Our Real Friends in the World.

Sanlucar  de Guadiana.

Sailors by nature tend to be people who enjoy different peoples, places and languages. Being used to watching one country disappear over the horizon, and then another one appear, conditions us to realise that their cultural aspects are secondary to the fact of their rather improbable existence; each is but another stage for divers players, albeit with different scenery.

Meeting the inhabitants of those countries soon helps us to realise that their differences are relatively superficial; deep down human nature is much the same everywhere, even while being tugged and torn between good and evil tendencies as universal as fair weather and foul! Admittedly, the moral climate, like the physical one, differs from place to place, but they all have their own advantages and disadvantages. It is wonderful at once to discover the variety, the differing perspectives, and the underlying universal meanings. This kind of thing accounts for much of the pleasure I take in sailing along the Gannetsway. The places that are special to me, such as Sherkin and Guadianaland, are at once remarkably distinct and remarkably open.

It may seem easier to know where one stands with those who speak the same language, but here is a lot of code that saves us the trouble of actual perception. Once one does manage to cross the language barrier, one is perhaps more likely to arrive at a better understanding concerning real meaning. This process actually works as something of a lie detector too, because to communicate across languages involves precisely finding common ground in reality. One knows that one has to make an effort to understand the other person, and how they perceive us. Lies so often depend on euphemisms and short-cuts that lazily skate round awkward facts, and in our own culture it may be easier to deploy the many handy mechanisms which it furnishes to help us avoid them. Sea-faring is a school of truth because it does not favour that kind of laziness.

Like the sea, the truth is often inconvenient and far from comfortable; however its successful manipulation is the prime preoccupation of dodgy psychopaths in their quest for power. Yes indeed, Mr J.Edgar Hoover, as you said, ‘truth-telling is the key to responsible citizenship’, just as the judicious manipulation of certain truths was key to your long career in charge of the CIA! That would not seem like a problem to anyone who can convince himself that he is on the side of the angels, but what if one is in thrall to the Devil?

With men like that, anything can be justified in terms of their concept of the

'national interest' in whatever war they happen to be prosecuting. War they must have, since this is what gives them their values and identity, their standard of right and wrong and their program for action. All too often, it is also what makes them rich, while many thousands of lesser mortals die in the battlefields.

In the 20th century very many people evidently lost all sense of themselves as persons apart from the role their country found for them. My country right or wrong! remains a powerful cry today. A devastating sense of insecurity compels some to look in the mirror of their country, in order to see themselves writ large, but when the mirror seems to be in danger of breaking, they panick. Those who help them keep the mirror together are good, those who threaten it are bad; and so they may even come up with foolish remarks like ‘our real friends in the world speak English!’ (Mr Nigel Farage in Washington lately.)

Mr Farage has found a friend indeed, a President who actually embodies the current paroxysm of nationalist narcissism. Duckie could hardly give a clearer indication that his claim to represent a genuine new deal is bunkum than his recently stated intention of increasing 'defence' spending by $54billion. We may believe in a genuine new deal when a President announces a massive reduction in expenditure on arms and also in their export, or even begins to pay down the national debt. I will not be holding my breath; it seems likely that it is impossible for the USA to ween itself off such drugs.

"I'm the king of debt. I'm great with debt. Nobody knows debt better than me," said Duckie in an interview on CBS last June. "I've made a fortune by using debt, and if things don't work out I renegociate the debt...."
"How do you renegociate the debt?"
"You go back and you say, hey guess what, the economy crashed," Trump replied. "I'm going to give you back half."

Such is Mr Farage's 'real friend', who boasts about 'keeping his promises to the American people'! Unfortunately those dudes evidently live in a parallel universe to, say, that of the plain people of Ireland, who are still smarting from having to pay off debts that largely weren't even their own. I guess there are still a few Americans who believe debt is something that sooner or later, one way or another, has to be repaid, but Larry Kudlow in the National Review said, referring to Duckie's recent speech to Congress, "That is optimism. That is leadership. And that is greatness." A bit like our own Celtic Tiger eh? I can only see that as fawning and deluded nonsense, and I would hope that few of my countrymen have memories so short that they cannot see through it!

Such narcissism is less likely to hold up between those of different nations and languages. Our real friends are those who help us see the truth, a process that involves triangulating from points of reference beyond ourselves. That is why Europe today is a more promising entity than the USA, and also because Europe, and especially the Germans, remember too well how such trips as that end! Europe must take up the age-old task of trying to weave the rope of human society around that Core which is at once its true heart but also utterly Other, beyond all our stupid human illusions, and even beyond our somewhat feeble efforts to understand what's up in this strange world!

***

In this blog, I am going to give the commentary on what is currently happening a rest, while I concentrate on writing a book about how the sea and other aspects of life taught me to see things as I do, and also to love the idea of a United Europe. It may even be called The Making of a European. I would love to be able to make certain people understand that we Europeans are here to stay, and why! I will post extracts as I go along, together with brief notes and photos if I'm doing some sailing.

Spring morning from Anna M.