I dare to cut Donald Trump’s slogan short on Election Day, not just because those chauvinistic declarations should not come from self-appraisal.
I paraphrase the late and great Christopher Hitchens:
Being great is like being lady-like. If you have to say it you are probably not.
Christopher Hitchens
Miele Logic
I cut off the superfluous “again” from “great” because it is as meaningless as directing clothes to be washed “warmer” than “cold” in washing machines all over America—the reason why I buy into the science of Miele.
Cold, without a universally accepted reference to temperature, has a different meaning to different people. Cold to a Nordic person means below freezing; cold to a Floridian means below seventy degrees Fahrenheit, a thirty-five-degree difference.
Never mind. You think that as long as the label on clothing says to wash cold, like the belief that America is great, the washing of clothes cold should pose no problem, and congruent, America will come out great.
Virtue Signaling
I am sorry, but virtue signaling is for the hopeless.
You may not know that the preservation of today’s disposable clothes requires washing cold to prolong usability, comfortably neglecting that sweat and other fluids produced by a 98.6º F human body bake into clothing, courtesy of the laws of nature unlikely to get washed out by cold water.
Ignoring the laws of nature, how we walk around in clothing falling apart at the seams, soaked in steadily accumulating human fluids, is suitable for the clothing industry. That same ignorance ties us to the make-believe of American greatness short of a universal reference to the meaning of greatness—a good thing for the fuzziness of governance.
America Is Great
America is great, as in the analogy above dutifully relativized.
I can speak from relative authority, having been born and grown up in The Netherlands, a country, along with many other European countries, rescued in the Second World War by the sacrifice and selfless bravery of the American people.
European lame-duck governments have learned very little from the seemingly innocuous minority of German Nazis killing 85 million people, only 5 million much-talked-about Jews, with Nazi “Gott mit uns” buckled über-mensch practices almost successfully destroying all of Europe.
Dangerous Ignoramuses
Oblivious to pattern-matching, Angela Merkel repeated the same mistake of not understanding freedom requires paradoxical rules by letting seemingly innocuous Muslims, feigning refuge status, freely enter Germany. They are leaving a trail of criminal disrespect for hard-earned sovereignty, plurality, and freedom of religion in their path.
Must I repeat, once again, that 27% of Muslims, about 350 million lunatics, believe in the most literal interpretation of the Quran and Hadith? And how, not unlike the totalitarian agenda of Nazis, the surrender to the last and final solution, the adherence to the frozen dogmas of the war-lord religion of Islam, is out to destroy the plurality of modern civilizations? Asleep, the government of Europe is again.
Compared to that mess, aided by more manageable neighbors on our continent, America is still the best of the worst.
Not Great Enough
Back to the analogy above, warm carries even less meaning when you realize most washing machines in the U.S., to keep the cost down, do not have heating elements inside and instead derive hot water from the boiler in the home.
Meaning, the water temperature in the boiler, greatly influenced by how many people have just taken a shower, defines the actual temperature of cold and warm in the washer. In the same way, America’s greatness is not determined by our perception of output but by how nature judges our input.
You see, the regenerative adaptability to nature’s entropy, in actuality, defines the greatness of humanity. As the ever-reducing availability of energy, nature’s entropy causes many bifurcating consequences like climate change, coronaviruses, aging, etc.
Truth
The excellence of humanity and America portraying to lead the world in said excellence assume we have made great strides in continually adapting to nature’s entropy. We have not, quite the opposite.
Too full of ourselves, we have normalized foregone truths like our self-aggrandizing appraisal long since invalidated. Manufactured truths do not conform to nature’s reality, the latter determining the excellence and longevity of the human species.
We could be better. Only when the regenerative adaptability to nature’s entropy proves we are. We can be great if we strive to make it so.
