Sometimes you have to hunt far and wide to describe a thing, especially when it is a specific thing that has no handy word for it. This German word comes closest to describing the phenomenon that Comus seeks to describe now. The word translates literally as ”foreign-shame.” That may seem a little odd, but when you think about it, it describes perfectly the oddity explained below. Digging a bit deeper, it means a sentiment or feeling of vicarious embarrassment over something someone has done or said. Often, it is something inappropriate, awkward, or cringeworthy, and, furthermore, that person is often unaware of his or her blunder immediately, if ever.
Because the well-known media, as represented by The New York Times, the Washington Post (not to mention the local media that jump on everything the President says), and others, report daily on the president’s real and/or fabricated examples, he is left off this list. Think of this column as equal time.
Current news events provide us with numerous fremdscham examples. Let’s begin.
The irrepressible Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently took to the Munich Security Conference for what was, to all pundits and other observers, her first foray into running for President in 2028. The result was fremdscham writ large. Her cringeworthy appearance is like compound interest: it just keeps on giving.
It began when Alexandria tried to give a social studies lesson on the current location of Venezuela. She placed it south of the equator. The image below presents the world today:
To be fair, the equator is close. It sits just below Colombia. Unfortunately for our barmistress, Venezuela is a bit farther north. If this had been the only gaffe, one might have ignored it, even though she is often touted as the ‘progressive” foreign policy” doyen. But it wasn’t. She went on to mimic presidential candidate Harris’s world salad when speaking about Taiwan and whether the US should defend it if China attacks. Her answer went like this: “I think that, uh, this is such a, a, you know, I think that this is a, um, this is of course, a, uh, a very longstanding, um, policy of the United States, and I think what we are hoping for is we want to make sure we never get to that point.” Got it? One fan argued that if Harris and AOC ran on a 2028 ticket, they would take every state in the US. That may be true since no one would know what either was talking about. Maybe AOC had one too many Vespers before that interview, but for more on that, see the Australian reporter’s fremdscham below.
But matters worsened after that, became ingravescent, as physicians might say of a disease. She took to TikTok to explain why she wasn’t wrong, or that her comments were not that insipid, complete with a loudly snoring dog in the background. TikTok is her go-to platform because it makes her seem more like us, or rather, like those who use TikTok. She explained how tired she was after hours and hours of being on stage, and how she pauses to think first before speaking, unlike the current President. Sadly, her pondering failed intelligibility. We’ll pass over the controversy with Rubio, cowboys, and Spain. Apparently, the foreign relations expert did not know, or forgot, that the Spaniards and Portuguese brought horses to the New World. Mexicans, specifically the Vaqueros, added the familiar getups. One would think with a name like Cortez, she might have known that.
Let’s move on.
Since Gavin Newsom recently hawked his book in Rock Hill, it seems only fair to report on his fremdscham. Speaking in Atlanta before a mostly Black audience, 2028 presidential hopeful Newsom desperately tried to relate to his audience. He claimed that, like them, he read very little and that, like them, he had a low SAT score, 960. Essentially, he told his audience he was as dumb as they were. In what must be one of the top five most racist comments made by a public figure, only a white media darling like Newsom will get a pass. Any other white man would have to resign his position and leave the country. His subsequent expletive-filled whataboutism rant didn’t help his cause.
At the Winter Olympics, Australian Channel Nine reporter, Danika Mason, went on air after having one too many Vespers at vespers, or something like that. The original story about coffee at the Olympics and elsewhere was fumbled into some unintelligible words about iguanas. To her credit, she took responsibility the next day, post-hangover, but did try to mitigate her gaffe by talking about the altitude, the pace of the Winter Olympics, and skipping dinner. Oh, and she did add the part about the few drinks she slugged down pre-airtime.
Comus should not overlook Marxist-cum-Leninist New York mayor, Zohran Mamdani’s contribution to this omnium-gatherum of fremdscham. Recently, he called on any able-bodied individuals to grab a shovel, and for $30 an hour, he would pay them to shovel snow. Why he made this list is what transpired subsequently. While he refuses to require an ID for voting, he demanded two IDs before New Yorkers could apply to shovel snow. Ostensibly, shoveling snow is more important than voting, and those who would be disenfranchised if they had to get an ID to vote are not when required to get two IDs to shovel snow.
Our penultimate piece of fremdscham occurred simultaneous with the President’s recent State of the Union address. Viewers may have liked of disliked the address, or like parts and disliked others. That’s the nature of SOTU addresses. But what can possibly explain why a small number of Democrats hosted a “defiance” event with dancing frogs?
Although this last bit of fremdscham refers back to that horrific virus event that bedeviled us a few years ago, it is still worth repeating. Every concerned citizen should read David Zweig’s Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions (MIT Press, April 2025). Zweig is no fan of Trump, but he does provide ample evidence if needed, that the Biden plan for four years was to do the opposite of Trump, especially on the virus. Zweig points out how American officials and the scientific community ignored the abundant evidence that masking didn’t work, that social distancing was useless, and that children should have gone back to school early.
Citing evidence from a dozen or so countries across the Atlantic and studies relating to them, Zweig chronicles how we knew as early as May 2020 that the spread of the virus from young children to adults was statistically negligible, that only compromised individuals and the elderly should have quarantined, and that the wholesale closing of schools and businesses was entirely unnecessary. Italy, France, Germany, Norway, Iceland, Denmark, and other countries had proven this to be the case, and that Fauci, Birx, and others knew this but chose to proceed differently.
Readers will doubtless remember that Birx told all of us to avoid family gatherings while she met with several generations of hers. Meanwhile, Governor Cooper warned us not congregate in crowds while he ran off with the Black Lives Matter protest. Even as far back as 2005, we had scientific evidence that widespread pandemic-like influenza should not result in school closings. Even when the European evidence was available, the US virus “experts” refused to examine it, ignoring it altogether.
The only reason this is important now is that the year or so that US children lost academically was completely unnecessary and obviously academically devastating. What makes this fremdscham more pervasively nocent is that those who brought us to this fraudulent impasse are still claiming they did nothing wrong.
We need to keep these things in mind when another pandemic arises.
