Louise Lewis's Notebooks

A Time of Reckoning, Hillary had said!Part 6

It looks likeWednesday November 9thwas another 9/11 for many Americans who woke up or fell asleep in theearly hours with the terrible realization that the unthinkable hadindeed happened. As on June 24th,the day after the referendum on Brexit, but even more so since theremotest country feels in some ways concerned by who the president ofthe United States is, people all over the world felt bewildered andflabbergasted. I went to work and my students, who are notAmerican but French, were not smiling as they usually do. They weregloomy. Some said they were shocked, others sad, others angry. DonaldTrump's rhetoric had been so simplistic with words and phrases thatmany of us thought no one with a modicum of common sense could fallfor. He said he would make America great again. But that is just whatBarack Obama has done in his two terms of office. Barack Obama gaveback dignity to the function of president of the United States, thedignity that Georges W. Bush had tarnished with his ethnocentricunderstanding of the world which had led to very unwise foreignpolicy decisions. Donald Trump's victory appears to the world asbeing the victory of ignorance and narrow-mindedness over knowledgeand open-mindedness. It obviously says something significant aboutAmerica and the dereliction of its education system. Are allAmericans really taught in the main subjects at a sufficient level?Have they really been made to reflect and to develop logic? Thoseelection results seem to highlight a wide gap between the showcase ofthe Ivy League universities, of Silicon Valley and the Deep America,the midwest, the America of the Ku Klux Klan with its patheticrednecks selling pamphlets on the superiority of the white race,dating back to Nazi Germany. Such level of illeteracy does not fitwith the image of a highly sophisticated country. It sounds like someparts of America have not evolved much since the period of theconquest of the West. One can thus understand that theunsophisticated appearance and discourse of an uneducated man such asDonald Trump would appeal to those Americans who consider themselvesforgotten by the intellectual elite, the elite of those who succeededand reached government offices thanks to their studies in the bestuniversities. It is just that the rest of the world did not expectthose Americans, those who see themselves as left behind, to be sonumerous.

Butlet's go back to America's new president, the one whose face theworld will have, willy-nilly, to get used to seeing everyday on thenews. All through the election campaign his political platform wasalmost void. On American TV channels, I heard several timespronounced such words as unpredictable, unchartered waters. Indeed,no one knows what to expect and the worst is that he probably doesnot know himself that he does not know. America, what have thoudone?