Wednesday 16 May 2018

Is it a mad bad world?

OK, so reasonable, sane people who don't have a right wing or protectionist agenda tend to loathe Trump, and this week's events in Israel have not helped one little bit. We long for the nuanced, thoughtful, non provocative Obama style. But here's the thing: it seems to be the case that the Trump style gets results. North Korea talking to the USA? (Sure this may collapse if North Korea feels there is too strong a nuclear agenda here), And I reflect on history's bad and powerful people who created stable and peaceful empires (at a cost), and the warring and jealous and feuding factions held in check by them. Is it the case I ask myself, that we need the madder, riskier types in power from time to time, so that a kind of balance of events flows? (Obviously this argument has its limits - Hitler for instance isn't a good advert for the case.) I wonder if the EU will fracture too, for lack of coherent leadership which committees cannot give. Is it the case that we humans just can't co-exist peacefully wherever money, power, resources and influence matter, and that wherever they do, look out?

Moving from all of the above to another story that is international this week, the wedding of Megan Markle to Harry Windsor. The media is feasting on the choicer portions of some aspects of the American cousins responses to it all. I heard one comment refer to the cousins' resentment that Megan had hardly been in touch with them and I wondered how much communication ever happened between them, especially before Megan hit the acting scene as big as she had? Were they that interested back in the day? Communication is two-way isn't it, but we hear the moans only when one of the parties hits the big time, and the others feel ditched, because their sense of entitlement to share the spoils has been ignored.

Ah, that spectre - a sense of entitlement. How that has come to haunt our educational and health institutions. Teachers can be worn down by a small minority of parents who feel entitled to more, health centre appointments are snatched up by the same kind of patient, and our voluntary community organisations can be wrecked by them. Eventually gate keepers are posted, and they become so used to the belligerent and demanding, that the meek and mild are met with the same tone and barrier building attitudes that were put in place for the aggressors.

I don't believe that there are more bad people than good in the world. Indeed I strongly believe the opposite to be the case. It's just that the bad and the mad seem to have so much more impact. And that takes us back to the start of my piece.  

Tuesday 30 January 2018

Understanding the resilience of Trump

I came across this in the Guardian Opinion columns. I hadn't clocked Suzanne Moore before, but I like her style, even if she's not offering solutions to the protests she voices. You can read the whole piece here:  https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/commentisfree/2018/jan/29/

I have expressed the opinion that Trump may well be re-elected. This excerpt from Moore's article may help to show why I think this.

Every day some terrible fact is exposed and social media rouses itself and ... nothing much happens. We are caught in a cycle of ineffectual reaction. Can this man really be in charge of pushing the nuclear button, we ask, every single time he pushes our buttons? Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury was going to bring it all tumbling down. It is a belting read, in a-bucket-of-KFC way; greasy and ultimately unsatisfying. Hillary Clinton reading bits of it out at the Grammys is surely the ultimate signifier of impotence. Let’s all laugh at him, us who are so much better.
As a collective strategy, this is proving as futile as my pathetic tweets. The Republican party keeps him in power. The Democrats still appear to be in a state of post traumatic stress disorder, stuck in the loss, unable to put it in the past. Trump has delivered to the right, to the Tea Party element, to the so-called “nativists” (also known as racists). He has cut taxes in ways Mitt Romney lost the nomination for talking about. The liberal revulsion to his misogyny and racism has been mistaken for opposition. It is not enough.
Gary Younge’s recent reporting from Muncie, Indiana, where he also spent a month before Trump’s election, revealed that most Trump voters think he is doing OK (and these people are not even his core supporters). Tax cuts, deregulation and a conservative in the supreme court are all cited as achievements. The underlying forces that propelled people to vote for Trump – a belief he would smash up the system and, yes, racism, are still there. The narrative of a maverick who works against the mainstream media operates successfully in a huge country where news remains suprisingly local.
The focus on his ludicrous ego and ignorance may make us feel superior. But that is all it appears to be doing. He will not be toppled by us jeering at a picture of his enormous arse or reports of his word salad on climate change, his links to Russia and his comments about pussy-grabbing. Not as long as he is supported by racists, the far right, Christian fundamentalists, the global business elite and his own party. And he is. It is time to get serious about what drives this presidency. At the moment, the joke is on us.
Suzanne Moore (Guardian)



Thursday 18 January 2018

Denunciations and accusations

I read that 100 women have signed an open letter condemning the recent wave of denunciations that are making waves at the moment particularly in the wake of the Harvey W scandal. I think they perhaps go a little too far in defending some masculine behaviour, but I also think we need to keep things in balance. I like debate, and when I saw the response of a group of 30 feminists accusing the 100 of trying to "close the lid" on the scandal and of scorning the victims of sexual abuse, I felt that it was they who were trying to close a lid, and that on simple debate. For me, the danger so easily let loose by the media is the one of judging before the evidence or the testimonies and cases are in. An accusation should be taken seriously, and fair play, women have been severely cold shouldered and made to feel guilty, complicit, powerless and ignored in the past, and for that there is no excuse. However, an accusation is not the same as guilt proven. I'm thinking of the witch trials in the past, where after an accusation was made, the accused stood very little chance of survival. The odds were stacked against the accused, in the same way as now, the odds seem stacked against the defendant. The headlines often speak of guilt rather than accusation, or at the least, imply guilt, before all the evidence is in, all the accounts heard. People have to act guilty, lose their jobs, go into hiding, just because they have been accused. That is not how justice should work is it? There will of course be incredibly difficult cases where the accused may not have abused more than one person, and so it becomes their word against their accuser. It is not difficult to imagine cases where people may have been bribed to speak false accusations, where powerful enemies have reason to seek the downfall of a particular person. However, I feel that the processes of careful evidence hearing and taking will in most cases deliver a just outcome, if they are allowed to happen fairly and wisely. And to this end accusations must be handled sensitively and seriously. There can be no return to a male dominated heavy hand of protection for the miscreant as has now so often been revealed to have been the case. And it may be that the pendulum must swing a little wildly before it settles.