of the great masses of the plain people. Even his election campaign expenditure was at least 20 times less than what his elitist rival Hillary Clinton spent trying to woo voters with a lame anti-Trump message.
Clinton tried to de-campaign Trump by saying he is a “downright moron” who should never be allowed anywhere near the White House while outgoing US president Obama weighed in by demonising Trump, saying he is unfit to manage his Twitter account and therefore can never be allowed to be the custodian of nuclear weapon codes.
The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic.
Trump was and is more likely one who likes his country more than the rest of those pretentious democrats, and was thus more disturbed than them when he saw America debauched.
He is not a bad citizen turning to crime. On the contrary he is a good citizen driven to despair. He therefore decided to make America “great again” by using the very democratic principles enshrined in the American Declaration of Independence.
The most dangerous man to the Democrats election campaign and its government was the man who was able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos.
That dangerous man is Donald Trump. Almost inevitably, he came to the conclusion that the Obama government he lived under was dishonest, insane, and intolerable. What is worse is that he made the majority of the Americans believe the same conclusion.
His campaign was simple and his message was democratically appealing – make America great again.
It therefore would be a little inaccurate to say he hated everything. He was simply in favour of common sense, common honesty and common decency. That common-man stature made him inevitably ineligible for any public office of trust, according to the Democrats.
Arrogantly, the Democrats thought that common-man, that “downright moron” would never win an election of any sort. They thought Trump would never make a difference to a US presidential election, conceitedly disregarding the essence of Mark Twain’s warning that, “If voting made any difference they wouldn’t let us do it.”
In true democratic fashion, the Democrats went ahead and let the Americans vote and what a great difference it made!In his prolific piece called ‘New Hopes for a Changing World’, Bertrand Russell aptly remarked that, “Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man, and our politicians take advantage of this prejudice by pretending to be even more stupid than nature made them.”
Now a ‘stupid’ Trump is US president. Whether he is honest or not is another thing. But what the honest truth reflects is that it’s called democracy. Democracy my foot! Movement for Democratic Change my foot! Voting for a “democratic downright moron” like Morgan Tsvangirai in 2018, over my shot body!
— Dubulaizitha!
Online Reporter