A time of reckoning, Hillary had said!

It looks like Wednesday November 9^th was another 9/11 for many Americans who woke up or fell asleep in the early hours with the terrible realization that the unthinkable had indeed happened. As on June 24^th, the day after the referendum on Brexit, but even more so since the remotest country feels in some ways concerned by who the president of the United States is, people all over the world felt bewildered and flabbergasted. I went to work and my students, who are not American but French, were not smiling as they usually do. They were gloomy. Some said they were shocked, others sad, others angry. Donald Trump's rhetoric had been so simplistic with words and phrases that many of us thought no one with a modicum of common sense could fall for. He said he would make America great again. But that is just what Barack Obama has done in his two terms of office. Barack Obama gave back dignity to the function of president of the United States, the dignity that Georges W. Bush had tarnished with his ethnocentric understanding of the world which had led to very unwise foreign policy decisions. Donald Trump's victory appears to the world as being the victory of ignorance and narrow-mindedness over knowledge and open-mindedness. It obviously says something significant about America and the dereliction of its education system. Are all Americans really taught in the main subjects at a sufficient level? Have they really been made to reflect and to develop logic? Those election results seem to highlight a wide gap between the showcase of the Ivy League universities, of Silicon Valley and the Deep America, the midwest, the America of the Ku Klux Klan with its pathetic rednecks selling pamphlets on the superiority of the white race, dating back to Nazi Germany. Such level of illeteracy does not fit with the image of a highly sophisticated country. It sounds like some parts of America have not evolved much since the period of the conquest of the West. One can thus understand that the unsophisticated appearance and discourse of an uneducated man such as Donald Trump would appeal to those Americans who consider themselves forgotten by the intellectual elite, the elite of those who succeeded and reached government offices thanks to their studies in the best universities. It is just that the rest of the world did not expect those Americans, those who see themselves as left behind, to be so numerous.

But let's go back to America's new president, the one whose face the world will have, willy-nilly, to get used to seeing everyday on the news. All through the election campaign his political platform was almost void. On American TV channels, I heard several times such words pronounced as unpredictable, unchartered waters. Indeed, no one knows what to expect and the worst is that he probably does not know himself that he does not know. America, what have thou done?