Gerstmann’s Syndrome

Barry Dredze
3 min readApr 14, 2020
‘Liberty’ by Jam Sutton: More here: https://thisisnot.studio/collections/art

Remember the big stink that Trump and the Cult of the Red Hat made over Colin Kaepernick’s demonstrations of support for Black Lives Matter during NFL pre-game National Anthem rituals? Internet memes usually fall short of any attempt at a cogent argument in public discourse but there was a particularly good one on the subject, with a photo of Kaepernick in uniform kneeling on the sideline, declaring that “Racism is so American that when you protest it people think you’re protesting America.”

I make certain assumptions that, since we often have the flag on our minds, people understand what it means that we live in these United States of America. See, here in the USA, we are fairly exceptional among the family of nations in that ours was based on an idea instead of an ethnic identity. Specifically, the American Revolution was based on the Enlightenment idea of equality. While the idea has certainly taken much of our history to refine, we risk becoming the victims of our own success as the complacency of the American Dream allows our bad electoral choices to take a couple-few steps back in the ongoing greater effort “to form a more perfect union.”

Much of our participating electorate today appears to suffer from a prominent symptom of Gerstmann’s Syndrome, namely the inability to differentiate between left and right.

--

--

Barry Dredze

Just another mortal, tweaking my cognitive map on the fly.