2020 vision

Some years seem, for whatever reason, to develop their own character. It is, of course, merely how we come to label and later remember them, but that doesn't make those characteristics feel any less real at the time. Just a few from my lifetime, at least as I remember them:

The long, hot summer of 1976.

The bitter fury and division of the miners' strike in 1984.

Famine, and Live Aid, in 1985.

The Labour landslide of 1997, ending so many years of Tory government. Portillo's defeat speech and Paxman's "You can't even hold Hove!" (And more personally, the fight to keep my football club alive which came to a head that year.)

My father's death, and the startling wave of celebrity deaths, in 2016.

There will be others I've forgotten for now, and many people will have different views of the same year if something significant happened in their lives. But pretty much everybody is going to look back on 2020 with the same general view, I think. It's been shit by more or less any measure. About the only generally good thing I can recall from this year so far was that, in terms of the weather, we had a great summer. At least those people lucky enough to have some outdoor space were able to enjoy some sun while they were under quarantine at home.

The year's not over yet, of course. Somehow, from somewhere, I've dredged sufficient optimism to choose to believe that it may yet, in its final couple of months, have a parting gift for many of us. Tomorrow the United States goes to the polls (those millions who haven't already voted, at any rate) in an election that could yet gift us the chance to look back on at least one day of this wretched year and feel a warm glow.

They might, just might, chuck out that racist, misogynistic, egomaniacal, half-witted, climate-change denying, dictator-loving, pig-faced, divisive crook and replace him with... well, another old, white man. But at least a functioning adult, politically experienced, with a young, female, mixed-race running mate. Who'd become President in the event Biden's age catches up with him.

Gotta be honest, though. What I said about years having characters? The outcome that most fits with this year's character is that Trump wins again and we get four more years of that hateful see-you-next-Tuesday. Or it's close, and he drags it through the courts for months, adding a presidential vacuum to an already catastrophic response to the pandemic over there.

Come on, 2020. Just do us this one thing, eh? Please?

The traditional image of Old Father Time, his work done, handing over contentedly to the youthful, following year.     La imagen tradicional del Viejo Padre Tiempo, su trabajo hecho, entregando con satisfacción al año joven siguiente.

And 2020's version. Y la versión 2020.

(Disculpa mi español!)

Algunos años parecen, por cualquier razón, desarrollar su propio carácter. Por supuesto, es simplemente como llegamos a etiquetarlas y luego recordarlas, pero eso no hace que esas características se sientan menos reales en ese momento. Sólo algunas de mi vida, al menos tal como las recuerdo:

El largo y caluroso verano de 1976.

La amarga furia y la división de la huelga de los mineros en 1984.

La hambruna, y Live Aid, en 1985.

La victoria de los laboristas en 1997, que puso fin a tantos años de gobierno tory. El discurso de la derrota de Portillo y el de Paxman "¡Ni siquiera puedes sostener el Hove!" (Y más personalmente, la lucha por mantener vivo mi club de fútbol que llegó a su fin ese año.)

La muerte de mi padre, y la sorprendente ola de muertes de celebridades, en 2016.

Habrá otras que he olvidado por ahora, y muchas personas tendrán diferentes puntos de vista sobre el mismo año si algo significativo sucedió en sus vidas. Pero casi todo el mundo va a mirar hacia atrás en 2020 con la misma visión general, creo. Ha sido una mierda más o menos en cualquier medida. Lo único bueno que recuerdo de este año hasta ahora es que, en términos de clima, tuvimos un gran verano. Al menos las personas que tuvieron la suerte de tener un espacio al aire libre pudieron disfrutar del sol mientras estaban en cuarentena en casa.

El año aún no ha terminado, por supuesto. De alguna manera, desde algún lugar, he sacado suficiente optimismo para elegir creer que aún puede, en sus últimos meses, tener un regalo de despedida para muchos de nosotros. Mañana los Estados Unidos van a las urnas (esos millones que aún no han votado, en cualquier caso) en una elección que podría darnos la oportunidad de mirar hacia atrás al menos un día de este desdichado año y sentir un cálido resplandor.

Podrían, simplemente podrían, echar a ese racista, misógino, ególatra, imbécil, negador del cambio climático, amante de los dictadores, cara de cerdo, ladrón divisivo y reemplazarlo por... bueno, otro viejo hombre blanco. Pero al menos un adulto funcional, con experiencia política, con una pareja joven, femenina y mestiza. Que se convertiría en Presidente en caso de que la edad de Biden lo alcance.

Tengo que ser honesto, sin embargo. Lo que dije acerca de los años teniendo personajes? El resultado que más encaja con el personaje de este año es que Trump gana de nuevo y tenemos cuatro años más de ese odioso hijo de puta. O está cerca, y lo arrastra por los tribunales durante meses, añadiendo un vacío presidencial a una ya catastrófica respuesta a la pandemia de allí.

Vamos, 2020. Sólo haznos una cosa, ¿eh? Por favor...

Karma's a bitch

No prizes for guessing the subject of this entry from its title. The news that the Trumps have contracted Coronavirus is exactly as surprising as the fact that the first presidential 'debate' turned into farce, with one of the participants in particular keener on a chimps' tea party than actually engaging in debate. (Always a potential problem when one of the candidates is nobody's idea of a great public speaker and the other is barely capable of stringing a coherent sentence together. Wonder if that came up in the producers' planning meetings?)

Anyway, now the next debate is in doubt thanks to Trump contracting a virus that just a week ago he told people 'not to worry about' because it 'affects virtually nobody', only the 'elderly and those with heart conditions'. 208,000 fatalities in the States strongly suggests otherwise, but don't worry, because he also said they're 'rounding the turn' of the pandemic, and has criticised his opponent Biden for wearing a mask and not gathering large numbers of people together at campaign rallies.

Now I don't believe in karma, but it's the only word that adequately stands as a synecdoche for what I feel is going on right now. And I know I'm hardly alone in that feeling, if my limited view of social media is anything to go by. I try to be a decent person when I hear news like this about somebody for whom I feel genuine antipathy – see my entry on Thatcher's death for a similar conscience wrestle some time ago. But Trump makes it very, very, very difficult to wish him a recovery. No, strike that – he makes it impossible. Even when Boris Johnson was hospitalised with Covid, I didn't want the man to die. I hoped, instead, that he'd learn from it and come out with a renewed appreciation of the value of the NHS. Fat chance, of course, but that was nonetheless my feeling at the time.

Now I don't want Trump to die either, but the reasons are rather less noble. I don't want him becoming some kind of political martyr to the extremists, climate-change deniers, MAGA dickheads and ultra-conservative right that he represents. I don't want those of his followers who believe the virus is a Chinese-engineered biological weapon to have any further 'evidence' for their bizarre claims. And I don't want any kind of sympathy that may be generated for the man if he gets properly ill to be converted into votes. 

So despite my glee at the entirely appropriate condition in which he finds himself, and despite that fact that if he comes out of it without having been seriously ill, it will add fuel to his 'don't worry about it' line, I'm in the awkward position of having to hope he recovers quickly enough that he can't make political capital out of it. Better he comes out of it looking stupid (sorry; more stupid) than he comes out of it looking like some kind of tough-nut 'fighter'.

This year has been comfortably the worst that many millions of people can ever remember. In every corner of the globe, whether it's forest fires, the pandemic, refugee crises, the ongoing rise of the extreme right, increasingly extreme weather events, Brexit looming, human sacrifice or dogs and cats living together (one for the Ghostbusters fans there), it's just been a complete shit-show from the fucking start. It may yet, though, have one positive note to end on, or almost end on.

I'll tell you what, 2020. You give us the gift of a Biden victory on November 3rd – a clear victory that can't be dragged through the courts for six months while Trump takes to squatting in the Oval Office – and we'll let bygones be bygones, eh?

Complete anus completes annus horribilis

You know those posters some people put up in the office - 'You don't have to be mad to work here, but it helps!' - that sort of faux-cheery, cod rubbish that never made anybody even smile, still less laugh? Well, years ago, when I was just an acne-covered 17-year-old cleaning the offices of American Express in the evening for beer money, I saw one of those on somebody's desk-space wall which has stuck with me. I don't know why - it was no more or less profound than any of the others.

"And a great voice boomed from the heavens, and it said 'Don't despair - smile and be happy, for things could be worse.' So I smiled and was happy. And, lo, things got worse."

That's what it said. Now it may have chimed with my innate pessimism. I may have retained it because, like many teenaged boys, I fancied myself a cynic at the time. I don't know. But for pretty obvious reasons it came back to me this morning, as the news broke from the States.

This has been, by both personal and wider measures, an absolutely fucking shit year. My father's death, our own referendum, the refugee crises, war in Syria, terrorist attacks in France and elsewhere, the rise of the extreme right across Europe and beyond, beloved and influential people like Bowie dropping like flies - I could go on. I was, though, naive enough to hope, still, that Clinton would become the first female President of the US. Female heads of State in both Britain and the UK - even if you don't agree with their politics, even if you accept they're both a long way from perfect, that would have been something, wouldn't it? Some signs for hope, particularly in the States, that a black man could be followed into the White House by a woman.

Well no, obviously. 2016 has decided, in its apparently infinite capacity to bring forth shit, that it hasn't done with us yet. It has, finally, squeezed any last vestige of optimism from me, and left me, like so many others, in despair. I still have nothing but the highest regard for those who won't let it defeat their spirit, of course. I may not be much of a Facebook user, but I see the defiance in people I love and admire, the determination to do good, to be good people. The will not to allow Trump et al to drag them down to his hell of fear, hatred, retrenchment and isolationism. But I've got to tell you, just at the moment, I'm not feeling that. I feel beaten. Hate is winning, everywhere.

We're being told that millions of ordinary Americans felt let down, disenfranchised by a political elite they regarded as corrupted, morally bankrupt and completely out of touch with how they felt. Well I know how they fucking feel! In an America with a right-wing nutcase President-elect, a Republican Senate, a Republican House of Representatives and a Republican Chief Justice, where the hell is the voice of the Democrat, the liberal, the minority, being heard, still less represented? Don't those millions, equally appalled at the state of their nation today, also count?

On this side of the Atlantic, at least, there seems to be a sort of bewilderment that 'it' could have happened again. That a country that can elect Obama, twice, can then put almost his direct antithesis into the same seat. What happened to the America that elected him? How have people that called him a terrorist, a communist, and a Muslim, the last being intended as an insult, have had their way, when this most human of Presidents, this classiest of men, seemed only ever to want the best for his country?

The US seems to have forgotten which way round parody
is supposed to work. The Simpsons, 16 years ago. 

I wrote an entry last July about not letting this sort of thinking - this sociopathic, atavistic, solipsistic ideology that's becoming so prevalent - win. Reading it back now makes me feel like I was Cnut, sitting on the beach, watching the tide advance inexorably but still trusting to the future. He, at least, was able to leave the beach when it was clear he'd been right - there was no stopping it. The rest of us have no such luxury, and we're already in it up to our chests.

Never mind - smile and be happy, for things could be worse.

The way things are going

Maybe I'm over-dramatising it a bit, but it feels a little like the end times are coming at the moment. I'm sure it's been worse - during the Cuban Missile Crisis, for example - but during my own lifetime I can't quite remember feeling this sense of dread at the way the world's politics seem to be moving.

It feels, for a start, like everything is shifting dramatically to the right. Right-wing political parties are gaining ground across Europe. Barriers are being put up, literally and emotionally - even an enlightened, modern country like Norway is building a fence along its border with Russia, for example. We all know what happened over Brexit. Russia, with a President who seems as close to a dictator as is possible without being named as such by other leaders, is moving nuclear missiles within range of Berlin. They're falling out with the US over Syria, to the point where relations seem as bad as they've been at any time since the Cold War.

Then there's us. (Not all of us, of course, but enough of us that it's horrible.) We seem to be dehumanising refugees to the point where putting up walls seems an acceptable solution to their appearance. I'm pretty sure that anybody with a shred of humanity, if they found a helpless child abandoned outside their front door, would do their best to help that child without a thought for where they'd come from, what colour their skin was, that they needed food from your larder and a blanket from your bedroom. Number those children in the thousands, though, mix them in with similarly needy adults and put them on the news, and the response seems oddly indifferent. Cruel, even; it's apparently OK even for a Prime Minister to describe these people as a 'swarm'. It all seems a bit shitty, frankly.

The most worrying thing of all for me though, is the forthcoming US Presidential election. I normally regard these with only a passing interest - as with party politics in Britain, there's usually a nagging suspicion that basically not much will change regardless of who's in charge. Witness Obama being thwarted at every turn on free healthcare or gun reform. This time, though, with the Americans going to the polls a month from now, one of the possible outcomes is genuinely terrifying.

I'm always slightly wary of commenting on matters of another country's politics - you could argue it's analogous to complaining about a bloke three streets away's lawn being too long - but in this case the prospect of Donald 'can't we just use nukes?' Trump becoming President is too scary, and seems too likely, not to allow some sort of comment from any quarter. You would complain about a lawn three streets away if the lawn owner's proposed solution to his problem risked razing the entire neighbourhood to the ground.

Quite apart from his alarming attitude to foreign policy, there's the fact that the man is, plain and simple, a pig. Is this really the sort of person Americans want sitting in their most powerful seat? The latest stuff to come out - I'm sure you've all heard about the video - is merely the latest in a long line of appalling insults and abuse. He's an Islamophobic, racist, misogynistic, bullying atavist who'd be suitable only as an exhibit in some kind of weird exhibition of antediluvian masculinity, fit only for scorn and laughter, if he were not dangerously close to becoming President of the United States.

He's dismissed much of this latest stuff as ' locker room banter' even during an apology for it. 'This is not the man I am', he explains. Which version of him are you to believe is genuine - the private, unguarded one or the one who's trying to persuade you to vote for him? He's losing backing from within the Republican party, but still many of his 'rank-and-file' supporters seem unmoved. In the case of some of them it'll be down to good old, down-to-earth, honest stupidity. But there's the much more frightening prospect that a significant percentage of the US electorate, whether stupid or intelligent, whether educated or not, whether well-travelled or parochial and insular, share at least enough of his views to be prepared to vote for him. Or perhaps simply hate Mrs Clinton.

I don't know. But I've learned a lesson about thinking that things would be OK, that sanity and humanity would prevail, from our own referendum. As much as I'd like to think that his is merely the side which makes the most noise, the polls still have them close, and it kind of feels like the world's holding its breath waiting for this one to play out, hoping desperately that the 'right' outcome is arrived at.

Can you imagine a world with Trump in the Oval Office, Putin at the Kremlin, Britain isolated from Europe, Kim Jong-un in charge of North Korea and The Muppets moved to subscription-only TV? Three of those things have already happened, one is definitely going to. That leaves Trump as the one that can still be stopped. Please, America. Please - I know she's not perfect, but no career politician is - please vote for Clinton.

Can't please everyone, can you?

It seems the re-election of Obama to the Presidency in the US has not made quite the positive impression on absolutely everybody that it may have done on some of us.

Everybody's favourite bad-haired billionaire Donald Trump can only be described as less than pleased by the outcome. He didn't hang about in expressing his opinion as to the outcome of the thing, and it was quickly picked up by the world's media. An example of the response here, with much of what he said, but to pick out a couple of favourite highlights:

"Lets fight like hell and stop this great and disgusting injustice! The world is laughing at us."

"This election is a total sham and a travesty. We are not a democracy! Our country is now in serious and unprecedented trouble...like never before."

Hmmm. Those pesky democracies which, when the result doesn't go your way, aren't democracies, can rather wind up somebody who thinks that their wealth gives them the right to do what they want, can't they? Surely, since he's quite so rolling in cash, the universe should arrange itself as to his wishes. I certainly know what I'm laughing at.

The very mechanism by which the American people have decided their own short-term political future has him screaming like a spoilt child. It's quite amusing - partially stymied in Scotland by locals who didn't want a golf course, and wind farm and hundreds of homes on their doorstep, and now again in his home country by the votes which are among the few things he still can't buy. Lovely.

As for the content of his rant itself - if anything, the world is in fact, I think, drawing something of a collective sigh of relief. With all the pollsters claiming it was too close to call, the voters in the end gave Obama a reasonably comfortable victory, and a firm mandate to at least try to make some of the real change he's been striving for. With Congress and the House of Representatives so split it's difficult to see how he'll ever be able to get anything too radical through, but at least he's still there to try.

As for Romney, you have to wonder how much some of what he, and other Republicans, have been saying lately has worked against them. I've written in recent entries on some of the scandalous comments coming out of the Religious Right's mouths lately - just maybe they stirred something in more rational-minded people and got them out there to vote.

Whatever actually settled it, I'm glad it's gone the way it has. These are unstable times and the last thing I personally wanted to see in the White House right now is a right-wing religious fundamentalist on some kind of modern-day political Crusade. Let's all hope Obama doesn't squander the opportunity the voters have given him, with any luck getting up Mr Trump's nose again in the process.

Romney shows true Republican colours

Mitt Romney's comments (here) on marriage, addressing a congregation of the converted (to say the least) as part of what is evidently a pitch to the Christian right voters in the States, shows both him and his party up for what they are.

It's a worrying sign that the same sort of people who want creationism taught in schools as fact, and who distrust atheists more vehemently than any other minority group in the US, according to an oft-quoted University of Minnesota study, still carry this much sway in the thinking of the patrician class of such a world power.

This man could be President, if the strength of feeling that this group evidently harbour against him can be used by the Republicans and translated into votes. Obama's support for free health care, and his modernist views on what marriage is, clearly strike a deep chord of discontent with these people. To parts of the outside world, and certainly to me, his attitudes merely seem human and contemporary, but this evidently marks him out as a socialist; sees him regarded as the worst kind of anti-American scum in some eyes in the country over which he presides.

It already looks absolutely imperative that Obama wins the Presidential election because, if Romney is to be the one standing against him and comes through to win, we could have another George W Bush on our hands. Remember him? The creationist loon who said, and I quote, at Chicago's O'Hare airport in 1987, "...I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God."

So he dismissed some of his own countryment, regardless of their feelings for the US. We must all hope we never have another of his kind in the Oval Office, but Romney makes me fear it could be all too soon that we have exactly that.