It may have been something to do with the cold, making me feel even more misanthropic than usual, or it may just be the way that my mind works, but I began to think of the Decline of Empires and how values are, well, devalued as a society sinks into the abyss.
It is, after all, very easy to get into an apocalyptic way of thinking when a pandemic is raging around us and economic disaster is an everyday reality. People talking of ‘The New Normal’ as if it is just a slight change in the weather, rather than a radical rethinking of the way that we have been doing things. When you see a film on television and it shows crowds of people jostling their ways around a crowded city; when you see people flocking to stadia or theatres; when you see people greeting each other with a friendly kiss on either cheek – and you think, that is another world, you begin to realize just how massive a change in the way that we behave and the way that we think has taken place. What we did this time last year was BC – before Covid. A different world, another country, foreign, they did things differently there. That is a bit of a mash-up of L P Hartley’s famous opening line of The Go-Between, but it expresses the sense of strangeness that passing time gives, or perhaps demands.
The true strangeness of our times is that this revolution in our activity has taken place in months, not years. Even with World War Two there was a sort of phoney war to get people used to the fact that there was a war on. Yes, there was the air raid warning that went off soon after the declaration of war, but it was a false alarm, my Dad was in London at the time and remembered the sense of, “Bloody hell! Here we go!” and the rueful anti-climax when no bombers swooped into sight. London and the rest of the country soon learned the reality of all out total war.
I am not sure what sort of reality prevails at the moment. We live a fairly enclosed life, with the occasional sally out for lunch or supplies, but we have not left our area for months, but I refuse to believe that the pelotons of cyclists that I passed on my morning ride along the paseo had dressed up in all their latex awfulness just to ride the few kilometres contained in our town - in spite of curfew being in force from 10 pm on Friday night to 6 am on Monday morning part of which demands that no one moves from their municipalities.
People are cherry-picking the rules that they want to follow. The number of cyclists, runners, dog walkers, and strollers who were not wearing masks is astonishingly high. They want normality to be here now, and they are perhaps used to living in a society where instant gratification is the norm. Covid breaks the norms, the trick is understanding that fact.
But, back to the Decline of Empire and the Decadence that is its usual accompaniment. Britain is a country where the time for sighing over lost empire is so far in the historical past that we should just shut up and get on with living with the status of a relatively rich but relatively uninfluential country. Our ‘special relationship’ with the USA is a sad self-deluding joke and we belittle ourselves as we preen ourselves in the reflected glory of a richer and much more powerful friend and ally.
Trump has tested the strength of American democracy and illustrated its weaknesses. His sad continuing tantrum that reality does not bow to his own sick idea of reality would be pathetic and risible, if he was not the most powerful man in the world with truly frightening resources at his disposal. This is where the cheap comparison with Hitler in his bunker falls down; Hitler was sending imaginary armies to fight against his inevitable defeat, Trump has at his disposal weapons that make the whole of the arsenal of the last world war look like fireworks. Trump can send real armies into the abyss!
Even though he has been defeated, even though he is a lame-duck president, even though the leaders of the world have congratulated Biden on his victory, the Orange Outrage still persists in his presidential petulance and every day he devalues his office a little (and some days a great deal) more.
But what has really struck me about the grotesquery of Trump’s tenure in the White House is how brazen he has been in rewarding the people like himself, privileged white plutocrats (if he does actually have the money to entitle himself to that title). He has cut tax for the very rich, he has reduced restrictions of manufacturing, he has opened up areas for mineral exploitation, he has degraded many of the agencies which protect our physical and financial environment. He has worked (between golf rounds) on making sure that his friends, family and industrialists have all benefited.
What is shocking is not that Trump has demonstrated no ethical standards in his government, who would have expected him to be anything outher than he turned out to be, but what is shocking is the extent to which he has been aided and abetted to stay in office by those around him.
When a friend was working, very unhappily, in a school where the owner was making everybody’s’ lives unbearable, I had to tell her the simple truth about the owner, she simply did not care. To the question which began, “But how can she . . . “ the answer was, “She doesn’t care!”
The Republicans in the Senate and in the House have shown that they simply, “do not care”. As long as they get what they want they can allow the president to do little or nothing as a quarter of a million fellow Americans die of Covid; they can work to repeal the Affordable Care Act threatening to leave millions of poorer Americans without health insurance; they can stuff courts with ill-suited right-wing judges; they can lie; they can be proven hypocrites and they simply don’t care.
The shocking thing is that it is all so plain to see. They lie and cheat in plain sight. They are caught out again, and again, and again. But they simply don’t care. Because the people that are suffering are not them.
The Republicans have allowed a clearly unsuited person to be president. They have supported him in the face of indisputable facts which disprove his position. They have been venial and base – and they should be finished as a political party.
Perhaps they are. The sick nightmare of the Republican Party that has been formed in Trump’s image is perhaps something that will linger on longer than the one-term president who allowed the absurd parody of self-interest to stand for Republican American politics,
The truly sad thing about the last days of the would-be despot is that he had the second highest number of votes ever cast for a presidential candidate and still people cling to his lies and delusions. There are weeks to go before he finally leaves the White House and the trappings of power are taken from his tiny hands. God alone knows what mischief he can do in that time.
And he will be supported by Republicans in both houses, because they do not care.
