What To Do About Phobias?

In Britain, they say that when the Labour Party is involved in scandal it is usually because of money, whilst, in the case of the Tory party, sex is more commonly the trigger. I certainly don’t know why these relationships should be so. It may be that the Tories, in the main, have money at their disposal, whilst access to licit sex may not be that readily available. In the Labour Party, the reverse situations may apply. Who knows?

However, for the purpose of this blog, we will ignore the Labour Party’s occasional fall from grace and focus, instead, on the Tories, since they are the current party of government. My take however, is that it may be unfair to see their party as a one-dimensional sex machine. On closer inspection, privilege and the sense of entitlement that goes with it, is the Tories’ greatest handicap. That sense of entitlement drives policy and locates Tories at a place from which they can’t seem to understand or relate to the common experience. Moreover, entitlement breeds that sense of exceptionalism, which sets Tories further apart from the rest of humanity. From exceptionalism, it is an easy segue to xenophobia.  It is this xenophobia - fear of the other - that made the party notoriously resistant to the idea of a European Union until, ultimately, the realities of a post-colonial decline forced them to send in their application to what was then the Common Market. The French, Britain’s nearest neighbour, know all about British (Tory) exceptionalism and, at first, and then again and again, rejected their overtures.  I sense that the Tories have not forgiven the French for this presumptuous act of hubris.  

Four decades after entry, and still smarting from that series of rejection, it has required just the jeers and taunts of a party on the extreme right to frighten the Tories into calling a referendum to decide whether to remain or leave the EU. Exiting would be a largely self-destructive impulse, and most sensible opinion has said so, ranging from the UK’s own central bank to international organizations and world leaders. It is uncomfortable enough to see the right-wing Ukip tail wagging the Tory dog, but many influential Tory party members are now out there, chanting the Ukip mantra and ready to savage anyone daring to advocate remaining.

Into this toxic, already vituperative brew, steps Barak Obama on his valedictory world tour including a stop to wish Queen Elizabeth II a happy 90^th and to get acquainted with the infant George VII. But, flashing his usual broad smile, he also felt obliged to suggest, as many others have done, that Brexit is a bad idea and that if that came to pass, Britain would have to take its place at the back of the “queue” for negotiating a trade deal with America... Ignoring the linguistic gulf between the two nations that Obama’s use of a five-letter word instead of a four-letter one exposed, the subsequent fracas would have been difficult to understand, if not for the fact that the chief Tory Brexit spokesman, Boris Johnson, in a choice few phrases, succeeded in not only demonstrating the most extreme version of Tory xenophobia, but also the party’s lingering regret over the unravelling of their erstwhile colonial enterprise.

Fair enough, you would say. But the reason I am writing this blog is that I perceive Boris Johnson’s attempt to defame the President of the United States, as just another facet in the Tory racist agenda, most manifest when the Party faces problems at the ballot box, as is the case in the Brexit referendum and in next month’s vote to choose a successor to Johnson as Mayor of London. 

Tell Fren Tru

A Dreadful Prospect

No one, other than Americans, should care about American politics. But we all do, and must, even though, as they say, all politics is local. The statement is true, of course, because an ordinary voter considers and lives his life in local terms. The question that, inevitably, he has to ask himself is, what is there in it for me?  In answering it, seldom, if ever, would he take into account larger issues outside his daily orbit as being relevant to his enjoyment of life or the pursuit of happiness.  A candidate seeking office is, therefore, constrained to stick to local bread-and-butter issues if he is to convince voters to cast in his favour. Ambitions and designs in the wider America and beyond are better left undeclared until voting is over and the candidate is well on his way to taking up his seat and position himself to pay back those who bankrolled his campaign. Then, and only then, would he or she begin to declare opinions relating to more global issues. Up till then, local affairs dominate and the needs of the local man- or woman-in-the- street, fearful of many things, remain paramount: “Losing” one’s job to a low-wage worker in a far-off China, for example or, even more shockingly, to an immigrant “swarming” into his community, grateful for a wage, however small. Such circumstances provoke an intensity of feeling that generates a nightmare vision of an enemy within, poised to snatch bread away from children’s mouths. And not only that: The invader may be seen also as the purveyor of new practices and rituals that undermine the comfortable certainties of a Christian God. Nothing could be more calculated to strike dread.

Enter one Donald J Trump, a man experienced in the arts of reality television, a medium designed to scramble the brain. In his case, it is not only what Trump says that allures, but how he says it. The body-language and hand gestures speak in more copious volumes than his words can ever do. People compare Donald Trump to Hitler but, for me, the man is reminiscent more of Mussolini than the German dictator. But however you cut it, the coming disaster of a Trump presidency cannot be underestimated. Mr Trump knows the buttons to press to ignite the base elements in the constituency that perceives their livelihood and religious certainties threatened by inward flow of Mexican and Moslem hordes primed to take away jobs and subvert belief. Part of the Trumpian vision, therefore, involves building a wall and getting homeland security to exclude those of a certain faith, not to talk of bombing the crap out of ISIL.

Meanwhile, the mainstream of Trump’s party, the GOP, stands by impotently in furious disapproval. To be sure, disapproval is not based on moral or even ideological grounds. It is just that the party’s preferred candidate would be one less likely to lose against the Democratic Party’s candidate, come November. But the Republicans have only themselves to blame for the place they are now in because of the hatred they foment and harbour against Obama, by which calculus, anything Obama is bad, no matter how common-sense. That article of faith, developed and entrenched during the past seven or eight years, transforms itself into the currency in which America’s wretched hope to purchase redemption. A dreadful prospect.

Too bad the rest of the world will catch the backdraught.

Tell Fren Tru