Tag: Donald Trump

Murder on the Trump Train Express

Rich Will1 Comment

The release next month of a new version of ‘Murder on the Orient Express’ may be, as we’ll see, timely, but I doubt the movie will have the same impact on me as the star-studded original did when I half-saw it while hiding behind the sofa at the age of eight or so. I found the film so upsetting because it’s a multiple murder mystery – the plot shows that the victim was such an abhorrent bastard that pretty much everyone he came into contact with had more than enough motive to stick a dagger deep into his guts. But how, you might ask, does that make the movie timely? Well…

Robert Reich yesterday posted the transcript of a conversation he had with an old friend, a Republican former member of Congress. His friend bemoaned the situation that so many Republicans find themselves in: on the one hand, they’re pretty much all fully aware that Donald “President” Trump is out of control and beyond all reason, a perfect human shitstorm of insanity, stupidity and evil who could, on a momentary whim in response to the merest slight his befogged brain might perceive via ‘Fox & Friends’, unleash a planetary catastrophe of unprecendented proportions – or, even worse, damage the mid-term prospects of the Republican Party. The bind that the poor Republicans find themselves is that although they are aware of all the above, and would – in at some least some noble cases – prefer the human race to survive, they also really, really want to give themselves a huge tax cut, and so are disinclined to disembark from the Trump Train for the time being. You can imagine their frustration. (Not for nothing did Noam Chomsky call the GOP the most dangerous organisation on the planet.) Then there are individual Republicans who have been betrayed and/or publicly humiliated, some of whom happen to combine a history of violence with proximity to their tormentor: former soldier John McCain (who’s going to die soon anyway); John Kelly, who has been wearing an army uniform and carrying a loaded weapon since the age of 3; erstwhile oil baron/mass-murderer Rex Tillerson; and Ayn Rand-worshipping psychopath Paul Ryan. All of whom happen to be firm believers in the primacy of the 2nd Amendment and thus subscribers to the notion that political violence can be both righteous and redemptive. The list of those insulted by Trump also includes: the entire populations of Mexico, Qatar, Iran, North Korea and Puerto Rico; pretty much all NFL and most NBA players; 800,000 DACA recipients and their friends and relatives; the families of the four soldiers killed in Niger last week; the entire surviving US military and anyone who respects the Stars and Stripes; all journalists and everyone with regard for the freedom of the press and the First Amendment; anyone who might need healthcare and/or isn’t a white supremacist; all those of us who care about our children; every single human being who doesn’t want to die in a nuclear holocaust; anyone who doesn’t share his profound contempt for the entire human species; Rosie O’Donnell; all women who are not Rosie O’Donnell, plus, obviously, Rosie O’Donnell again; Russell Brand; and, why the hell not, just for good measure, me.

Speaking of me, this is what I wrote last November:

The US Republican Party is now faced with the conundrum of managing a situation which is to all intents and purposes impossible. There may already be whispers in the arras that he could be forcibly removed…few rational people living or dead would be all that opposed to a good old-fashioned off-stage poisoning or stabbing. Or possibly an air crash? I sincerely hope that 1) there are still some Republican leaders out there who still have some measure of faith in the values they profess and the integrity to implement them and 2) that they have left no options off the table.

It’s also worth noting that at the end of the film, Monsieur Poirot (played by Albert Finney) gracefully declines to arrest the twelve people responsible for ridding the world of such a repugnant beast, declaring (with a knowing look to the camera) that he has the ‘honneur to retire from the case’ – after all, the victim had been ‘deservedly murdered’. I hope that whoever dons the pince-nez and the twirly moustache in the 2017 version is able to deliver such lines with similar panache and make its implicit message of blithe impunity clear to all those with the means to respond accordingly. As for the motive, everyone who’s not catastrophically deluded and/or criminally complicit has more than enough of those. As with that other ‘elderly, malevolent American’ ‘Samuel Ratchett’, no sane human being would mourn the more-than-timely death of Donald Trump.

 

How to speak better English than Donald Trump

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https://youtu.be/9CvKu5y5I_o

Would you (or your students) like to speak better English than a “native speaker”*? Wouldn’t it be great if your command of the language could be superior to that of the most powerful English speaker on the planet? Granted, Donald Trump is not noted for his articulacy. Possibly as a result of a degenerative brain disease, his fluency, coherence and range of vocabulary have deteriorated considerably over the years, as this 1992 interview demonstrates and this article explains in detail. He used to be able to follow a train of thought; now listening to him is more like witnessing a syntactical train crash. Half-ideas cascade chaotically like carriages piling up on top of one another, deafening explosions of total incoherence reverberate down the track while anyone with any regard for their personal safety runs away screaming.

The very latest indication that Trump’s mastery of standard (or, rather, sane) English is slipping out of his tiny grasp came yesterday, in the tweet he posted in the wake of yet another NRA-sponsored massacre**. His tweet offered his “warmest condolences” to the victims (and, obviously, no condemnation of the culprit – Trump hasn’t expressed any anger at the killings). Cue howls of ridicule across social media: why? Well, no one talks about “warm condolences”. You might offer warm congratulations to a friend who’s just found a job, or sincere or heartfelt condolences to someone who’s just lost a loved one. But the adjective ‘warm’ just doesn’t go with the noun ‘condolences’. Or, in other words, it doesn’t collocate.

How do I know this? Well, I’ve spoken (and, more importantly, read) English all my life (and taught it for nearly 20 years). I’ve never seen or heard that expression before. The fact that Trump thought that ‘warm’ was an appropriate word in response to a mass shooting may be some indication of how such events make him feel deep down. But it’s also an indication that he’s not in control of what he’s saying. Maybe the fact that he boasts of never reading books has something to do with it.

So, how can you acquire a better command of the language than him? Well, you could buy yourself a collocations dictionary, which will tell you which adjectives are commonly used with which nouns, which nouns collocate with which verbs, etc. (Better language coursebooks also put a great deal of emphasis on what many now call ‘word grammar’.) Or, you could use this website. As you can see, it has a really simple interface, and is free. I urge all my students to use it, and it has an immediate and dramatic impact on the quality of their writing in particular. A smattering of collocations can easily raise any IELTS score from 6.5 to 7.0, for example. I’m sure Trump would struggle to write a coherent 250-word essay; he probably hasn’t composed anything longer than 140 characters since he was cheating his way through college. (As for writing in a foreign language, he’s probably barely aware at this point that such things exist.) In the speaking test, he’s probably get a 4.0: links basic sentences but with repetitious use of simple connectives and some breakdowns in coherence; can only convey basic meaning on unfamiliar topics; errors are frequent and may lead to misunderstanding and/or nuclear war.

*This is in inverted commas as it’s a highly problematic term, its use punishable by stoning in some quarters.
**Trump is also sponsored by the NRA, to the tune of more than $30 million.

A prediction: Trump will tweet in favour of Catalan independence 

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Maybe if Scotland had opted for independence in 2014 the international context would now be different. Maybe the Brexit vote wouldn’t have happened and Trump would have lost. In such a scenario, the prospect of Catalan independence would have a very different meaning.

Catalonia is a country with a distinct culture, its own political traditions, a (partially recent) history of brutal oppression by the Spanish state and (most importantly) a consequent desire to be independent. The fact that it isn’t already is a pure accident of history. Nation states come and go; a country is, someone once, a dialect with a flag. As it happens, Catalonia has a very attractive flag, one that makes it look like its national anthem should be composed by Manu Chao. Partly as a result, Barcelona is generally seen as a a left-wing city – it has a radical mayor (who, as it happens, opposes independence). However, especially outside Barcelona, Catalan nationalism is not necessarily a progressive force. The Catalan left has nontheless partly presented this referendum as a vote against austerity and neo-francoist Spanish nationalism. (The spectacle of violent repression has given credence to the latter claim.) Nevertheless, a huge vote for independence will not be interpreted in such terms internationally. Nationalism, by definition, always involves a narrow set of concerns. The fact that deeply reactionary forces outside Spain will celebrate the victory concerns me more than the impact on dynamics inside the Spanish state. In the country where I live, Italy, the result will encourage the far-right to renew their campaign for more autonomy for the rich regions of the north, who have long complained about the burden of having to sustain the filthy peasants of southern Italy. There have been echoes of this kind of rhetoric in the Catalan case.

Hence the support of the global far-right for independence. The Italian fascist leader Matteo Salvini and the British far-right party Ukip have expressed support for Catalan independence; should the vote be tallied and independence be approved, their allies such as Le Pen and the AFD will present it as another Brexit, a vote against the European status quo. The Kremlin’s propaganda outlet Russia Today has made no secret of its affiliation, some of Donald Trump’s few remaining non-bot social media enthusiasts have expressed principled, albeit somewhat selective, concerns about political violence, and Julian Assange has been busy spreading disinformation about events via Twitter. Then there’s Trump himself. As is well-known, Trump loves to be on the winning side. Regardless of his previous stated support for Spanish union, he, seeing his political allies celebrating, will be desperate to join in. Trump is nothing if not inconsistent: witness how quick he was to disavow his support for ‘his’ candidate in the Alabama primary this week. Of course, he’s far too stupid to understand either the ins and outs of the plebiscite’s legality or the consequences of explicit US support for an unofficial referendum over the break-up of a major European power. He won’t reflect on how his actions will affect countries from Turkey to Italy to the US itself (how much does Puerto Rico gain from its status?). Trump has no consistency, no ideology, no loyalty and no strategy, and is in endless need of new distractions. That’s why I believe that in the aftermath of the vote and the near-universal revulsion that the violence has provoked, he will, with no regard for the implications, in between bouts of attacking hurricane victims, berating black sports people and trying as hard as his tiny fingers will allow him to provoke an actual nuclear war, tweet in support of independence for Catalonia. If he does, I hope the Catalan independence movement tells him very firmly ves-t’en a prendre pel cul. That would be a great symbolic statement of the kind of country they would like to build.

First they abandoned the Puerto Ricans

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I once tried to watch a documentary about the political status of Puerto Ricans. With all its myriad details of unincorporation vs statehood vs self-determination, it was considerably less entertaining than ‘West Side Story’. Now, for more than three million people, such issues may be a matter of life and death.

Donald Trump doesn’t know much about Puerto Rico either. He’s been told that it’s an island, and sort-of foreign and sort-of not, but he also knows that the people there can’t vote. He’d really rather just tell people things are going great and go and play golf. It doesn’t matter to him what happens to the people there. It’s an island, for Christ’s sake. Trump wouldn’t have the capacity to help even if he wanted to. He just has no intrinsic motivation to care about people who can’t do anything for him in return. (EDIT: The US has brought back Trump’s five predecessors to coordinate the reconstruction, due to the fact that the current office-holder so obviously does not give a shit.)

Trump also has no impulse control. Since he became president, he’s spent more than two months on the golf course. Although (as I wrote shortly after the inauguration) he’s the kind of leader that the US has imposed on so many other countries, it’s not so much that (as some claim) he’s following an authoritarian playbook; he’s too stupid, arrogant and lazy to read. Instead he’s an instinctive tyrant, his instincts conditioned by the crudest imaginable form of Social Darwinism. The notion that life is all about competition is a suitable ideology for someone who’d already been awarded the gold medal before they’d even drawn their first breath. This is not story he tells himself, of course. He just knows he’s entitled to go and play golf whenever he feels like it. His ideology, then, is Neoliberalism at its most basic: the market works for me, so it must work for everyone else. More competition is always good, because I’m the guy who owns all the starting pistols and the finishing tape. Now kneel before me – or, rather, stay on your feet or I’ll use the starting pistol on you.

Now, such a person has an instinctive understanding of threat posed by climate change. To people like Trump, the idea that society might – indeed, must – become more cooperative is worse than the reality that our habitat is collapsing. As Naomi Klein has cogently argued over the last few years, capitalism (particularly in its turbocharged, scorched earth variety) is simply incompatible with the continued existence of our species.

Of course, it’s easy to blame our leaders for our plight. There’s also the question of our own responsibility. We, as a ‘civilisation’, long ago collectively decided to ignore the implications. That is, after all why Trump was elected: there’s nothing less real than reality TV, so one way to escape from a frightening reality was to elect a reality TV star, someone who plays the role of a tycoon for the cameras. Facebook, Twitter have happened along, not quite by chance, at just the right moment to enable us to screen out those aspects of reality that make us uncomfortable. It’s no accident that Trump once declared that “All I know is what’s on the internet“. While Obama was the first black president, Trump is the first internet one. (Not to mention the “first white president“.)

Puerto Rico is an instructive case. It’s not like parts of Bangladesh, Houston, or Miami, i.e. part of a larger territory into which our perception of its suffering can be subsumed. It’s isolated, so presents a very stark test case of whether or not we actually give a flying fuck about our future. If we don’t respond to calls like that of the Mayor of San Juan, and not just with donations but with political action, we are truly lost. Every city on earth will face similar existential crises,often part of bigger ones, like the coming wave of crop failures. The market – the rising price of food and energy, which some are lucky to be able to afford – will only protect us so far. Its not just that our current leaders will let us starve or drown, they will actively ignore our plight just as they denied the circumstances that made it inevitable. We have to recognise that what is happening in Puerto Rico is a climate catastrophe, part of a much larger and even deadlier global transformation, and act accordingly by making sacrifices on behalf of those already suffering and by getting rid of political leaders who refuse to even acknowledge the nature of the crisis. We must build local and international solidarity networks and demand that those we elect to govern our cities develop infrastructure to withstand the inevitable. If we don’t do these things, there will be no one left to speak up for us.

Why isn’t Trump dead yet?

Rich Will6 Comments

Around 15 years ago it became commonplace for anyone who spoke up in defence of basic human rights to be posed the following hypothetical dilemma:

You say it’s always wrong to torture people. That’s fair enough. But what about terrorists? What if the authorities somehow knew that a captured suspect was planning to blow up an entire city? Wouldn’t it be morally right to put pressure on such a terrorist in order to save millions of lives?

Of course, such questions were a red herring. There never has been or could be such a textbook case. No authority could claim foreknowledge which allowed it to abandon universally agreed principles of respect for the judicial process and for human rights. That doesn’t mean they don’t try, and this ubiquitous theoretical challenge to the foundations of human rights – at every level of culture, from the front page of Newsweek to ten or so series of the TV show ’24’ – was accompanied by a very non-theoretical assault on those principles, most spectacularly in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. This is how we arrived at the point where the most powerful political figure in the world can openly instruct police officers to exceed the bounds of legal conduct in the treatment of anyone they don’t like and/or suspect of (potentially) committing a crime.

As the previous paragraph made clear, I believe that human rights are inalienable. No authority has the right to exclude any individual from fair judicial processes or to negate their physical existence.

But there’s something about the current conjuncture which I find puzzling. The most powerful position in the world, one that grants immediate access to weapons that could annihilate human existence at the touch of a single button or at the posting of a single tweet, is in the hands of a man who is deeply psychologically, mentally and emotionally unstable, has no moral scruples which might serve to regulate his impulses, and no meaningful understanding or apparent sense of the consequences of his actions for either his morally hideous family or the entire human race. He has also repeatedly demonstrated that he has no respect whatsoever for the vast majority of that which his compatriots hold most dear, including – particularly if they happen to be black – their lives. This in a country which has huge numbers of very heavily-armed individuals who have been brought up by Hollywood movies to believe that it is right and good to use violence, up to and including self-sacrifice, to redress the moral balance of the universe, and that God has uniquely anointed the American people with this redemptive task.

As I say, I personally don’t believe in political violence, and I don’t believe that any institution or individual has the right to deprive anyone else of life. There are, however, many people who do believe such things, and who have the means and motivation to act on their beliefs, on our behalf.

Where are they?

(P.s. I’m well aware of the argument that those who focus on Trump as the exclusive source of the world’s problems and ignore the brutal history of American imperialism are guilty of naivety. As it happens, such notional individuals are not nearly as naive as those who, like Glenn Greenwald, argue that those who focus on Trump as the source of the world’s problems and ignore etc, etc, etc are patronising. Greenwald was, until recently, a fine and principled journalist; now, he’s working for the other side.)

21 facts that PROVE Donald Trump is NOT racist

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  1. There are numerous photos in existence which show President Donald Trump in the presence of black people. Were he racist, he would have refused point-black to ever have his photo taken with any black people, punched them in the face and rapidly walked away from the camera. No racist on earth would ever think of not doing that, and it is absolutely inconceivable that Donald Trump could combine lifelong racist beliefs and behaviours with the occasional cynical photo opportunity for PR purposes. It’s also definitely the case that any black people who have been in shot whenever a photo of Donald Trump has been taken can be considered to have granted him unqualified support for anything he has ever said or done and will ever say or do. It’s like he owns them.
  2. A huge number of notable black people have expressed enduring respect for President Trump. Muhammed Ali called him ‘the greatest anti-racist activist that the world has ever seen’ on at least seventy-seven separate occasions, while Rosa Parks requested that the words ‘I would never have had the courage to sit at the front of the bus if it hadn’t been for the brave and principled leadership provided by President Donald J. Trump, truly the first black president’ be chiselled on her gravestone. Rapper Chuck D even named his first three children Donald in tribute to President Trump. (N.B. Although there is no actual evidence of any of these things being true and it may well appear that we have made all of them up on the spot, we refer you to points 3, 4, 8, 9, 12, 13, 19 and 20. below.)
  3. Barack Obama once said something negative about white people, or something.
  4. Hillary Clinton allegedly used a private email server.
  5. The notion that Donald Trump is racist is part of a witchhunt orchestrated by the Deep State. The fact that there is no evidence suggesting the existence of a ‘deep state’ (an expression imported from Turkey) is conclusive proof that the Deep State is so powerful it has covered up all signs of its existence, (c/f ‘The Usual Suspects’). The current secret leader of the Deep State just happens to be…Lebron James!!!
  6. Racism doesn’t exist. Albert Einstein called the very concept ‘a patent absurdity, a transparent Frankfurt School fabrication and an attempt to disguise the natural superiority of the white race’. (N.B. This quote has also been attributed to Anders Breivik.)
  7. Slavery existed before the so-called slave trade, etc etc etc (see stormfront.org for more background on this).
  8. Barack Obama once said something negative about white people, or something.
  9. Hillary Clinton allegedly used a private email server.
  10. There is nothing ‘racist’ about believing that human beings can and should be divided on the basis of genetic differences which determine their innate abilities and characteristics, that white people occupy the highest position in the racial hierarchy and that their resultant socio-economic and juridical superiority may at times need to be enforced by violence.
  11. Donald Trump is himself married to an illegal immigrant who barely speaks any English.
  12. Barack Obama once said something negative about white people, or something.
  13. Hillary Clinton allegedly used a private email server.
  14. There were some crimes in Chicago, or something. (I can’t remember the details, it was on Breitbart.)
  15. It is President Trump’s repeatedly stated belief that heavily-armed self-declared nazis and KKK supporters bearing burning torches and screaming about the innate superiority of white people over blacks and Jews is unproblematic, even healthy, and that those who oppose racism and fascism are terrorists who deserve to be met with extreme force. Those who connect these beliefs with his family history of KKK affiliation and a series of 1970s court cases which conclusively proved that his family business systematically discriminated against black tenants, add in the fact that he used to keep a copy of Adolf Hitler’s speeches by his bedside, and draw the conclusion that he is and always has been racist, are somehow, for reasons we prefer not to go into, missing the point.
  16. Barack Obama once said something negative about white people, or something.
  17. Hillary Clinton allegedly used a private email server.
  18. Purported recordings of President Donald Trump repeatedly using the N-word while filming The Apprentice has been hidden by the series’ producer, a confirmed Trump supporter, so no one needs to worry about that. Phew.
  19. Barack Obama once said something negative about white people, or something.
  20. Hillary Clinton allegedly used a private email server.
  21. President Donald Trump is clearly absolutely massively racist, but his supporters can’t admit this to others or themselves, so they run around in circles performing logical somersaults, making up bizarre lies on the basis of utterly implausible hearsay and humiliating themselves beyond repair.

Is Donald Trump literally illegitimate?

Rich Will1 Comment

I don’t just mean politically. Obviously he’s playing the wrong role, was swept into office on a frothing white tide, and is now a demented puppet of forces he couldn’t even begin to understand. I mean literally.

Clearly he had enough of a connection with his father to inherit his wealth and his hate-fuelled value system. But accounts of his life make clear just how insecure he is about his status in a range of fields. As President, he projects those insecurities onto others, tweeting and rabidly barking at his mirror-mirror-on-the-wall rallies about the illegitimacy of his political opponents. The force of his obsession with others’ illegitimacy was what took him to the White House. Of course, he focussed (and continues to focus) principally on Obama’s legitimacy as an American – maybe Trump, like many of his fellow racists, believes that all black people are literally bastards. As for Hillary, the fact that, as he flounders further and further out of his depth and the reality dawns even on him that he lacks even the most basic notion of what his rights and responsibilities as president are, his only consistent response is to whine about the illegitimacy of her defeat, is a clear sign that he knows that he is marooned in a role he is absolutely and uniquely ill-suited for.

I suspect that what lies underneath Trump’s almost crippling self-doubts about himself as a white heterosexual male is a fear that he is, in the deepest of senses, illegitimate. As he teeters on the edge of a full hysterical breakdown just at the moment when his emotional inadequacies may lead the world to an actual full-on nuclear fucking war, one way to send him gibbering away from the levers of power may be to state clearly to him what we all know: he is not only illegitimate as president, but also not the rightful heir to his father’s name and fortune. Not only is he pretending to be Commander-in-Chief; he is pretending to be the son of Fred Trump, and thus only pretending to be Donald J. Trump.

He tried to bring down Obama by casting down on his legitimacy, thus revealing his own Achilles’ (as he, less literate than any black high-school drop-out, would attempt to spell it) heal. Now’s the time we need to leave aside his tax returns just for a moment and ask: what are you hiding about your birth certificate, Donald? Could it be that the J actually stands for…Jamal?!

Maybe a good hashtag to use would be simply…#birther. Now, I wonder how we can go about getting Lebron James to tweet that?

Support Trump? Want to earn $1,000?! Here’s how!!!

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Although I no longer have a Twitter account, it’s proven impossible over the last few weeks to divert my eyes from the rolling car crash dumpster fire of Trump’s hamfisted attempts at pretending to be President while hanging on to his (ahem) integrity. As things stand right now, with his entirely pathetic tweets praising protestors and protesting, he has lost, bigly, the respect of the only person whose opinion he truly cares about, a portrait of whom is apparently the only picture hanging in the Oval Office office: his KKK-supporting father*. Donald wanted so much to honour the memory of his progenitor by continuing to stand up for his white supremacist cheerleaders, but he couldn’t do it. Last night, unable to sustain the arrant sub-Alex Jones nonsense he’d been posting about ‘anti-police agitators’, he tweeted about the need to ‘heel’ America, oblivious to, or maybe secretly recognisant of, the fact that he and all he represents is the cancer that the country is trying to fight off. Trump is his own Achilles’ heal. (Although, to be fare, maybe he was actually trying to spell ‘heil’.)

Much like his verbal incoherence, Trump’s combination of limited vocabulary (like his Mexican counterpart, it appears he has never read a book) and partial iliteracy seems to endear him to his supporters, a large proportion of whom would not only put up with his spelling mistakes but actually anything  he could conceivably do (including total nuclear annihilation, but quite possibly excluding his speaking out for protests and against racism. They really won’t like that in the slightest). Maybe in tribute, his supporters’ tweets are similarly poorly composed. Uniformly so, in fact. Given that there are only 140 characters at steak, you’d think that just once one of them might produce an accurately-written post, but no. So far not one Trump supporter has been able to produce a single tweet which does not contain at least one glaring and laughable mistake.

Maybe it’s a question of motivation. After all, Trump’s political victory was the ultimate realisation of the principle that money is the only driving force in any human endeavour. Maybe if his hate-addled disciples had a gold-plated carrott dangled in front of their faces (they’re already seem vulnerable to various hypnotic effects), it might propel them to think more carefully about their spelling, punctuation and grammar. Trump’s own linguistic incompetence is not in this sense a cause for optimism, but maybe he just has too much money in the first place. Although he’d happily set fire to his own trousers for $1,000 (or its rouble equivalent), he’s not intrinsically motivated to do so. His supporters are another kettle of deplorables entirely. Lots of them could certainly do with such a sum.

I’ve decided to help out. I am offering that amount via Paypal to any Trump supporter who manages to compose an error-free tweet between now (mid-August) and Christmas. It does not have to be a work of pithy genius – a simple statement regarding current events from the standard wilfully myopic/blissfully misinformed perspective will do. It just needs to obey the basic rules of English orthography, grammatical structure and punctuation. If it were also possible to make it factually accurate, that would trigger a million-dollar jackpot bonus; however, its not feasible that any statement based on factual information could be supportive of Trump, and in any case I don’t have access to that sort of money, not being, like some, in league with the mob.

To give budding entrants some practice in spotting their errors, I’ve litered this post with several speling, punctuation and grammatical mistakes of my own. However, as always on this website, their are no prizes for pointing them out. This is, after all, merely a blog, not an official statement on behalf of the Comander in Cheif or anything like that. As for whether or not you should trust me…maybe you should look up the spelling and the meaning of the word ‘gullible’.

* Nigel “Nazi flags in 2017? Whoever would have thunk it?!” Farage seems to have similar issues with his own dad, his initials being by no means a coincidence.

** There’s also the hilarious possibility that Trump was trying to be presidenshul, viz. like Obama.

What Donald Trump doesn’t understand about regulation

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The above video is simply called ‘Indian traffic’, and was presumably filmed by a tourist from a hotel window. It has ten million views. In it we see rickshaws, trucks, cars, buses, cyclists, motorbikes with up to three passengers, and pedestrians all engaged in a seemingly hazardous but actually innocuous dance. Pretty much everyone at some point looks as though they’re about to crash into another vehicle. It looks like total chaos but, despite the apparent absence of traffic signals, actually runs smoothly. The traffic seems to self-regulate; the experience of watching it has a nicely zen-like quality.

To be fair, it is only two minutes. I’m sure whichever city it is has its fair share of traffic accidents*. I mentioned the video the other day in a conversation with a Dutch friend visiting Rome. At a slightly similar intersection we were traversing he said that he tells his kids (of whom he has several) always to look into the eyes of drivers when crossing the road, to create that human connection. I responded that I often do the same.

Perhaps its by studying how traffic interacts in less ‘developed’ countries that has led some European cities to experiment with reducing the amount of traffic signage. Doing so seems to force people to engage with one another in a less abstracted and therefore more humane manner. It was actually a Dutch engineer, Hans Monderman, who developed the notion of  “naked streets”. He argued that “traffic was safest when road users were “self-policing” and streets were cleared of controlling clutter. His innovations, now adopted in some 400 towns across Europe, have led to dramatic falls in accidents”. So said Simon Jenkins when writing about the topic in The Guardian. Jenkins, who has long played the role of the newspaper’s neoliberal provocateur, went on to argue (with typical sarcasm) that:

The white line down the middle of the road is a metaphor of the age. It is the guiding hand of a benign government. Its abolition hints at a loss of control, a lurch from authority towards personal responsibility, even towards anarchy. Mankind cannot tolerate too much naked tarmac. No sensible person could want more confusion and uncertainty in life. We need the firm paintbrush of a caring minister.

I don’t know if I’d read Jenkins’ article at the time, but the conversation with my Dutch friend also seemed to lead naturally on to talk of other forms of regulation. If traffic (a word we also use for trade in all its forms) is best left unregulated, what about other forms of social and economic interaction? Does the video of traffic in India support a laissez-faire view of the world?

Well, while of course there are no actual car crashes in the youtube clip, there are less visible hazards. The fact that traffic accidents have an immediate and visible impact makes them dissimilar from other consequences of other forms of human interaction which may be less remote in time and space and thus much more difficult to disentangle, or even (often consciously) hidden, but not for that any less real or damaging. However, it does make it much more difficult to apportion responsibility. An obvious example is Climate Change (how many of those Indian drivers are now proud possessors of “carbon neutral” Volkswagens?), but its by no means the only one. To quote the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu:

It can be shown, for example, that problems seen in the suburban estates of the cities stem from a neoliberal housing policy, implemented in the 1970s…This social separation was brought about by a political measure. [But] who would link a riot in a suburb of Lyon to a political decision of 1970?

If we’re looking for the causes of the current rise of far-right parties around the world, ignoring the financial crisis of 2008 would be like tying to enjoy a pleasant hotel breakfast while a woolly mammoth careens around the room shitting all over the toast racks and trays of scrambled eggs. It’s unlikely that Donald Trump has seen ‘Inside Job‘, the excellent documentary which explains succinctly how financial deregulation, and particularly its impact on the housing market, created the catastrophe which has in turn, like a multiple pile-up seen in horrifying slow-motion, done possibly fatal damage to our economies, societies and democratic institutions. As it happens, the President* apparently prefers to watch movies like ‘The Fast and the Furious’ by fast-forwarding to the…car crash scenes.

His total and blissful ignorance of the subject, combined with his evident wish to destroy all traces of the Obama years, is leading him to try to overturn the regulatory legislation put in place in 2010 (too little and too late, but still) to try to clear up the worst of the mess and stop such a disaster taking place again. Now, Trump is unaware that such things as consequences exist, partly because, for him, they don’t and never have. For me, that raises a very interesting question. There’s been lots of speculation as to whether or not the Mango Mussolini knows how to read, or use a computer, or speak English, but I’m starting to wonder, given that he’s been chauffeur-driven since the moment he was born: does Donald Trump even know how to drive? I mean, I don’t, but then a) I live in Rome, so even if I learnt I’d be dead within ten minutes and b) I’m not the one pretending to be US President.

*Apparently it’s New Delhi, where there are loads of accidents. Still, on with the argument.

Donald Trump’s an alcoholic, isn’t he.

Rich Will3 Comments
“Let’s see…I’ve still got some of that brandy the Saudis gave me…”

Election Night 2010 left me in a Very Bad Mood. Seeing the disaster that had befallen the country, with the Conservative Party and their eventual suitors the Liberal Democrats effectively wiping Labour off the board, knowing that in government David Cameron would very soon stop pretending he would be the “greenest ever” Prime Minister/friend-to-all-the-woodland-creatures and start gleefully ripping apart all that was most precious about British life, I changed my Facebook status to the (ahem) unambiguously jestful ‘I think I might kill myself’.

I should have included a link to something related to the election. When I turned on my phone the following morning around 7am my phone was buzzing like crazy with messages from concerned friends, family and acquaintances. Not nearly as many as I might have expected, but still.

I would never have done it had I been sober. Watching the results in the pub with fellow campaigners for our local far-left candidate had been a despondent affair. I guess I must have thrown caution to the wind and probably had six or seven pints to numb the disappointment and then a whisky or two (I hate whisky) to make the short walk home slightly more fun.

I’ve cut back in the last few years on what a friend calls ‘combat drinking’. Up to a certain age getting inappropriately drunk just for the hell of it ceased to be a permanently hilarious jape and started to look and feel like the sort of lifestyle trajectory that leads to sitting in church halls reminiscing about the nights you spent searching through bins just in case they contained a not-entirely-empty can of Strongbow.

Then, of course, there’s the danger inherent in being addled online. My previous blog died a slow, painful death after I got into the bad habit of sharing my late-night weed-fuelled mental meanderings with the world (or, at least, my website’s dwindling fanbase). I suspect that it may well be the eventual fate of pretty much all blogs to end up as a receptacle for posts whose contents are so unidentifiable that even people with 18 years of solid alcoholism behind them would think twice before imbibing them*.

Thankfully I never did any permanent damage, either to my liver (apparently) or to my reputation. I’m not remotely famous, so embarrassing myself online (as I may be doing right now) has never worried me unduly. I’d imagine that if I somehow found myself in a position of global responsibility it would be helpful to take the edge off with an occasional drink, and there is always the possibility that in these panoptical times that could lead to serious trouble.

Remarkable, then, that the most powerful person in the world has never even tasted alcohol and is apparently able to deal with the stresses of the job with nary a drop of inebriating liquid to help him come down from the inevitable highs and lows of adrenaline that the job entails. Curious, as Hasan Minhaj recently pointed out, that Trump’s barely coherent and often catastrophically unwise 3am tweets are written in a state of total lifelong sobriety.

How on earth is the President of the United States able to combine his laudable dedication to a teetotal lifestyle with the pressures inherent in a) his status of leader of the free world in a time of geopolitical chaos and b) his condition as a pathological liar?

Errrrrrr…

Cheers!

* I’m aware this is quite a confusing sentence, maybe I should have a drink and think about how to rephrase it.

NB: There’s also of course the possibility that Trump is a bit like Obelix, as in ‘Asterix &…’. Obelix fell into the pot of superstrength-granting magic potion as a child, and thus unlike his little moustachioed buddy never requires a top-up before going into battle. He does, however, need constant reminding of this fact, and given that Trump has no memory for anything but slights and grudges, it’s unlikely he’d be capable of remembering that he’s not actually supposed to drink. He may also just be a dry drunk. I don’t really care, I just hope that he gets to hear the malicious rumours that he’s an alcoholic and the resultant rage, shame and anguish cause him to suffer a massive heart attack and die. At this point we have to try everything – it’s him or the planet. Speaking of which, do you really think that someone prepared to lie about something as significant as Climate Change should be believed when he says he doesn’t drink?!

(Incidentally, no offense to actual alcoholics is intended in or by this article. Many of my closest friends are borderline alcoholics. For some reason.)