America: our great, powerful, despairing friend

One's hitherto vague, occasional glimpses of the wretchedness of so many Americans has been brought into clearer focus by the newest Social Progress Index, and, then, by accomplished columnist/reporter Nicholas Kristof's New York Times' piece "We're No.28! And Dropping!"

Kristof has just had a moving and distressing-to-listen-to conversation with ABC Radio National's Geraldine Doogue in which, against the backdrop of the Social Progress Index's voluminous findings, he focused on his beloved and unhappy home town in Oregon as a case study of USA wretchedness.

A quarter of the then happy, golden and optimistic children he used to share the school bus with in rural Oregon are now dead, he told Doogue, from drugs, alcohol and suicide - what are called "deaths of despair".

"The quality of life has dropped in America over the last decade, even as it has risen almost everywhere else," Kristof finds.

"Out of 163 countries assessed worldwide, the United States, Brazil and Hungary are the only ones in which people are worse off than when the index began in 2011."

"The index, inspired by research of Nobel-winning economists, collects 50 metrics of well-being - nutrition, safety, freedom, the environment, health, education and more - to measure quality of life. The United States, despite its immense wealth, military power and cultural influence, ranks 28th, now behind significantly poorer countries."

The United States ranks 91 in the world in access to quality basic education and 97 in access to quality health care.

"America ranks a shameful No.100 in discrimination against minorities," Kristof laments.

"Trump is a symptom of this larger malaise, and also a cause of its acceleration."

For those of us, leftish in our politics, always appalled by our governments' lickspittle readiness to join in the USA's mad invasions and wars, it has been easy to mindlessly hate the USA. Now (the hitherto smugly unkind anti-American mind boggling a little) there arises the challenge of loving and feeling sympathy for the people of the USA, our great and powerful but increasingly despairing and declining friend.

Readers, voters, citizens, what is it you really, really want in a candidate wooing you for your vote during this harlequinade, this ACT election campaign?

Coming across a campaigning candidate in a public place and going up to him or her (keeping a firm grip on your dog's leash, for dogs can show an intuitive hostility towards politicians) what probing questions will you ask?

And what if, instead of banal matters of their party affiliation, what they feel about cracked footpaths, graffiti removal, bus timetables, unkempt trees and clogged gutters, we looked for Bigger Picture proofs of what kinds of minds they have?

I refer you, only appearing to digress, to the late Clive James.

The Guardian has just exclusively posted an exquisite excerpt from his new, latest and last book. In it the effervescent Australian poet and wit rhapsodises about the magical part poetry has played in his life.

"Let me flash back to Opportunity School at Hurstville, Sydney," Clive reminisces, "with its rule that every pupil, at the end of the day, had to stand beside his desk and recite a memorised poem before he was allowed to go home. It was a fantastic combination of Parnassus and a maximum-security prison.

"The remarkable thing, I suppose, is not that I memorised a few poems, but that I never forgot them."

The shy idea occurs to your poetry-mad columnist that it would be a fine and revealing thing to go up to campaigning ACT political candidates and ask them, then and there, to recite for you a poem lodged in their memories.

An ability to do it would reveal a lot about them, including that they are at least a teensy bit cultured and have sprightly, retentive minds.

Don't we all want our legislature to bristle with cultured, sprightly and retentive minds, so that, for a change, our MLAs can make engaging contributions to the Canberra Conversation, to the Conversation of Mankind?