Lady and the Trump | USA | Al Jazeera

Lady and the Trump | USA | Al Jazeera

 

Jonathan Cook, journalist

Some insights on the Trump inauguration that maybe only an American citizen who was not native-born could have offered.

Hamid Dabashi:

They love Obama for he was
the last shining smile concealing the frightening gnarls of American
militarism. Trump has grabbed the sacrosanct symbols of this nation, as
he put it now infamously, "by the pussy". Trump is the vulgarity
American arts and letters had scarcely kept at bay.

The US now sees itself as ugly as Israel, with a crook as its
president, as rude and ill-mannered as Benjamin Netanyahu. The US now
looks into a mirror and sees a racist state it had thought exorcised
into Israel. Americans have, overnight, turned into Palestinians, the
dreams of their democratic institutions occupied by the nightmare of a
militant minority of zealot racist triumphalists.

Millions of
decent, defiant, angry, and determined Americans are now trapped inside a
vulgar buffoonery, as Palestinians are in Israel, and as Arabs and
Muslims are in their own countries from one end of the globe to the
other - caught in the web of a graceless, crass, kitsch of a state, with
the picture of President Trump all over it.

America has become
the "banana republic," the "third world tyranny", the "stan" it has
habitually termed, racialised, and ridiculed, to think itself superior
to them all. The US now believes Russia has done to it what the US has
done to countless other countries: aborted the democratic course of
their national destiny and imposed a gang of ignoramus billionaire
public enemies in charge of their future.

 

President Donald J Trump reacts from the reviewing stand during the
Inaugural Parade after he was sworn in as the 45th president of the
United States in Washington, DC [EPA]