The new politics of appeasement

IT IS NOT surprising that America gave the world Donald Trump. It is a nation reared on a greasy diet of semiotics.

- LORENZO A DAVIDS

Create a message or sign, repeat it over and over and hit the jackpot. For those of us who had some exposure to America in the 1980s, it was a country that sold motivational courses constructed on slogans, rather than intellectual content. Therefore, it is not surprising that America elected Donald Trump to lead them. He is the most intellectually incompetent president in their history. Their conflation of television personality and opulence with intelligence and success is why they elected a glaring mistake as their president. Their current problem is that now they can’t switch off the damn television, and it’s beginning to affect their health and economic well-being. Donald Trump is the Chuck Norris of bankruptcy.

What adds to the fury is that the rest of the world, including South Africa, has joined this cult of tolerance and bestows undulating honour on him. I recall my visits to Zimbabwe in the 1980s. Every news bulletin about South Africa in Zimbabwe referred to the country as “the racist republic of South Africa.” How about our media begin a process of referring to the USA as the “fascist United States of America” or to Trump as “Donald Trump, president of fascist America.” I sense that the former South African ambassador to the fascist United States of America had more moral fibre than most when he described the MAGA movement as “a white-supremacist response to growing demographic diversity in the USA” and a “supremacist assault on incumbency.”