Brasil-Japão: 125 anos do Tratado de Amizade: exposições e guias culturais da Japan House de SP

 

O importante Tratado de Amizade Brasil-Japão completa 125 anos em 2020 e, para marcar a integração da comunidade japonesa que imigrou para o Brasil, a Japan House São Paulo promove a ação “Caminhos Brasil | Japão” no dia 06/dez, domingo, a partir das 10h. Com duração de cerca de 1h30, a caminhada contará com 6 diferentes percursos pela cidade de São Paulo que celebram os temas Artes, Atualidades, Cultura, Esportes,Gastronomia e Memórias Brasil e Japão.  *O evento será transmitido ao vivo no site da JHSP e o público, de casa, poderá escolher qual caminho quer acompanhar de maneira online.

Conheça os personagens e os convidados de cada trajeto:

Rota Artes: Mauro Sousa, filho do cartunista Mauricio de Sousa e diretor da Mauricio de Sousa Produções, será o personagem do trajeto Artes e será acompanhado pelos artistas Zezão, Gabriel Ribeiro (Gabs) e Catarina Gushiken.  Partindo do Pavilhão Japonês no Parque do Ibirapuera, passam pelo Monumento em Homenagem aos Pioneiros da Imigração Japonesa, local que representa a história da imigração, do começo com a agricultura e o café consolidando a grande parceria e amizade dos dois países, pelo Hotel Unique, com a exuberante arquitetura de Ruy Ohtake, com design incapaz de passar despercebido e pela Galeria Joh Mabe, onde serão recebidos por Yugo Mabe Junior e chegarão à JHSP 5,3km depois.

Rota Esportes: O percurso esportivo tem início no Jardim Japonês localizado no Parque da Aclimação. Ao longo de 4,2 km, o nosso guia é Pedro Henrique Gonçalves da Silva, mais conhecido como Pepê Gonçalves, canoísta olímpico de slalom, um dos atletas de maior destaque do Brasil, classificado para representar o país nos Jogos Olímpicos de Tóquio. Para conversar sobre a contribuição da imigração japonesa para o esporte brasileiro, juntam-se a Pepê o jornalista Marcelo Duarte e os atletas Fernando Kuroda, Thais Makino, Rogério Saito e Patricia Hamamoto. O trajeto em direção à JHSP passa pelo Instituto Fukuda, onde o grupo encontra Ricardo Fukuda, coordenador artístico da instituição, e a Associação Kumamoto Kenjin do Brasil, que promove a cultura da província de Kumamoto em nosso país.

Rota Atualidades: O jornalista Ricardo Cruz é o personagem do trajeto Atualidades e encontra pelo caminho Rafael Gushiken, com quem conversa sobre diferentes temas atuais do Japão. Partindo do Fundação Mokiti Okada, onde conversam com o presidente da instituição, Marco Antonio Baptista Resende, e o especialista em cultura japonesa, Erisson Thompson. Em seguida, rumam para a Associação Hokkaido, passando pela Escola de Educação Infantil Multicultural Brasil Japão Mutsumi Youtien, que ensina japonês desde o berçário, e encontram as anfitriãs Saniy Onishi e Yuka Shimizu. Antes de alcançar a JHSP, eles realizam uma última parada na Associação Ishikawa-Ken, dedicada à promoção da cultura da província de Ishikawa, completando o percurso de 4 km.

Rota Gastronomia: Em celebração à riqueza e à diversidade da gastronomia japonesa, este trajeto de 4,2 km é encabeçado por Telma Shiraishi, chef do restaurante Aizomê, e Hideki Uehara, fundador do GoHanGo e cozinheiro do Tamashii Ramen. Telma e Hideki iniciam o caminho na Rua Conde de Sarzedas – conhecida também como Rua dos Japoneses – como forma de celebrar o local que desde 1912, quando passou a ser ocupada por novos moradores vindos do Japão, significa esperança por dias melhores para os imigrantes. A primeira parada do trajeto será na Associação Okinawa Kenjin do Brasil e, de lá, Telma e Hideki seguem para a feira da Praça da Liberdade, onde conversam sobre a história da relação entre Brasil e Japão pelo ponto de vista das comidas e bebidas, sobre pastelarias, izakayas, mercados e restaurantes. Ao longo do caminho rumo à JHSP, eles encontram personalidades do universo gastrônomico, como Yoshi Higuchi, do izakaya Kintaro, Cesar Yukio, chef pâtissier e referência em confeitaria contemporânea japonesa, conhecida como Yogashi, e o chef e sumotori Taka Higuchi.

Rota Cultura: Eric Klug, presidente da Japan House São Paulo, é o nosso guia no trajeto que celebra a contribuição cultural da imigração japonesa e os 129 anos da Avenida Paulista, principal corredor cultural da cidade de São Paulo. Ele inicia sua caminhada no Instituto Moreira Salles, onde é recebido pelo superintendente-executivo Marcelo Araújo, passando em seguida pelo Hotel Blue Tree, onde encontra a presidente do grupo, Chieko Aoki, e pelo Museu de Arte de São Paulo, o MASP. No caminho, Eric encontra Toshio Ichikawa, presidente do Kenren, a Federação das Associações de Províncias do Japão no Brasil, que o acompanha em parte do trajeto, em direção ao Centro Cultural Fiesp/Sesi. O caminho inclui ainda a escultura Tomie Ohtake, momento em que conversam com Akira Kusunoki, cônsul geral adjunto do Consulado Geral do Japão em São Paulo, além do Itaú Cultural e do SESC Avenida Paulista, onde encontram-se com Aurea Leszczynski Vieira Gonçalves, gerente de relações internacional da instituição. Eric passa ainda pela Casa das Rosas, antes de completar o percurso de 2,6 km até a JHSP.

Rota Memórias Brasil e Japão: O nosso guia na caminhada de 3,7 km que tem início no bairro da Liberdade, berço da Imigração Japonesa no Brasil, é Claudio Kurita, diretor de operações, eventos e institucional da JHSP. Na Liberdade, Kurita parte da sede do Jornal Nikkey Shimbun, importante veículo de comunicação da comunidade nipo-brasileira. Ao longo de seis paradas, Kurita revisita suas memórias familiares e recebe como convidados Hayao Hirata, Pedro Yuri Tani Souza e Seiko Tani. O caminho, então, continua pelo Largo da Pólvora, pelo Nikkey Palace, pela sede do Bunkyo (Sociedade Brasileira de Cultura Japonesa e de Assistência Social), onde o grupo é recebido por Renato Ishikawa, presidente da instituição, seguindo pelo Templo SotoZen, pelo Yamaguchi Kenjin e pelo Hiroshima Kenjinkai do Brasil, até a chegada à JHSP.

Ao todo, as 6 rotas somam 24 quilômetros de importantes histórias, memórias e celebrações, que permanecerão como legado para a cidade de São Paulo e disponíveis, posteriormente, para todos que tiverem interesse em percorrer os roteiros e aprender ainda mais sobre a centenária união nipo-brasileira.  Quando: 06/dez, domingo, a partir de 10h Onde: assista, ao vivo, aqui Siga nossas redes sociais para acompanhar todas as novidades sobre o evento Caminhos Brasil | Japão:

Reflexões sobre um personagem que anda à procura de um autor (com a devida licença de Pirandello) — Paulo Roberto de Almeida

 Reflexões sobre um personagem que anda à procura de um autor (com a devida licença de Pirandello)

Paulo Roberto de Almeida

O Josias de Souza chamou o patético personagem — a quem eu chamo de chanceler acidental — de “sub-chanceler”. 

Acho que faz sentido, mas não todo o sentido. Tem muito mais coisas atrás dessa pobre filosofia.

Lula já tinha inventado a figura do “sub do sub”, mas falando de ninguém menos do que o USTR de Bush, Robert Zoellick.

Bolsonaro queria um “sub do sub” no Itamaraty. Acabou achando, sem ser preciso ler “Trump e o Ocidente” (que, de resto, ele não entenderia nada).

O rapaz perdeu um tempo enorme fazendo um blog cheio de altas considerações metapolíticas e metahistoricas, para meia dúzia de leitores. Ignaros além de tudo.

É um escritor sem leitores, para gente que só queria um pau-mandado no Itamaraty.

Como aquele coronel do Garcia Marquez, que “no tenia quien le escribiera”, o rapaz não tem quem o leia. Está mais para mero escrevinhador das alucinações alheias.

Na verdade e de fato, acho que está mais para capacho de toda essa gente: do degenerado, do Rasputin OC, do Zero Três, do Robespirralho, do Trump e do Pompeo, de quem mais?

É o sub do sub do servilismo automático...

Acho que o cara deve se angustiar, na frente do espelho, antes de ir dormir, toda noite.

Aliás, deve ser difícil conciliar o sono, pensando e remoendo tanta humilhação diariamente, constantemente, cada uma pior que a outra. 

O Serviço Médico do Itamaraty vai ter de conseguir uma equipe inteira de conselheiros “espirituais”, depois que terminar o sofrimento: um psicanalista, um psiquiatra, um psicólogo, um neurologista, um curandeiro, das várias escolas combinadas: um freudiano, um outro junguiano, não pode faltar um lacaniano, talvez um reichiano, quem sabe um marcusiano? (êpa!), um umbandista, o pessoal da canabis recreativa, do Santo Daime, whatever, whoever...

Deve ser duro de aguentar ter de trabalhar para gente tão ignara, que o vigia de perto: ninguém ali leu Also Sprach Zarathustra no original, ninguém penetrou nos segredos da Imitação de Cristo, ninguém pensou na batalha de Salamina como a salvação do Ocidente antes do Ocidente vir a ser o Ocidente, nem o Trump, que nunca ouviu falar de Spengler, muito menos de Toynbee, que achava que os EUA já tinham entrado em decadência aí por 1947...

Deve ser duro para o rapaz: podia estar escrevendo novelinhas distópicas, mas foi se meter com um bando de bárbaros fundamentalistas. 

Será que já está arrependido?

Se não está agora, se sentindo todo poderoso, protegido pelo degenerado e seus rebentos, vai se sentir depois, quando a festa acabar.

Imaginem o “corredor polonês” virtual do Itamaraty, quando a luz apagar e os lambe-botas se afastarem? Como é que vai ser?

Amanhã vai ser outro dia, como diria o seu compositor favorito...

Pois é, agora é tarde para se arrepender.

Devia ter pensado antes.

Mas, sempre tem compositor com Réquiem já preparado: assim acaba uma carreira.

Não vou antecipar o julgamento da história. Eu mesmo vou fazer a crônica dos tempos presentes e passados: aliás, já está no quarto volume, só falta encontrar um título accrocheur, que não pode ser RIP evidentemente. Deve ter algum slogan latino apropriado. Preciso sacar o meu Cícero, o meu Virgílio, quem sabe até um Dante? Talvez encontre alguma sugestão no Metapolítica 17, alguma coisa com laivos wagnerianos...

Nada menos abaixo da sua desimportância para a história da diplomacia brasileira...

Paulo Roberto de Almeida 

Brasília, 28/11/2022

Vocação de pária: editorial da FSP, sobre o conflito bananinha embaixada da China

 O QUE A FOLHA PENSA

Texto não assinado que expressa a opinião da Folha

  ITAMARATY

Vocação de pária

Não contente em atacar China, Bolsonaro deixa filho gerar crise fazendo o mesmo

O deputado Eduardo Bolsonaro (PSL-SP) - Mandel Ngan - 30.ago.19/AFP

FSP, 26.nov.2020 às 23h15

 

Qualquer pessoa pode ser perdoada se, por ignorância, desconhecer que China e Estados Unidos são as maiores economias do mundo. Um homem público desprezar que ambos são os maiores parceiros comerciais do Brasil, isso já é de uma nescidade indesculpável.

Esse tem sido o saldo da diplomacia brasileira sob Jair Bolsonaro, com Ernesto Araújo no Itamaraty e o deputado Eduardo Bolsonaro (PSL-SP) na camarilha familiar. O trio arruína a imagem do país, coadjuvado pelo ministro do Meio Ambiente, Ricardo Salles.

O filho 03 protagonizou a crise mais recente com a China. Seu pai já criara atrito desnecessário ao pôr em dúvida a segurança da vacina Coronavac, e o parlamentar completou o golpe em área ainda mais estratégica ao reiterar suspeita de espionagem embutida na tecnologia chinesa de telefonia 5G.

Eduardo macaqueia, com isso, os ataques do republicano Donald Trump contra a concorrência asiática, sob o pretexto de risco para a segurança nacional. Claro está que não se deve menosprezar tal possibilidade, até porque a Presidência do Brasil já foi vítima de bisbilhotagem eletrônica, só que praticada desde Washington.

Se é que algum dia fez sentido o alinhamento automático com um destrambelhado como Trump (nunca fez), após sua derrota na eleição a conduta se torna irresponsável. Bolsonaro se isola ainda mais como pária internacional ao permanecer como um dos últimos a não reconhecer a vitória do democrata Joe Biden.

O fanatismo ideológico da família nada tem de inofensivo. Além de ser filho do presidente, Eduardo é parlamentar e, mais, preside a Comissão de Relações Exteriores da Câmara. Deveria refletir antes de publicar qualquer bobagem em redes sociais.

A tripla condição de destaque aparece registrada na violenta nota de reação da embaixada chinesa. O texto publicado ignora o habitual comedimento diplomático ao aludir a possíveis “consequências negativas”, caso a retórica bolsonarista não seja contida.

O Brasil destina para a China seu maior volume de exportações (estimados US$ 60 bilhões neste ano) e tem com ela seu maior superávit comercial (US$ 32,5 bilhões até outubro). Pequim pode bem retaliar os arroubos brasileiros, por exemplo com barreiras não tarifárias, ou talvez perfilar-se com Joe Biden e a União Europeia para isolar o Brasil no front ambiental.

Salles e Araújo, pelo menos, podem ser contidos por Jair Bolsonaro, caso o presidente um dia desperte para o dano que infligem. Bem mais difícil de imaginar é que consiga refrear a incontinência do herdeiro, já que não se cansa de dar-lhe o mau exemplo.

editoriais@grupofolha.com.br

 

"I love you Trump" perde o seu objeto: Bolsonaro ainda insiste na resistência a Biden - Frederic Puglie (Washington Times)

 Newfound flexibility? Defiant Bolsonaro not rushing to embrace Biden

By Frederic Puglie - Special to The Washington Times 

Thursday, November 26, 2020

In the wee hours of election night Nov. 3, the president’s son tweeted a screenshot of Michigan vote totals purporting to show a sudden jump in favor of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden.

“Strange,” he noted ironically.

But what may sound like Donald Trump Jr. in truth came from Eduardo Bolsonaro, the congressman and third son of a man who has long and enthusiastically embraced his “Trump of the Tropics” moniker: Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro.

Several foreign leaders who forged strong personal bonds with President Trump — including Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — over the past four years face challenges adjusting to the prospect of a Biden administration. But nowhere may the whiplash be as severe as in Brasilia.

Having openly endorsed President Trump’s bid for reelection, the leader of South America’s largest and most populous nation now finds himself having to deal with a man he all but called a danger to his country as recently as two weeks ago — and one who has had some pointed criticisms of the populist Brazilian leader to boot.

“We heard a great candidate for head of state say that if I don’t put out the fire in the Amazon, he’ll put up trade barriers against Brazil. How can we react to all that?” Mr. Bolsonaro said on Nov. 10.

“Diplomacy alone won’t do,” he cautioned. “When you’re out of spit, you need gunpowder.”

The remark was but the latest sign the confrontational Mr. Bolsonaro sees no immediate intent to ingratiate himself with Mr. Biden, who had threatened the former army captain with “significant economic consequences” should he refuse to “stop tearing down the forest” in exchange for a $20 billion payment.

Not surprisingly, Mr. Bolsonaro is one of the last major holdouts who has yet to formally acknowledge Mr. Biden’s apparent electoral victory, so long as his friend Mr. Trump refuses to formally concede the race.

But also characteristically, Mr. Bolsonaro’s defiance is not so much about alienating Mr. Biden or placating Mr. Trump as it is about promoting none other than Mr. Bolsonaro, said Ambassador Paulo Roberto de Almeida, a former director of the IPRI think tank at Brazil’s foreign ministry.

“He must know that Trump lost and that Joe Biden will be the next president,” Mr. de Almeida said. “But since he embodied this ‘anti-multilateralist, anti-globalist, pro-American, anti-Chinese, anti-communist and so on’ position, he sticks to it.”

And while Mr. Bolsonaro’s refusal so far to congratulate — much less offer to work with — Mr. Bidenmay unnerve Brazil’s foreign policy establishment, his inner circle continues to egg him on, Mr. de Almeida added.

“Bolsonaro depends on his immediate advisers: [foreign policy adviser] Filipe Martins; son No. 3, Eduardo Bolsonaro; and Foreign Minister Ernesto Araujo,” he detailed. “Those three kept Bolsonaro from ending [his] silence about the [Biden] victory.”

And little suggests Mr. Bolsonaro is about to turn into a second Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, Mexico’s leftist president who — despite his political leanings — was able to forge an unexpectedly respectful and productive relationship with Mr. Trump, his ideological opposite.

Mr. Bolsonaro “doesn’t seem like he’s really ready to backtrack and find ways of working with Biden,” said Peter Hakim, president emeritus of the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington think tank. “In part, it’s [because] Brazil is certainly less dependent on the United States than Mexico.”

Running in 2022

In the medium term, then, the fate of Washington-Brasilia relations may well depend on what Mr. Bolsonaro concludes is his best campaign strategy to win a second term two years from now.

“Whatever he does with regard to relations with the United States — what he looks for in the United States — will be in reference to his [reelection],” Mr. Hakim cautioned.

The Brazilian president, who has remained buoyant in the polls despite the country’s devastating fight with the coronavirus, has shown a tactical ability to be flexible on the policy front.

Having initially championed his Economy Minister Paulo Guedes’s pro-market fiscal conservatism, Mr. Bolsonaro this year switched course to allow for generous government handouts amid the coronavirus pandemic — one big reason, analysts say, for an unprecedented bump in his approval numbers.

“After a blustery, Trump-like start that he is going to make these huge changes in the way Brazilfunctions and he’s not going to follow the rules,” Mr. Hakim quipped, “he has [now] recognized the value of getting something done.”

And though the Nov. 15 first round of municipal elections saw Bolsonaro-backed candidates lose key mayoral races, the overall success of center-right forces, ironically, turned out to be good news.

“In truth, he gained strength,” Brasilia-based political consultant Vera Galante noted. “He ends up strengthened in Congress, and also in the states, even though his candidates were defeated.”

Which version of Mr. Bolsonaro — the 2019 ideologue or the 2020 pragmatist — will show up for the 2022 campaign, then, is, more than ever, anybody’s guess.

“He has a real dilemma facing him,” Mr. Hakim said. “Does he use his populist strongman approach? … Or is the best to try to get the economy going again? He would like to do both, but there are trade-offs there for him.”

The dilemma is real, political scientist Lucas de Abreu Maia agreed. But economic realities will ultimately force Mr. Bolsonaro’s hand, the former O Estado de S. Paulo reporter added.

“He is in a very tough position, actually, because he has to please his domestic audience — but the Brazilian economy cannot afford to have anything but [a] good relationship with the U.S.,” Mr. de Abreu Maia said. “Brazil needs the U.S. a lot more than the U.S. needs Brazil.”

And plenty of influential forces will be pushing Mr. Bolsonaro to at least try to mend fences with his new American counterpart, Mr. Hakim said.

“The agricultural lobby, the business community and the military — and even many of the evangelicals,” he said, “are going to press him to find a way to patch up relations with Biden.”

To do that, though, all roads lead back to the Amazon, whose deforestation pits Mr. Bolsonaro’s trademark talking points — sovereignty, national pride, development — against Mr. Biden’s assertion of an “existential threat” from climate change and his determination to make climate change a centerpiece of U.S. economic and foreign policy.

“Trade relations, trade negotiations, trade agreements,” Mr. Hakim enumerated, “are going to be very hard for Brazil to secure without a real reversal on Bolsonaro’s Amazon policy.”

In fact, Mr. Biden’s mention of the Amazon in the first presidential debate was the first time he had seen a purportedly domestic issue come up so prominently in a foreign campaign, economist Marcio Pochmann said.

“The Amazon issue, in truth, is an international debate,” said Mr. Pochmann, the former president of the Perseu Abramo Foundation linked to the opposition Workers’ Party.

About-face?

And given Mr. Bolsonaro’s newfound flexibility on a variety of issues, another about-face is certainly within the realm of the possible, he suggested.

“I wouldn’t rule out Bolsonaro changing positions” on the international scene, Mr. Pochmann said.

Getting along with Mr. Biden could certainly help Brasilia stay at the top of the South American pecking order, Ms. Galante suggested.

“President Bolsonaro will want to re-establish [Brazilian] hegemony in the region, and for that he needs the United States,” she said.

But any “flexibility” could easily cut both ways, Mr. Pochmann cautioned, pointing to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s conspicuous display of camaraderie toward Mr. Bolsonaro at last week’s virtual BRICS summit of major emerging economies.

And if anything, the former congressman — who during his 20-year career in politics has switched party allegiances no fewer than eight times — has a history of digging in, not dropping out.

Mr. Bolsonaro’s animosity toward Argentine President Alberto Fernandez — by all accounts mutual — seems to have survived countless attempts at reconciliation. And his jabs against China have already cost Brazil dearly, Mr. de Almeida said. At the BRICS summit — a loose grouping of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — Beijing quietly withdrew its longstanding endorsement of an expanded role for Brasilia at the United Nations.

A telltale sign of what course Mr. Bolsonaro wants to take toward the Biden administration, analysts agreed, will likely be the fate of Mr. Araujo, his foreign minister.

A changing of the guard at the ministry’s famed Itamaraty Palace in Brasilia could come around Mr. Biden’s Jan. 20 inauguration and would signal Mr. Bolsonaro’s desire for a new beginning, Mr. de Almeida said.

“I would pay close attention to the Itamaraty,” Ms. Galante agreed, “because he could use this opportunity.”

But foreign policy and self-interest aside, embracing Mr. Biden will not come easy to Mr. Bolsonaro, who modeled much of his political success — his stunning 2018 electoral victory, his jabs at “fake-news” media, his Twitter tirades — on the Donald Trump model.

“He embodied this ‘Trumpist’ position not because he was Trump’s friend — he isn’t — [but because] he is Trump’s admirer,” Mr. de Almeida said.

“To the extent that either follows a playbook, Bolsonaro has been following Trump‘s,” Mr. de Abreu Maia said. “It’s going to be harder for [Mr. Bolsonaro] to win reelection without having really an inspiration — really a playbook to follow.”

Philipp Oehmke: Os EUA estão doentes! É uma decadência moral! -

 Um outro artigo deveras assustador, não em termos de Covid, mas uma epidemia moral, que está destruindo os Estados Unidos, tal como o conhecíamos até alguns anos atrás.

Eu me pergunto se o Brasil não está igualmente sofrendo uma espécie de decadência moral, não semelhante, mas funcionalmente equivalente, talvez similar. Eu a chamaria de a DOENÇA DA CORRUPÇÃO!

Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Der Spiegel, Hamburgo – 27.11.2020

A Land in Decay

Where Did America Go Wrong?

Despite Donald Trump's defeat, the United States still appears to be in a state of moral decay. A DER SPIEGEL correspondent reflects on his five years in America.

Philipp Oehmke

 

During the opening of the recent "Saturday Night Live” he hosted, comedian Dave Chappelle, asked if anyone could still remember what life was like before COVID-19. Joe Biden had addressed the nation two hours earlier for the first time as president-elect. People were celebrating in the streets of cities and Biden wanted to spread a sense of optimism.

Then came Chappelle.

It probably says something about the country that the most important political commentators at the moment are late-night presenters and stand-up comedians. In Germany, comedians tend to occupy a niche, but in the United States, they are among the most important voices in society – and Dave Chappelle has been one of the biggest, loudest and and most acerbic of them for years running.

In his opening monologue, Chappelle recalled life back in pre-COVID-19 times. "You guys remember what life was like before COVID? I do,” he said. "There was a mass shooting every week. Anyone remember that? Thank God for COVID. Someone had to lock these murderous whites up and keep them in the house.”

America has survived Donald Trump for now. And it will also likely survive the pandemic. Once it does, though, it will be time for a reckoning: The country will again find itself facing the problems that have clouded the "American experience” for quite some time.

Trump and COVID-19 – especially the toxic combination of the two – have only made these problems more visible. Biden's optimism, his emphasis on community, are important. But words alone won’t be enough to save the nation.

Biden says that among the four main problems he intends to address first is systemic racism. No newly elected president has ever said such a thing. The economy, health insurance, jobs, taxes: Those are the kinds of things political leaders speak about in the moment of victory. But systemic racism?

America knows it is sick. It is showing all the symptoms. There are doubts about the legitimacy of elections, and confidence in political institutions has crumbled. The media have abandoned or lost their role as impartial observers. The country's predominantly white police force continues to deploy misguided violence against a disillusioned and outraged Black population. There are armed militias on the streets and it's become almost impossible to voice an opinion without getting overwhelmed by hateful comments on social media.To top it all off is a president who refuses to concede defeat, a society that has been battered by a pandemic that can only be contained by way of solidarity.

It will all still be there after Donald Trump leaves office – even Donald Trump himself will remain. And the next authoritarian-minded leader to come along is almost certain to be less dim-witted, less childish and less incompetent - in the best-case scenario.

David Brooks, the moderate conservative commentator, recently asked in an essay in The Atlantic whether these symptoms of the disease really do mean the end of a historical era. Whether America has experienced the kind of critical convulsion in the past six years that will trigger a kind of molting and herald a new morality.

In the essay, Brooks cites Samuel P. Huntington, one of the great political thinkers of the late 20th century, who concluded that such "moral convulsions” happen every 60 years in American history. And that they are always accompanied by the same symptoms: a loss of trust in institutions; widespread moral indignation; contempt for the elite; a moralistic young generation with new means of communication dominating the debate; and marginalized groups that had previously been excluded taking control.

Huntington wrote that at the end of the last century, but it reads like a description of the current state of America.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be so stunned by the mysterious decline of this cultural space - one that has been so vital for Germans over the past several decades. Perhaps we should have seen it coming. But the catalysts weren't easy to identify because they weren’t of a pragmatic, political nature. It was an internal state of mind that shifted. Or, as Brooks describes it, social trust.

This, Brooks writes, "is a measure of the moral quality of a society – of whether the people and institutions in it are trustworthy, whether they keep their promises and work for the common good. When people in a church lose faith or trust in God, the church collapses. When people in a society lose faith or their trust in their institutions and in each other, the nation collapses.”

Evan Osnos, who has just published a biography of Joe Biden, wrote recently in the New Yorker about the Fund for Peace, which analyzes "cohesion indicators” inside many countries. The factors studied include the level of popular discontent, trust in the security apparatus and the entrenchment of political factions. The United States recorded the largest drop in cohesion of all the countries surveyed and came in last place, behind Bahrain, Mali and even Libya.

What triggered this crisis of confidence? Where did society, politics and culture take a turn so wrong that it ultimately wound up with Trump, 20,000 lies and street battles in a pandemic?

The first time I moved to the U.S., Bill Clinton, a member of Baby Boomer generation, was president. The most visible representatives of the Baby Boomers were white males who had been politically and culturally influenced by the emancipation movements of the late 1960s. Upward mobility was a fact of life for them. Everything seemed to be within reach, prosperity was seen as a given and it was accepted as fact that their children would automatically be better off than their parents.

They didn’t need security, which gave them time to pursue greater freedoms. They wore jeans to the office, cheated on their wives relatively brazenly and continued listening to rock music, even as they grew older. Their rise culminated in the late 1990s, when I arrived in New York. The size of their generation meant that by then, they had taken over the leading roles in society, with Bill Clinton at the helm.

Their boundless optimism seems almost naive today. Clinton’s campaign slogan in 1992 was, "It’s the economy, stupid,” if the economy would just continue to grow, things would continue to get better for everyone. The markets regulated themselves, and it seemed inconceivable that the Dow Jones or the Nasdaq could ever fall.

Although he is, unlike Clinton, a rather atypical Boomer, this is also the climate that molded Donald Trump. It wasn’t just about economic freedom, but also societal morals. It was a matter of faith that the sum of all self-fulfilling individuals would amount to a happy society.

Today's generation of young Americans is perplexed by that worldview, if not contemptuous of it. They grew up in a world in which "institutions failed, financial systems collapsed, and families were fragile,” Brooks writes. He believes the values of the Millennial and Gen-Z generations that will dominate in the years ahead are the opposite of Boomer values: "Not liberation, but security; not freedom, but equality; not individualism, but the safety of the collective; not sink-or-swim meritocracy, but promotion on the basis of social justice.”

"People no longer believe they can make a difference."

 

"The Wire" creator David Simon

 

It should be noted that Baby Boomer Clinton actually exacerbated some of what Biden is referring to when he speaks of systemic racism. To keep the Republicans quiet, Clinton - with considerable support from a senator by the name of Joe Biden - passed tougher laws for fighting crime. In retrospect, today's overcrowded prisons can be traced back to that bill - as well as a prison population that is disproportionately black.

Still, when Clinton inaugurated his new office in Harlem in 2001 right after his tenure in the White House came to an end, the streets were still lined with cheering African American fans. "You will always be our president!" they shouted. The devastating effects of Clinton’s law, which was already seven years old at the time, obviously wasn’t yet clear to them.

The first, broadly perceived wake-up call regarding the decay of the U.S. came a year later, in 2002, when former police reporter David Simon wrote and produced a television series about his hometown of Baltimore. Simon’s series ran on the pay-TV channel HBO, the station that seemed to broadcast all the shows the cultural elite were talking about at the time, including "The Sopranos” and "Sex in the City.”

Simon's series was called "The Wire,” and over the course of five seasons, it showed how and why a city like Baltimore could have sunk to "failed state” status by the early 2000s. There was the city’s uncontrollable drug trade, which seeped into both business and politics. There were the streets full of boarded-up houses and controlled by Black gangs. There was the port where white workers were losing their jobs. Schools in the bad neighborhoods were so overcrowded that even the children who did want to learn eventually chose to join a drug gang instead. There were also disillusioned cops and corrupt, attention-seeking politicians. In brief: Any of the trust that Brooks is now writing about had already long since been exhausted.

When I walked through Baltimore with Simon a few years after the series’ release, I asked him about the reasons for the collapse of public life. By then, the shocking reality of the series had entered the collective consciousness and had become a much discussed issue. "People no longer believe they can make a difference," Simon said at the time - which essentially is just another way of expressing the loss of trust.

Simon’s series primarily shed light almost 20 years ago on a Black underclass in the big cities that had become isolated and abandoned. In rural areas, meanwhile, in states like Ohio and West Virginia, a white underclass was emerging - relatively unnoticed at the time - that felt just as emotionally excluded as parts of the Black population, although for different reasons.

In his recent monologue on "Saturday Night Live,” comedian Chappelle suggested that the white, Trump underclass could learn from the Black population (though he used the N-word to refer to them). "The rest of the country is trying to move forward,” he told the whites, but you keep holding us back with your "stimulus checks, the heroin.” But now "you need us. You need our eyes to save you from yourselves.” Chappelle was alluding to traits – unemployment and drug addiction – frequently associated with Black people in America.

In 2012, three years before Trump began trying his hand at politics, political scientist Charles Murray became the first to write about this social class for a wider public. Interestingly, their distinguishing characteristics weren’t economic, but had more to do with psychology, morals and habit. The problem of underclasses in the past was primarily a lack of wealth – a difficulty that could be alleviated relatively easily. The government could fill their bank accounts, but getting into their heads was a different matter altogether.

In his book "Coming Apart,” Murray describes a fictional place he calls Fishtown, a post-industrial city where morale sank as unemployment rose. He assembles Fishtown from statistical data and draws a vivid picture.

Increasingly, the men of Fishtown began reporting that they were unfit for work, while only about a quarter to a third of the children grew up with both parents. Plus, people stopped going to church, which had previously served as an important stabilizer of the community.

Author J.D. Vance didn’t need Murray’s statistics to have a clear understanding of the problem. He grew up in a real-life Fishtown, a place called Middletown, Ohio. His father had abandoned the family and his mother was a junkie. He grew up with his grandparents and made it out of Middletown to the East Coast by joining the Marines. He ultimately graduated with a law degree from Yale University. At one of his first dinners there, he was asked whether he wanted still or sparkling water. Vance laughed nervously. He had never before heard of water with bubbles. He thought the question was a joke.

"Hillbilly Elegy,” Vance’s memoir about the conditions and people he grew up with, came out in the U.S. in the summer of 2016, a few months before Donald Trump was elected president.

In New York, we all rushed out to get the book for the background it provided on these backwaters. According to those who read the book, Trump could only have been elected because he attracted millions of voters who hadn’t even been identified as a voting block previously. The book shined a spotlight on a white middle and lower class in the Rust Belt states that, in addition to having lost all trust over the last 20 years, had also grown incredibly angry.

I traveled to West Virginia, Ohio and Kentucky to take a look for myself. It was quite some time before it became widely known, but these areas have been steadily destroyed since the 2000s by opioids - painkillers in pill form that have a heroin-like effect.The pharmaceutical manufacturer Purdue had flooded the market with the drug 15 years earlier. There are doctor’s offices in small towns in the region whose business model consisted exclusively of selling prescriptions for Oxycontin, the most famous opioid, for $250 each to millions of new, white junkies.

Whereas crack was still the drug of choice for Blacks in the big cities in the 1990s, "Oxys” had become the drug that whites in rural areas had become addicted to. The victims were fathers and housewives, like Vance’s mother. Entire families, including grandparents, parents and children, grew addicted to opioids. When the authorities moved in to close the pill clinics, as they were called, and the pills became more difficult to find, most people just switched to cheap heroin. In Huntington, West Virginia, I visited a slum full of white, drugged-out zombies. In Ashland, Kentucky, I went on a ride-along with paramedics whose work consisted almost entirely of helping addicts who had overdosed.

I met with J.D. Vance in Ohio, and he explained to me why members of his family and his friends had become so culturally disconnected. How, over the years, they had developed their own behavior, their own view of the world, of truth and morality, and how they had grown alienated from the rest of the country. The people Vance wrote about almost all voted for Trump. In Trump - in his aggressive, predatory behavior and his constant focus on personal gain - they recognized what they were used to at home. Everybody, says Vance, had someone like that in their family.

Oddly, he said, his old friends back in Middletown consistently claimed that they worked hard, even though most of them didn’t have jobs. They believed the world was against them, that someone was trying to trick them. It was, essentially, the same feeling espoused by their president, who insists the election was stolen from him.

 

Is the system working? Nope.

 

In recent years, these tensions could also be felt in New York in those situations when strata of the population that had been separated for decades somehow collided. At the checkout counter of the organic supermarket Whole Foods, absurd psychological battles would break out pitting well-off customers against the almost exclusively Black cashiers with face tattoos. The more the mostly enlightened, liberal customers tried to treat the cashiers with excessive politeness, the more the workers would frequently see this as an incentive to be even more contemptuous of the obviously privileged. As if a little feigned kindness could make up for hundreds of years of oppression.

That, at least, is how Ta-Nehisi Coates explained it to me when we met at New York University in the spring. It was shortly before the pandemic struck and three months before the police murder of George Floyd that triggered racial unrest across the country. All that checkout-counter friendliness at the supermarket proved to be of little help - friendliness, by the way, that was partly due to Coates himself. Five years earlier, in his book "Between the World and Me,” he explained to white elites in shocking detail just how it feels to be a Black man in the second decade of 21st-century America. Not great, he wrote, because you have to fear for your physical safety every single day. You're not worth as much as the others, he wrote.

Weeks after the election, Trump has allowed the transition to the Biden presidency to begin, but he still hasn’t conceded defeat and continues to challenge the election results. A large part of the Republican Party, a centuries-old institution at the heart of American society, has supported him in his effort. And more than 71 million Americans voted for Trump. A majority of them likely believe Trump’s lies about election fraud. Trust? Faith in the system? That others are doing the right thing, as David Brooks has called for? Nope. At best, there is hope.

As I leave this country, I am at a loss. 

 

Philipp Oehmke was DER SPIEGEL's New York correspondent from 2015 to 2020