Surviving in the Era of Populism

Can’t fathom where the last decade went. True, some of its ravages have left their mark on this poor body of mine, but in other ways, things have been moving so fast and so far that the universe has become virtually unrecognizable from the one we knew at the beginning of the decade.

         Of course, the dominant motif has been the spread of this vast network of interconnectedness that links most of humanity together. I am talking here about the digital connections in which, we are told, 3.5 billion of us are engaged these days, treating each other and everyone who has access, to the tedium that defines our lives.

         But lest we forget, our digital inter-connectedness can never match the biological connectedness that links us, as humans, manifested in the indivisibility of the DNA sequences that weave us all together. To emphasize the point, although the number of genes coding for human characteristics and features has been downsized from the 100,000 that was calculated at the opening stages of the new genetics era to between 24,000 and 25,000 now, there is still a huge potential for variation that transcends family, group and region and exposes the emptiness of those who would divide us. And here we include non-essential attributes like skin colour, hair texture, body shape, physiognomy. It’s rather like being in a car lot where you’re looking at buying yourself a nice new motor. On that lot you see an array of vehicles, stretching from horizon to horizon: Different shapes, different sizes, colours, different marque, and indeed different models, some only slightly differing from the other. But all have four wheels (When did you last see a three-wheeler? Whenever one of these appears these days, it does so mainly for comic relief), a steering wheel, gear shift, accelerator and brake pedals, and the array of instruments on a dashboard. The motor under the hood, however, is the same: It could be internal combustion or, nowadays, electric. But they are still the engine that moves the whole thing along.

         The point I am making is that all those variations do not detract from the essence of ‘carness’, if I could coin a word. By the same token, human beings, on our car-lot of humanity, are essentially the same under the hood, despite or because of the 25000 genes that we each embody.  And, prick any of us, we bleed the same red blood. But it has become fashionable, in some quarters, to somehow, deny this reality by attempting to drive a wedge between communities and groups for only one sordid purpose, capturing power. From the streets of London to America’s heartland, and from the domes of the Kremlin to places along the languid waters of the Danube, and from the hovels of New Delhi to the dragons rising in China, and from the unfortunate Rohingyas on to Brazil’s burning Amazon,  “strong” men (and women, sadly) have wrested control from the hands of social democrats who, until recently, have been trying to make the world a better place. But by the end of the decade, things have taken a decidedly bad turn. True, the Robert Mugabes and Hosni Mubaraks, the Gadafis, the Tunisian Ben Alis, and The Gambian Yahyah Jammeh have been swept away. But the optimism that followed these ejections have not fulfilled their promise.

         Instead, there are important countries in which people are incited to hate each other to a level that has become totally toxic orchestrated by a President of the United States, for example, who, it seems, believes that wholesale disruption is the brilliant approach to refashioning world order. Even his domestic policies reverberate negatively around the world, and his so-called foreign policy directly threatens world peace. All we can do is hold our breath and hope that we can survive to exhale in the purer air of broad and sunlit uplands.

         So, despite the early signs, let us not despair but instead, wish ourselves survival in 2020.

Tell Fren Tru

A Year To Remember

2016 has been a strange one. Midway through, the Brits conjoured up the phenomenon of Brexit, when they voted not to remain in the European Union. The smart money had been on a different outcome, although it should have been obvious from the very beginning how the vote was going to go: The thing was that older generation Brits were keen on getting out of a union in which they had never been wholly comfortable. It was a club into which they felt they had been dragged by a bunch of metropolitan liberal elites, and June 23 provided the opportunity for them to free themselves of its shackles. It was also the chance to let those elites know how they felt about all claptrap like multi-culturalism and open borders.

So they took their opportunity and brought those elites down a peg or two, thumbing their noses at them for being "out of touch" with the ordinary folk, whose rights had been trampled on when the country was sold off to similar elites in foreign countries.  The June vote was the chance to sort them out, stick one in their eye and take back control of the country. Job done.

            Brexit was the summer’s fancy. Then autumn came and brought with it its fall fayre, the American presidential election. The outcome of that also caught the pundits flat-footed. They had been absolutely certain, as near as 99% could be that Hillary Clinton was going to become 45^th president of the United States. Even Donald Trump himself, who eventually won, did not much fancy his own chances either. Indeed, he was so unsure about his prospects (even with help of Russian friends) that he declared that he would not accept the results if Clinton won. As it turned out, he did not have to go down such a destructive route. In the aftermath, many worry that, given his temperament, he might not be able to resist the impulse, as commander-in-chief, to launch real WMDs if someone were to get under his skin.

            The fall was indeed the season when America completed its descent from the grace that the Obama presidency had been mooting. To be sure, Donald Trump was chief among detractors who tried to undermine Obama’s legitimacy by claiming that he had been foreign-born. It was probably not coincidental therefore, that it was round about this period in America’s history that its race-consensus began to unravel, to the point where street-level executions of African-American became almost routine in law-enforcement. Donald Trump’s entry into such a charged atmosphere did nothing to quieten nerves but probably exacerbated tensions. It was shocking, therefore, that a mature democracy like America’s blithely handed such a person the keys to the White House.

            Time Magazine has just named Trump its “Person of the Year”, for good or ill, it says. Fair enough. The “ill” is code for saying “watch out, America, you could be on course for a very destructive era”. That too, is fair enough. But if this tendency for doing harm erupts into a contagion, repercussions around the world could be disastrous: Countries that do not yet have a settled relation with democracy could end up in a very bad place. I can just imagine "strong men" on the African continent, for example, thinking and saying, “You know what? That Trump fellow has something”, and then casually continue fixing elections, invoking him as their new guru. This was the hazard that Gambians faced as they voted in their presidential elections last week. Hitherto, incumbent, Yahya Jammeh had managed things so nicely that his electorate “voted” him in for several five-year mandates, while jailing any who opposed him along the way. With chants of "Lock Her Up" ,  "Lock Her Up" now echoing everywhere, it was impossible not to be pessimistic that Jammeh's tendency to send opponents to Mile 2 (prison) or worse, will be curbed. But the people surprised us and, what was more astonishing Jammeh, amazingly, announced that he had accepted the people’s verdict.

            Once again, the urban elite got it wrong. Or did they?

Tell Fren Tru

Brexit Wrecks It

I am sitting in a quiet corner in Toronto, watching the shenanigans that are shaking up the world’s greatest democracies. Two weeks ago, I would not have believed it if you told me that the citadel of the once-great British Empire would be enmeshed in the coils of a drama the likes of which we haven’t seen in decades, even in political soaps. It all goes to show how tenuous my hold on historical precedence is. But more able students of the subject would remind us that the last two hundred years or so have, in fact, been untypically tranquil and orderly in the way that government transitions take place in England and the kingdom precariously united under it. So, really, things are merely reverting to type and the status quo that used to be during the many centuries that preceded the last two. True, no blood has stained the floor during the internecine wars that are currently raging along several corridors of power. Not even fake blood. But, exsanguination of a kind has occurred, nevertheless. And, most horribly, we see those who wield the assassin’s knife, becoming themselves impaled by the same instrument they employ to stab former colleagues. (“Friends” would not be the word to use here). The backdrop to this internecine war is of course the people’s vote that, narrowly, instructed the government to get out of Europe. In the end, two women were the ones who remained standing in the contest to lead the governing Tory party that had made the mistake of calling the referendum. Then there was one. She, Theresa May, now has the Tory chalice firmly in her grasp, but she may be well advised to pause before she takes too full a draught from it.

          On the other side of the UK’s political divide is the Labour Party, which is going through its own self-immolation project. Here, again, the most proximate cause for the infighting is the Brexit vote which, the leader’s detractors accuse, he did not do enough to influence in a positive way. Hence, they claim, the bad outcome. Most in his parliamentary caucus want him out and many in his shadow cabinet have deserted him, whilst he, in turn, has sacked a few others. And, he says, he’s going nowhere because the party at large put him where he is, insisting that their democratic will be respected. The big beasts in the party have called for a leadership vote from which Corbyn was to be excluded: “See you in court,” he says, if that vote went ahead without his name on the ballot paper. In the end, his name was allowed to go through.

          Meanwhile,  in that other great democracy, they are enduring their perennial angst as to how to assign equal value to the life of each of its citizens. Don’t get me wrong. We are all different. But to say that being in, or of one group means that you should be consigned to a segment of the populace in which life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is denied makes a mockery of the principles which that great nation espouses. So, for one week in July we see, in real time, black men going about their legitimate business, being murdered by police in the streets. In retaliation, a black man murders five white policemen and wounds seven others before being blown to bits by a robot bomb deployed by a police force that had run out of answers on a hot night in Dallas. All of these events occur in the backdrop of a presidential election campaign in which the most improbable candidate ever, all but bags the nomination of the Republican Party. Mr Trump, the man I speak of, has shown himself to be a most divisive individual, saying explicitly what some of his constituents think but are too embarrassed to utter themselves. The other candidate for the presidential vote, the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party, Hilary Clinton, and the one I hope will win come November, is having to traverse a minefield of outlandish accusations laid by Trump and those who support him. True, Trump also irritates his Republican Party no end, but they must live with him. It’s him they’ve got, for better or worse. But it was they who encouraged his kind of nonsense in the first place by making it impossible for Obama to deliver, in the matter of gun control, for example. I cannot wait to enjoy my moment of schadenfreude when the lot of them lose in November. But counting chickens before they are hatched is definitely not good husbandry. Ask David Cameron.

However, if things go well, the prospect of Hillary Clinton, Angela Merkel, Theresa May and Nicola Sturgeon running things is très délicieux.

Yum Yum.

Tell Fren Tru