My Uncle’s Peanuts and John Oliver’s America

My uncle stopped buying American peanuts after Trump won. My aunt refuses to go near a McDonald’s now—which, honestly, her cardiologist is probably grateful for, even if the politics are confused. And a friend of mine, whose hard drive I could describe in some detail, quietly retired his entire Jenna Jameson collection. These are the gestures available to people who feel something about the state of the world but live too far away to do anything that actually matters.

It’s not irrational. The United States elected a man who campaigns openly on contempt for everywhere else, and the impulse to return the favor is understandable. The problem John Oliver laid out recently on Last Week Tonight is that this response flattens a nation of three hundred and thirty million people into one extremely orange face. America isn’t Trump any more than Germany is a beer stein.

Oliver’s counterargument came in his usual register—absurdist, generous, slightly wounded. The country also gave us YouTube. Dinosaur costumes. Beds that look like the Batmobile. He’s working in a specific comic tradition, the idea that a civilization can contain its worst and best impulses simultaneously, and that punishing the whole thing for its leadership’s sins is the wrong math. He’s probably right. I still don’t feel particularly warm toward the country right now. But I’ll concede the Batmobile bed. That’s something.