What happened to you, America?
Foto: Unsplash/Lena Polishko
Last night I dreamed that the Greenland secret service Donald Trump had kidnapped shortly before the inauguration. The American president was first frozen and then fed in snacks of cute seal babies, who wore all stickers with the inscription “Save the Planet”. And then I suddenly woke up in the real nightmare, in which Donald Trump had long since become the President of the United States.
What happens to you now, America? I have always had a close and emotional relationship with you, which was primarily shaped by culture. At the beginning of my teenage time, I put my first dance performances with my buddy Martin in the basement to the Gassenhauer “Kids in America” that stormed into the charts at the time. We sang loudly. We were the “Kids in America”, members of a cultural empire, as Dietmar Dath described so beautifully years ago. Before that, we had accompanied the detective Mike Stone and Stone and Steve Heller in the crime series “The streets of San Francisco” on their trips through the Bay Area every week.
A few years later, the wind turned and I indulged in the then common and rather flat US criticism, as the band “Slime” made and in the early 1990s also found in a Spanish textbook circulating in the left scene that acted by the United States as “El Enemigo Numero Uno”. But from this certainly necessary and yet too wood -cut criticism, I played out with the help of the reading by Thomas Pynchon, El Doctorow, Jonathan Lethem and Ursula Leguin and later with the texts by Silvia Federici and David Harvey.
The United States, it has occurred to me again and again in recent years, were somehow even the better sociopolitical presence. Could that be? Then what does Trump have to look for there? At first, activists had opened a tent camp near Wall Street during the financial crisis with a global media effect, and with Black Lives Matter, a movement policy wave branded through the United States, which in its severity compared many with the anti-Vietnam war movement. A lot has seemed possible in the United States in recent years.
Did an emancipatory social departure actually become, of which one could only dream here? And it was also more exciting in the USA in the parliament. While the Left Party was helplessly weakening from one crisis into the next and the Greens have become a state -supporting association for ages, the “Democratic Socialist of America” rolled up from behind the Piefy Democratic Party from behind. The election advertising videos by Alexandria Octavio Cortez (AOC), which a collective, who later founded the left media streaming platform »Means TV«, advertised with a promising working-class place that was with a pop-cultural joke. For me on my doorstep, only lame sayings about heating prices hang on the Bundestag election campaign, while AOC threw her democratic competitors out of the race in the Bronx by accusing him that he neither sends his children to the catchment school nor drink the tap water. That would be unthinkable here!
What will become of AOC and its squad that have become the ultimate enemy of the neo-fascists that have come to power in recent years? Hopefully nothing will happen to you. Like the thousands or maybe millions of people who have to fear for their papers, their political disposition or their sexual orientation whether their everyday life is blown up by an aggressive executive that sits in the starting blocks in order to implement presidential decrees.
The United States, it has occurred to me again and again in recent years, were somehow even the better sociopolitical presence. Could that be?
Philip Roth played the takeover of the fascists 21 years ago in his novel “The Plot Against America”, which was also filmed by HBO, in which Charles Lindbergh, together with Henry Ford, grind democracy and lead to anti -Semitic pogroms. “Fuck American Firmsters!” Says the female leading actress in the series and points out that this slogan was used 90 years ago by the isolationist Nazis in the USA. At that time, nobody could guess that the power combination of the President and an entrepreneur, which was so important for the parliamentary success and so important for the parliamentary success. But also in my youth that fictional stories seemed so far away in my youth that painted a civil war on the wall as in the novel “American” (2017) of the Canadian Omar El Akkad, in which the south is fighting north because of the prohibition of Combustion engines. Or the right -wing death squadrons, which are passed by Brooklyn in the film »Bushwick« (2017) and are greeted there with fiery riots. And most recently Alan Garland’s »Civil War« (2024), in which the Western Forces are folding against the right president and ultimately execut him in the White House.
Hollywood has been doing this against Trump for years and day, but it didn’t help. The wonderful future draft in the series »Watchmen« (2019), in which Robert Redford is President of an enlightened America, there are reparation payments for African -American citizens and Tulsa becomes a memorial against racism remains pure utopia. The Disney Group, which, like many companies in the United States, has changed its diversity guidelines, generally shows where the trip is going. Trump mainly leads a cultural struggle from the right. The Star Wars series offshoot “Acolyte”, which was too feminist, was stamped with the shelter after a season because right-wing internet trolls had complained in a review bombing that screenwriters dealt with the fabric.
Does Netflix remain the address to critically process the Black History of the United States, as has happened so far in series such as »When They See Us« (where Donald Trump really gets away)? And what does the quality TV brand HBO, which likes to deal against American rights as in the philip-red adaptation mentioned?
What are the writers doing now? In 2019, Jonathan Lethem released a rather lame anti-trump novel with “The Wild Detective”, which tells more about the escapism of left-liberal bourgeoisie than to formulate a position against the authoritarian horror of the American rights. Salman Rushdie Drosch 2017 in »Golden House« obviously, but also very artistically clasped, on Trump. And Thomas Pynchon also urged in 2013 in »Bleeding Edge« against the big upcoming right.
The US culture industry now has to make a lot of effort against Trump and its cultural war. Otherwise there is not much left. Then the Greenland secret service with its seal babies can no longer help in the dream.