Face it, most Americans don’t even know what the word “dichotomy” means.

Lockdown progress report for May 7, 2020

Total words: 0 (haven’t started yet)
Manuscript total: 57,249

I keep reading news articles with desperate public health officials repeating the same thing over and over again:

Choosing between keeping people alive and reopening the economy is a false dichotomy.

– Public health officials, like, everywhere

The trouble is that their words are falling on deaf ears, because far too many Americans probably can’t even define the word “dichotomy.”

Ugh, America. You arrogant giant.

The only time I feel the least bit patriotic is during when the Olympics, when some American athlete is standing on the podium being awarded a medal while our national anthem plays. The athlete starts to cry, and then I start to cry, and then I have this swelling of sentiment in my chest for this too-large, too-proud-of-itself country of mine.

There are a lot of great things about the United States, I remember for a moment. Stephen Spielberg is American, for example. So was Stan Lee. So there’s that. Also: basketball.

But then the anthem ends and I go back to just covering my face with my hands. These past three-and-a-half years with the orange national embarrassment known as Donald Trump at our helm, I have felt the urge to lie about my nation of origin while traveling abroad more than every.

(“I’ll just tell them I’m Canadian if they ask. Everybody loves Canadians.”)

I didn’t think it could get any worse, and then the coronavirus came along.

I just have no words.

The thing about the orange disaster who currently occupies the White House is that he is a symptom, not a cause.

I think about 70 percent of Americans are reasonably intelligent, good human beings. But 30 percent of my country(wo)men — who may still be intelligent, good human beings — hold weird right-wing views that are only getting weirder.

Fully supported by the orange disaster, they consistently insist upon railing against an imaginary “Deep State” and doing things like this:

Oh yes, gentlemen in the photo. You’re such patriots by defying the stay-at-home orders meant to keep you and your loved ones safe. And with automatic weapons — good idea! That will definitely prove your patriotism and make your Deep State boogeyman quiver in its boots.

What makes them like this?

I’m not exactly sure what turns 30 percent of the country into the people in the photo above. My guess is that it’s a combination of a lot of things, but it starts with the myth of America’s greatness itself. From reciting the Pledge of Allegiance to the American flag from kindergarten, to the concept of Manifest Destiny that never really went away even after we realized that the genocide of Native Americans was an asshole move, and finally to the other false concept of America being a meritocracy, which in turn has led to a too-rosy picture of the American dream, we’ve brainwashed ourself as a country to believe that all of us not only CAN be successful but SHOULD be successful.

And if you really believe in those American folktales and work as hard as you can but you still don’t get anywhere in life? Your town’s manufacturing jobs go away and your family loses the farm it’s owned for four generations and your small town gets smaller every year?

Well, then. You’ll need someone to blame. And you can’t blame America, because America is beautiful (true, actually), and a democracy (somewhat true), and everyone who works hard can get ahead (not the whole truth). So it’s much easier to invent the Deep State boogeyman and blame IT than reckon with the fact that America has always had deep-seated, systemic inequalities that were gradually but inevitably designed to help the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

And ironically, some of those same systemic problems are in place precisely BECAUSE America has always believed its own press.

Ending on a positive note.

I honestly try not to rant too often on my blog. After all, I’m a nobody author, not a public official. People don’t really care about my political opinions; if they want to know anything at all, it’s when my next book is coming out. Most people probably skip my political posts. That’s fine; I get it. But I’ve got to vent this frustration somewhere, and after all it’s my own damn blog.

When I do rant, I always make an effort to end with something positive, so today I want to end with a story I read this morning in The Washington Post.

For all that I complain about America and crazy Americans, there is also something in our national character that makes us prone to birthing women like Rhonda Shearer, a New York City-based artist who took out a $600,000 home equity loan on her Manhattan residence so that she could personally buy and distribute PPE to hospital staff in some of the poorest, hardest-hit neighborhoods in her hometown.

Honestly, read the article. It will give you hope. But if you’re not going to, here’s the 1-minute summary:

Basically, Rhonda saw the difficulty of red tape and bureaucracy slowing down getting protective equipment to hospital workers and she was like, “Screw this. I can do a better job my own damn self.” So she worked with contacts she’d made from the last time she’d taken on a project like this — distributing equipment at Ground Zero after the 9/11 attacks — and got her hands on a s*ton of PPE.

At first she tried giving out the PPE she acquired through official channels, but that took forever, so she decided to hand it out from the back of a truck she managed to wrangle.

How about that.

American ingenuity at work. That’s what we’re supposed to be about — solving problems with creativity and gumption and outside-the-box thinking. The idiots with guns standing outside state capitol buildings could learn a thing or two about real patriotism from Rhonda.