As if confirmation were needed that the United States has completely lost touch with reality, last week bought three startling images. First up we had Alabama Senator, Katie Britt, delivering a reply to Joe Biden’s State of the Union address, so weird it defied parody (although Scarlett Johansson would give it a go on Saturday Night Live). Sitting in a completely bare, beige-coloured kitchen, without so much as a tea towel in sight, fresh-faced Katie was obviously supposed to come across as a young mum – very relatable to y’all middle class suburban voters. What was her devastating conclusion? “Our future starts around kitchen tables just like this one. With moms and dads just like you.”
The entire thing was like a throwback to ye olde ideas of “the American Dream”, a phrase that recurred with monotonous regularity. (“…but now the American Dream has become a nightmare”). It was like a bedtime story being read to small children by a smiling, evil mommy dearest who wanted to scare them to death. Katie’s face went though the entire spectrum of emotions: smiling sunnily, growing solemn, turning psycho, smirking, holding back tears… The only problem was that none of these expressions corresponded to the words coming out of her mouth.
The more dire the tale she had to tell, the more gaily she beamed out at us. When she talked about being a mom (about 600 times) she looked as if she’d like to carve up the kids with a switchblade. And those poor kids! Their names are Bennett and Ridgeway! Imagine going through life in Alabama sounding as if you were a brand of golf club. Aren’t these exactly the kind of names that empty-headed, pretentious people would think sounded really classy?
All smiles, Katie suddenly turned dark, telling us how she had personally gone down to the De Rio sector of Texas and spoken with a woman who had been raped by Mexican gangsters. “She told me not just that she was raped every day but how many times a day…” Thankfully she didn’t provide the actual stats, but it was lurid enough to prompt most moms to send the kids straight to bed.
After the speech, plenty of people pointed out this incident actually happened 20 years ago, under Geoerge W. Bush, and took place in Mexico. It had nothing to do with Joe Biden or his border policies, and nothing to do with the USA. The entire story was a lurid beat-up intended to scare voters into believing Biden was opening the borders to waves of gangsters, drug fiends, murderers and rapists.
This was followed by another gruesome tale, of Laken Riley, a “beautiful 22-year-old nursing student”, who was murdered by an alleged ilegal immigrant and has now suffered the posthumous fate of becoming a political poster girl for a Republican scare campaign.
“She never got the opportunity to return home,” emoted Katie. “She was brutally murdered… This could have been my daughter. This could have been yours.” Half-crazed look, angry look, smirk of self-satisfaction, smile.
Is this the new face of US politics? The SOTU reply turned into an advertisement for good, ole-fashioned values? The idea that a woman’s place is in the kitchen, telling bloodcurdling stories of rape and murder? Smiling ecstatically?
This comes on behalf of a party that will not accept even the smallest gun controls that might put a brake on the mass shootings now a part of everyday American life; whose annointed leader is a convicted sex offender; and that just sunk a border deal they had themselves negotiated and agreed upon – because Trump told them he wants the border to remain a live political issue. And as for Katie’s out-of-the-blue pitch for how much Republicans love invitrofertilisation, well they didn’t love it much last week when Alabama wanted to ban it.
This was bad acting, but so much more. It shows a party with no policies, concerned only with trying to seize power, pushing hatred, lies and scare campaigns. The republican moral compass is well and truly smashed.
Look also at the photo of Trump posing with the family and friends of Laken Riley. He’s holding up a poster with her face on it. He’s signed the poster with a flourish and left the sharpie parked on the top edge, impinging on the photo. Once again, he’s smiling insanely, as if this is a great celebration, and a big political rally. Note the massed America flags.
Finally, a new poster announces: “Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene leads a hearing on investigating the black market of baby organ harvesting.”
Marge is so thrilled to be taking part in this anti-abortion special hearing that she is smiling out at us as if it were a toothpaste commercial.
A raped and trafficked Mexican teen, a murdered nursing student, baby organ harvesting…. these are the things that make today’s Republicans smile. Simple, all-American pleasures.
The art column this week is devoted to the 24th Biennale of Sydney, subtitled Ten Thousand Suns. I tried, I honestly tried, to like it, but there is far too much political claptrap and too many works of dubious merit for me to sustain any enthusiasm. Spread across six venues (seven, if we count a projection on the Opera House), it sends a brutal reminder of Sydney’s lack of adequate public transport, and parking. As for the art, there’s probably a worthwhile piece or two at every venue, but the standard is decidedly patchy – a lot of things must have seemed like a good idea when the show was being planned.
As this is the Biennale, I’ll aim to come back for a second look in a few weeks and see if first impressions were deceiving.
The movie being reviewed is Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction, a fable of racial bad faith that earned Jeffrey Wright an Oscar nomination. Although there is a lot of lugubrious family drama in this story, the satirical hits are well aimed. Unfortunately, it’s only viewable on Amazon Prime, but I’m probably under-estimating the number of people who subscribe to this service. By now, all the world must be hooked up to Amazon Prime.
With satire and black comedy, it’s OK to smile. The problem in America is that real life has become a black comedy, where, as Katie Britt has shown, no-one knows any more when they should be smiling, and when they should be hiding under the bed.