Early Dog Days

Tags

Canada, China, trump

 

RIP Liou Zha Bo, a great friend of world peace and true democracy, a scholar and a poet, who tended to view his country through a lens too sharp for his time. Like everywhere, China is different. Her governments don’t brook criticism – not from anyone, except, occasionally, themselves – which tells you they’re insecure, understandably uncertain how they’d deal with the rising up of a billion disaffected people. Better to crush all nascent dissent, and give everyone else a little taste of wealth. Just a little. Better also to let the waking dragon roar a bit at the world, at the coffers and vaults of the west. It’s been asleep for so long. But, all in all, is the US any more tolerant of vehement dissent? Was there any real substantial difference between the Kent State massacres and Tiananmen Square? And China hasn’t sent 500,000 young men and women to their deaths in foreign wars over the past fifty years, has she? Let the dragon yawn and stretch; its time is surely nigh, and then we shall have to change our indolent ways.

 

Julie Paillette (my spelling is aural, not visual, so forgive if necessary). A wonderful choice for the new Canadian Governor-General. Her Majesty will probably enjoy chatting with an astronaut, someone who has obtained a real perspective on this world. Kudos to le Petit. I am hard on him, true, but only because I want him to be perfect – which, alas, he’s far from being, as are we all. I think he wants to do the right thing; but I suspect there are more powerful forces preventing him, consigning him to a purely decorative role. Will he have his father’s integrity and grit, to speak out one day? – that’s the question. We deserve to know who really holds the reins here, even if there’s nothing we can do about it. Or nothing legal, nothing peaceful.

 

The Mad House

Tags

impeachment, Islam, muslim ban, politics, travel ban, trump, USA

 

It is really quite impossible to ignore the situation in Washington, in the vain hope that it gets better, or evens out at least. It appears to get worse by the day, and follows a course that is increasingly erratic and uneven.

 

The Huffington Post today ran a piece quoting an unnamed member of the White House staff who claimed that President Trump is mentally unbalanced and unfit to occupy the executive office – which means unfit to lead the country. The source is anonymous for obvious reasons, but the Post seemed sure of his authenticity, and it has always been a reliable news source. It is deeply worrying. The staffer cited many incidents of Trump’s emotional instability and wild mood swings, saying that it was hard to work for him as a consequence. He is incapable of absorbing the advice from briefings and incorporating them in his decisions. Briefing papers are usually several pages long, but Trump has demanded that they be no more than a page, with bullet-points listing the issues, and no more than nine points on the page. The source said that the President ignored the complexities involved in major issues, yet would fly off the handle over the most trivial things. He issued a bulletin, for example, ordering the hand-towels on Airforce One to be changed for softer versions. His excessive and often explosive reactions to petty criticisms of him, or the ridiculing which is now fresh meat for comedians, was deeply unsettling. All of it, said the staffer, pointed to a malignant narcissist unable to perceive a reality beyond himself. It led to the tortured relationship with the media, still hatching out, and was sure to lead to far more dangerous and disruptive situations. His staff were deeply unhappy, concerned that they would one day be blamed for his enormities – which was why they were now speaking out. This is not anything we have ever seen before. Richard Nixon, at his most deluded and deceitful during Watergate, was a babe in arms compared with what we now hear daily of Trump. The talk-shows and comics can poke fun all they want – and God knows there is so much to poke at – but this is far darker than they seem to appreciate.

 

Perhaps Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece, Dr. Strangelove, depicted a madman in the White House, but it is not an idea that has really been explored much before. The fact that Trump is portrayed by much media as a characiture is one thing, but the fact that he consistently acts like one without seemingly being aware of it is something else altogether. I have tended not to entirely dismiss his claims of a hostile and biased media – there’s mutual hatred, it’s not surprising – but increasingly I see journalists with integrity uncertain how to deal with an administration that brutalizes the truth. Trump says it is not a Muslim ban, for instance, and yet we find that effectually it is. Two Canadians of Moroccan descent were turned away at the border today. Their cell phones were taken and they were interrogated for several hours before being denied entry. Morocco is not one of the seven nations listed in the allegedly temporary ban. The questions asked them were all about their religious beliefs: Which mosque do you attend? Who’s the Imam? What does he say in his sermons? And, outrageously, What do you think of President Trump? Border guards have clearly been instructed to keep out Muslims. They do not act on their own initiative. The President is therefore lying – and such a ban on religious beliefs is unconstitutional. Courts are now striving to overtuirn it, but we find in these legal hassles that Trump’s officials are trying to insist that a Presidential executive order cannot be denied. This too is unconstitutional. With a President so thin-skinned and reactive to any perceived slight, one wonders what the Republican party is up to. They surely knew what they were getting some time ago, so why is there so little resistance?

 

We must remember that George W. Bush was ridiculed in office before September 11^th, 2001. The War On Terror changed all that in a trice. A TV series lampooning the Bushes was cancelled. Everything became very serious, and the public forgot how they’d scorned George II. They even voted him in for a second term. It will not take that much for the Oval Office Buffoon to become King Donald the Brave. And a war, I suspect, is something very attaractive to him. As Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, a president’s powers are vastly increased, and a wartime populace is far more pliable. Who will it be? Iran? North Korea? Take your pick. It won’t be China, though – too complicated and possibly unwinnable.

 

Since the late sixties, many have been predicting that America would become a totalitarian regime, a police state. Is this what the more nefarious Republicans have in mind? How can we tell? Well, there’s the erosion of civil liberties – we may see that with Jeff Sessions and the new Supreme Court. There’s the stricter control of education and what can and what cannot be taught in schools. Judging by the calibre and record of those now in charge of this area, we may see that too. There’s vastly heightened security everywhere, and we’ve been seeing that for some time. There’s control of the media, and we know Trump would like to have that. Then there is the gradual dismantling of the justice system to allow arbitrary arrests, suspension of habeas corpus, and the imprisonment of dissidents. The US has been accused of trying to achieve these goals for decades, and good people have so far managed to fend off the assaults to some degree. But has the US Constitution got what is needed to avoid a tyranny usurping the government? Alexis de Tocqueville was of the opinion that it did not. Admittedly, his observations were made in the 1830s, yet the Constitution hasn’t changed much substantially since then. It is in fact a sadly atavistic document. The mosr convincing sign of a tyranny in the making is, of course, when the leader decrees his position to be one for life.

 

Both Napoleon and Hitler were voted into office by a reasonably fair ballot. First, Napoleon elevated himself from one of three consuls to the invented position of First Consul. Next he was First Consul for life. Then he was Emperor. Hitler was elected Chancellor, and a year later became Fuhrer, a nebulous term but a lifetime post. In both cases, there were no more real elections, and the countries were effectively dictatorships until the dictator died. But somehow I do not see Trump as Fuhrer material. No one laughed at Napoleon or Hitler – they should have, but they didn’t. So either the American system is hopelessly dysfunctional, allowing the election of a demagogue unwanted really by both parties, or the Republican elites have a plan to turn all this to their own advantage.

 

It is usually a mistake to take the surface events for what is really going on. And it is a fundamental error to forget that the US is really controlled by giant multinational corporations, particularly those in the arms and military supply industry. President Eisenhower warned of it in his farewell address – look it up, it’s chilling – and it was George Bush the First who privatized the military, ensuring that irresistibly vast profits awaited the next war, and the one after that. Since there hasn’t been a lack of small US conflicts since Korea in the fifties, these corporations have become inordinately wealthy. Halliburton, for example, once run by George W’s vice-president, Dick Cheney, is now headquartered in tax-free Dubai, although it is still one of the principal suppliers to the US Military, flogging them everything from meals-in-a-bag to private security personnel, who are not answerable to the Government in Washington. The mass-murder of Iraqi civilians a decade or so ago by men working for the Halliburton division, Blackwater, has never been brought to justice. There are many more examples. But the chief head of this hydra is avarice, the raking in of enormous profits no matter what their cost in human life. Such are the men who control America, and it is hard to think of them perspiring with anxiety over the current Oval Office occupant. Such people do not hesitate to kill – or to pay someone else to do it – when their interests are threatened. One must therefore conclude that their interests are not now being threatened.

 

Paul William Roberts

 

Banned

Tags

muslim ban, politics, trump, United States of America, US History

 

President Trump’s ban on various people entering the US doesn’t affect me. I have been banned from entering the country since 2006, just after my first-hand account of the Iraq invasion, A War Against Truth, was published. I had been invited to a peace conference at the University of Colorado, Boulder, campus, and was told at US Customs in Toronto that I was inadmissible. No reason given by the Homeland Security official who went off with my passport until the flight I was due to catch had left. Since 1969, I had freely entered the USA, often spending months there. My literary agent was in New York, as was my publisher at that time. These arguments had no effect, although the official refused to state why I was inadmissible, saying he was not obliged to do so. Subsequently, I deduced that there was something in my book that severely aggravated the Pentagon, for neo-conservative cabals in Canada and the US waged a concerted war on my war against truth, eventually coming up with a flimsy argument accusing me of plagiarism. It was just a few sentences that I confessed were merely the result of shoddy note-taking in a war-zone, but it was enough for my gutless – or perhaps complicit – publisher to pulp the book, destroying over two years’ work and much of my career. It is still available on Amazon, however, but the loss of my eyesight prevented me from fighting the issue for many years. It did teach me, though, that there are powers with which one cannot easily contend. What was it that so offended elements of the US Government? I think it was documented evidence given in the book proving that the US Military in Iraq were using cluster-bombs in which the bomblets scattered were disguised as childrens’ toys. It’s not difficult to see that this would be hard to explain to the American public. I am still banned from entering the country, and will probably always be banned – these orders are nearly impossible to get rescinded.

 

America has a long history of banning undesirables, however. In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act kept out Chinese nationals for petty reasons. Long considered the harshest act of its kind, it still permitted the admission of students, academics and persons with business commitments. But, as with later bans – the Phillipinos, the east European Jews, the Japanese – there was blowback. In 1905, the Chinese government issued a boycott of all US goods in the country. Similar reactions were caused by other bans, but the real effect was on US global prestige. The nation claiming exceptionalism does not enhance its claim by exclusionalism – not to mention the oxymoronic nature of exceptionalism, which states that we are exceptional and you should be like us.

I promised to avoid commenting on the kakristocracy forming down in Washington, so I will restrain myself to one thought. As amusing as Trump and his cohorts’ “alternative facts” may be to the media, we ought not to forget that his base takes them seriously. Such people hear a few times that the media are covering up terrorist attacks, and they believe it. Why they believe the lyging media that tell them this is another question. America has the least-well-educated population in the western world – and herein lies the problem. Propganda only works on those who do not perceive it as propaganda, where a lie repeated becomes the truth. If I were an editor or an executive producer of news programming, I would be very careful about printing or broadcasting any statement issued by the White House before it was thoroughly fact-checked and vetted. To not do so is pouring gasoline on this already-raging fire.

 

Paul William Roberts

The Tyranny of the Majority

Tags

Alexis de Tocqueville, democracy, trump

 

Alexis de Tocqueville, a French aristocrat and social historian, who visited America in the 1830s, made some remarkably astute and percipient observations about US society and the nature of its democracy just over fifty years after Independence from England. His social rank opened doors in New York, Boston and Philadelphia, but he also travelled to the frontier lands of Michigan, and sailed down the Mississippi on a steamboat, and he met many, if not most of the key figures during that time. Three things struck him most forcefully. Firstly there was the cupidity and sheer greed of the general populace, all of whom reveled in the idea that anyone could become very rich – and that wealth equaled fame, prominence and thence power. He was distressed that the line between public and private life was blurred, and that it was accepted that private financial skullduggery should transmute into public corruption. At a high-society gathering, he was warned not to mention the subject of bankruptcy, since half the men there had been bankrupt at least once in their lives – for this was how one achieved financial success in spite of past failures. It was the American Way. Secondly, Tocqueville closely examined the structures of American democracy, admiring some aspects, but having grave reservations about others. Most grave of all his reservations was his belief that the US Constitution had no adequate protection against the advent of a tyrannical rule. All that was required to create such an administration was a majority vote, and, in his view, most voters were too ignorant to know in any real sense for what or whom they were casting ballots. Thirdly, he marveled at the profusion and influence of newspapers, which he termed a “living jury” judging issues of the day and those involved with them. At that time, there were 1,300 entirely unrestricted papers in the US, compared with 300 tightly censored ones in France, whose population was then not much smaller than that of America. Tocqueville focusses on these three issues – money, democracy, and the media – arriving at conclusions that are eerily relevant today.

 

The equation of wealth with success and thence power, he decided, was dangerous, and led to the disturbing tendency he saw in people to view wealth as a validation for anyone seeking high governmental office. It alarmed him to find there were no impediments to someone without any political experience running for and obtaining positions of immense systemic power. Among the important people he met was President Andrew Jackson, a wealthy entrepreneur with no experience of public service, and thus someone in the Executive Office who most closely resembles Donald Trump. Jackson was elected, Tocqueville observed, precisely because he had a proven track-record of financial wizardry, and absolutely no experience in politics. Obviously without any idea where media would be headed in 200 years, Tocqueville still saw that, lacking any controlling authority, newspapers were able to plant opinions and ideas in the minds of those too busy or tired trying to get rich to think over issues for themselves. He observed that journalists – who, on the whole, he regarded as uneducated and ignorant – dealt far more with emotions than with ideas or facts – and that emotions far more determined how people voted than reason did. While being a bastion of freedom, these newspapers are also, he tells us, a threat to public order – because there is no established class or social group to guide their editors and contributors in portraying correctly a stable course for the evolution of society. They promoted their own interests and prejudices over the general welfare of society. This would result in what Tocqueville called “the tyranny of the majority”, a right of those least qualified for the task to elect people least qualified for the office for which they run. This is known as a kakristocracy – and we are about to see one in action, for Mr. Trump has placed in the highest offices men who are extravagantly ill-qualified for such positions. Since half of the electorate clearly felt that politics should not be in the hands of politicians, we and they will find out how correct this idea is.

 

Of course, Tocqueville saw the press then as an epitome of independent free speech. Every town had at least one newspaper, and each day it printed whatever came into the editor’s head the night before. Back then it was impossible to envision that one day great monied interests would almost entirely dominate the media and selectively control their content of news and opinions. Yet, nonetheless, Tocqueville perceived the hazards involved in journalists, who are not politicians, boosting the virtues of business Titans, who are also not politicians. The public life is not remotely like the private life. An experience of governance, he says, makes it impossible, or at least reprehensible to make the kind of election promises that unexperienced and less credible candidates tend to broadcast in order to get elected. While he had a restrained admiration for the new and supposedly classless society, he also saw its pitfalls. An overclass is bound to emerge, but its values will probably not be fructifying or even sound – and people of doubtful character, unschooled in tradition, in the value and importance of social structures or institutions, will be able to assume the highest offices solely because an ignorant media sanctions them through manipulating the emotional aspects of their campaign messages. Where reason is abandoned, he says, the suffrage is worthless.

 

Anyone interested in a quick appraisal of Tocqueville could do worse than find a two-part podcast about him by the exceptional CBC Radio program, Ideas – CBC. ca/ideas. Anyone not interested can switch the remote back to Fox News.

 

Paul William Roberts

 

President Trump

Tags

election, nightmare, politics, trump, United States of America

 

Ouch!

 

I firmly believe that it doesn’t really matter who is president. The great machine runs on. The people who really make decisions are still there. Policies are still in place, and changing them takes time, as well as consensus. A mechanism as vast and complex as the United States cannot be rewired or rejigged by one man or one mere election. Yet the aftermath of last night’s dunces’ jamboree leaves a very sour taste in the mouth. The election and the man may not change anything, but they do indicate a national mood, a mass-proclivity. If immigration stats are accurate, this may have been the last US election in which the proclivity of white males has any decisive impact. A damn good thing that would be too – if yesterday’s vote is anything to go by. Presumably, people voted for Donald Trump’s media image, which was, of course, despicable. I say ‘was’ because we will see, and indeed we are already seeing, a different Trump. The belligerent divisive oaf becomes the gracious national healer, a President-Elect for all the people. If we accept the great I.F. Stone’s maxim, that all politicians lie about everything all the time, and if we accept that Trump is a politician (it is surely absurd to suggest that someone who runs a two-year campaign to snare the White House is not a politician), then we must accept the fact that we don’t really know Trump at all. It may even be possible that Trump doesn’t really know Trump at all. Gone forever is the publicity-hungry fat-cat businessman and beauty-show predator. Gone forever is the need for self-promotion. Gone too is the craving for financial success. Such desires, and many others, are more than adequately fulfilled by becoming the most powerful man on earth. The Trump Empire is probably already looking risibly puny to its erstwhile emperor. The insatiable yearnings that have fueled his life were all abruptly sated around 3 a.m. this morning. As life-changing experiences go, this one must be exceptional. It’s somewhat like me applying to be CEO of Procter & Gamble and getting the job. The learning-curve will be steep. We all know something about household cleaning-products, just as we all know something about politics, but running the Free World will be a little more tricky than bullying around wildly variegated aspects of the Trumpire. There is, of course, no reason to believe he cannot be a competent US President – or even a good one. As said, we don’t really know him – but now we hope he knows himself more than but slenderly. With Congress and the Senate stacked in his favour, President Trump will be able to further, if not his own agenda, at least the Republican one, without let or hindrance for two years — until the 2018 mid-terms.

I doubt if there will be a Wall – too complicated, too expensive, too silly – but I have little doubt that the modest advancements in social justice made under Obama will be on the scrap-heap inside a year. What does this say about the American electorate? The mentality of a populace able to elect George W. Bush for eight years, then Barrak Obama for eight years, and now Trump is baffling. As my wife said, it’s like a woman who has dated a crunchy-granola feminist organic gardener, doesn’t like it, and instead dates a dope-dealing biker who beats her. She won’t like that either, but will be too scared to leave the brute for four years, after which time she finds a black civil rights activist who writes poetry. The giddiness aside, what does such fickle capriciousness mean? Do most Americans not actually have any enduring values or principles? It has always been a puzzle why blue-collar workers consistently vote against their own best interests by favouring Republicans, yet perhaps this is just part of a greater and more general malaise? Or does a Trumpresidency signify something else? This could just as easily be a triumph of xenophobic, racist and divisive politics as it could be a more thoughtful, mature distaste for career politicians and vested interests. I will admit that the latter is mostly wishful thinking – but, as Miles Davis said, what’s wrong with that?.

However, one thing was painfully obvious and disgraceful last night. All the US media networks – even Fox – displayed a distinct Democrat bias, as did every pollster, with the notable exception of the Los Angeles Times. How else can one explain poll after poll over the past week claiming a victory for Hilary Clinton? Either polling methods are so inaccurate as to be worthless, or else they’re a function of wish-fulfillment. Every poll bar one was wrong? Unlikely. The performance of Wolf Blitzer and Anderson Cooper on CNN was little short of embarrassing. Scurrying around the country for palatable interviewees, they followed news of each Trump victory with a thousand reasons why it didn’t constitute an election triumph. The calling of results in swing-states was delayed for an improbably long time, and even when it happened was palliated by increasingly arcane and complex explanations for why Trump couldn’t win. One felt sorry for the dolled-up hacks on Fox, who either could barely conceal their Clinton bias, or else really didn’t have a candidate running. Not absolutely everything Trump has said was nonsense. There is indeed a distinct media bias, and it ranges over many topics. There would be nothing wrong with this were it not for the oppressively limited ownership of all major media. And such bias is more repellent in CNN or the New York Times than it is in Fox or some tabloids. With the latter, you know where you stand – although no one on Fox last night seemed to have a floor beneath his feet. Trump’s relationship with the media will be interesting to follow. Now the great self-promoter has no more need to promote himself, will his PR skills stand him in good stead or be a liability?

Since no good result was possible for this egregious election, it is hard to feel that disappointed about it. I know my American friends are, though, and I offer them a box of Kleenex. But the sun still rose this morning, and the financial markets will survive their panic or take a Xanax. Nothing is ever as bad as we imagine it is, so the optimist in me looks forward to a pleasant surprise in the Oval Office. I couldn’t say what this surprise might be, but, my fellow Americans, you can all come to hide in my attic until the nightmare or the world ends.

 

Paul William Roberts

 

 

Patriotism

Tags

Canada, patriotism, politics, trump, United States of America, war

What is it? Well, some – including Bob Dylan and Sam Shepherd – say, “It’s the last refuge to which a scoundrel clings.” I am bound to concur. It’s at the core of currently-floundering Trump’s message (believe me, he won’t go down so easily), just as it was rooted in the barking of Adolf Hitler, whose principal appeal was one of national and ‘racial’ solidarity. The Fuhrer’s ranting demands for lebensraum merely consisted of a call to expand the Fatherland and reintegrate bits that had been carved off by history – German-speaking bits, on the whole. So the hollering for nationalist fervour – which is patriotism, after all is said and done – seems not to be a good thing? If the Nazis are too extreme and polarizing an example, take Napoleon. His vision for a United States of Europe – an idea currently crumbling into dust – was in reality one of an engorged France controlling many servile satellites. Paris was to be the capital of this ‘union’, which was the French Empire under another name. From Frederick the Great all the way back to the Romans, patriotism meant the expansion of a local ideology to incorporate thinking in the most far-flung regions. Rome extended to Persia. Great Britain included China, and still, psychologically, includes Australia and some Pacific islands. But patrimonies, homelands, now seem to feel threatened, insecure. Hence the appeal of patriotic hectoring in various forms.

Is this, one asks, why the Angus Reid organization last week conducted a poll to gauge the level of emotional attachment citizens had to Canada? Putting aside the value and rectitude of polls in general, this one evidently noted that so-called ‘millennials’ – apparently people aged 18 to 35 – showed a marked lack of emotional attachment to their country. This strikes me as a good thing. Ever-jingoistic, the media thought otherwise, with baleful comments about the shortage of national pride. It may just be me, but I keep hearing politicians talking about Canada as, “the best country in the world,” these days. It almost sounds like part of the nation’s name, like “America the Wonderful”, or Alexander the Great. Don’t get me wrong, I have great affection for my adopted country, and certainly consider it a better place to live than most others. But to say it is the greatest country in the world has grimmer implications. If we weren’t such a small place, in terms of population – the tiny British isles have three times as many people – we would be hauling these nationalistic fantasies into a far more dangerous place, and we would be…well, America.

Can a vast country, built by immigrants from everywhere on the backs of a crushed indigenous peoples, ever claim the uniqueness of being, “One nation under God”? We are forced to admit that ‘the West’, wherever it is now located, is largely a product of European economic migrants. With its disgraceful thousand-year history of endless petty wars, Europe can hardly lay claim to the virtues of peaceful coexistence. And thus Europeans have an ingrained tendency to seek hostile solutions, where other erstwhile nationals – the Chinese, for example – look to a more innate rectitude of purpose to overcome problems. China has five thousand years of continuous civilization – the Chi’in state is the world’s oldest political union – where the USA barely has 300 years. While the Chinese have a strong sense of cultural identity, it has never translated itself into imperial designs. The state has merely reclaimed territories lost during periods of internal weakness. The American model, aped now so often by Canada, involves an incapacity to see the world as not, or – God forbid! – even anti-American. Historically, the United States has either been xenophobic and enclosed, or else imperialistic, seeking to impose itself on vulnerable nations or peoples. With the current enthusiasm for world-cop-like missions, I see a danger in Canada pursuing this path. It is logically impossible, however.

The Angus Reid poll, seeking to measure the levels of national idolatry, fails to take into account the increasing number of Canadian citizens who can never claim to love this country more than any other – usually the one of their heritage. Thirty-five years away from it, I would still have to choose England over Canada, if the countries were ever at war. No doubt, the same is true for many if not most immigrants. Culture, heritage, language, whatever it is – they bind us. To hear “God bless America”, or “Canada, the greatest country in the world”, is thus alienating. It implies that some of us are Canadians, and others are not, when, in truth, only the abused First Nations have a right to that claim. The Quebecois have been here four centuries, yet many of them still identify themselves as other than strictly Canadian, or ‘Anglo’. Patriotic fervour – the military, the heroism! – may not be so apparent a disease here as it is in America, yet deadly diseases grow and spread.

The Trump groan, to “Make America great again” is – besides making one wonder when exactly the USA was ever great – a call to arms. Crush dissent! Muslims and Mexicans out! We’re the global cop and the world will now pay us for the task, whether or not anyone wants it! For people who have nothing or know nothing, it may incite some form of identity or pride. Yet for the rest it’s obnoxious. And patriotism is truly obnoxious. The One God’s on our side – everyone else is wrong, or with Satan. That’s how it works, and it has been the single greatest cause of human misery for all of recorded history. You love your country, you fight for it – no matter how right, wrong, or indifferent the casus belli may be. As studies of the human genome show, we are all the same. Even the idea of races is ill-founded. As the greatest photograph in history shows, we all live on one beautiful little blue planet – and we’ll have to share its bounty equally, ,or else perish, like many incompatible species before us. Old maxims are rarely incorrect: Patriotism? It’s the last refuge to which a scoundrel clings.

 

Paul William Roberts

The Great American Divide

Tags

Afghanistan, america, hilary, hiroshima, iran, Iraq, racism, trump, vietnam

 

During the American Civil War, when fathers fought against sons, brothers against brothers, and families against families, a profound psychic divide in US society was first concretized. By ‘psychic divide’ I mean a pronounced mental proclivity to seek out fundamental social divisions. Of course, the rich-poor division exists in all societies. But it is innate in them, an inequity that can be addressed without necessarily tearing the social fabric. In the US these divisions always threaten social strife, sometimes apocalyptically – and I use the word in its original sense of ‘a revealing’. Perhaps the earliest division was between the Puritan Fathers and a settlement of avowed hedonists who lived along the shore from them and practised free love, as well as, one assumes, free speech. Naturally, these sybarites were termed ‘demonic’ by the purist Christians. The next major division was between white European settlers and the indigenous tribes, where countless fabricated tales were told of Indian atrocities to make the white population amenable to their extermination – which, after all, was the project. There is a reason indigenous peoples are not mentioned in the republic’s foundational documents, where all men are born free and independent. The African slaves aren’t mentioned there either, and they would go on to constitute another great divide which, lamentably, still exists – black-white. Nowhere are the rancid politics of division more apparent than in the US, in Washington, where partisan rhetoric is bitter and hateful, and, although there is little difference between Democrats and Republicans in terms of policies, one party is always the Devil, the other the Lord. In Canada, and in most western democracies, there is always a race between opposing parties – and there are usually more than two of them – yet when the race is run peaceful co-existence reigns. Not so in America, where shout-shows on far-right media even skirmish with the other media that are, at best, centre-right. And perceptions always trump issues in these so-called public debates.

One of the great unsolved riddles of American social history is the issue of why the working-class invariably votes against its own best interests by casting a ballot for the Republicans. Theoretically at least, the Democrats are more concerned with workers and the middle-class, and certainly don’t advocate tax cuts for corporations or the super-rich – although the party behaves differently when in power. As Noam Chomsky has observed, it is not difficult to win a US election: you simply promise what everyone wants – subsidized education and health-care. The working-class majority, however, votes emotionally along carefully delineated lines of division, including black-white, Christian-or not, salt of the earth-toff, pro-or-anti-immigrant, gay-straight, liberal-conservative, and, ironically, rich-poor. Sadly, it usually counts for more that a candidate seems like ‘the kinda guy you can have a beer with’ than he does the kinda guy who can intelligently run a country. And, although you could probably have a beer with Donald Trump – not necessarily an enjoyable one – you actually couldn’t have had one with George W. Bush, unless it was de-alcoholised. Again, the perception not the reality rules. Why? It is tempting to conclude that the lumpen proletariat is stupid, easily led by the nose. Yet why can’t a left-wing candidate lead them? It is, I think, the us-and-them divide, where ‘us’ means good old-time religion, traditional values, no blacks, no Jews, no immigrants, and ‘them’ means the opposite, a psychic break-up of the Union by the advocacy of change. It is no wonder that politicians are increasingly exploiting this polarised view of society. ‘Change’ has often been an appealing slogan, yet change is not really what 100 million citizens seem to want. What they do want is a politician who’s not a politician.

The politics of division do not stop at home either. US Foreign Policy deals only in angels and demons. Starting with the Axis Powers, and moving on through communism, the Axis of Evil, Islamic extremism, drug lords, and now Isis and terrorism in general, the attitude is not rational and certainly not open to diplomacy or debate. They’re always the Devil, we’re always the Lord. It is often said in war that you become like your enemy, and America has come to bear an eerie resemblance to totalitarian states, to a drug lord, and to international terrorism of the state-sponsored variety. For example, we now find that the CIA was responsible for the arrest of Nelson Mandela in South Africa – because he was a suspected communist. The us-and-them divide controls and directs such erroneous thinking. There is now a foreign minister in Israel who has threatened to blow up Egypt’s Aswan Dam, and to ‘flatten Gaza like a soccer-field’. We are outraged, no? Yet we are scarcely bothered by infinitely worse US aggression and mayhem in countless other countries – why? Because almost all western media play along with the American version of divide and conquer: we can do no harm, they can do no good. It is insidious, and only the few independent media, like the BBC and CBC, stand between us and the deluge of warped thinking.

Of course, nowhere has the Great American Divide been more apparent than in the current and catastrophic race to the next White House. There have been some pretty repulsive presidential candidates, but I can think of none so flamboyantly revolting than Donald Trump – but I don’t like Hilary much either. At best, she’d be dirty business as usual. They’re both up against an avowed socialist who, I fear, knows little about economics. Indeed, they’re all big on denunciatory rhetoric, and fanciful promises, or threats, but almost invisibly small on policies. When Trump says he’s going to make America great again, does he mean greater than it is with him in it? When, in fact, was America ‘great’? Hiroshima? Civil Rights? The Cold War? Korea? Vietnam? South and Central America? The useless War on Drugs? Iran? Afghanistan? Iraq? And now the Syrian vacillation? Forgive me, but I don’t perceive much greatness. I do, however, see divisive politics opening up a chasm amounting to a Cold, possibly Hot, Civil War. One is forced to wonder if there’s a way out of this dilemma. You can lead a cowboy’s horse to water but you can’t make the rider think. It’s not as if the Internet isn’t choc-a-bloc with insightful articles revealing the real issues at stake.

When I was in Iraq, writing for Harper’s magazine, I witnessed new levels of cunning in military intelligence. I wasn’t embedded, and you had to get permission from the army authorities to travel here or there. I was never refused, but the BBC and many national newspapers had a dreadful time. I realised that the Pentagon didn’t care what a few hundred thousand Harper’s­-reading intellectuals got to think about the war, but they cared tremendously what millions of BBC-watchers or New York Times-readers got to think – and this they monitored carefully. It does not augur well for the health of a society that nearly half of its members base their voting decisions on slogans and not the intricacy of issues. Trump supporters have said that there is nothing he could do to change their minds about voting for him. Nothing? Well, the good news is that he won’t win, and the bad news is that Hilary will. Where will this leave America? It will leave a gaping wound in which the divide between have-brains and don’t-care-to- think has never been more apparent, and will not easily be healed. It is not even really a question of education. No society has been able to deal effectively with those elements which simply don’t wish to participate in the advantages a democratic government offers them. In Canada we have the Hell’s Angels; in America you’ve got 100 million Trump supporters. Welcome to the Grand Canyon…

 

 Paul William Roberts