We exist too, Mr Johnson!

 

 

 

 

 

Only a two-faced lazy chancer like Johnson could appeal to “the power of sweet reason” to get a Brexit agreement “over the line” without apparent recognition of irony.  This is because there is no real link between what comes out of his mouth and any discernible link to what might be loosely termed “reality” in the Conservative dystopia that passes for politics nowadays.

     “Reason” is the very last thing that has driven the Brexiteer Vandals, they have behaved like berserkers drunk on their intoxicating brew of bigoted self-interest and blind adherence to a twisted ideology of purist Brexit where mere reality is relegated to a lowly, nay insignificant place in what passes for their thinking.

     Given Johnson’s morbid narcissism it is impossible to tell whether his assessment of a Brexit agreement as “looking very, very difficult at the moment” is yet another of his macho taunts to the EU showing that he can play the poker hand with steely nerves, or whether he is really preparing us for the fact that we are not actually going to get an agreement as all.

     The inherent contradictions (or lies as it might be fairer to call them) in the Brexiteers’ position have always been there.  The questions that are the sticking points today have been the areas of confusion from the start, and in the years that the Brexiteers have had to make their plans clear in how they were going to work, they have done virtually nothing, except talk incoherent, self-defeating nonsense.  They have no ideas about how to get what they want (when they actually know what it is that they want) except through tantrums and unreasonable demands.

     And in the middle (sometimes, when he can be bothered) is the joke of a man who wears the title of prime minister. 

 

Johnson must know that he is in a no-win situation.  To gain the agreement of the rabid Brexiteers in the Conservative party, he will lose the majority of the ‘moderate’ (whatever that means in Conservatism nowadays) majority that makes up the Parliamentary party.  If he gets anything like a reasonable (whatever that means in terms of Brexit nowadays) agreement, he will have the right-wingers frothing at the mouth.  Whatever he manages to get from a reasonable agreement to a full repudiation of Brexit to a no-agreement Brexit, he is going to be pilloried.

     You might say, with some justice, that he fully deserves to be attacked en mass; the only thing that drove him to espouse the Brexit ‘idea’ was naked cynicism wrapped in all-devouring ambition.  Public service and the country didn’t get a look in.  So, we could stand back and watch the blood bath and say, “jolly good riddance!”

     Except we can’t.  As John Donne stubbornly reminds us, “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent” – the irony of the word ‘continent’ being used when you  think about Brexit is tellingly ironic!   

     Although Johnson doesn’t give a damn about us, the ordinary people, we cannot share his wealthy distain for the realities of lived life, we are directly affected by his decisions and the decisions of his party.  Johnson may be concerned with his self-image and be concerned about how posterity sees him; we have to live in the world and country that he is making.  His wealth largely insulates him from the financial and practical effects of his policies: he is not concerned about the problems of being able to live, he is more concerned with how he appears.

     When all is said and done, I simply do not trust Johnson.  I don’t trust him as a politician and I don’t trust him as a person.  He lacks morality.  He is a liar.  He is a deceiver.  He is an opportunist.  And he is deciding my future.

     It is a sad and almost tragic thing to say, but I do put my trust in one aspect of Johnson’s modus vivendi, he is a betrayer.  He betrays because, as one commentator put it, he lives in the moment and the past is not of any real concern to him.

     And that is our hope!  Johnson will produce an agreement that goes back on virtually everything that he has said because that is what he does!

     It’s a frail hope, but I think it is the only one that we have because “sweet reason” left the room many years ago.

 

Today has been, continues to be, cold.  13c.  It rained briefly last night, but today we have had fluffy clouds with patches of blue – not much actual sunshine, but no rain.

     The weather is important because today is a holiday and this time (as opposed to the weekend) people from outside Castelldefels can legally come and walk along the paseo.  It is an opportunity for bars and restaurants to try and get some cash flow before Christmas.  We went to a restaurant, one of our usual haunts, and it was quite full (with the 50% limit), there were certainly people around and yesterday there were television pictures of queues of people waiting to go into shopping centres to get their Christmas gifts organized.

     Which begs the question of what people are going to do during the holiday period.  As I have said before, I think that the next month or so is going to be critical in the way that the pandemic pans out.  If people regard Christmas as a time to be laxer than they already are, then the middle of January will show a massive jump in infections.

     Realistically people are not going to be vaccinated until the middle of next year.  I think that I may be lucky if I manage to be vaccinated by April, as I manage to tick a few boxes for the early application of the needle!  This means that we will be well into the summer of next year before the majority of the population have had their double injections.

     But what I am hearing are sighs of relief that a vaccine, or series of vaccines, are being rolled out and that the horrors of the pandemic are numbered.  Which they are not.  We are not safe until everyone is safe and we have been told by numerous authorities that Covid is a virus that is not going to be eradicated and is something that we are going to have to live with.  For ever.  That hard truth has not found its way into many consciousnesses.  And that means more death.

 

On a different topic entirely.  I am trying to find out how to treat the rather exotic book cover that I talked about yesterday.  This cover is made of suede and is falling to pieces.  I am not sure what to apply to the cover to preserve it.  Would leather cream or polish do anything?  Any thoughts gratefully received!

 

 

 

 

Oh god, not him!

 

 

 

There is surely nothing more engineered to foster confidence about the Brexit talks than to see the charlatan Gove (the love child of a defrocked pixie and a gobby goblin) skuttling his elven way to Brussels to – to do what exactly?  To add his five pennyworths of facile, slimy lies to the morass of doublespeak that is the British ‘position’ in what should be negotiations?   

     God help us all when that chubby cheeked cheat speaks for Britain!  Still, I suppose Gove can use his White Queen trick of believing five impossible things before breakfast to encourage his verbiage (conveniently forgetting his previous belief that Johnson was supremely unfit to become prime minister) and marching forward to defend the indefensible.

     I felt physically sick when, on the news this evening, I heard that the British Government had offered up as a bargaining chip to bring the discussion to a ‘satisfactory’ conclusion the offer not to behave illegally!  How jolly decent of them because, of course, an Englishman’s word is his bond, unless it isn’t.   

     How the EU side can stop themselves from treating the shambles of the British position with anything other than contempt, I really do not know.

    

Let’s face it, at this stage of the “Never ending, stor-ree!” (just thought that I would throw in a reference to the true earworm that music is) the only thing motivating the British side is not, emphatically not, Britain.  Our negotiators couldn’t give a toss for the country and the bulk of the people in it.  Fishermen, the population of Northern Ireland, businesses, imports and exports, areas of deprivation, they have all been thrown off the bus – you know the one that the liars’ liar Johnson paints for recreation – and the members of Johnson’s third or fourth rate cabinet merely look to their wealth as they crunch over the bones of the suckers who ever thought that they might be of concern to them.

     The Conservative Party, as we are regularly told, is one of the most successful political parties in the western world, and it has got its power and its longevity by a callous disregard for anything other than its own survival.  If they do good, like the 1944 Education Act, it is almost by mistake, and they certainly did not reward the architect of that act, RAB Butler with leadership of the party when the time came to choose.

     Johnson, the Man Who Would Be Prime Minister, does not have the intellectual or moral worth to be able to sustain the role.  He has got to where he is today by systematically lying and showing utter disregard to anyone and anything other than himself and his ambition.

     His empty rhetoric way wow blue rinsed ladies of various Conservative Associations, but it doesn’t work when practical things have to be decided on the basis of that rhetoric.  Johnson has no interest in the rules and regulations that govern institutions, he is, as virtually everyone has pointed out, not a details man.  Unfortunately (for us) he has become prime minister at a time when a details man is exactly what is needed.  Rhetoric kills – look at the number of Covid deaths in the UK.  Rhetoric destroys – look at industry still desperately asking the government for leadership and information about what is going to happen in a few weeks’ time.

     “Get Brexit Done!” – the perfect meaningless jingle for Johnson, allowing him to sound dynamic while the empty platitude played well with people who wanted simplicity in an almost terminally complex situation.

     Now we are in the final days when all the detail that Johnson hates so much is everything.  Rhetoric has to be written down in legalistic words where there is no wriggle room for gaudy metaphor and inept simile.

     Johnson’s shoddy, corrupt government now has come to the crux of negotiations.  Real things have to be decided and the only, the absolutely only (I know that is tautology, but I feel it fits here) thing that is motivating Johnson is what he can get away with.

     He will, as he always has done in the past, junk anything and anyone to get what he wants.  His situation is desperate: No Deal will be a financial disaster, and even his most stupefied followers will have to own and admit it eventually; a thin deal will please nobody as everyone will feel hard done by; a generous deal will be regarded by the Brexit fanatics as an act of treason.  There is nothing that Johnson can get out of Brussels that is going to satisfy everybody.  Perhaps there is nothing that Jonson can get out of Brussels that is going to satisfy anybody.  And he is going to have to own it.  And he will not be able to do that.

     I can imagine somebody doing the sums (Johnson is far too lazy to do them himself, and besides he doesn’t really know who is in his party anyway) and trying to work out which deal would be the less disastrous.  And the disaster will not be related to the people of Britain it will be directly linked to the fortunes of the Conservative Party.  Politics, not logic or faith or economics or fairness or justice, is going to determine what we get from the “oven ready” deal that has taken four long years to cook.

     And unless Johnson uses the “Long Covid Symptoms” to fabricate himself a get out of parliament card, then he is going to have to own the disaster of his making in years more of his narcissistic premiership, when we will continue to pay the price.

 

I put that bad feeling that you have just read down to the fact that I got to the swimming pool an hour early this morning.  Today was ¡Fiesta! and tomorrow will be an extra day of holiday so instead of opening at 7 am it will open at 8.  An extra hour in bed?  Not really, I am programmed to get up, or at least get ready to get up, at 6.15 am, and if I say in bed longer I feel that I am cheating and I do not get any real benefit.  It is easier to get up at the normal time and do neglected housework to make the time feel valuable, and to give myself a warm glow of self-satisfaction!

     But today I forgot about the holiday and so I had to come back home and do neglected housework etc etc and complete the Guardian Quick Crossword, rather than fill in a single clue and then leave it for later after the swim.

 

 [Yes, I know this image is not upright, but it's too late and I'm too tired to re-jig it]

My catalogue raisonné continues apace with items of little value, but some interest, filling the pages.  Compiling the catalogue is forcing me to look again at some things that I have ignored for years.  For example, I have decided to list a copy of The Selected Poems of Oscar Wilde.  This is a volume printed in 1912 with a soft brown suede cover stamped with an interesting Art Nouveau flower design and with the title stamped in gold.  It is not particularly valuable, but it was bought by my father to give to my aunt who in turn gave it to me a quarter of a century later after my father’s death. 

     The suede is rotting and has an unpleasant feel to it, the binding is unravelling, the pages yellowing – and yet, it is important to me.  There is always something about reading the actual pages that people important to you have read before you, whose hands have held the volume in the way that you are holding it.

     Yes, I realize that this is Romantic nonsense, but it doesn’t make the oddly satisfying feeling I have when I handle the book any less real to me.

     A worthy addition to the catalogue!  And it takes my mind off other things.

 

 

 

A Cold Rant!

 

 

 

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.