As an old white middle class Christian male I cannot pretend to be completely disheartened by the results of the US presidential election. In many respects it’s back to business as usual. Certainly the results were not those I had anticipated; and the ambivalence of the outcome indisputably speaks to the persisting differences of morality and philosophy among Americans. On the other hand the adherence to historic  rhetoric is curiously stabilising because it removes the necessity to think or act beyond the scope of one’s immediate and personal interests. While the clarity may be likened to the theory of the Melting Pot, one cannot escape the contemporaneous recall of the Confederacy and White Supremacy which have historically underwritten and sustained similar anthems of singularity in American society.

Making America Great Again doesn’t divert from some hardcore features of American society. I cannot help but recall my own limited experience as a child in the 1950s living in Washington DC in an upper middle class residential environment, attending Horace Mann School in the same class as Julie Nixon (whose family headed by VP Richard Nixon lived a couple of blocks from us) with a black live-in maid, when the country club in nearby Maryland was a common resource of me and my sister. It was what I recollect as a safe and secure life,  My sister and I regularly walked to school; our neighbours all were white with similar household staff. Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin were the celebrities along with Howdy Doody, Mr. Roger’s and Leave it to Beaver. The rest of the world was seldom mentioned  it wasn’t until I began attending boarding school in 1963  and JFK was assassinated that the world changed. Perhaps it was the the start of the Enemy Within heralding the ensuing suicide mania of David Koresh’s Branch Davidians cult in Waco, Texas and Timothy McVeigh’s Ohklahoma City bombing.

And now I hear screams against communists, Marxists, murderers, rapists, drug dealers and the radical left.  And build a wall. All the while school shootings increase and guns are reminders of the Wild West There is as well the tolerated threat of dictatorship and militarism and revenge in the name of God from those who last invaded the Capitol building, threatened civil war and latterly walked openly through public streets with torches while shouting “Kill the Jews”. Mention of sexuality other than rape or pornography is disapproved. Books are ritually condemned as unfavourable truths. A convicted felon, adulterer and notable liar is the president of the United States of America. The substance of oligarchy broadens.

But who’s to blame?  Upon whose account does this conclusion rest? Therein lies the really uncertain and unsettling reason, the underlying motive and intent of the American people, the unequivocal limitations of popular persuasion, the erstwhile unspoken realities. Americans have reasserted themselves and unwittingly brought to the fore decades of undisguised subterfuge of their own. Fear is a two-edged sword.