Trump,
in times of crisis, has his uses.
It is immensely comforting to know that,
at the click of a few buttons one can get the latest up-to-date news concerning
the present President of the United States.
And one can also assume that whatever one is likely to read about what
the President has done, and certainly about what he has said, it will be
something that, with all one’s liberal sensibility, one can reject utterly. He is (in more telling ways that I had
considered before I thought of the comparison) the Apartheid de nos jours. He is, in his actions, his thoughts and in his
speech utterly, bigly, rejectionable. He
is the secular anathema of our times. He
is what we are not. Simples.
The
most effective showing up of Apartheid was when opponents said to the then
South African government, “If you think that Apartheid is the right system;
then just follow your own rules!” The
point being, that Apartheid as a corrupt and corrupting system could only
work if the rules were bent. The system
was build on lies and therefore it only ‘worked’ by corruption. It was the same sort of approach that workers
used against unreasonable bosses when they ‘worked to rule’, obeying all the
petty restrictions that grow up in workplaces and are usually ignored in the
service of efficiency and ‘reasonableness’!
Trump really believes that he has achieved
what his little-me British impersonator wanted as a kid, to become ‘King of the
World’ and he speaks and acts as though his thoughts are fiats.
How well are Americans living in the
Trumpian vision of America that he is forging?
Ask the dead. Ask the
jobless. Ask the hungry. Ask the sick.
Ask the disenfranchised. Ask the
victims. Ask the women. Ask the blacks. Ask the refugees. Ask the undocumented.
Of course you would get a very different
picture if you asked billionaires, CEOs, polluters and fascists.
When is the Republican Party going to
recognize that Trump is a dangerous embarrassment and that the stench of their
support for a man clearly unsuited to high office will cling to them for the
rest of their lives? Dump him and his
pernicious party – as if Trump has any clear idea of what the wider Republican
Party was, is, or even stands for!
But for liberals he is the standard
against which they can be measured.
Every day, every bloody day, he says or does something that is quite
clearly wrong, and junky-like, every day I am drawn to that section of my
on-line Guardian that lets me see and hear his latest outrages against truth,
the WHO, China, the EU, decency, the English Language, morality, history, NATO,
UNO, postal voting, or whatever else Fox News brings to his attention.
But Trump has achieved immortality. His (please god) one term presidency will be
written about for the foreseeable future.
As a leading candidate for the worst president ever to be elected (by a minority
of the popular vote) his car crash of a presidency will fascinate and appal forever. His Trump Presidential Library (leave aside the
sick irony of that concept) will be packed with books detailing his lies and
narcissism and his fatal mismanagement of the Covid-19 crisis. His presidency has rocked the very
foundations of The Republic and virtually obliterated the moral force of the USA in the world. It will be a very
long road back from the damage that he has done. And that road back will be in the aftermath
of the virus, and clearly he has none of the qualities necessary to unite and
rebuild the country. His campaign slogan
rings hollow and every day it gets more hollow and fatal.
From
our tiny section of Castelldefels that we see and hear on a ‘normal’ day, i.e.
one during which we do not make any excursions, it is difficult to judge
exactly what is going on around us. But,
I suppose that we have become accustomed to picking up smaller details in the
repetitive daily life that we have and we use those to flesh out a wide picture
of the general response to our continued lockdown.
To me it seems as if there is greater
movement around us, as you might expect when the government has said that
construction workers and other non-essential workers can go back to work.
As we are on a sometime used flight path
for Barcelona airport, it is usual for us to have the sound of planes from time
to time: we have had none, even though, as far as I know, the airport is still
open for some flights.
We are not on a main road in terms of
though traffic so our immediate neighbours own most of the cars that we see. The most traffic we get is pedestrians
walking their dogs, usually illegally as they are far too far from their
homes. There is greater noise of kids,
who must be getting beyond stir crazy in their enforced incarceration.
I cannot
see any real changing of the lockdown well into June. And that is a sobering thought.
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