Pink Floyd's Roger Waters: 'Ignorant' Trump Is Proof American Democracy Is Dead
The latest celebrity to rip Donald Trump and his divisive anti-immigrant bigotry to shreds is the hugely famous Pink Floyd co-founder, Roger Waters, who slammed the abrasive tycoon in a Rolling Stone interview. Waters makes some excellent points about America’s narcissistic obsession with its own greatness and just how coddled the Republican base is:
“I have [laughed] except it’s not funny that he’s as popular as he is,” Waters says. “His ideas [are] not outlandish at all. It’s American exceptionalism gone crazy and delivered under the umbrella of absolute ignorance. He is pig-ignorant and he always was and he always will be. He lives in the illusion that he’s admirable in some way. And obviously for somebody like me, he stands for everything that is not admirable in American society…It’s silly and disgusting as well, unless they wanted to hark back to the potential. If the Founding Fathers hadn’t been so up their own asses, they might have come up with a system that fell somewhere between republican democracy that was going to work and that had proper checks and balances to prevent it disintegrating into what it has become, which is a country for sale to the highest bidder with the Supreme Court at the top of it, who’s appointed by the highest bidder eventually.”
The truth is hard to hear sometimes, but Waters nails it on the head. While the Founding Fathers could not have predicted that things would have turned out this way, our nation’s slow slide into oligarchy is a direct product of the system which we have created, where the establishment has a stranglehold on politics to the point where the entire Republican Party has entirely given up any pretense of governance and lives only to serve their lobbyists. Case in point:
“The mainstream media in this country tend only to report a very limited section of ideas and views. So it’s perfectly understandable why people would believe Donald Trump’s nonsense, because it’s important to the 1 percent to propagate and disseminate these theories and these system beliefs in order to retain control. It’s organized theft on a giant level, a huge scale, and is extremely efficient and well-organized.”
He also has a few choice statements to make about immigration and the offensive implications of Trump’s hate-speech:
There were millions of Native Americans and you killed them all,” he said. “So the idea where, oh good, we’ve got this huge very rich thing, we’re going to keep everybody … no you’re not. It’s a joke. There’s no possible way. It’s called osmosis. Human beings will travel. Osmosis is the movement of molecules from an area of high concentration to an area of lower concentration through a semipermeable membrane; well, you can build any wall you like and it’s still semipermeable and it always will be. And people will always go. If they’re poor as sh*t over there and they think you’re rich, they will move across the border and why shouldn’t they?”
He’s absolutely right. People don’t move across the world just for the sake of it. The refugees from Syria and the South American immigrants are searching for a better life, for jobs and security, for peace and prosperity. Who are we to deny them their own chance at the American Dream? Our greatest strength is our diversity, and we cannot allow poll-baiting rabble-rousers to co-opt our democracy and shatter our unity with xenophobic scapegoating.
