Lost and Found

 

 

I thought, as you do, of using some apposite quotation from the Parable of the Prodigal Son, or that bit in Matthew of “rejoice, and be exceeding glad” to express my delight at being presented with my Lost White Notebook (the capital letters indicating the growing importance that I have placed on it while it was lost) to accompany my post swim cup of tea.  I had obviously left the book or dropped the book at or near my seat and it had been found and carefully put away by the catering staff.  “Great happiness!”  Though that is not the King James Version of the Bible, but rather King Duncan in Macbeth, and his joy has to be viewed with a certain degree of irony!

     And that is always the problem with quotations, or perhaps it is their delight – that they come with associations.  You detach them from their contexts at your peril.

     The Parable of the Prodigal Son ends with the father telling his disgruntled elder son, that his younger impoverished, wastrel brother, “was lost, and is found.”  Simple, precise, and beautiful.  Applying the ‘mere’ words to my lost notebook may be accurate, but a book of my scribbles being kept behind the counter in the swimming pool café, waiting for me to reclaim it, is hardly the stuff of moral instruction, and the spiritual baggage of the quotation overwhelms the occasion.  

 

 

 

 

 

     Similarly, with the ‘bit’ of Matthew.  The words are spoken just after Jesus has delivered the Beatitudes and he encourages his disciples and followers to accept the persecution that will follow acceptance of his doctrine as a sign of their being blessed.  Not just popping a small notebook back in the pocket that it must have fallen out of.

     At one time an ‘educated’ person would have been able to use images and language from the Bible and the Classics and have a reasonable expectation that his ‘educated’ listener would be able to follow his examples.

     Today, what is our generally shared pool of knowledge?  I would suggest that even with a parable as famous as The Prodigal Son, and even with the phrase being part of reasonably everyday English, few know any details of the story, or even that it comes from the Bible.

     When I was teaching and trying to justify (is that the right word) Milton’s use of heavy religious and Classical imagery, I would ask the class to think of a simile, to make one up, but to use a figure or event or product that they knew well, with the aim to get the simile accepted by the whole class.  So, for example, you could say, “Complete the following simile, ‘As famous as ………..’ filling in the space with the name of a person, a living person, whom everybody in the class would know.”  The students usually forgot that I was in the class too, and their favourite and very famous singers or football players or television stars, did not sometimes figure on my list of the famous, which the kids used to call ‘foul’ to and say that to get someone even I must know would be impossible!  Which was part of the point that I was making.

     It was a useful exercise to show that there were various spheres of “You must have heard of him/her” where not knowing the “famous” person by a section of the class was greeted with astonishment.

 

 

  

 I also used the expression, “As faithful as Ruth.”  Not only had most of the classes never heard of the expression, they also did not know that there was a book of the bible called Ruth and they knew nothing about the story of Ruth, Naomi, and Boaz.

     Of course, you could say that my generation of baby boomers was the last to be brought up on a diet of significant and generally accepted Great Literature, with poems from Palgrave’s Golden Treasury featuring heavily.  In my first year in Secondary School, we read from a slim volume called Men and Gods which gave brief and readable versions of some of the more famous Greek and Roman myths, giving us a fairly easy was in to hearing some of the Classical names that would feature in the literature that we would be presented with as we progressed through school.

     The odious Johnson peppers his discourse with references to the Classics, throwing a few well-worn Latin tags into his so-called conversation to give the impression of timeless erudition.  But he hides behind the effect, he does not use Classicism to elucidate but rather to intimidate.  He aims for the same admiration that right-wing thugs gave to Enoch Powell, 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

when they vaunted his linguistic ability and his ability to read Latin and Greek as a way of giving themselves some reflected kudos from his academic reputation and using his assumed intellectual superiority to justify their base behaviour.

     A shared body of knowledge is only useful if it makes communication easier, otherwise it becomes a way of excluding and reinforces exclusivity.

     So, what about the expression of my glee at finding something that was lost?  Famous quotations come ‘ready-made’, but they come with associations that are rarely exactly to the point that you are trying to make.

     The only solution, of course, is to write your own!

    

Saying something trying to be nice

 

I am going to try hard, and do my very best not to be abusive as I write about Trump.

I let that sentence stand as a paragraph to remind myself of my starting point as I continue to type!  But, truly Trump has exceeded the normal bounds of political discourse and has put in place something new and, I am going to say, ‘exhilarating’.

On the positive side, Trump has shown that you need have no experience in politics or local, city, state or national governance to become Head of State.  He has shown, truly, that everyone has a chance.  For someone as seemingly unprepared and unqualified (no, I did use the word “seemingly” so I am still being sort-of polite) he illustrates graphically that the top job is not the reserve of those who have worked a lifetime to get there.  People must look at Trump and say, “There, but for the fact that he got there before me, goes I!”

Was it not Napoleon who said, “Every French soldier carries a marshal’s baton in his knapsack”?   The clear implication being that everyone, no matter how ‘low’ had the potential to become great.  And those words were said by an Emperor - the Little Corsican, risen to greatness!

Trump’s speeches may be, let’s be generous, “free-wheeling”, but he constantly hits the spot with his base and, although he has very low approval ratings generally, he is still riding high with the people who originally voted for him.  He knows (even he knows) that he did not get a majority of the votes cast in his election, not by millions, but he is now the President and not Clinton.  The Electoral College may be an anachronistic absurdity, but that is the system and that system got him elected.  We have the same sort of result in some elections in Britain where the party of government did not win the popular vote, but they did get the greatest number of members of parliament – and that is the system with which we have to work.

So Trump knows that “The Liberal Establishment” (whatever that might be) can say and do what it likes because he knows that it will have little effect on the forces that elected him.  Rather like the Daily Mail for me: it may be the most read newspaper in the country and have a mythical reach in articulating the voice of the disturbed right, but it might as well not exist for me because I NEVER read it.  Even when it is given away free at airports I shun its rancid pages.  So, for me, the Daily Mail can say what it likes, it doesn’t actually touch me. 

 

Yes, I know that the pernicious influence of the rag constantly corrupts our political discourse, but I, a confirmed Guardian reader disdainfully ignore it.  And that is part of the reason that Brexit happened.  As I continue to live my arts-heavy, opera going, European life style I have failed to notice or to take proper account of those who do not have, and may never have or want, the luxury of sitting in a stalls seat in the latest performance in the Liceu in Barcelona These are the people who may never have, to get slightly more real than opera seats, the right to a decent pension, or education or health service.

If you see a bleak future in which you are probably going to be worse off than your home owning parents then you look around for someone or something to blame.  And history teaches that, in the short term, the obvious victims are The Others.  Those people who are different: skin colour; religion; sexuality; politics; language; nationality – anything that can be shown to be a threat.

In this respect Trump is an idiot savant – and I don’t think that is a real insult, even if it does have the word ‘idiot’ in it.  After all, I am well educated, articulate, reasonably intelligent and sociable, but the highest ‘0ffice’ that I ever had was the largely ceremonial post of President of the Cardiff branch of The National Union of Teachers – where the real work was done by the Secretary and the Treasurer.  I chaired meetings and had headed notepaper!  And Trump is President of the United States of America after inheriting vast sums of money and becoming a reality show front.  Whatever else he doesn’t know, he certainly does know what buttons to press.

A key exponent of button pressing was Enoch Powell, most particularly in his ‘Rivers of blood’ speech.  Yes, I have read the whole speech and, yes I know that the key phrase did not actually occur in the actual talk he gave.  The whole episode is extremely distasteful, though, taken as a whole the speech is more reasonable than the fabricated extract by which it is known.  But Powell was no idiot, even in those far off days he knew a thing or two about ‘soundbites’ and he knew which parts would be taken up by the press and he knew the consequences.  Or at least he thought he did.  He could defend himself from accusations of outright racism by reference to the speech as a whole, but he could not defend himself from the political consequences of such a speech, that such inflammatory comments for general consumption would be. 

For me Powell will, for ever, be associated in my memory with a particularly incisive caricature by Ralph Steadman in Private Eye, which, if anything flatters the man!  

It is said that every politician’s career ends in failure and perhaps that is true of Powell.  After his ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, although he was a national figure and idolised by certain sections of the population he was not in government in the cabinet ever again.  Although listened to and respected and reviled he did not have his hands on the levers of power.  He paid the price for his calculated speech.

Trump has said many things that, in their way, are just as astonishing and outrageous as Powell.  He still has his hands on the levers of power.  He has survived and indeed thriven and his standing in the Republican Party is even more secure.  To a large extent the Republican Party IS Trump.  This is an amazing achievement for a person whose statements have been so divisive – and there is the clue.  Division is his stock in trade.  He is not, and does not pretend to be a President of the whole of America.  He plays to his base, and that base is astonishingly accommodating.  He knows that his grasp on power is dependent on that base staying loyal and voting and they have to be fed the right sort of sound bites on a daily basis.

The latest gift to his base is a masterwork.  Today Trump has said that he is minded to end the practise of allowing anybody born in the USA to claim citizenship.  Trump has framed his possible executive order as being one opposed to illegal immigrants who give birth and then their children become citizens.  There have been howls of outrage and assertions that such an executive order would be unconstitutional.  That may or may not be true but it is irrelevant because Trump’s base will have heard yet another strong statement from their champion showing that their views are being held at the highest level in government.  Whether this order actually ever appears is not the important element here, what is important is the timing, so close to the crucial mid-term elections.

This purported action, together with the ‘army’ sent to stop the caravan of potential immigrants making their slow way to the Mexican border and the possibility of a presidential speech on immigration a few days before the elections themselves are all elements in a masterful display of ‘strength’ to energize the base.

If this strategy is the sole idea of Trump then it is a remarkable achievement in inventive marketing.  Ethically dubious certainly, but politically astute.  The fact that it is transparently opportunistic is not important because intention is more real than actuality.  Trump speaks his own reality and if you have bought into his pronouncements then The Word is all you need to know that your concerns are being met.

I have absolutely no faith that the people of America will produce the Blue Wave that is being hoped for.  None.  Trump has not fabricated the zeitgeist though policy or ideas – he is not creative enough for that, he embodies the zeitgeist, he is the zeitgeist, and if that is true what he does is, and is enough.

God help us all!