American Diaspora
I don’t know if I’m the first to use the phrase “American diaspora” in reference to the Trump era, the emptying of America of its great minds. We’ve all gotten into taxicabs in American airports, driven by quiet, brooding Asian men who were doctors in their country of origin, fleeing to the USA because their own country had shrunk to the size of a tyrant’s playground. A true American Diaspora — an utter reversal of these roles — will be a new thing, an absolutely new thing for us. Just as Hitler chased brilliant minds out of Germany because he hated “Jew Science,” so our modern Hitler is ridding America of “woke science,” in this case, making it difficult for brilliant people to live and work here. And right on cue, earlier today, just to emphasize how deeply Trump hates intelligence, he stood at the mic at the UN General Assembly and claimed he ended the war between Armenia and Cambodia, two countries thousands of miles apart, who’ve never experienced any conflict with each other.
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My son is a research MD, a department head at Melbourne University, pulling together great minds to solve the many puzzles of addiction — what is it, how to treat it, etc. These days, practicing Down Under, thousands of miles from where he was born and raised, he receives applications from the USA, not only from fellow MDs or scholars or candidates for top positions, but from desperate doctors, “Just give me something, I’ll take anything, I need to get out.” Soon, he suspects, it’ll be American doctorate candidates acting as his Uber Driver to and from the airport. No more disgruntled Sri Lankan refugees driving him wordlessly around Brooklyn or Manhattan. It will be us Americans who are adrift, having lost our place in the world, the Western world no longer caring what we think, what we buy, what we read or listen to, how we vote, where we learn, or how we see ourselves in this new, approaching world, people will grow tired of hearing about our fall from grace, our full-throated embrace of a world-destroying moron, charging headlong into catastrophes that were totally avoidable, our nation tolerated by the Western World until it became clear that our Orange-headed Mussolini had turned out all the lights.
We’ll settle in as “just Americans,” that sad nation without vaccines, where women are frowned upon for taking Tylenol, that nation where skilled, foreign workers are rounded up and put in cages. We’ll be the huddled, sane Americans, far from home. It will be us driving cabs, shuttling around the new intelligencia, speaking a language that we now had better bloody well learn. We’ll be washing their dishes, pumping gas, hoping that our application to some Grad program from the University of Barcelona or Prague will be looked upon favorably, and we’ll settle into a lower place in the world, a world in which no one really wants to hear about Yankee Stadium, Hollywood, the Grand Canyon or our blessed nation stretching from sea to shining sea. We’ll fade into “loser” status, a tribe of lower-case laborers, cheap knock-offs blown downstream from Canada. We’ll be the Yanquis, the nation that carved out its very own downward spiral, the nation that sharpened a sword for other heads, but then fell on it.
