The country is split down the middle, almost as if a Mad King Solomon had decided it so. Solomon, as you recall, offered to cut the baby in half and give one half to each of the two disputing mothers. The real mother cried out, “No!” and threw her body over the child and that’s how Solomon knew she was the real mother and gave her the baby. How do we know who the real America is? Answer: There are two Americas, each as real as the other. There are brainless, easily duped people who will vote for Donald Trump coupled with the wealthy and avaricious people who also will vote for Trump, because he’s only too happy to sell the government to them. And then there are the rest of us, the Americans that believe in honor, integrity, the rule of law and all the good values that made for the idea of American exceptionalism in the first place.
Make no mistake, November 5, 2024 marked a turning point in our history. America decided to elect a convicted felon to its highest office. Why? My belief is that right-wing media has poisoned Americans minds and in this instance managed to convince people that *lawfare* was responsible for Trump’s conviction and not the fact that Trump’s an out and out crook.
A lot of people are lazy and in all fairness, people are too busy generally to sort their way through the enormous bandwidth of information and disinformation, of mainstream media complacency (and complicity) and right-wing skullduggery. People get skewed notions of things and they retain those skewed notions. I well remember when the birther conspiracy came out. It was common knowledge (I foolishly thought) that Barack Obama was born in Honolulu. Trump knew that, too, but he also knew that if he started saying on TV that Obama was born in Kenya that he would be believed.
And so that madness began and that was the cell in the body politic that went cancerous and look at where we are now. The videos you’re about to see are stereotypes of Americans held by Europeans. There is a lot of truth in this even though it’s offered for comedic purposes. And I can only imagine what’s going to come next if this creator keeps doing these posts.
What Europeans think America is like pic.twitter.com/mcFxV9tcJl
— Daily Dose of X (@schuld_eth) November 23, 2024
Let me address the food stereotype. This is real and it gets weirder still. When I was in college in the seventies I did a semester abroad in France. A young gal there was writing a paper on American culture and she asked me the strangest thing. She said, “Why do Americans only eat sandwiches?” I said, “Where did you get that idea?”
After a few minutes of discussion I figured it out. The mid-day meal in France is the main meal for a lot of people. In Lisieux, where I lived, businesses closed for two hours between 12:00 p.m. and 2:00 p.m. for “diner” or dinner. In the United States businesses did and still do a staggered lunch hour so that the businesses keep running.
There was an assumption and yes, assume does make an ass of you and me, that the mid-day meal, lunch, was the main meal in the United States. Not at all. The big meal of the day for most Americans is usually dinner. But because this young gal thought that the mid-day meal was the main meal in the United States, she thought that McDonald’s or Subway or whatever is what we lived on, primarily. (That’s an even worse fate than Trump in the White House, but I digress.)
So I told her, “Yes, for LUNCH, that’s what a lot of people eat or they carry a sandwich from home, because you’ve got a one-hour lunch, sometimes less, and you just need to eat something fast. But dinner — in our parlance the evening meal — is the main meal and that’s where you’ll find American cooking. And American cuisine is extensive.”
She was wide eyed when I told her about personally knowing how to cook Mexican food, Indian, Italian, other cuisines. I said, “Look, you know America’s the Great Melting Pot, right? Obviously, we’re going to bring our home country’s cooking with us, whether it’s lasagna or enchiladas, or curries. There’s all kinds of incredible food in the United States and no, we do not eat sandwiches primarily.”
But stereotypes die hard. And with Mr. Big Mac and fries himself back in the Oval Office, I don’t expect the negative food stereotypes to go away.
And the negative food stereotypes are the least of our problems. Dead last, in fact. Seeing how much of the government Trump can destroy is our primary, secondary, and all encompassing concern. And the world is having a good laugh at that, when it’s not agape in horror.
Hard to believe antivaxxer kennedy will fix the food problem when tyrant already got him to eat McDonald’s on the plane lol. But we do have a problem with eating the wrong quantities of some foods and far too many Americans do fit the stereotype in those two videos. Fat and eating crap, in very large quantities. Moderation and common sense should play a bigger part in our diet. Not all can eat right and exercise daily though.
Other countries don’t have near the corporate control of food supply and food quality. American meat like chicken and beef can’t be sold in Europe or many other countries because it’s too full of hormones, pesticides and bacteria, washing it in chlorine doesn’t help. The FDA already doesn’t do enough and this guy wants them to do less?
Roll on the food-poisoning epidemics and contaminated food scandals like the 1850s New York Swill Milk Scandal, th’30s organophosphate poisoning, the ’73 Michigan PBB poisoned meat scandal, the ’85 Californian Watermelon scandal and all the others.
What the RWNJs cal over regulation, those of us with brains call PROTECTION.