The U.S. Born on Third Base, Thinks It Hit a Triple

A Spanish friend once said to me, "Chris, the best and worst thing about your country is that you have no sense of the ridiculous." As this conversation took place over a decade ago, I don't remember what he was referring to, but it wasn't Donald Trump. Sure, other countries have their corruption, their incompetence, and their misguided national pride. But America takes it to a higher level because we're still an adolescent culture, not yet moderated by a sense of the innate ridiculousness of life. We seem still not to have quite grasped that power is only ever partial, that money can only buy passing snippets of something resembling happiness, that companies selling beer and trucks wrapped in flags are playing us for the fools we demonstrably are.

Part of the problem is our adolescence, as I say. We've only really had one war that affected civilians on a large scale, and that was in the 1860s. Most European countries have experienced several such wars in the past hundred years, plus severe depressions, fascism, and refugee crises that make the Mexican border seem well under control. So there's that. But there's something more: circumstance. The U.S. is like Donald Trump in the sense that we were born rich but insist that we're self-made.

A country that starts out on a continent with one of the richest environments on the planet defended only by under-equipped, unorganized bands of natives, separated from rival powers by two vast oceans, attracting the brightest minds from around the world with its surfeit of opportunity (provided mainly by the vast, sparsely inhabited continent) cannot help but thrive! Yes, we've made some clever moves as a culture, but really, most of the great success of "the American experiment" can be chalked up to incredibly fortuitous circumstance. Constantly congratulating ourselves on our cleverness is not only unseemly, it's corrosive to the sort of self-reflection necessary to wisdom.

Researchers at Berkeley fixed Monopoly games so that one player had twice as many rolls of the dice as the other, got twice as much money every time he passed "Go," and started out with twice the bankroll. Guess who won the games? Both players knew the incredibly unfair advantages one held, but when they were interviewed after the game, the winners continuously talked about their winning strategies--as if their brilliant play were responsible for their victories! Good luck to them next time they play on a Monopoly board that isn't tilted in their favor.

Despite the plentiful evidence to the contrary, Donald Trump believes himself to be brilliant because he's "a winner." The fact that the games he's winning are all fixed is of no interest to him, just as the fact that the United States has benefitted from unique historical circumstances have occupied little space in discussions of how or why "we're number 1!" We were born millionaires, but believe we earned it all with hard work and pluck.

Maybe Donald Trump truly is the president the United States deserves.