KNITTED PROMOTION | Opinion

Not everything can be transmitted in written form. I devoted nearly six hours of my life to watching one of the last public appearances featuring Donald Trump at New York’s Madison Square Garden last Sunday, and I must admit in advance that what I saw and heard , I am not capable of describing them with some hope of fidelity to someone who has not seen and heard them as I have. The adjective “indescribable” should not always be discarded. There are realities that are beyond any description. We may settle for a summary of a title, or a literal phrase in quotation marks, but there is much, much more, that will remain inaccessible to our verbal abilities.

This is generally the case with certain aspects of American life, with the scale of its natural spaces for which we have no comparison in Europe, and the exaggerated and even commodification of many of its places, attitudes, and everyday objects. Also happens with extreme dimensions: SUVs huge, Babylonian constructions like shopping centers surrounded by parking lots like excessive asphalt estates, bodies of several people, pieces of grilled red meat, half-meter sandwiches, torsos extremely tough military and police forces, Casinos where overweight retirees in Bermuda gamble on their monthly Social Security checks, megachurches the size of casinos or shopping centers; And even that which can neither be seen nor quantified: the messianic rhetoric of political speeches, the sacred theatrics of closing your eyes, raising your chin and placing your hand over your heart as the national anthem plays. , the simultaneity of extreme wealth and a poverty whose filth no European can even imagine, the contradiction between the continental diversity of the country and the infinite repetition of a series of invariable patterns, which is a numbing hypnosis when traveling on the highways: the porches. But the development of family homes with gardens and flags, the permanent expansion of the sale of second-hand cars, identical hotels that are always on the outskirts of an airport, fast food chain restaurants, warehouses such as gardening or hardware store hangars, always The same, on those highways that cross forests or deserts in a straight line, and in the background of which the skyscrapers of a city begin to stand out on the horizon. City Which will become ghostly at five o’clock in the afternoon.

The paradox of the United States is that there is no other country that seems more familiar to us, because from the moment we are born we are inundated with its images and its stories, and yet, deep down, it Very foreign to us, very strange. Bill Bryson, when he returned to his native Iowa after several years in England, wrote a book about his return and titled it lost continentThere is so much of the country, not only to foreigners, but to the natives themselves, who live in the large cities, and who disdainfully call the area between the two coasts an impenetrable vastness, fly over the countryThat distant country over which you fly by plane, a vaguely picturesque Tibet in which there prevails a theocracy of Bibles, firearms, the white race, red meat and voting for the Republican Party, is no longer the preserve of protectors in black suits, respectful accents and Country club, but that populist and apocalyptic coalition that Donald Trump started almost ten years ago.

I remember well the shock of his victory in November 2016. The guy with the unexpected hairstyle we saw on the Gossip cover New York Post and in one reality show It is even more unlikely that it was called learnerFrom one day to the next he was Barack Obama’s successor, and with his loud rich man vulgarity obliterated the mirage of elegance and racial progress symbolized by that iconic dark-skinned couple in the White House, a building built by slaves. Eight years later, we are even less able to understand the fascination that such a character held on millions of people: an oligarch who traveled in a private plane with gold-plated taps and toilets, giving him a working-class He is seen as a hero of men and women victims of poverty and stripped of any form of social security; A sexual predator who buys the silence of porn actresses and persistent ex-wives, inspiring a religious fervor close to idolatry in evangelical Christians obsessed with sin and hell; A crude sexist who publicly celebrated the size of a sports player’s genitals and has been convicted of sexual assault provokes ecstatic screams from women when he appears on stage looking like a rock star ; An admitted racist who describes illegal immigrants as murderers and rapists attracts a large percentage of voters of Asian or Latin American descent who have been in the country for less than a generation but because of their antipathy to immigrants. Already suspicious of new people. The exploited are forced to pay tribute to their exploiters, in the hope that they will leave behind those who are worse off than them.

Last Sunday’s show at Madison Square Garden was an overflow of that American reality that is impossible for us to understand, like an abscess of demonic dimensions that bursts and infects everything: an isolationist, fundamentalist and xenophobic breeding ground that will always has existed, but it was suppressed by hypocrisy or institutional power or modesty. One by one, cheered on by a crowd that did not let up its mad enthusiasm for more than six hours, Trump’s opening acts, accompanied by shrill voices threatening manhood, repeatedly lied, insulted, exaggerated, defamed. , tavern rudeness, fraud that makes it seem impossible for anyone to have confidence in his judgment: American cities have fallen into the power of gangs of murderers released from the world’s worst prisons; Hurricane victims in North Carolina do not receive help from the federal government because money that should be spent on emergencies is given to illegal immigrants living in luxury hotels; Kamala Harris, besides being incompetent and mentally challenged, is a puppet managed by her brokers for the purpose of destroying the country; He is also Satan and the Antichrist; Democrats are degenerate and low class people who hate Jews. A speaker waved a cross with the gestures of an exorcist and declared that Kamala Harris does not love Jesus Christ and does not accept people who love her at her public events. Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani assured that Palestinian children, at the age of two, are already trained to kill. Only Donald Trump can save American girls and women from rapists, murderers, alien kidnappers; For workers facing hardship; Freedom from greedy taxes for small traders. God himself had already voted that July day when he saved him from a bullet that potentially only touched his ear.

About five hours later, one of those religious and patriotic rock songs that works like exercises on the brain announced the certain arrival, the earthly presence of “the best president in the history of the world,” “the greatest of fighters.” , which he again declared, raising new roars of enthusiasm, as “the largest mass deportation in all of history.” Hearing so many praises, Always And NeverOne thing happened to me too: I have never been so scared of an election in my life.