Wooley: Clearly our US mates are not just like us at all
A man like Donald Trump wouldn’t have a hope of being elected in Australia … our even be in the running
Opinion
Don't miss out on the headlines from Opinion. Followed categories will be added to My News.
I first met Clive James when we were both filming in the same city in America.
I was part of a Channel 9 film crew: four blokes including myself.
Clive, with the BBC, had at least eight people including two beautiful young women, one who applied dulling spray to his shiny pate and another who was clutching a clipboard containing his hilarious thoughts.
No amount of spray could dull Clive’s sharp wit.
And his lovely PA scribbled to keep up.
In a short conversation I admitted to an admiration of America while being well aware of its many shortcomings. Clive agreed, though he was of the opinion that “you have to admire a country so democratic that a mentally handicapped man can become President”.
Back then he was referring to George W. Bush. The events of this week remind us that in American governance, apparently some themes are eternal.
When it became obvious early in the count that Donald Trump was back, I remembered WB Yeats’s line in his dark poem The Second Coming:
“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.”
I think that is one of the scariest lines in literature but only half as scary as the reality of American politics today.
And all the more alarming for us because despite the prophecies and prognostications most Australians didn’t see it coming. Or didn’t want to see it.
What confounds us is that in Australia a man like Trump (I don’t need to list his well-known crimes and misdemeanours) wouldn’t have a snowflake’s chance in the Tanami Desert of getting elected.
Or even running.
So, while we might be tempted to suppose that our closest allies and trans-Pacific buddies, the Americans, are just like us, clearly they are not.
“How could they elect that awful man?”
The lady behind the counter at the Dodges Ferry Bakery asked me the morning after, when I needed the comfort of a bacon-and-egg pie.
“Are the Yanks bloody crazy?” That was the question at the Lewisham Tavern later in the day. And the people asking were conservative tradies, not woke Greenies.
It was clear that Donald Trump’s election didn’t pass the pub test at the ‘Lewie’.
We don’t really understand the Americans even though when you first cross the Pacific to discover their country, you think of it as a familiar place.
You feel you already know the lay of the land even before you touch down.
Or so you think.
The streets of New York and San Francisco are instantly recognisable. You know them without going there. Those are not foreign cityscapes like Prague or Rome.
You don’t need to gawp in amazement because you have seen it all before.
When I first visited the USA it was with a sense of coming home to a place I had known since I was a kid at the Star picture theatre in Launceston. I knew it too from television shows like The Streets of San Francisco and NYPD on the Pye 23-inch black-and-white set which dominated our lounge room and my young life.
Through the movies and the television America might still be better known to Australians than many parts of our own country. In our popular culture the sight and sounds of America are so familiar in every respect it is too easy to forget that the USA is actually a very foreign country.
Until they elect a President.
In a slap in the face to progressive politics, American voters expressed more concern about the cost of living and border security than they did about Trump’s character and bad behaviour. Which should have made him manifestly unsuited to the task of leading the free world.
His meandering and often incoherent ramblings, his multitude of lies and weird assertions that illegal immigrants were eating pet cats and dogs would have had him laughed off the stage in Australia.
In America they ate it up along with those Springfield moggies and mutts.
I’ve spent a lot of time over there and long ago worked out that what the great mass of Yanks don’t have is the equivalent of that good old-fashioned Australian bullshit detector, the Pub Test.
Kamala Harris appealed to America’s better nature, to “define what unites us and not what divides us”.
The majority of Americans weren’t listening.
Perhaps she should have made a more prosaic case for border control and how to bring down prices as well as attempting the loftier goal of healing a deeply divided nation.
What has happened is not unlike the way Australians overwhelmingly rejected the Voice referendum; healing wasn’t such a bad idea, but it was badly presented.
It is often too easy to blame the electorate’s baser instincts of greed and selfishness when things don’t go the way progressives would wish.
But elections are just as often lost from poor advocacy as they are from the mean-spiritedness of the voters.
In any political appeal to people’s better nature, without a little pandering and the promise of some goodies, fear and loathing will always trump decency and altruism.
As it surely did this week in America.
Charles Wooley is a Tasmanian-based journalist
Join the conversation
‘Tall poppy syndrome is alive’: Sam Kerr fury as Australia divides
Sam Kerr’s tawdry saga has concluded – but the conversation is only now just starting about what happens next to the Matildas star. HAVE YOUR SAY
Read more
What Albo needs to do to dodge Trump’s tariffs
Anthony Albanese’s pitch to avoid Donald Trump’s tariffs is simple: we are not ripping anyone off. The President appears to have listened, but the PM has not convinced him yet.
Read more