The game is on; we’ve a big wedding coming up in West Clare, and the only decent place there for a reception there Darling is… the Trump International Hotel at Doonbeg on the Atlantic coast. My first reaction was NO, but the locals who run it take the line that it’s their outfit, and it doesn’t really matter who the capital comes from; after all whoever that is may be here today, but will be gone tomorrow, and meanwhile God knows where the money actually comes from, and why should we care? After all, we have to find some way of living with the present dispensation in America; maybe we even have to try to butter up the Duckie*, while doing our own thing as firmly as possible, à la Macron. This old sailor has to fall into line again!
Meanwhile that other old man goes from bad to worse. He doesn’t seem to bother with trying to address people with some modicum of intelligence, and gives no reasons in his public addresses for his apparently insane, ridiculous and horrible decision to withdraw from the Iranian nuclear deal, not to mention from the Paris climate treaty, other than hurling just such epithets at it. What can one make of his contradictory denunciations? Nowadays Iran is the world’s “leading state sponsor of terror”, but in 2015 he described Saudi Arabia as “the world’s biggest funder of terrorism”; that country “funnels our petrodollars – our very own money – to fund the terrorists that seek to destroy our people.”**
I suppose the get-out is that it’s not the Saudi state as such, whatever that may be, which for example sends ‘our very own money’ to ISIS, but this doesn’t really wash. The only relevant difference between the Saudis and the Iranians that I can discern is that the former send sufficient quantities of petrodollars back to buy arms and know how to flatter a certain fragile ego. The Sunni/Shia business is beyond me, but from what I can make out the Wahhabi Sunni version of Islam of Saudi Arabia is particularly obnoxious, and rather like the Puritanical version of Christianity. One is inclined to contrast it with the Sufism, a more spiritual and a non-violent version of Islam, which has a history of being persecuted by Wahhabis.
It has always been a struggle to arrive at some kind of objective grasp of contradictory narratives, which are by no means new to this so-called age of post-truth. I grew up as a boy in England being led to believe that the British Empire was a great bearer of progress, the rule of law and general enlightenment to the world. I was not long finding a different narrative, especially when it came to considering the history of Ireland. Russian communists were continually complaining about ‘imperialists’, even while they sent their tanks into Eastern Europe. For some the big enemy is communism, for others capitalism, but clearly there is no monopoly of virtue either on the Right or the Left. In the end most people tend to plonk for one narrative or another for primarily tribal reasons. So-and-so may be a liar and crook, but isn’t he ‘our’ crook? Where can one find some kind of objective criteria?
‘By their fruits shall ye know them’ seems the most promising line. Does such and such a proposition or policy or approach result in denying opportunities for life or promoting them? Of course, everyone will try to argue that their crowd are the ones doing the promoting; one can but examine the rival claims and try to find out how they work out in practice.
Brexiteers claim to offer some wonderful global role for GB in the future. Looks like humbug to me, a mere chimera stemming from dreams of past glories. Europe actually offers a much more plausible route to a meaningful global role for GB, as this present crisis about Iran demonstrates. One thing is reasonably clear: the life opportunities of millions of British people are going to be curtailed, once they lose their European citizenship.
On an opposite tack, our Irish Government, no less, is asking the Irish people to give their assent to the taking of uncounted innocent and vulnerable human lives. This undeniable fact is dressed up in a narrative of compassion for women in trouble which is, to say the least, of extremely dubious validity. One thing is certain: many more babies will be denied the opportunities of life if ‘Yes’ prevails in the forthcoming referendum.
The proponents of Brexit and those of abortion, especially in America, are generally supposed to belong to opposed tribes in contemporary politics, so one can only conclude that said politics are overdue for a thorough reboot. This side of the end of the world, we may be sure that nobody's politics or tribe will entirely accord with Truth, but wherever one lives and whatever one does, it is our duty firstly to attempt to become more aware of our own tribalism and of its limitations, and secondly to do all in our power to communicate with opposed tribes. The methodology is clearly set out in the New Testament, and probably every major religion has made some attempt to do so. It’s no use merely trying to counter tribalism with Liberal Enlightenment, which sometimes seems to have established a tribe with as little awareness of its own limitations as any.
Tribalism, like language itself, is a constituent fact of our humanity, though it takes very different forms, and some of them are indeed better than others. We have to examine, to interrogate the basis of our own tribe, and transcend its limitations without necessarily abandoning it. Every attempt to do so, every bit of real human communication and accountability, has its value, even if it involves going to a wedding in the Trump International Hotel; maybe that's on our side of some kind of transatlantic bridge? And the better a tribe can come to terms with 'the other', and get to know itself in the process, the stronger it will become. Meanwhile, more power to Robert Mueller!
*http://gannetswaysailing.blogspot.ie/2017/02/eh-duckie-hang-on.html
**https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/is-iran-really-the-worlds-leading-state-sponsor-of-terror
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