LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 32 – Thursday, 16th APRIL

 

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.

    

The new white feather?

As a Baby Boomer (Leading Edge) I have never had to make the sort of problematic choices that the previous generation to my own had to make.  I have not been involved in a World War, I have not had to do Military Service, I have been able to find work without problems, I have been looked after through my educational life and in terms of medical help in a way in which I have not had to think too hard about the financial consequences.  I have, in short, been fortunate in choosing the time to be born! 

Central of course to that opening paragraph of gloating, though not actually stated, is the reality of my pension.  I now have three pensions from two countries: which sounds a damn sight more impressive than the reality!  I have a professional pension from my job, I have a much smaller state pension and I have a truly tiny (but welcome) pension from Spain.  The generations that have come after my own look at my experiences and feel envy and resentment.  This is an attitude that I can easily understand, especially as the retirement age seems to be getting more and more distant for some folk.  But this piece is not about finance and comfortable old age, it is more about responsibility.

I was far too young to have an opinion about Suez and the criminal behavior of my government: I was too young to understand the trauma of moving from an imperial past to an uncertain future – and very badly managed at that; too young to understand the full import of the Cold War, though old enough to appreciate the danger of the Cuban Missile Crisis.  I suppose that the first real moral challenge that I felt fully engaged with was the Apartheid system in South Africa and the United Kingdom’s culpability in the continuation of the regime.

What did I do?  Looking back on it, the answer would have to be, not very much.  I supported Anti-Apartheid; I refused to buy or eat South African fruit; I didn’t drink South African wine; I sent money to organizations against Apartheid; I put up posters; I marched; I spoke against it.  But could I have done more, could I have been more pro-active?  And what about Viet Nam?  How much, or how little did I do to show my abhorrence about that grubby conflict?  When I look back, I think that I was more worked up about the Conservative government’s imposition of museum charges for our national galleries than I ever was about a war which claimed the lives of thousands and threatened the stability of the world!

In other words, I feel a nagging sense that I could have done more, and should have done more, but I was protected by a fairly comfortable sense that, in spite of a few local and international difficulties, things would probably work themselves out with, or without, my active help.  And my involvement was my choice.

In today’s world, with the rise of the extreme right, the self-inflicted wound of Brexit, the reality of President Trump, the growing obscenity of inequality in the world, the banking crisis, corruption and on and on – it is much more difficult to remain as a vaguely involved spectator.  To do nothing, is actively to encourage the situation to worsen: disengagement is denial.

What I am saying is that life in 2017 is the equivalent of life in the 1940s: there is an international crisis and everyone has a part to play in attempting to ameliorate what is turning into a national and international disaster.  You have to make a choice, in which not making a choice is a choice in itself.  It’s the same as it was living in Northern Ireland during the Troubles: the situation was dangerous, and if you had knowledge that might help the authorities then you would have to accept that your duty would put you in danger.  In just the same way involvement in the Word Wars that my parents and grandparents had to endure, put them in danger too.  Dangerous times, and god knows we are living in dangerous times now, call for positive action.

We can see that the growing opposition to Trump and so-called policies in the United States and around the world is an active statement that many people have accepted their responsibilities to hold power to account.  This is one of those times when inaction is the deadliest action of them all.

So, what am I doing, this time round?  Well, it basically comes down to reading the Guardian, shouting at the television, watching American late night political comedy on YouTube and typing futile screeds against the fading of the light!

Stuck (by my own choice) in a wealthy, sunny corner of Spain it is easy to forget that the rest of the world is going through a crisis and, in some ways, this period of time is a little like the so-called Phony-War before the actual war of 1939-45.  My Dad was in London when war was declared and remembered the sirens sounding soon after the announcement and . . . nothing happened: no enemy planes, no bombs, nothing!  Obviously that quiescence was soon to develop into the bloodiest conflict that the world had ever seen, but the immediate result of the challenge to German Nazi power was nothing.

You might say that quite a lot has happened over the last few years.  The banking crisis has weakened economies, and the paucity of cells filled by the perpetrators of one of the greatest pieces of financial fraud and duplicity ever has weakened the very concept of democratic accountability.  Governments have poured public money into the banking sector with the result that the very bankers who caused the crisis are now even more secure in their inflated pensions and high lifestyle.  Bonuses are back, the stock exchanges are booming and people are getting poorer.  This should be a time when implementing the ideals of socialism is seen as something that can take people out of poverty and make a fairer society – instead of which we see the politics of inequality and prejudice trumping any humanistic ideal.

You might think that, as a retired person with a secure pension, I am one of those people ‘sitting pretty’, but I am most certainly not.  As a British national living abroad in an EU country, I have seen the relative value of my pension fall by some 20% as the reality of Brexit gets closer and starts having a real effect.  I have the threat of punitive action by the government in which I reside when Article 50 is finally invoked and I find myself as a foreign citizen, living in a state which can, at a moment’s notice cancel my healthcare, and revoke my right to stay in the country that I now call home.  And that is just the local, Spanish situation.  Let us not consider the full ramifications of the Oaf in the White House!

We are all (including the country of origin) living in what the Chinese curse calls “interesting times” and what we do in response to those interesting times will define the conditions of development for the next generation, or indeed the next generations.  We all have to step up to the plate and ‘do’ something.