Fatefully, here is how I was boasting about our independence just weeks ago:
We are a relatively young nation of only 396,000 people. Yet not even the hegemony of the United States can chasten our national pride.
(“Happy Independence Day, Bahamas!” The iPINIONS Journal, July 10, 2020)
But even I never thought not just national pride but national survival would compel us to do this:
American tourists will be barred from entering the Bahamas amid the re-surging COVID-19 pandemic, Prime Minister Hubert Minnis said in a national address Sunday. …
In the address, Minnis announced that the country’s national airline Bahamasair will cease flights to the United States, effective immediately. …
Minnis said there would be an exception for flights from Canada, the United Kingdom, and the European Union.
(USA Today, July 19, 2020)
Of course, Covid-curbing states like New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut are attempting to ban travelers from Covid-spiking states like Arizona, Texas, and Florida. Therefore, one can hardly blame The Bahamas for wanting to do the same – without adding insult by attempting to discriminate among Americans.
For many Americans, though, I suspect this is rather like the insult that causes Blacks to say it’s one thing for them to call each other the N-word but quite another for any white person to do so. Except that the fallout could be far worse in this case.
This is why, when I first heard news of this ban, my instinct was to contact siblings in The Bahamas and entreat them to pray as follows:
Lord, please don’t let Trump get re-elected. Banning Americans but allowing Canadians, Britons, and Europeans? You know he will never forgive The Bahamas for doing that. And you know how petty and spiteful he can be. No Bahamian would be allowed to set foot in America during his 2nd term, come hell or high water… Even worse for our tourist economy, no American would be allowed to travel to The Bahamas.
It was clearly tongue-in-cheek, reflecting the gallows humor that has seen us weather hurricanes that destroyed far more than Trump could ever imagine doing to us.
All the same, Trump has made such a toxic and dystopic mess of America’s fight against this pandemic, only a handful of countries now allow Americans unrestricted travel. But, with the exception of Mexico and the Dominican Republic, I don’t see Americans showing much interest in traveling to places like Albania, Kosovo, Serbia, Tunisia, or even Turkey.
Not to mention this looming irony: Trump began his presidency with a shocking and unprecedented travel ban on all Muslims. Now he seems fated to end it with most countries imposing an even more shocking and unprecedented travel ban on all Americans.
Or, to put this in a way he might better understand, Trump has turned America into such a pariah and putrid nation, even countries he once ridiculed as shithole basket cases are now banning Americans from traveling there.
Nobody could have scripted this turnabout is fair play even if they tried.
Apropos of which, Trump spent much of the Obama presidency carnival barking about how the first Black president of the United States was turning it into an international laughingstock. Yet he’s presiding over a United States that the world not only sees as a laughingstock but treats like a leper to boot. Bernard-Henri Lévy, arguably as informed a friend and critic of America today as Alexis de Tocqueville was during the early nineteenth century, pitied this on Sunday’s edition of Fareed Zakaria GPS on CNN.
Incidentally, this is a good place to clarify the “projector-in-chief” reference in my title. I’ve been labeling him as such for years. Therefore, imagine how gratified I was when his own niece Mary, a clinical psychologist, diagnosed him as such in her bestselling book Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, which was published just last week.
Specifically, here is what I wrote around this time in the election cycle four years ago:
The psychopathology afoot here is called projection. It is defined by people attributing to others traits, faults, and blame that inhere in themselves. And it explains almost every insult Trump has hurled at his opponents throughout this presidential campaign.
So when you hear him calling other people crooked, insecure, weak, beholden to special interests, liars, etc., be mindful that he’s just revealing self-conscious truths about himself, dimwittedly.
(“Forget the Clinton Foundation. Shut Down the Trump Organization!” The iPINIONS Journal, August 26, 2016)
It follows that, when you hear him accusing others of trying to rig November’s election, this dotard is simply betraying what he is trying to do … by any means necessary.
In any event, given the Covid petri dish that is now the United States of America, one can hardly blame the neighborly and wholly “dependent” Bahamas for joining the rest of the world in banning US travelers from its shores. After all, according to universally accepted reporting by Johns Hopkins University, the United States has 3,774,769 confirmed cases and 140,563 deaths, whereas The Bahamas (now) has 153 confirmed cases and 11 deaths.
So clearly this is not personal. It’s prudent. In fact, we are really going to miss our American friends.
We look forward to seeing you guys when Covid and … well, let’s just say when things return to normal.
Related commentaries:
happy independence… Muslim ban…
Hurricane Dorian… Mary Trump…
Projection… Covid shutdown…
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