How Freedom Became Free-dumb in America – Why the World is Horrified by the American Idiot

“Avridamah!!” shouted Matteo, from across the park. Snowy looked up at me, quizzically. It was too early for this. I grumbled, irritated. What was the Italian doctor trying to say this fine spring lockdown morning?

“Mate. Have you seen this?!” Ben, the grizzled London copper asked me, starting to cackle, as he handed me his iPhone.

There, I saw a picture of crowds of people gathered in Central Park. Then another, on California’s beaches. With, apparently, not a care in the world.

“What the hell is wrong with them? It’s not like there’s…a…global pandemic…or anything.” Ben laughed.

“You zee!” added Matteo. “Avridamah!!”

“What the — “, I began to ask. And then I got it. Freedom. As in: look at what these idiots think is freedom. LOL! Snowy looked up at me, grinning.

My dog park buddies had a pint. “Americans,” I said, sighing. I struggled for a moment, and then gesticulated. All that came out was: “They’re just…different.”

Ben rolled his eyes. Matteo sighed melodramatically. “We know, mate. Oh, we know.”

The American idiot is, by now, a figure that’s the stuff of myth and legend across the world. Nobody else is really quite sure: are Americans really like this? This…well…laughable? Yesterday, they were the kind of people who made their kids do “active shooter drills,” meaning masked men burst into classrooms…and pretend…to kill them. What the? Today, they’re the kind of people who happily congregate in parks and on beaches during a global pandemic…when the lunatic fringe amongst them isn’t protesting for “liberation” in the first place. What on earth?

I don’t use the term as an insult — the American idiot. I mean it in a precise way, as I try to remind people. For the Greeks, “idiot” carried a precise and special meaning. The person who was only interested in private life, private gain, private advantage. Who had no conception of a public good, common wealth, shared interest. To the Greeks, the pioneers of democracy, the creators of the demos, such a person was the most contemptible of all. Because even the Greeks seemed to understand: you can’t make a functioning democracy out of…idiots.

Now, I’m going to generalize. But I don’t mean that all Americans are idiots. I mean that, for example, more or less everyone who wants to carry a gun to Starbucks, deny their neighbours healthcare, make people beg for medicine online, and not let anyone in society ever retire…all of those people in the world, by and large, are Americans. Nobody else — nobody in the whole world at this point in history — thinks such things are remotely desirable. Hence, the American idiot. It means: the world’s largest and most hardened subset of idiots at this point, in the Classical Greek meaning of the word, is largely American.

You don’t have to think very hard to understand why my Italian friend laughed at such a person. We’ve had many serious conversations over the last few months. “How are things in Italy going”, I ask, trying to be gentle. He looks away, in grief, and says simply: “Dificile.” The dogs play. I wonder if his loved ones are OK. He tells me stories of a society pulling together, to fight a deadly disease, whose toll has been heavy and grave. Is it any wonder that, looking at Americans gathering in Central Park, on Long Beach, he’s shocked into laughter? We’re lucky he’s laughing. What he really feels, I’d bet, is a kind of horror, combined with contempt. The very same contempt the Greeks felt for…their idiots.

‘Freedom?’ I’d bet he thinks. ‘More like freedumb.’

When Matteo, when Ben, when every single person I know who’s not American, when the world looks at America, it sees the American idiot, and what it tries — and usually fails, because it’s lost for words — to express is something like this: can people really be this selfish? This oblivious? This…thankless? Why do they keep voting for less healthcare, retirement, education, income, savings, happiness, trust, year after year — even the so-called good ones? What kind of people…why are the literally the only people left in the whole world who do that? And then…complain bitterly about not having…the very things…they deny each other? Who can even make sense of this, the bizarre circular firing squad of social suicide that America has become? But all those, of course, are key traits of the idiot. The answer — sadly, I think — is: yes, people can really be this way.

Third_Party_

Article URL : https://eand.co/how-freedom-became-free-dumb-in-america-baee33dc6476