The World Sees Trump’s America as a Sad Joke

There is still and always will be transcendent American culture. But I’ve never seen anything like this. For years, they called us fat—but bellies are made of pleasure, and the world still loved McDonald’s. For years, Europeans spoke of Ugly Americans: brash, impatient, loud. But it was that admiring complaint you have about your favorite son, your big brother. They also longed to visit us here in our great cities, as yet unoccupied by ICE goons and gauleiters.

By identifying the new signature American pose with the opioid crisis, which has killed nearly 600,000 over just the last five years, the video damned our society the way only movement, as root language, can. It’s a portrait of soft power gone to mush, and of a crisis that singularly shows how the full spectrum of society has contributed to a declining America with her hamster judiciary, her zombie Congress, and her senile warlord in chief.

This is the United States under Trump: folded, trapped in limbo for three more years of—exactly what the Greenlanders showed us so bravely, against his menace—being propped up by habit, momentum, denial, instinct: a society whose legs stand only sturdily enough to deny the legibility and respite of true collapse.