Cloud-face over the Shannon Estuary. |
Thank you America, for a really thrilling piece of political theatre (or maybe I should write ‘theater’, but that would be a bridge too far). I am in Ireland after all, where these days the golden rule is to say as little as possible that might upset the apple cart, and we keep our politics boring, impotent and largely decorously irrelevant. Whatever else Trump is or is not, he’s a great showman, and surely his turning of the soil will do some good! He’s not boring anyway, and maybe he will even liven things up here.
I hasten to add that I would not relish the prospect of all that American capital going home. The pension might become very shabby. We are fortunate in that it affords Fiona and I the leisure necessary to watch all those pod-casts, - Joe Rogan, Megan Kelly, Jordan Peterson and the rest. What fun it is to feel that we have a ring-side seat at all the drama! What I don’t understand is how busy people who have a family to rear find time to do it; still apparently many millions do so, even while working or travelling I suppose. One must also conclude that they do not waste time looking at newspapers or TV, and I cannot claim I’m sorry about that, even if I worry about putting too much power in the hands of a few billionaires, notably Elon Musk. It is certainly an issue to watch carefully.
We have had a stern warning, in the way censorship prevailed during covid, and the desire on the part of so many governments, including the putative one of Kamala Harris, to ‘regulate’ the internet, but there is hope in the very nature of the new technology. ‘The Media is the Massage’, and it is a lot easier for anyone to participate in the new media, which has brought a level of intensity to the ‘noosphere’ that everyone who cares about the world has to participate in, and it won’t do to just write it off as ‘globalism’. But now that the owner of Starlink and X is in there with Trump, he may make censorship impossible, or put it on steroids. Too much depends on those men for my liking! Yet they are nothing without our support. To the degree to which everyone is free to participate, we may be hopeful - it’s that First Amendment thing again.
Personally I lost faith in the legacy media, if I ever had any, around 60 years ago, when I tried my hand at working for them. I had for instance my little go at reporting how the barricades in Derry and Belfast were thrown up in pure terror at the B Specials, who had run amok, shooting up Nationalist areas from their Saracen armoured cars. A sub-editor only has to leave some things out, change other bits round, stick on a misleading headline, and the great British public remain as uninformed and cosy in their prejudice as ever! I met the bloke who produced that excellent little film ‘The War Game’, which simply but effectively tried to convey something of the reality of nuclear war. The BBC pulled it, under Government pressure. But the level of censorship in those days was tin-pot compared to that potentially exercised by Trump/Musk.
Anyway I decided against spending my life working for that lot in London in my day, and am very glad that I did so, for it would have been horribly frustrating. Had I taken to the kind of career that my father expected of me, the combination of Brexit and the covid affair would have been a very sorry culmination of it. But was there anything more to that cultural atrophy in London besides what might be expected from the demise of the British Empire, something which afflicted more than Great Britain?
Such a possibility started to figure in my mind when at my then impressionable age we witnessed the assassination of President Kennedy. One cannot understand the impact it had unless one also understands how tall he stood for peace and justice. It took many years, however, for the realisation to dawn that ‘conspiracy theories’ about the deep state, the CIA etc were likely true, and that President Kennedy was maybe indeed assassinated because he had decided, for instance, to pull out of Vietnam and refused to invade Cuba. I must admit to being delighted that the Trumpistas won so convincingly if for no other reason than that I hope that after all these years, the truth will finally be laid before the world.
I followed Bobby Kennedy jnr into the Trumpista camp. Now I am looking forward to an even more consequential act in the American political drama! Will ‘The Ducky’, as I like to call him, be willing and able to follow through with his chat, particularly about peace and dismantling censorship? At least the world has already taken one step back from the brink of WW3, but only one step! Will this brash man, who if the mantra ‘we are what we eat’ were true, is mainly hamburger and coca-cola, really be able to get us back to the place of relative peace that prevailed during his first chaotic term of office? Will he genuinely honour the partnership with Kennedy in regard to Big Pharma?
Will he be true to his words, for instance in not paying attention to windy ideas that speak of winning wars? Unfortunately, too many people are stuck in a mind-set inherited from WW2, which is about as far as their concept of good and evil gets. It may just have been viable to think in terms of winning wars then, but it is certainly not so today. Well, ‘Sufficient unto the day are the evils thereof’, and let’s concentrate on putting a stop to them. Let’s deal with the situation as it is today, dealing with real, flawed human beings. Let’s refrain from demonising them, even when they behave very badly, but concentrate first of all on getting the motes out of our own eyes, and then follow the show very critically!
If Trump lays bare the chicanery of the CIA, that might be a good way of setting about sorting out the Ukraine war. In the case of Israel, he will have to somehow get back to those Abraham Accords. If they had been pursued with vigour and determination, maybe this senseless war in Israel could have been avoided. In the event, there was no other way that the Israelis could have been expected to respond to the vicious and depraved attack they suffered, as Hamas knew too well, while Biden just bleated about restraint and gave more weapons. If on the other hand Trump’s partnership with the Arabs were to prevail, then perhaps Israel and Iran could be induced to settle down. The present situation only strengthens the position of dodgier leaders there!
When it comes to the domestic agenda, would not we all love, in Ireland as in America, to see less dependence on multi-national or even national corporate entities, and more localised production and responsibility? Is this a contradiction at the heart of Trumpism? Again, the USA is such a big, multi-ethnic and diverse confederation that maybe the renewal of nationalism there is OK. The nature of the beast will not allow it to turn excessively on itself. Imagine Elon Musk being told he could only operate there! As for silly old GB, the government had to turn round and hire an extra 80,000 civil servants in the wake of Brexit. Here in Ireland, at least most people understand that we need the EU to have any cost-efficient kind of vibrant, modern society, even while we also think that there is a mammoth task ahead to keep it in its proper place.
What we do not need is the likes of the WHO and the WEF in on the act, though we do have to keep the Planet in mind, while keeping any global institutions answerable. The Catholic Church provides an excellent model in principle, solidarity and subsidiarity being the key words, though God knows we often fail in practice. Well. Fiona is working on the answerability bit for this institution, while I’m working on concern for the Planet and reducing dependence on oil in my own little way. It’s better not to depend on high-falutin’ ideas handed down by academics, civil servants or even clerics, nor to give in to fear-mongering and the authoritarianism that thrives on it, but let it all be the one thing that authoritarians hate most,- fun!
Thanks again, America, for the entertainment - your saving grace is indeed that First Amendment, and we at least hear you over here in Ireland. The drama will run and run,- good job one can follow it anywhere. I’m off to Portugal again next week, for another session on the Anna M before Christmas - general election or no general election! Been there, done that, standing for the Christian Solidarity Party back in the ‘90s. Yet if the Trumpistas really shake things up here, by for instance letting Bobby Kennedy loose on the covid vaccines, one wouldn’t know what might happen,- it’s a good job I’m too old to be seriously interested in politics again, but I do enjoy them when the real issues are in contention!