The most powerful executive president in the entire democratic landscape has tried to stage a coup. A coup that would have, if successful, transformed the most powerful country in the world with enough nuclear weapons to fry the world many times over, into a dictatorship, manned by a madman, who could easily put the North Korean one to shame.
Many say that this incident shows America in a very bad light.
I am not so sure.
See, he is still President, and at the time of staging the coup, was the commander in chief of the US armed forces. In a country with a weaker democratic backbone, he would have surely succeeded.
There are millions who are devastated. These believe that Donald Trump won the election. All the crazy conspiracy theories are ardently swallowed by not only many Americans, but also a substantial number of the far right in India, and that includes evangelical Christians.
“Hey”- one of them tells me- “Trump may go, but the idea will live. It will not die.”
And what, pray tell, is the idea?
The idea that there are many cultures, and that they are mutually exclusive. There are no universal values that we can agree on. Each should strive for greatness, on its own, and that this idea is bigger than any truth.
In fact, no truth exists, and all truths should be seen through the lens of ethnocentrism, and barely concealed xenophobia. And suitable adjustments should be made to it.
Hell, man. This is the new idea? This is the same idea based on which the entire world functioned till very recently. This is the same idea that spawned millions of years of cannibalism, genocide, rape, slavery, mass slaughter, horrible punishments and crushing inequality. What is so new and superior about it?
Nothing. Nothing.
(Jimmy Mathew)
