Like many here in Ireland, I have been watching the incredible twistings and turnings of your presidential battle with what can only be described as a mindset of shock and awe.
There is heavy coverage on this side of the Atlantic, and there is a new development about every hour. Amazing stuff.
At time of writing this, for example, our TV pundits are grappling with the implications of the second FBI investigation of the Clinton emails, and Trump is bellowing that this is another Watergate. Probably that development will have been obscured by another by the time you are reading this.
However, for a little lighter relief, can this Irish observer roundly offer words of praise to whatever colleague over there coined the magnificent description of swathes of the U.S. now being a Rust Belt. Brilliant!
The quality of it has been hallmarked by the cameras following the campaign teams through towns and regions demoralized and depopulated by the loss of traditional industries and the jobs connected to them. The rusting factory chimneys and mining buildings totally authenticated the reality of the Rust Belt.
But should not the scribe who defined that Rust Belt's existence not have developed the point much further? Is there not a whole lexicon out there as the battle rages around the polls? I firmly believe there is indeed and, with my tongue firmly embedded in my left cheek, offer the following list.
Is there not a booming Bust Belt around Wall Street and indeed Washington and New York which is occupied by billionaires with armies of accountants who can pick loopholes in the law which enables them to somehow legally claim they are bust, and accordingly unable to pay your federal taxes and even apparently income tax? Could that financial jungle not be properly termed a Bust Belt?
Then what about the Gust Belt? Is there not now an entire region along your East Coast, from New Orleans northwards away above Florida and the Carolinas and beyond which, because of global warming and environmental pollution generally, is now subject to ever more damaging hurricanes and wicked storms, none of which make much of an impact on the policy declarations of the campaign.
And, because of the same climactic problems, worsening by the day, could it be suggested that huge tracts of states close to the West Coast, stricken by long droughts and the subsequent scarcity of water for irrigation and even domestic consumption, could now accurately be termed the Dust Belt? Again that situation does not seem to be impacting on the campaign coverage we see over here.
However, we see quite distressing images, over and over, of the ghettoized and depressed inner areas of major cities, apparently suffering dreadfully from lack of job and educational opportunities and the emergence of gun and drug crimes and real poverty. We see lines of folk queuing at the few food banks available to them. Is this a kind of Crust Belt?
Could the red light districts in all the big cities be renamed Lust Belts?
Could all those many communities in the South especially those which are very strongly and fundamentally Christian be described as residing in a Trust Belt? It would appear that there were many other options available to the scribe who brought the Rust Belt to our attention.
Watching the big show in its incredible final throes is, to put it mildly, mind-boggling.
Shock and awe for sure. All along that Rust Belt road.
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