As always, for all manner of reasons, the shadow of the United States of America looms over the culture of the world. That’s a big statement I know and we can argue about it over dinner sometime.

Despite all predictions of its imminent demise, from our shitty social media feeds to the movies we critique, the online series we binge on, and the politics we follow, the idea  of America is omnipresent.

In a post-globalised world, within the 24-hour news cycle and the sodden floating morass of opinion and perspective that passes for actual information,  you will find multiple aspects of the perplexing, infuriating, compelling, impenetrable, amorphous concept of America.  

No other country on earth filters through via so many lenses and I suppose that is why everyone, whether they have been there or not, have so many strident opinions on the place and I have probably been the worst offender.

So that’s why I decided, worn out slaving for The Local, that my next journey would be to that country. I did not expect to traipse the halls of power, feel its hot breath, nor oscillate around the world of the elite and famous.  

I simply wanted to see the USA at ground level through my own personal lens and form an opinion of this land via actual experience. I hope that what I have put down is worth  reading. – Tony Sawrey  

United States president Donald Trump intends to sanction the country’s law firms who he considers to be filing ‘frivolous’ lawsuits. The memo issued March 30 is yet another step by his administration to punish those he considers to be trying to impede his government’s agenda.  

As one of the numerous directives, memos and announcements coming out of  his White House office, it is difficult to determine what specific effects this will have in the coming months. But one thing is certain, after barely three months, Trump’s  second term is generating a climate of anxiety and unease everywhere.

 In the state of Arizona in the southwest of the country, this unease is particularly  acute. Southern Arizona, much of it harsh desert, shares a 600km border with Mexico and is literally the front line where the movements of illegal immigrants, asylum  seekers and undocumented workers rub up against a United States retreating into  isolationism and xenophobia.  

Thus a government threatening to go after lawyers and their ‘frivolous’  applications (such as advocating the rights of deportees or impeding the separation  of immigrant families) may have real consequences there, as Maurice Goldman, a  Tucson-based immigration lawyer explains:  “The question becomes, how are they going to define frivolous?

Is everything in  the eyes of this administration fraud or frivolous? These are words that can just get  thrown around with no real true basis to it and it’s a way to chisel away at our system  of justice and the rule of law.”

 And of course it is not just legal organisations affected by this climate of  uncertainty. It also has implications for non-government activist groups such as  Humane Borders.

Those who chose the risky crossing of desert regions into the  United States are vulnerable to its extreme heat and since the turn of the 21st century  over 4000 people have died making the journey.

 Humane Borders’ mission is to ‘save desperate people from death by dehydration  and exposure while working to create a more just and humane border’.

They do one  simple thing, that is to maintain a series of permitted water stations in the desert  along trails used by migrants. The stations consist of blue plastic barrels filled with  fresh water placed in a shaded area with a flag attached that can be seen from a  distance.  

The work of Humane Borders and other NGO’s like them has attracted the ire  of authorities in the past. Volunteers have been threatened with prison and fines due  to their efforts to place life-saving food and water and they have been accused of  encouraging people smuggling and organised crime.  

There is no doubt that ultimately it is these types of groups and their supporters  that the current administration wants to impede.

By going after the lawyers that assist  them, they can easily isolate, criminalise and restrict their activism. But here in Arizona it’s not just the authorities Humane Borders has to be wary  of. Guillermo Jones is a volunteer with the group and goes out on regular runs into  the desert to check and refill water stations.  

“We sometimes find barrels where the spigot had been removed by border patrol  officers, draining the water. Often the barrels get shot at too. On a recent trip we  encountered someone impersonating a migrant in distress and asking for a ride. He  was trying to entrap us, as transporting people without documents is a crime.”  

The wall straddling the line between Mexico and the United States is the  President’s vision of an isolated and locked-down country-made manifest. The eight-metre high structure, festooned with razor wire, towers over the desert town of  Nogales.    

Border patrol pick-ups drive along the base and helicopters and drones with  infrared scanners cruise the skies. But within the local population, predominantly Hispanic and indigenous, there is a sympathy, or at least some understanding, of why  those who brave the desert do what they have to do.  

“People are scared right now,” says Guillermo, “Even those who have the right to  enter the United States are afraid to cross over the border in case they get picked up  in a sweep,” referring to recent arrests and deportations by Immigration Customs and Enforcement officials.

“But ultimately undocumented immigrant traffic will continue, and we will help them survive no matter how hard they try to stamp out our efforts in Washington DC.”  

Words & images of Maurice Goldman, top left, and the wall: Tony Sawrey  

Images: Guillermo Jones, top right, and cross: Supplied by Guillermo Jones  

By Donna Kelly

“You should have never started it,” Trump said. “You” being Ukraine and “it” being the war that Russia clearly started when it launched a full-scale  invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, having annexed Crimea in 2014.  

The world has gone nuts. And the sad thing is some people, perhaps mostly MAGA idiots, will believe it. And history is rewritten. Much like the Gulf of America with Google maps already showing the new title – almost before the ink was dry on the presidential order.  

Then there’s the renaming of Denali, the highest mountain in North America, to Mount McKinley. Denali is based on the Koyukon name of the mountain, with the Koyukon a people of Alaskan Athabaskans.

The McKinley bit happened in 1896  when a gold prospector came upon it and thought he would randomly commemorate former US president William McKinley. Of course, McKinley never stepped foot in Alaska.  

Anyway, enough about that. I am just glad I got to Europe before Covid and then America last year. I love Australia and I think I will just do a bit more wandering around this great nation – which doesn’t need to be made great again, no matter what Clive Palmer thinks. Good grief.  

New Zealand is also wonderful and I hear the Chinese are buying up land there in droves in readiness for climate change. Along with southern Australia. Smart  buggers.  

We popped over the ditch a couple of weeks back for a family catch-up. Had a  great time, well apart from the B&B which you can read about over on the left in Kyle’s Rant.

The family was fun, food was great, scenery (Kaikoura) was absolutely breathtaking and Kyle and his 80-year-old dad and a few others even went ziplining.  

Came back a little worse for wear but obviously had the time of their lives. Not my thing so I went shopping with the 11-year-old great niece who was so cute I couldn’t resist buying things for her. Mind you, she loves op-shopping so it wasn’t too onerous on my credit card.

Charlie ended up with a present to give her grandmother, another one for her mum, a stuffed alpaca, lip gloss, strawberry fudge, a tin of marshmallow, some chocolate biscuits, Kiwi biscuits including Shrewsberries and Ginger Nuts to give to Kyle, an orange slushie and a can of Dr Pepper – yuk.  

Kyle’s sister’s family used to live in Christchurch, until that massive earthquake, with Sharlene working just across from the CTV building that collapsed. She ran all the way through the city, through liquefaction, to her son’s school.

I always  remember thinking she was fitter than I realised.  So they moved to Kaikoura just in time for the earthquake there that lifted the sea level by three metres.

They were living by the beach, heard the tsunami warning,  got to the grandchild staying with them and then drove off up the hill – pulling up only to unhitch the boat that was being towed behind them.

I have asked them not to move to Hepburn Shire – just in case.  

Anyway, back home now, with summer slowly coming to an end which means it’s time for fun with festivals – like ChillOut.  The Local has been a proud media partner for 11 years now and I must admit I do love being in the parade. This year is no  different.

The theme is circus which, as  Kyle says, suits us perfectly. We are pretty much a three-ringed circus most of the time, just keeping the balls in the air. And the general manager is a bit of a clown at  times. Just sayin’.  

In late January 2017 an insignificant US Republican Party dogsbody named Kellyanne Conway earned long-lasting infamy and ridicule when she told television interviewer Chuck Todd on the Meet The Press program that clearly false claims made by newly elected president Donald Trump’s press secretary,  Sean Spicer, were not lies, or “falsehoods”, but “alternative facts”.  

It’s worth remembering that Conway trotted out her logic-defying statement in defense of a lie over a trivial matter.

Trump claimed the crowd at his inauguration ceremony in Washington, DC, was the biggest ever seen, which was a demonstrable lie.  

Call it an alternative fact, or “untruth”, if you want, but The Lie is the hallmark of the Trump era in US politics.

In 2021 the fact-checking unit of the Washington Post reported that, “By the end of his term, Trump had accumulated 30,573 untruths during his presidency – averaging about 21 erroneous claims a day.”  

One of the strategies mastered by Trump and those who serve him is to deny and lie whenever confronted by inconvenient facts, and, if all else fails, profess your devout Christian faith. If you keep the lies coming fast and fantastical, any media watchdogs that might choose to check them will be overwhelmed, and the 24-hour news cycle is such that yesterday’s lies will be buried under layers of new lies.  

In my 30-plus years living in Australia, it seems to me that political discourse throughout the layers of government was often heated, sometimes rancorous, but generally took place with a policy outcome in sight.

Admittedly, some of Paul Keating’s  withering takedowns of rivals were pure theatre: “The little desiccated coconut’s under pressure and he’s attacking anything he can get his hands on,” he said of Liberal leader  and future prime minister John Howard; and for another Libs leader, John Hewson, this: “He is simply a shiver looking for a spine to run up;” and for Howard’s treasurer,  Peter Costello, “He’s all tip and no iceberg.”  

A lot of Trump’s shameless, cruel, thuggish behaviour has found favour among certain types of people in Australia, and not just fools carrying Nazi flags. Still, I cannot  imagine an Australian politician showing such complete lack of human decency as he and his trolls have during the recent fires in southern California.  

While the fires raged, while firefighters and first-responders were on the ground,  risking their lives, while the people of Los Angeles and its surrounding suburbs  were in the midst of experiencing devastation and loss and heartbreak, Trump and his stooges were delivering a torrent of lies to gullible and subservient media about who supposedly was at fault for the ongoing disaster.

Their completely transparent intent was to score political advantage over Democrats and culture-war opponents in  positions of authority.  

Even before the fires ignited in Los Angeles, Trump was preparing an assault on California’s progressive Democratic political structure.

Here’s a statement he made in September while still on the campaign trail: “…and the reason you have no water, you have the canals, the reason you have no water is because [California Governor] Gavin  ‘Newscum’ [his surname is Newsome] didn’t want to do it. I had it all done … So you have millions of gallons of water pouring down from the north, with the snow caps in Canada, and it is all pouring down, and they have essentially a very large faucet, and you turn the faucet, and it takes a day to turn it, it takes one day to turn it, it’s massive,  it’s as big as the wall of that building right there behind you, and you turn that, and all of the water goes into the – aimlessly into the Pacific, and if they turned it back, all of that water would come right down here and right into Los Angeles … And you have so  much water. And all those fields that are right now barren, the farmers would have all the water they needed.”  

It sounds like the mad rambling of someone in the throes of dementia, but it’s part of the formula – surround the lies with gibberish and no one knows what to make of any of it. It almost sounds funny, the old fool trash talking about things that clearly  don’t exist.

But then his pet media pals pick it up, clean it up, and suddenly the focus isn’t on the victims but on supposed scapegoats: Democratic politicians; the Mayor of  Los Angeles, Karen Bass, a black woman; Kristin Crowley, the first openly LGBTIQA+  person to serve as Los Angeles fire chief; and a tiny endangered fish, the smelt.  

As Trump and his minions embraced and amplified the lies, officials who could have been working on recovery efforts, instead were forced to spend hours defending themselves from false accusations.  

On January 20, as he was taking the oath of office to become US president for a second term, Trump took a moment to further denigrate the people who battled the Los Angeles flames. “From weeks ago, without even a token of defense, they’re raging through the houses and communities.”  

“Without even a token of defense”, he said. I wonder how the thousands of first responders with boots on the ground, putting their lives on the line, feel about that.    

After many happy years living in Victoria and working at The Age,  journalist and former Wheatsheaf resident Jeff Glorfeld, and his wife  Carol, went back to California, the land of his birth, where in the past  seven years he has survived bushfires, snowstorms and drought. And  Trump. And Covid. And Trump again. The cicadas and locusts didn’t arrive. Well, not yet. Jeff is also the voice behind The Down Under Hour which is broadcast every Wednesday at 1pm, in California, on  radio KKRN 88.5FM. The show can be live-streamed at KKRN.org. In Victoria that’s 7am Thursday. Several programs have been archived on the website – well worth a look!