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How others see us
We are no longer a picture of health (if we ever were)
Writing in the Canberra (Australia) Times (July 11, 2020), Crispin Hull, former editor of the Times, put a jarring coda to the herky-jerky, disjointed Ivesian symphony that has become the sad opus of American politics. In Hull’s view,
“The underlying weakness in present U.S. democracy is that partisanship has become so extreme that the nation is incapable of dealing with the major issues that face it. COVID-19 has illustrated that starkly, with every word and act predicated on party allegiance. Meanwhile, other problems like race, police violence, gun control, inequality, the health system, climate change and energy policy go unattended.”
Hull’s critique of the state of American politics and the general decline in comity and reason initially struck me as a rather harsh and imperfect painting of our nation’s condition.
Harsh but warranted critiques
However well-meaning, criticism offered by a friend is often harder to swallow than any malign…
