Reality sometimes gets distorted by distance, as when, eight years ago, several Danes informed me that the United States would never elect a black man as President
writes
Jeffrey Frank in the New Yorker.
This year, the visit [to Denmark, the country into which I’ve married and where, over the years,
I’ve often been asked to explain what’s happening back home] was a chance to express the belief that, though Americans may practice political brinksmanship, we are not about to let loose a bomb—or probably not.
I was uneasy about this trip, because I knew that I would hear a lot and be pushed to say a lot about our Presidential election and about the bomb in question: the inescapable Donald J. Trum …
… Friends and relatives, though, would rather talk about Trump, and want
assurance that he is an aberration, even more so when his words are
translated without subtlety into Danish. (A headline in the widely
distributed Metroxpress read “Trump: Gun owners Should Stop Hillary Clinton.”)
… As
for the view from Denmark, when I asked a favorite member of my
extended family if she was really worried about the rise of Trump, she
seemed uninterested in a possible Clinton landslide, or in Trump’s bad
polls, but rather, with an alarmed look and speaking perfect
Americanese, said, “I’m scared shitless.”
