Troubles in store

 NEW LOCKDOWN: Day 10, Sunday

 

 

 

The counting goes on.  And on.  And on.  But Biden has won and so we can put that worry to rest.

     And speculate about what old One-Term is going to do in the almost two months of lingering shame that he is going to have to suffer as, every single day, he is reminded that he has been voted out of office and from the 2^nd of January he will no longer be the President.

     We do have some evidence with which to speculate.  As Trump has shown himself to be ruthlessly concerned with money and his own status before everything else, we can expect him to continue placing his wealth and his public face in the forefront of his concerns.

     Prison is not a good look for anyone other than a Nelson Mandela and, with the best will in the world, even his most dedicated Swamp Base would not equate The Orange Monster with a South African Freedom Fighter.  If Trump is prosecuted for a fraction of the crimes that he is alleged to have committed during his time in the White House then he will be put away for a long, long time.  Misuse of public funds, nepotism, cronyism, bribery, simple corruption, tax avoidance, tax evasion, lying about virtually everything, justice – where to start with his trashing of the justice system? -  and so on ad infinitum. To say nothing of various dodgy financial pigeons coming home to roost to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.

     So, one of Trump’s first concerns is going to be how to stay out of prison.  Because as soon as he is no longer the president and protected by the office various court cases are going to be reactivated.  

      The great question is, “Can Trump pardon himself”?  As far as I know, no president (even Tricky Dickie) didn’t stoop to self-pardon.  But just because something hasn’t been done before, it doesn’t mean that No Shame Trump won’t try it.   

     A more likely scenario is one that I have mapped out before which is, Trump resigns, Pence becomes president, pardons Trump, Trump becomes president again and hands over his trashed office a free man.   

     Though, to have a pardon is actually to admit that there is a wrong, so by pardoning himself, Trump will be admitting that he is a criminal.  But that won’t worry him, not with what is already on his grubby, grubby little hands!

     What scope does Trump have to Sharpie-sign yet more Executive Orders, because whatever mischief he can get up to like the spoilt child that he is, he will.  Bolstered by 70 million of his fellow citizens who voted for him, he will feel that he has a popular authority to do as he likes to make Biden’s accession as difficult and as messy as possible.

     Can anyone seriously imagine Trump graciously hosting Biden in the White House?   

     It is equally difficult to imagine Trump attending the inauguration, and one commentator has suggested that it is more likely that Trump holds a rally at the same time, so there will be a split screen of Biden and Trump and their various crowds.  Though that might mean that Trump will not do it because he will be terrified that his crowd could be smaller than Biden’s.  Though, even if it was, that would merely be an “alternative fact” which could be brushed away by the Mendacious Monster.

     This is surely one time when the “oxygen of publicity” should be denied to Trump (and yes, I am well aware of the source of that phrase and the poisoned outcome of its practical use) but if Trump continues to peddle lies he should not be given a worldwide media platform to repeat them.  But I also recognize the freedom of speech and freedom of information elements that have to be considered.   But  . . .

     I am sure that we are going to have a damn sight more than two months of pathetic interference in the political situation by Trump and his minions, but with any luck they can be swept into the dustbin of history.  Fond hope!

 

I am missing my swims.  I check the booking app that we were encouraged to download to book ourselves in for our activities to see if they are accepting reservations and the first day that there appears to be bookings waiting is for the end of this week – but they are not yet open to be made real, so I will wait a while to see if reality matches appearance.

     To compensate for my missed swim I am extending my daily (electric)bike ride and so now I cycle the entire length of Castelldefels and Gava Mar and while it is an impressively  long distance for me, my fitness app tells me that my journey is almost entirely on the level which, as it is beside the sea is logical.

 

We have started talking about Christmas and I am determined to put up my Belen (Christmas stable scene, with added people) this year as well as having a small Christmas tree.  The tree will be decorated with baubles made by SQB – just as soon as the parcel containing them gets here!

     The Christmas meal is altogether more problematical.  Toni will be devastated if he can’t see his family over the festive period and I think that we will have to make a trip up to Terrassa even if it is only a fleeting visit to bump elbows and then back again.  But time will tell just what we allowed to do.

     Amazon is going to make a fortune, sorry, an even bigger fortune this Christmas as everybody in the world decides (especially if they have Amazon Prime) that it is worth getting the presents from Amazon if only for the fact that postage will be free!  But we will worry about that much, much later.

     In a bout of what might be described as Gourmet Porn, I slathered my way through pictures of M&S hampers and noted with something approaching wistful regret that many of the high price items in some of the more expensive hampers are alcohol related.  As I now do not drink alcohol (I say for medical reasons, but what my doctor actually said was, “You can allow yourself one small glass of red wine a day” – as if that was possible! Better to recognize weakness in self-control and give it up entirely!) bottles of Champagne and Vintage Port do not attract.  Well, they do, but as I am not going to drink them, it would be fairly pointless to buy them and just look at them, or even worse, sniff them and retexture what they taste could be like from past experience of drinking.  And if that sounds like something I have indeed done, then you would be right in so thinking.

 

My new watch continues to please, though I have adjusted the always-on element of the watch face to turn off for the hours of deepest darkness.  My watch also startled me, by suddenly playing music, not a ring tone, real music.  It took me a while to work out where the sound was coming from.  If you had been watching me then you would have seen me taking out my mobile and being confused by the fact the more I tried to hear the music from it the more it wasn’t coming from it, and yet the music was tantalizingly near.  I am sure that my confusion only lasted a couple of seconds but it was deeply disturbing.  And frankly even more so when I found it emanated from my watch as I had done absolutely nothing to encourage it.  Honestly.

     It turns out I have one tune on my phone and I have little idea about how to put more there.  I will leave downloading the full manual for a sunnier day when I am feeling gadget strong.

 

I have downloaded an app or something called The Fussy Librarian which is supposed to provide a series of free or bargain downloads of books that you can read on Kindle.  My first choice of a Sci-Fi novel turned out to be short story length and to be part 1 of 7, and I can’t find the other six.  I fear that yet again, what appears too good to be true, is too good to be true.  Though I will continue to investigate and report back later.

 

Meanwhile the writing, apart from this blog, is not going well.  And the fact that some of the letters on the keyboard are misbehaving is irritating.  And the fact that one of the worst behaving letters is the ‘e’ is even more unbearable.

     Cotton buds and wet wipes must be called into play, because the cost of a replacement Apple keyboard is not to be thought about this close to Christmas.

Who are they?

 New Lockdown: Day 6, Wednesday

I admit it. I got up very early, in the darkness and, under the subterfuge of going to have a pee, I had a sneaky look at my mobile to find out the state of play in the American election.  What I read was not exactly comforting and my attempt to go back to bed and sleep until daybreak did not work.

     So, up before dawn and reading my Guardian app on the phone while listening to Radio 4, I had a consolatory cup of tea and pondered on the sheer unadulterated differentness of people.

     People like me are going to have to come to terms with the fact that Trump got more votes than he did in the election in 2016.  Whatever the outcome of the election, and, as I type nothing at all seems even remotely settled, over 50 million (probably nearer to 60 million by now) people watched Trump be ‘president’ for four years and still voted for him.  I will not recite Trump’s glaring faults – perhaps they trip too easily off liberal tongues, like mindless repetition of rosary prayers.  I am tempted to say that the repetition has the same empty efficacy, serving merely as sonic balm to hide the fact that they are merely words with no further function than mouthed sounds.

     I listened to a Trump supporter say that she had her doubts about the character of Trump but felt that she shared his ideas and values.  She obviously didn’t mean the repulsive ideas and values that I see in him, but presumably some hazy version of what being a Republican means.  She was affluent and had higher education, but she mentioned the disturbingly left-wing policies of Biden (!) and the fear that he would limit freedom in some undefined way as justifications for her instinctive rejection.

     Obviously, this woman was on camera, felt under an obligation to ‘justify’ her support of Trump and, as far as I could tell in the fairly unnatural position of a televised interview, she seemed sincere and content with her choices.  She seemed decent enough, but had obviously put aside, or perhaps rejected as False News, much of the negative (factual) coverage of this depressing presidency.

     It is certainly tempting, from my point of view to dismiss Trump supporters as self-deluding idiots, and some of the choices that non-American commentators make in their choice of Trump supporting interviewees seem to fit that category, but 60 million Americans (and counting) voted for this person, and they cannot all be idiots, and to continue to think so will ensure that the divide in the country will never be healed.

     Some of the Trump supporters are in it for the money and for the power, or are the immediate nepotistic-sweetened family, but that only covers a fraction of the voting electorate.

     The four years of Trump have led some people who seem to live fairly coherent lives to say that, “He is the best president we have ever had!”  To say, “He really understands people like us!” or, “He cares!”  They see his public speaking, which I see as cringe-makingly embarrassing, as “natural” and “welcoming”, that he is, “really speaking to us!”  His free association of incoherent and contradictory meanderings allow Trump supporters to see the wealth-inherited billionaire (he claims) as one of their own, chatting to them in a way no other ‘politician’ can - or would dare to.

     Even as I try and be fair-minded, I can feel my bitterness and contempt seep through into my writing.  But astonishment at his continued ‘success’ will do nothing to stem the toxic populism that he represents and fosters.

     People on the left have a duty to understand how it is that so many people reject what seem like age-old standards of human decency for a strident self-defeating national selfishness.  And where do we start?

     Only one of my friends has admitted (that is an important qualification) to voting for Brexit.  None of them admits to voting for the Conservatives.  I read The Guardian and study the History of Art and live in Catalonia, not the obvious background to a right-wing populist, or a background likely to bring me into contact with other populists.  But my point is, that if the numbers of those voting for Trump or Johnson can be taken as a guide to how widespread their ‘ideology’ is then I must know a fair number of people who vote for what I regard as the disturbingly right-wing, and they are the people I need to understand and interact with in the expectation of bettering not only my own understanding of what is making people tick at the moment, but also of bettering our national dialogue.

     The problem, of course, is what to do next.

     I reject the idea of living in a Trumpian world: virtually everything he does and says is anathema to me.  But how do you change what seems to be a perniciously attractive way of looking at the world and one’s place inside it to many whom I have been able to regard (and I mean in an observational sense) as ‘other’?

     Perhaps, as part of our ‘Family Wisdom’ has it, “Anything is better than nothing!”  Speaking, conversation, writing, participating in political life, sharing thoughts, ideas - who knows what might eventually help, but an awareness of the divisions within society and a sensitivity towards them must surely be a step forward.

     And, when I get up tomorrow, perhaps Biden might have garnered the requisite number of Electoral College votes to start the process of the reinvention of the New Normal Politics, and then we can work on the New Normal during/after Covid without worrying what the so-called Leader of the Free World might tweet off the top of his head!

 

LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 20 – Saturday 4th APRIL

To absolutely no one’s surprise our lockdown has been extended to the 26^th of this month: only another three weeks to go.  To what?  Do we seriously think that this whole disaster will have run its course in a few weeks?  Locked inside, we have little to think about than when this is going to end.  Or rather ‘if’ this is going to end.  Let’s face it, the end of this crisis will either be the final playing out of whatever the virus wants to do in its own sweet time, or the truncated reign of the virus brought about by the intelligent care and management of the politicians who are directing our fight against it.  Seriously, which would you think the more likely scenario?

     Admittedly we are not cursed with an a nepotistic buffoon like some (Republican voters have to ‘own’ their elected idiot) unfortunate Americans who goes out of his way to reject the advice of his own scientific advisors, for example over the wearing of face masks.  But our own political leaders do not inspire confidence: politics always seem to trump (ha!) national need.

My inner Ben Gunn (cf. Treasure Island) has surfaced with the last piece of cheese consumed being a fading memory.  I have therefore ordered 2kg via the Internet (at premium price) and it is something to look forward to when it is finally delivered in a week or so’s time.  I have also ordered a collection of goodies from The Pound Shop, mainly because it is one place that makes no bones about delivering, even if it takes a couple of weeks.  If nothing else, it will make a pleasant surprise when it finally arrives, as I have already forgotten what I ordered!

     I have comprehensively failed to get a slot from any of the major supermarkets for a home delivery, so for the foreseeable future (forget about the 26^th being a cut off date!) Toni will have to venture out and brave the inconsideration of people who fail to cough into their elbows!

On the other hand the sun is shining and, although my early morning walk was a trifle chilly, the warms must now have heated up the tiles on the floor of the terrace on the third floor and I am prepared to grace the place with my presence.

     From my eyrie on the third floor it is possible to look around at a whole selection of houses and flats swimming pools and tennis courts. 

     My assessment of the strictness of the lockdown, based on the microcosm I can see, is that the rigour of the isolation is fraying at the edges.  The kids in the flats are playing together; over the other side of the main road, people are grouping together; four guys were playing tennis; kids were playing in the car park under the building of another set of flats. 

     OK this is a Saturday (if anyone is keeping track) and a certain relaxation goes with the day, but the figures of infection and deaths are still frighteningly high in this country and any slackening of the procedures would be counterproductive (what a euphemism!) at this stage of the measures that we are taking to cope with the virus – if our figures indicate that we really are dealing with it.

    If we take the government’s time line, we are half way through the period of lockdown. 

     The next three weeks are going to be telling ones.