Contra Trump
愛屋及烏
IFLA (I Fucking Love Australia) writes about America and its Pacific cousin on Substack. In his inimitable Australian style of prose, IFLA chronicles the saga of a benighted America. He does so from the Blue Mountains in New South Wales, my ancestral homeland.
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In this chapter of Contra Trump, we reproduce a second love letter from IFLA to a country that he has loved since childhood. For his first letter, see An Australian’s Letter to America, as well as:
- The American Green Zone in Our Consciousness
- ‘Stupid, stupid, stupid’ — A.A. Gill on The Golden Door
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The rubric of this chapter — 愛屋及烏 ài wū jí wū, ‘to love a dwelling, including the ravens nesting in its roof’ — is an expression that draws on the Book of Documents《尚書大傳·大戰》, where the full passage reads:
武王與紂戰於牧之野，紂之卒，輻分，紂之車，瓦裂，紂之甲，魚鱗下，賀乎武王。紂死，武王皇皇，若天下之未定，召太公而問日：入殷奈何。太公曰：臣聞之也，愛人者，兼其屋上之烏；不愛人者，及其胥餘。何如。武王日：不可。
In modern Chinese, 愛屋及烏 means to love something or someone including, or despite, their flaws. Among other things, one thinks of the first lines of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 141:
In faith, I do not love thee with mine eyes,
For they in thee a thousand errors note;
But ‘tis my heart that loves what they despise,
Who, in despite of view, is pleased to dote …
As well as the deathless sentiment found in Sonnet 116:
… love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no, it is an ever-fixèd mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand’ring bark
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
And, so, on we go, perhaps ‘even to the edge of doom’.
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The following essay may well bring tears to your eyes; it did to mine. As IFLA says:
… when you are hurting we feel it out here in the cheap seats, even if we do not always come out and say so.
— Geremie R. Barmé
Editor, China Heritage
8 August 2026
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I FUCKING LOVE AMERICA
A letter to 340 million people who have been told the world has stopped caring about them, which is a lie, and I intend to prove it.
7 August 2026
Her name has long been forgotten, buried under 40 odd years of dust and distant memories, but I can still hear her, because she was my kindergarten teacher and she was American, and to a small Australian kid in a scratchy uniform she may as well have arrived by rocket ship with a star studded parade. It was the vowels that got me first, the way she said “y’all” like it was one syllable of pure sunshine, the way she called us “honey” without it being weird, because in her world it wasn’t weird, it was just how you spoke to someone smaller than you who was having a rough morning. Five years old, and already carrying a torch for an entire continent I had never laid eyes on, and I never really got over it, because everything that came afterwards just poured petrol on it.
The films, the music, which is to say most of the music, and the fast food, because you invented pretty much all of it and then posted it out to the rest of the world, and I need you to understand what you were rescuing me from, which was fish fingers under a grill, three veg boiled until they surrendered every cell of chlorophyll and vitamin starting with A and ending with Z, and a slice of tinned beetroot doing the work of an entire flavour profile. The photographs of a country so big it broke my little suburban brain, red canyon walls and black pines standing in snow and that flat gold Midwest light coming in sideways across a wheat field at 6pm, cities that hum, diners at 2am, a gas station in the middle of absolutely nowhere with a bloke behind the counter who will talk to you for 20 minutes about his dog.
And then, eventually, the actual Americans, on mine sites and job sites and a hundred boring Zoom calls for a business that has nothing whatsoever to do with any of this, and every single time, without fail, the same thing: polite, warm, curious, genuinely and disarmingly interested in you as a human being. Americans will find out you are Australian and immediately want to know three things, whether it’s true about the spiders, whether you know so and so from Sydney, and whether you would like to come and stay at their house, and they have known you for 90 seconds, and the invitation is real.
I have been sold a hundred different versions of America by a hundred different people with an agenda, and every single one of them was wrong, because every single one of them left out the part where the bloke at the counter wants to tell you about his dog.
That is the country I fell for, not the flag, not the anthem, not the fucking eagle, but the people, the bloody people, which is precisely why the last few years have hurt the way they have.
What I read at 4am
I run a shitposting Australian politics page with a dog on the masthead, so I am nobody, but the messages come in anyway, and I read all of them, and lately they have stopped being funny.
I read Americans apologising to me, apologising, for their own government, the way a kid apologises for a father who has been on the piss again. I read a woman in Ohio explaining that she has been rationing insulin and doing the maths on how many days she can stretch a vial, and a bloke in Pennsylvania whose entire retirement plan is now “work until I die, hopefully quickly,” and a mother describing the very specific, very private humiliation of standing in a supermarket aisle putting things back on the shelf while her kid watches her do it and pretends not to notice.
Mostly though I read between the lines, which is where the real damage always sits, and what is sitting there is a flatness, an exhaustion, that particular tone a person gets when they have quietly stopped expecting anything to improve and have started simply bracing instead.
Here is the bit that should shame every wealthy nation on earth, mine very much included, for looking the other way. Roughly 41% of American adults are carrying some form of medical or dental debt, they collectively owe at least 220 billion dollars for the crime of having a body, and about 3 million of them owe more than 10,000 dollars each. When the bill lands and there is nothing left to sell, they go online with a photo of their kid and they beg, which is why a third of all fundraising on GoFundMe is now medical, and researchers at the University of Washington went through more than 400,000 of those campaigns and found that roughly 1 in 6 raised precisely nothing, not a cent, while an earlier study found 90% never hit their target at all, pulling in around 40% of what was needed on average.
The richest country in human history has quietly replaced its safety net with a website, where the sickest person in the room now has to also be the best storyteller in the room, or die.
That is not a policy failure, that is a moral one, and it was done to you deliberately, by people who then turned around and told you the reason your life got harder was the bloke mowing lawns down the road.
Who I do not love
Let me be crystal clear about the exceptions here, because I am not handing out unconditional love like a fucking Hallmark card.
I do not love the Duce of the Drive-Thru, a man who has never once in his gilded life had to put anything back on a supermarket shelf, and who has spent a decade convincing people with nothing at all that their real enemy is people with even less. I do not love Stephen Miller, who I remain convinced sleeps upside down in a closet with his wings folded, and who has built a very comfortable career turning cruelty into a deliverable. I do not love Jared Kushner, a vacuum-sealed nepotism experiment who looks permanently like he has just been asked a question about a spreadsheet he did not read. And I do not love Vladimir Putin, who has spent 20 years and a considerable pile of money making sure that Americans hate each other more than they hate him, and who is currently enjoying an outstanding return on that investment.
Four names, that is the entire list, and everyone else in that country, all 340 million of you, I am on your side, and I could not possibly care less which way you vote or what is written on your hat.
We are on a rock, mate
Here is where I get soppy, and you are all welcome to take the piss out of me in the comments.
We are standing on a lump of iron and stone, hurtling around the sun at roughly 107,000 kilometres an hour, while the entire solar system drags the lot of us around the galactic centre at about 828,000 kilometres an hour, through an ocean of absolute nothing, with no air, no help coming, no adults in the room, just us and each other and a thin blue smear of atmosphere that would not even wet your fingers if you could scrape it off.
Everyone you have ever loved is on this rock, along with every song ever written, every good dog, every decent cup of coffee, and every person who ever made you laugh so hard you could not breathe, all of it, right here, on this one stupid beautiful spinning thing, and we are supposed to spend our 80 laps around the sun screaming at each other about a line drawn on a map by men who are already dead.
We are all we have got, which is not a slogan, it is just the arithmetic of being alive on the only rock in the neighbourhood with a pulse.
Whether we like it or not we are joined at the hip, so your economy sneezes and my mortgage catches the flu, your democracy wobbles and every autocrat from Moscow to Beijing takes notes, your kids grow up on the same internet as mine, and when you are strong the whole world stands up a bit straighter, and when you are hurting we feel it out here in the cheap seats, even if we do not always come out and say so.
So I am saying so.
Why the page is called what it’s called
Yeah, alright, the masthead says I Fucking Love Australia, one bloke, two sheilas and a shih tzu terrier named Mitzy, banging on about politics from the Blue Mountains, but that name has always been shorthand for something a fair bit bigger, so I may as well come out and admit it now.
It may as well say I Fucking Love the United States of America, and it may as well say I Fucking Love Canada, who are currently copping their own hiding with more grace than anyone has any right to expect, and it may as well say I Fucking Love New Zealand, and Ireland, and Ukraine, and every other place where ordinary people are being done over by a handful of pricks in good suits.
I am one bloke with a keyboard and a dog, a speck sitting on a speck, yelling into a void that is not remotely listening, and in the great cosmic ledger I am a rounding error, but this is my bit, this is the little bit I can actually do, so I do it.
To my American friends
You have been told the world is laughing at you, and some of it is, but not this corner. You have been told that nobody out here cares what happens to you, which is a lie, and a deliberate one, because a person who believes they are completely alone is a person who is very easy to govern. You have been told that the people across the aisle are your enemy, when they are nothing of the sort, they are just some other poor bastard putting things back on a supermarket shelf in a different county, being lied to by a different channel.
In my long and entirely unscientific experience you are some of the kindest, funniest, most generous and most stubbornly hopeful people on this planet, and I have loved you since I was 5 years old and did not know what a country was, and I love you now, watching you go through the worst of it.
So hang on to each other, check on the quiet ones, and be unbearably kind to somebody who has done nothing to earn it this week, because it costs you nothing and it might be the only decent thing that happens to them all month.
And when it gets bad enough that you feel like the last person awake in a dark house, remember there is a bloke on the other side of the world, on the same rock, doing the same 107,000 kilometres an hour, who is awake too, and who is thinking about you.
I fucking love you lot, all of you, even the ones who voted for the self-basting turkey with a phone.
Now get up.
IFLA ~ Gman
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THE AUSSIE-TO-YANK GLOSSARY FIXER
Alright, this one is a bit different. Usually this section exists because I have called someone a drongo and half of Ohio has emailed me asking whether that is a bird. This week the words are mostly not insults, they are the furniture of a childhood, and one of you is the reason I noticed any of it in the first place. My kindergarten teacher spent a year listening to a room full of Australian five year olds and never once let on that we sounded ridiculous, so consider this the long overdue return leg. Four of the eleven are about food, which I would like on the record is not my fault, and which will explain in some detail why a nation raised on this stuff took one look at a drive-thru and wept with gratitude.
Banging on: Talking about something at length, usually to people who did not ask and cannot leave. A bloke bangs on about his ute, his back, the council, or in this case American politics from a mountain in New South Wales. Not quite the same as whingeing, because whingeing has a target and banging on just has stamina.
Blue Mountains: The range of sandstone escarpment and eucalypt forest an hour or so west of Sydney, blue because the oil coming off the gum trees scatters the light that way, which sounds like something a bloke made up in a pub and is actually true. Cold, foggy, full of cockatoos with a personal vendetta against your gutters. Home base for this whole operation.
Done over: Ripped off, worked over, or comprehensively beaten, depending on how the sentence lands. You get done over by a mechanic, by a landlord, or by a government that quietly moves the deductible while telling you it is protecting your freedom.
Fair bit, a: A quantity we use precisely because it refuses to be precise. A fair bit of money, a fair bit of trouble, a fair bit rougher than the photos suggest. Somewhere between a decent amount and considerably more than you would like.
Fish fingers: What you call fish sticks, which is the more honest name, because nothing about them resembles a finger unless something has gone very wrong at the cannery. Crumbed rectangles of reconstituted whitefish, grilled until the outside is orange and the inside is a rumour.
Hiding, a: A comprehensive flogging, literal or metaphorical, delivered to someone who cannot do much about it. A footy team cops a hiding, a currency cops a hiding, and a country cops a hiding when a bigger one decides tariffs are a personality.
Meat and three veg: The load-bearing dinner of postwar Australia. A piece of protein, three vegetables boiled into submission, and gravy poured over the top to hide the evidence. No garlic, no herbs, no ambition. An entire generation was raised on it and turned out mostly fine, which is either a tribute to their resilience or an indictment of what we thought food was for.
On the piss: Drinking, deliberately and at length. Distinct from having a beer, which is a thing you do with dinner, and distinct from pissed, which is the destination rather than the journey. A father who has been on the piss again is a specific and universally understood figure, and every country has a few million of him.
Play up: To malfunction, misbehave, or start giving trouble. A car plays up, a knee plays up, and a kid plays up in the supermarket at precisely the moment you least need it. The genius of it is that it files the crook alternator and the six year old under the same category of problem.
Plughole: The drain in a sink or a bath. You say drain, which is functional, we say plughole, which at least acknowledges there is a plug involved. Also the subject of the single most persistent question every Australian gets asked overseas, and the answer is that it depends on the shape of your sink and has nothing whatsoever to do with the hemisphere.
Tinned beetroot: Sliced beetroot from a can, packed in its own violently purple juice, and the one flourish permitted in an Australian kitchen for about 40 years. Goes on burgers, which horrifies visiting Americans, and stains everything it touches including the plate, the bread and the bloke eating it. Genuinely good on a burger. We will not be taking questions.
Drongo: An idiot. A fool. Named after a useless Australian racehorse from the 1920s that never won a single start in 37 tries. The horse retired. The word stuck around to honour him.
Worth knowing that the real Drongo apparently ran second a few times and was reportedly a decent enough horse who just could not close, which somehow makes it worse. There is also an actual bird called a drongo, a glossy black thing that is quite clever, so the bird is getting defamed by association through no fault of its own.
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Source:
- IFLA, I Fucking Love America, 7 August 2026
‘To my American readers, and there are a lot more of you than there used to be. You do not owe a bloke in the Blue Mountains money. Hit free, that is genuinely all I want. It costs you nothing, it tells the algorithm to put this in front of somebody else who needs to read it, and it means you are still here next time. If you have got a spare few dollars and you want to chuck them in, they go on hosting, coffee and the occasional legal opinion. If you have not, that is completely fine, and I mean that, because I have just spent 3,000 words on exactly why a lot of you have not got it spare.’
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