Spare a thought for the urban elite

I have been on furlough during which I have been thinking about the plight of a much-maligned group who are currently under the cosh.

It has become fashionable to blame them, the “liberal metropolitan elite,” as they are called, for some dodgy political decisions voters have been making recently. (Of course, the people are always right. How could one possibly think that they might be otherwise?). 

Anyway, the analysis goes something like this: the ordinary man or woman is fed up with being told what to do or think. Therefore, they are now rebelling and asserting their independence of thought, word and deed.

The charge is of course bogus and, ordinarily, in a world where there is common sense it should be summarily thrown out. But the world is one queer place these days. Now, anything goes, as long as it can be said in soundbites or delivered in 140 characters or thereabouts. Either way, such pronouncements can contain an enormous amount of misinformation, frequently laced with venom and other noxious substances. We’re not even talking about insults here. For those, four-letter expletives remain sufficient and for which certain world leaders are notable.

Demolishing untruths and misrepresentations packed into only 140 characters fashioned during the wee hours, for example, can, surprisingly, be quite tough, not to say irritating, requiring considerable skill and deftness in word craft. Re-formatting a bad sector, as old computer lingo used to have it, in a corrupted mind, can be incredibly difficult. Minds like that are just not amenable to the devices of common sense. You don’t have to look hard for examples. They are everywhere in the political landscape of today.

But who are these “liberal metropolitan elite” anyway? According to the label on the tin, you can infer that they live in the city or in a big town. Though not necessarily. What probably defines them most is that they fashion their wicked ways within a thoughtful network of innovative individuals. They nourish each other. Their currency is ideas. Ideas about what makes the world work. And indeed, how, in fact, the very thing itself revolves around the sun rather than the other way round, for example.  It is also not flat. It is a globe. Remember, these were the kinds of ideas that people got their eyes gouged out for or had some other unpleasant things done to them.

Most of these so-called elites would have spent years learning stuff. Although not necessarily.  They are just able to think clearly and sift wheat from chaff as well as show readiness to jettison ideas that obviously don’t make sense. Beyond that, they tend to take the long view too, both forward and back and pick out lessons from history.  Also, they try to warn us not to repeat the mistakes of previous generations. Most importantly, they welcome new ideas and show willingness to change position when facts warrant.

It is through this receptivity that the world has become a better place. Readiness to receive new ideas and, create new ones in turn, has guided human progress and contributes bigly, to coin a phrase, to the making of today’s world, where food is generally plentiful and people live longer, healthier lives. Life expectancy is increasing progressively, even in countries that are relatively poor. 

So what’s not to like about the urban elite? Nothing. Except, of course, when you have no alternative to offer. Especially, if your agenda is merely to seek public office for office's sake. In those circumstances, facts can be rubbished and substituted with “alternative” facts in a strange universe where the laws of physics and maths don’t apply, a place where 2 plus 2 does not add up to 4. There are many practitioners of these strange arts, some in seriously important positions from which they make a lot of noise, and with the power to mess our world about. Think of the vaccine rejectionists, the climate change deniers, the evolution deniers, to mention just a few of the really pesky ones. And there are many others as well of various dimensions. Together, they are a formidable force that makes the job of defining policy truly hard.

This is why it is important for scientists and technologists to resist and call out these destructive elements in society that aim to take us back to their “golden age” when they called the shots and held all the cards that kept the vast majority of us in our place.

But I might be too pessimistic. The urban elite are alive and well and will remain fighting fit to beat back the forces against progress. Starting in France. And the UK.

Tell Fren Tru

A Day To Remember-- World Sickle Cell Day, June 19th

The calendar is loaded. Just about every day of the year is spoken for for celebrating or marking some event, idea, concept and dare I say, obsession. Some are worthy and even brilliant. The rare one is deeply embedded within the canon and even more rarely have attained the stature of shibboleths that are not to be messed with. I will steer clear of these latter, though some are so entrenched that they are beyond appearing in the international order of world days. Indeed, all of us, in our own way, enjoy, celebrate and revere these rare examples.

The ones that I have no truck with are the obscure and the pointless. Like, for example, Defend The Donot Day (Feb 24) - for crying out loud! - or ADWN, an acronym for a A Day Without News, Feb 22, that Wikipedia gaily assures me exists. And there is World Cat Day (August 8) - for goodness sake - and World Tripe Day (October 24), as if we don’t already have enough of that dished out on a daily basis. You just have to listen to certain world leaders, especially what they say in their early morning rants. And then there is World Pest Day (June 6) - good grief! -which, in the spirit of conservation or parsimony, could be twinned with the day for Trump, sorry, Tripe and, which gives me an idea. Why not have a World Parsimony Day when the entire caboodle could be dispensed with in one massive blowout? But judging by the range of days that already plague us, I wouldn’t be surprised if there is already such a beast in existence somewhere.

So, if one is fed up with all these pointless days, why promote another one? Well, there are some days that are heavy, not only with symbolism, but also with real value. So, it is with some confidence that I present to you, again, this June 19, World Sickle Cell Day. This day reminds us that the battle against sickle cell is still on and that the fight against this debilitating and often fatal disease continues. Even though there are advances every year, sickle cell disease is still responsible for a significant number of deaths in children under five years of age in many countries.

Do your bit to help the fight. Go visit the website: www.sleonesickle.org to see what you can do to help.

Tell Fren Tru

Is This The Cure For Sickle Cell Disease?

Sickled Cells in a patient with Sickle Cell Disease

It’s all over the place. Everywhere you turn there is this buzz. Relief, one is happy to say, from the relentless reports of wars, conflicts and disgraceful tweets. The thing that is causing the buzz is the story about a new cure for sickle cell, a disease that affects hundreds of thousands, if not millions throughout the world.

There is nothing unusual about new cures. Breakthroughs for this or that are regularly announced, both in the regular media and in fringe outlets. And we humans seriously take them on board together with their hope and their hype, especially for diseases that stubbornly resist the best efforts of our medicine men and women, scientific or shamanistic. The cure for cancer, especially (as if cancer is just one disease, like appendicitis), is one that regularly grabs the imagination. But one must always be cognizant of the fact that however relevant these “cures” might be, their impacts are mostly incremental and, in any case, require time to mature into full-fledged remedies.

The cure that was announced last week must, as in other similar examples, be the subject of a reality check. Nevertheless, this is one announcement that should be taken very seriously because the procedure directly targets the engine that drives the terrible clinical consequences of the disease. In the report, French researchers describe how they harvested blood stem cells from a 13-year- old boy suffering from the disease and inserted normal haemoglobin genes into them. They then returned the modified stem cells back into the boy, who subsequently began to make normal red blood cells. Fifteen months later he is free of all the symptoms of the disease. Pretty good, when you consider that for most of his young life he had suffered severe symptoms. Everybody is now talking excitedly about how this treatment can be rolled out to all those hundreds of thousands of patients throughout the world suffering from sickle cell.

Conceptually, the procedure is simple enough. But in practical terms, it could be devilishly complicated as demonstrated by the huge number of researchers that pulled off the treatment. Indeed, when I looked at the report, I had to give up counting the named individuals and institutions that collaborated in the work. I can say, though, that their number, combined, might well exceed the entire scientific and medical capital in some countries where sickle cell is prevalent.

Another point: This is just one case. That of a13-year-old located in a well-resourced setting and is a long way from signalling that the treatment can be extended everywhere, even to other rich countries, never mind into the swamp-like conditions that prevail in poor ones. To show that the treatment can be applied elsewhere calls for a clinical trial that would involve many patients preferably from more than one big institution. Undertaking such would require time and money. We’re probably looking at, may be, five years, if not longer, not to mention the necessary amount of cash.

In the mean time we do have other measures which, though not curative provide much relief for patients. These are the things we should focus on at present. But even here, there is an urgent need for peoples and governments to step up and do their duty.

Tell Fren Tru

The Times, they are too interesting…

I was saying in my last post that it wasn’t necessarily the case that the Gambian dictator, Yahya Jammeh had really conceded victory when, on the day after the presidential election he congratulated Mr Adama Barrow, the winning candidate. I found it difficult to digest the notion that a man who had seized power by force in 1994 and had subsequently bullied his way into several election victories thereafter should suddenly undergo a Road to Damascus moment. I was worried too, that signals out of America were in danger of being misinterpreted to mean that a free pass had been granted to dictators everywhere, especially those in Africa. I was not surprised, therefore when, barely a week afterwards, Jammeh reverted to type and declared that the election he had just lost “flawed”. He now demanded a fresh vote hoping that his machine of state persuasion would produce the right result the second time round. He used all the wiles in the book of dirty tricks to intimidate the country into submission but, in the end, he had to cave in to the persuasive logic of the stick and carrot. 

We do not know how appetizing the carrot was, but one ingredient was, no doubt, the prospect of a retirement haven out of the reach of international justice. So, on the night after the inauguration of the new president elect, dressed in characteristic flowing white and brandishing his regulation copy of the Quran, he waved goodbye to a thin crowd of long faces standing lugubriously on the tarmac at Banjul International. The country could exhale again.

The rap sheet that Jammeh would have had to answer to and, with some luck, might still do, is a long one. But, for the moment, he is safe in Equatorial Guinea where, one imagines, he would be swapping dictator anecdotes with his host, president-for-life, General Teodoro Obiang. Meanwhile, Gambia’s long-suffering people must content themselves with merely mocking their recently departed tormentor.  

Talking about thin crowds, this is one of the issues that get the wind under the skirts of the new Trump administration, right from its chief exec down to its lowliest gofer. The size of an adoring crowd, by itself, is not a big deal. However, correct me if I’m wrong: the last time someone obsessed so much about the size of his crowd it didn’t end well. And even today, eight decades on, we remain awestruck by the intensity of crowds at Nazi rallies that shook the ground as they shouted “Sieg Heil!  Sieg Heil!” You might again say no big deal. A few “Sieg Heils” here and there do not register high on the Richter scale of political upheavals. The real problem lies in the horrible traits hidden below a thatch of orange or of any other colour. But we have to hand it to Mr Trump. He does not hide behind mealy-mouthed words. He “tells it like it is”. He wants his hearers to understand exactly what he is getting at. And it seems they do. For now, anyway. But for the rest of us, the majority, I hope, the parallels are troubling and the possible consequences of the new president’s size-obsession, his statements and his executive orders make for sleepless nights. Fortunately, America’s founding Fathers wrote up a constitution that provides fairly robust protection against dictatorial tendencies. 

The other defence against unbridled executive power is mockery, for which this particular executive is ripe. Lampoonists remain unbowed both in their spoken word and their graphic essays, whether on TV or through cartoons. This is powerful stuff although Mr Trump responds with a counter-narrative that includes violent language and “alternative truths”, none of which, so far, has been enough to deter anyone, even the little children, who just as in The Gambia, have also joined in the fray.  

It is early days yet, but America must ready itself for difficult times Yahya Jammeh started off fairly benign (as dictators usually do) but in the end he became a terrifying figure in the Gambian political landscape. Hitler was exactly the same. 

Watch out, world.

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