On Air Force 1 overflying the “newly renamed Gulf of America” last week, Donald Trump boasted that his approval ratings were at 49% and “no one has ever seen numbers like this before”. Seemingly so. His numbers are worse than those of any other post war President, apart from himself last time.
My speech at the “Trump Climate Disaster” Rally outside the US Embassy (11/1/25).
The new US Ambassador that Trump is installing in that Vice Regal fortress behind us – and, I’ve got to say that that’s a very wide moat they’d got there, which makes you wonder what they are anticipating – is a guy called Warren Stephens.
Stephens is an investment banker from Arkansas, whose company holds huge oil concessions in the Gulf of Mexico (which Trump wants to rename the Gulf of America). He is also a climate smartarse – someone who likes to use pseudo scientific one liners to deflect from the seriousness of climate change, which are only convincing for those determined to be convinced and unwilling to ask any questions to puncture their own delusions.
He will have two jobs above all.
One will be to push the UK government off its agenda for green transition.
Trump wants “no windmills” in the USA and “no windmills” in the North Sea.
If renewables are abandoned, the limited reserves in the North Sea means that, even if they were maxed out, they would be unable to fill the gap in energy needs; which would have to be made up by very expensive imports of US Liquifid Natural Gas, which we now know has a carbon footprint 33% worse than that of coal.
If the government succumbs to that pressure -which is being pushed “patriotically” by the Conservativbes and Reform now as Trump’s Fifth Column, with the media in a screaming descant in support – it would be a spectacular act of self harm that will impoverish people on a grand scale and make climate damage a lot worse.
His other main priority will be to push the US militarisation drive.
Trump wants NATO allies spending 5% of their GDP on their militaries. Thats more than double the current average.
Neil Kinnock seems to think that 4% is “reasonable”.
This is NOT because they are under any threat militarily. Direct US allies account for 2/3 to 3/4 of global military spending already (depending on what estimates you use).
This collosal concentration of coercive power polices the transfer of $10 Trillion from the Global South to the Global North every year.
This is why countries want to join NATO. It makes them part of the imperial core. As Anthony Blinken put it, “if you are not at the table with us, you’re on the menu”. The problem now though is that being at the table with the US is a bit like having dinner with “the late, great Hannibal Lecter”, as Trump might put it. You can never be sure when the host is going to trun round and take a bite out of you. But you can be sure that he will do so at some point.
Doubling that level of expenditure cannot be seen as a defensive measure. It only makes sense if they are planning wars of aggression.
That is explicitly proclaimed by the UK Defence Review, which talks of being in a “pre war situation”, and there is overt talk of the British Army having to be ready to fight a major land war in Europe within the next ten years. This is completely mad and suicidal.
The impulse for this is partly that the US is losing ground to China very fast economically, but also because, in the context of the climate crisis, US society as it currently stands – and the wealth of the feral billionaires who are running its government – can only be sustained if they can put the Global South in general, and China in particular, back in its box.
They are fully aware that the climate crisis is real. All the denialist stuff is just prolefeed. An example of this is the US Army Report from 2019 that argued that,
This would be extreme cognitive dissonance if they did not have a perspective where they could maintain a per capita carbon footprint the size of a Diplodocus, so long as most of the world barely has one at all.
So, the United States can no longer pretend to be anyone’s elses future, not even its own.
The problem they will have with this is that the costs of carrying through this massive shift of resources into militarisation will lead to massive economic and political crises.
To be specific. For the UK to spend 5% of its GDP on its military would cost an additional £60 -70 billion a year. Mark Rutte of NATO has very kindly suggested that this could come from Health and Pensions. Nice. We can be absolutely clear that it would also have to come from green infrastructure investment.
Flood defences? Why would we need those when we can trust to luck?
Ditto investing in fire prevention, because there’s no problem with wild fires is there?
Insulating homes? That would have to go. People can stay patriotically cold.
Electrified railways and affordable public transport? Who needs that when there’s weapons to buy?
So, if the government capitulates to this pressure we will face
All to defend a “rules based international order” in which – as we’ve seen this week with the US sanctions on the International Criminal Court as punishment for the Gaza indictments – the US makes the rules, and the rest of us are expected to follow the orders. The US is not interested in global leadership, it is interested in global domination.
You can’t build a wall to keep this out.
Millions across the world will resist this – including in Europe and the US itself. Trump’s polices are likely to blow up in his face. His tariffs, if imposed, will be ruinous.
People do not want to be poor. They do not want to be killed in a war. They want more action to keep us safe from climate breakdown. Let’s mobilise that majority, with the trade union year of action from this September as a lever.
I’ll end with an advert. Just down the road from here, on Clapham Manor Street, is the only trade union owned pub in the World, called, perhaps inevitably, Bread and Roses. On 23 January at 7pm it is hosting a showing of the latest Reel News film about the inspirational GKN Firenze factory occupation, and another supporting Vauxhall workers resisting Stellantis closing their plant.
Everyone is welcome.
Donald Trump and NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte want NATO members military expenditure increased to “Cold War levels” and for member countries to adopt a “wartime mindset” in order to prepare for a perceived threat from Russia, China, Iran and North Korea.
Neil Kinnock has just stated that 3-4% would be a “realistic” level to reach.
Part of this mindset is a preparedness to sacrfice health, welfare and pensions to fuel the military machine required to fight a war with Russia in Europe that would be suicidal for all involved if it actually broke out.
The UK’s “Defence Review” is framed in a similar “pre war framework”, posing Russia, China, Iran and North Korea as “the deadly quartet”; a good name for a jazz band, but geopolitically infantile.
The threat is posed most sharply in relation to Russia, largely because NATO is now evidently losing its proxy war in Ukraine. This impending defeat is being posed as a lever to militarise European society on the presumption that a Russian win there means that they will then threaten to invade the rest of Europe.
This is simply insane.
If you look at the balance of military expenditure between NATO and Russia, even after a sharp increase in Russian spending forced by the war to 7-8% of GDP, the imbalance in NATOs favour is overwhelming, because the combined GDPs of the NATO countries are almost incomparably bigger than Russia’s (which is smaller not only than the USA among NATO countries, but also Germany, the UK, France, Italy and Canada and barely larger than Australia).
If the argument from all quarters on high in this country is that “the world is becoming a more dangerous place”, its quite clear from this which countries are making it so in Europe. If the Russian level of expenditure shown in the yellow column is posed as a terrible threat by NATO, how much more threatening is NATOs current expenditure for the Russians?
To underline this with stark figures, with overall NATO spending in 2024 at $1185 billion and Russia’s at $109 billion,
So, the question posed by this is already, who exactly is under threat from whom?
Trump and Rutte, and now Kinnock, propose to raise NATO military spending to “Cold War levels”. That was around 5% of GDP between 1970 and 1987. That would double the imbalance above and set NATO up for an offensive war with a collosal military advantage of 14 to one, even if the US kept out of it, and 22 to 1 if they were involved.
This reality is revealed by the decision of the EU to break its own fiscal rules and raid its levelling up funds to finance war preparations which, among other things, involves strengthening bridges so that “tanks may pass safely”. Were they concerned that columns of Russian tanks would be steamrollering West they would be weakening bridges so they couldn’t pass at all.
This is leaving aside the political feasibility of a Russian offensive, even if it were militarily feasible – which it obviously isn’t.
It beggars belief that a war of this sort is being envisaged with a nuclear power. The same people who argue that the UK’s nuclear weapons “keep us safe” and shouted at Jeremy Corbyn “would you press that red button, Mr Corbyn?” seem to think that a land war in Europe which, given the balance of forces, would be aimed at regime change and the balkanisation of the Russian Federation and have nothing to do with “defence” would not lead to the trip wires for use of these weapons being crossed.
It is a suicidal course.
It would also impoverish us in the meantime.
Every item cut instead would improve people’s lives. The best that can be hoped for increased military spending is that it doesn’t give our lords and masters the tools to end them.
All this flows from the strategic self subordination of Europe to the United States. As this recent article argues, the new situation for Europe is that the US is leading them into war with the continent’s strongest military power, Russia, at the same time as it deliberately undermining European rivals’ economies. It amounts to a US policy of subordinating Europe through a combination of military and economic warfare.
This is a lethal combination for Europe, the most serious threat to the entire continent since at least the end of the Cold War and in a broader sense since the end of the Second World War.
So, the fight against war, and the fight against austerity, to defend our conditions of life will have to go hand in hand.
My last blog did not take account of just how slowly votes are counted in US presidential elections. While the result has been obvious from the grey dawn of Nov 6th, and the outlines of the vote equally apparent, a precise accounting has had to wait until now. Even now (Nov 27th) the vote count stands at 99.7%, so there’s roughly another few hundred thousand votes to tot up, but these won’t make much difference to the broad conclusions that were reasonably obvious, and therefore broadly misrepresented in the media, from day 1.
First of all, contrary to my initial blog, Trump did gain votes from 2020. But not many. His total was just over 77 million this year, compared to just over 74 million in 2020; so, a gain of just under 3 million votes.
Similarly, Kamala Harris lost a lot of votes on Joe Biden’s total in 2020, down from just under 81.3 million to just over 74.4 million; so a total loss of 6.9 million votes.
Turnout was down overall by about 3 million votes.
So, the core conclusion that this was more a Democrat slump that a Trump surge still holds. This matters because some of the conclusions coming from Democratic Party reinforce the strategic choices that led them to lose. There are basically three strands to this.
This denial is designed to move the Democrats onto the same ground as the Republicans on the spurious argument that there was a significant shift towards them. There wasn’t. It is not a strategy to remobilise their lost voters, let alone an attempt to pose answers that meet the needs of working class voters. Quite the opposite.
It reflects a deeper reality that – their protestations that Trump is a fascist nothwithstanding – they would prefer to lose than contradict the demands of their donors, let alone challenge core US imperial imperatives; which is the fundamental purpose of both parties and the reason why the US political structure is set up the way it is; to squeeze out any genuine challenge that might express the popular progressive majorities that exist for, for example, Medicare for all, Abortion Rights, Serious action on climate, raising the national minumum wage, ending US support for the war in Ukraine and the genocide in Gaza and opposing a wider war involving Iran.
Polling showed, for example, that taking a harder line with Israel would have won Harris significant votes in the swing states.
What we had instead from the Biden adminstration was a performative 30 day ultimatum – due to expire conveniently after the election – for Israel to allow more aid into the Gaza strip on pain of having (some) arms cut off – because even in performative ultimatums, you wouldn’t want to go too far in case the wrong signal gets picked up – in the hope that this gesture would bring back some of the votes that their single minded support for Israel had alienated.
Needless to say, when the 30 days were up, in the middle of Israel’s most ruthless offensive yet – implementing the “General’s Plan” to completely clear the whole of Northern Gaza of its Palestinian population, making it a free fire zone and totally shutting down of any supply of food, water or medicine – the US declared that enough aid was being allowed in for them to keep praising Netanyahu and passing the ammunition.
The psychological shock to a lot of people in the mainstream of politics is that 2020 was supposed to be a “return to normalcy” from the insane aberation of four years of Trumpian excess, after which the Pax Americana could be reasserted on its customary tried and tested basis, with all its familiar landscape intact. The problem is that it can’t, now that the US is no longer the world’s largest and most dynamic economy, the old rules won’t work anymore, so what people thought Biden was now looks like an interegnum in a “new normal” in which the US takes off its masks and stands before the world in all its hideous nakedness as a climate denying rogue state, reduced to having to bully its allies to increase military spending and banking on increasingly overt threats to try to bluff its way out of decline.
This is unlikely to work, but is extremely dangerous and damaging nonetheless.
Beyond the grotesque and demeaning soap opera of his cabinet picks, like putting the former head of the Worldwide Wresting Federation in charge of Education, which could be filmed by Hollywood as the Joker taking control of the Gotham City Mayor’s office.
The decline of US power has entered a bumpy and perilous period and the election of Trump is a symptom of that. Standing on much thinner ice than the media is suggesting, the harder he tries to grip, the more things will slip through his fingers; the harder he tries to assert US power, the more he will expose how much it has already slipped.
Correction: As of 14/11/24 Trump’s total vote is just under 76 million and Harris’s just under 73 million. That means Trump’s vote has risen by 2 million while the drop in Democrat support is around 8 million.
It is important to base analysis on facts not wishful thinking, so, once the final final count is in, I will rewrite this blog.
Nevertheless, the main argument remains valid.
A small increase in the Trump vote, perhaps 2% or so up on 2020, is not a surge, and remains a very thin mandate for the sweeping changes he intends to bring in. He is standing on thin ice and it is likley that the measures he will take will blow up in his face.
The drop in Democrat support, at around 10% of their 2020 vote, remains very large.
The media chatter about fundamental realignments in US politics has an air of the UK in 2019, but where is Boris Johnson now?
Between the 2020 election and the 2024 election, with nearly all votes now counted, Donald Trump’s vote FELL by a nearly a million, from 74.2 million to 73.4 million*. This is not the surge the media are reporting.
But, the Democrat vote slumped by 12 million, from 81 million to 69 million. So, this was more a Democrat defeat than a Trump victory.
In some ways it is a Republican victory despite Donald Trump.
As this was based on a squeeze on worker’s living standards with real wages lower now than when Biden was elected, and an anger and fear about the slide in US global standing (Biden first lost significant support at the time of the Afghanistan withdrawal) Trump will find that he is standing on thinner ice than the media are projecting because his economic policy of tax cuts for the rich and tariffs on imports will hit living standards even harder, mass deportations will spark mass anger, as will the devastation brought by wholesale environmental deregulation, not to mention the impacts of letting RFK loose on health.
With Republican control of the Senate, the House and the Supreme Court, there will be no checks and balances on this, so the madness will be able to run in full spate until at least the mid term elections in 2 years time. At which point, its likely that the reaction will be severe.
The decision of the Democrats to campaign on what might be called a “Red Wall” strategy,
This parallels the experience of the UK Labour Party, which has relentlessly carried out the same orientation since Keir Starmer was elected leader, with the result that Labour amassed half a million votes fewer in the General Election this year than in 2019 (down from 10.2 million to 9.7 million) only managing to get a huge majority in the House of Commons because the Conservatives had presided over a decline in livings standards even greater than that in the US over the same period, and the right wing vote, for the first time in modern history, was split right down the middle between the Tories and Reform; putting this governmnet too on very thin ice – as local council by elections are showing sharply.
The core lesson for the UK is that an incumbent government that proves incapable of at least maintaining living standards is going to be kicked out. “Its the economy, stupid”.
Warning. Writing this makes me feel simultaneously weepy and nauseous, so this contains material that might make you feel the same.
The rifle used to kill 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary school in Uvalde Texas on Tuesday was an AR15. This is a devastatingly lethal semi automatic weapon that anyone over the age of 18 in Texas can just buy privately with no restrictions, or walk into a store and buy, with a minimal “real time” background check, no permit required and no record of sale; thanks partly to the seven relaxations of gun safety rules by Governor Gregg Abbott last year. There is no registry of firearms in Texas. People over 21 can “open carry” hand guns. In fact, gun laws are so lax in Texas that smugglers ship guns from there into Mexico. Texas Governor Abbott described the mass shooting on Tuesday as “inexplicable”. Perhaps he can’t join the dots that the rest of the world seems to be able to manage.
The NRA likes to say that “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.” Which is as asinine as you can get, because its a lot easier to kill people if you have a gun. Especially a gun like an AR15. Oddly enough, no one is allowed to carry a gun – openly or otherwise – at the NRA convention this weekend in Houston. Given that they see themselves as “the good guys with guns”, you might think this would cause protests. After all, if a “bad guy with a gun” gets in, how are they going to defend themselves?
This is how what the AR15 can do is described in a post that is evidently enthralled by it, and paints a sickening picture of why it is that the remains of those killed on Tuesday had to be identified with DNA tests.
A remarkable feature of the AR 15 rifle is its lightning speed when it is being fired, and even if peradventure the bullet fired does not hit its mark, the gun can get reloaded in a very short and fast amount of time. The reloading speed of the AR 15 mimics those seen in the military rifles being used in war situations requiring combat action. A feature that enhances the firing speed of the AR 15 gun is the fact that the rifle possesses a muzzle of very high velocity. This high velocity muzzle contained in the gun when used with a .223 bullet round can successfully guide the bullet fired to hit its mark (possibly an animal) while also producing a powerful rebound action if the bone of the animal is hit.
The firing speed of the AR 15 can leave a devastating and destructive mark on its target and this is hugely because when the gun is fired, the bullets are ejected out of the muzzle at a high speed. If the bullets come in contact with an animal, they are bound to cause great damage to the bones and internal organs of the target. An AR 15 can fire around 2 to 3 bullet rounds per second, this means that in 15 seconds, an AR 15 can fire about 30 to 45 bullet rounds, so in a minute, an AR 15 rifle can fire up to 120 or even 180 bullet rounds (depending on how fast the shooter is to reload the gun with bullet rounds while continuing to squeeze the trigger).
You might want to take a deep breath after reading that. Or go for a walk. Or have a weep. It really should be enough to read that and know that these weapons should not be on sale. No one should feel under threat from them. But, in the US, those who stand for “the right to bear arms” react with self righteous fury when this is even suggested. When Beto O Rourke stood up at Governor Abbott’s Press Conference this week to make the connection between the dead children and the gun that killed them, the cry from the platform that he was a “sick son of a bitch!” was vehement. A similar proportion of Republican voters oppose an assault rifle ban as believe in the Great Replacement Theory (and there will be some overlap). Their notion of “law abiding citizens with guns” is that the “law abiding citizens” are people like them, “protecting themselves” from dangerous others. Its unfortunate for that argument that some of the mass shooters are “Second Amendment People” who have gone the whole hog into white supremacy, like the Buffalo shooter last week.
To get this onto the emotionally safer ground of devastating statistics.
The line from the NRA and contemptible figures like Ted Cruz and Donald Trump is that, rather than remove, or control, or even register weapons capable of killing whole classrooms full of children – schools should be “hardened”, teachers should be armed so the “bad guy with a gun” can be stopped by a “good guy with a gun”.
The problems with this argument are obvious; which is why no one is allowed to carry a gun into the NRA Convention centre.
There were a lot of “good guys with guns” at Uvalde. There have been “good guys with guns” at other incidents and it hasn’t done a lot of good. A “good guy” with a hand gun has almost no chance at all against a “bad guy” with an AR15, or any other kind of rifle.
This is not new. I remember that in the Buffalo Bill Annual, that I read avidly time and time again when I was 8, an inquest jury in the 1880s brought in a verdict of “suicide” for man who tried to take on an opponent armed with a rifle by drawing a handgun on him.
In the case of the police at Uvalde, there is also a serious question about the motivation of the “good guys with guns”, given that it took them an hour to get in, and they were screaming at, handcuffing and shoving parents who were imploring them to do something in the meantime. The school being overwhelmingly Latino, the Police tending to the Right and seeing them as the sort of people Trump wanted to build a wall to keep out, might be an explanation that won’t be peculiar to that locality. Whose lives matter?
So, are Trump and the NRA proposing to have armed guards in schools with assault rifles to even up the odds? Are the teachers supposed to have an assault rifle propped up by their whiteboard, primed and ready to go, just in case? Are they supposed to devote time to training so they can “safely” take out an armed intruder without hitting anyone else? What are the chances of these weapons being seized and used in a massacre themselves? Nothing like having the tools for the job close to hand. How jumpy would these teachers and schools get? So, what does this do to the school? And the students? Turning a school into an armed camp is a hidden curriculum for Dystopia.
The question for them is actually a simpler one. If it had been illegal to buy a gun in Texas, would those children and their teachers still be alive? That they would is so obvious that the only conclusion that can be drawn is that the NRA and its supporters think that their cold, dead hands are a price worth paying for their “Second Amendment Rights”.
To contrast that with what has happened here.
After the Charlie Hebdo shootings in France there was a lot of concern because a school next to the Magazine’s Offices had implemented its emergency procedures, which meant that everyone trooped out into the playground like they would in a fire drill, making them more vulnerable to being shot – had the killers been interested – than if they’d stayed where they were. Local Authority Health and Safety Committees had to draw up Emergency Procedures in the event of such an incident. There had been plenty of school shootings – like Columbine in the US – that did not spark this response, so I think there was an aspect of this that was about fitting schools into their place in the “war on terror” and – had the procedures drawn up become the basis for regular drills like the “duck and cover” exercises that brought the Cold War into every US classroom in the 1950s – they would have had a purpose well beyond safety procedures. In the event, while teachers were given INSETs about what to do – essentially lock the door and get everyone down behind a brick wall – and distinctive alarms set up and tested once a week as a reminder, most schools that I know of did not do drills with the kids. This was for obvious psychological reasons. The chances of such an incident were and are vanishingly low. But the chances of psychological damage from safety drills done often enough were very high.
Parents here feel safe sending their kids to school. As they should. In the US this is no longer the case. The rage, fury and despair on display in US media and podcasts this week shows a society that is tearing itself apart. Its now the long holidays in America. Schools are shut. How is everyone going to feel in late August when its time to go back?
On the far right/QAnon sites, the conspiracy theories are already starting. This was fake. Actors. Staged. Because the Libtards want to take away your guns. The NRA, with its weirdly appropriate symbol that looks like a steer skull with an entry wound in the middle of its head – will pull its usual strings and press its usual buttons, pushing for more guns as the cure to the guns that are already out there – the profits will pile up at Smith and Wesson and Colt and Olin Corp – and the spiral of US self destruction will take another turn – even as it pushes to recover its military mojo in its European front yard -while we wait for the next mass shooting; unless there’s enough of a surge from the majority that don’t own guns and want them under better control; and they vote out every “sick son of a bitch” that takes money from the NRA and pushes their line.
Outside Morrisons in the midwinter mist, the old sax player stands against the wall of the undershop car park – that makes the entrance so welcoming with its reek of stale exhaust fumes – a series of mute grey frames with him the only image, playing snatches of tunes that sound a bit like Coltrane’s version of “Favourite things” (1) drifting through the attenuated traffic on a very tired Edgware Road. Coltrane’s version is cool. Julie Andrews, it isn’t. A necessary historical corrective to a false impression of how dominant the cultural challenge that took place in the sixties was is that the best selling album of the decade wasn’t Sargent Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, but the soundtrack from The Sound of Music. The fifties lasted until about 1977 in most places.
A young woman in a hoody and a half mast mask waves wildly at someone drifting slowly and invisibly upwards on the escalator.
My graffiti spraying neighbour has now painted the letters “WLM” on another white van; showing the respect for private property so characteristic of the right wing. This is more obscure than his last effort – which was “Trump Jesus”, as in the slogan chanted by the fascist mob at the Capitol building on January 6th, “Trump is President and Christ is King!” Because you can just see Jesus smashing his way through windows with a riot shield wearing a horned hat and carrying flexi-ties, a Glock and a Confederate flag shouting “Hang Mike Pence!” in my brain, since about 1974, WLM has stood for “Women’s Liberation Movement”, but I somehow doubt that that was what he was spraying. Googling it throws up more possibilities, but nothing obvious. “Windows Live Messenger”? “Weak Localisation Model – physics”? “Women Loving Men”? “White Light Motorcade?” That one sounds implicitly Alt Right and supremacist, but turns out to be a band. Maybe he’s taking a turn to culture, but the mystery remains.
Although a little out of season at this time. I’m signing off with a happy gesture of solidarity for 2021 from the cheerful snow people in Ash Tree Dell, who look as though they have joined the Red Front.
The attempts by the US right to banalise the attempt by the most fascist elements of Trump’s base to invade the Capitol building, stop the certification of the Presidential election and possibly kill legislators build on a solid foundation of racist presumptions that run through the whole state like writing through a stick of rock.
This graph shows the number of Police deployed to deal with – respectively – an impending and flagged up riot from the far right, and a peaceful demo by Black Lives Matter last Summer. Very little else needs to be said.
A magisterial account of how the political crisis in the USA has got to this stage is here. http://www.socialistaction.net/2021/01/14/the-georgia-elections-and-the-new-period-in-american-politics/
One of the many new luxury flats developments replacing the now defunct art deco light industry on either side of the Edgware Road beyond Colindale (and isn’t everything?) – is described as ” A landmark development of 183 apartments, townhouses, restaurants and shops set in the heart of old Oriental City.” Their emphasis.
“Old Oriental City”. All real estate is tinged with fabulism – a Rumpelstiltskin like capacity to turn dross into spun gold. “Desirable neighbourhoods” are stretched imaginatively out across their scrag end hinterland, so that the cachet will rub off on increased prices. Ultimately, all of North London will be some far flung corner of Greater Hampstead. Some of Donald Trump’s capacity to lie on such a spectacular scale with such total self belief is rooted in the commercial necessities of real estate moguls to pass off dull realities as whatever they can get their marks to believe in.
As with Geography, the sense of being somewhere historic, being part of an older and – in this case – exotic – History has a similar drive. “Old Oriental City” is a phrase that conjures an imaginary world in which – for centuries – trading Junks laden with tea, silks and Ming vases sailed up the River Brent to a bustling outpost of the Middle Kingdom; inexplicably situated half way to Watford – from a more recent, humdrum, reality.
The “Oriental City” on that site was a shopping Mall, originally built as Yaohan Plaza in the early 1990s; so not exactly “old” in any historical sense. A speculative venture from a Japanese company looking for an outlet for excess capital, running on the momentum of the late eighties property boom – already crashed and miring Japan in stagnation ever since – Yaohan went bankrupt in 1997, and was bought out by the Malaysian company which renamed the Mall “Oriental City”.
It combined a very popular food court with almost empty shops that were forever closing down and being replaced. These started off very posh and expensive in the Yaohan days – Oxford fashions, marketing a Japanese notion of expensive English taste in a fairly down at heel English suburb, beautifully presented, highly priced and always empty – and moved rapidly down market to cheap and cheerful plastic tat, that sold better but couldn’t sustain the rent.
At the entrance -towering above stone lions that would not have looked out of place in an imperial palace in Beijing – was a gigantic silhouette of Sonic the hedgehog luring punters to subterranean pleasures of the Sega gaming centre; when arcades could still compete with consoles. Above the rattling and clanging darkness of this labyrinth of addictive psychic distraction was the Zen CX – Alexei Sayle’s favourite restaurant for a while – though, as it was an all you can eat, it could have been better labelled Zen XL. Finally going bust just before the 2008 crash and derelict for several years afterwards, now the site is mostly a Morrisons; though the Bang Bang Food Court and Loon Fung Supermarket have re-emerged from the wreckage as the vigorous and viable survivors demanded by commercial Darwinism.
An older connection with China is also fictional. The eighteenth century writer Oliver Goldsmith lived for a time at Hyde House – a farmhouse demolished in the 1920s to make way for a district hospital, demolished in turn to make room for a small cookie cutter housing estate. The building now called Hyde House is a Premier Inn on the other side of the Edgware Road opposite the care home built where the Red Lion pub used to be. All that is solid melts into air and all urban landscapes are palimpsests.
Goldsmith – who described himself at one point, tongue in cheek, as “the Confucius of Europe” wrote a series of essays in 1760-61 in an adopted Chinese persona. The citizen of the world; or Letters from a Chinese philosopher, residing in London, to his friends in the East. This allowed him to pose as having a perspective from a distinct “other” civilisation simultaneously “exotic” but worthy of respect for its longevity, cultivation and sophistication and, at the time, wealth and power. Different but equal.
The scores he was settling were all, of course, domestic, but the notion that a Chinese perspective might allow him – in some respects – to look down on Western society, is one that still comes as a jolt after two centuries of imperial dominance. It is a perspective that underlies a lot of the hostile treatment of China in the Western media today- since a recognition that the way China dealt with COVID19 was staggeringly more effective than that of the West – with domestic infections eliminated in two months and an economic recovery that will amount to 60% of total world growth next year – requires a barrage of venom to be thrown into people’s eyes to avoid them asking awkward questions of our increasingly clownish leaders.
One of the odd features of getting older is that things start happening to your body. “Popeye elbow” is a soft swelling on the elbow that looks like a golf ball – or one of Popeye’s elbows – that doesn’t hurt and you can get away with not noticing until people around you say “Argh! What’s happened to your elbow?!”
Popeye was one of those cartoons that always had the same essential plot. Like Whacky Races or Scooby Do or, come to think of it, all of them. Briefly summarised in the words of a US Civil War General whose name I’ve forgotten who said – “Little guy’ll always beat a big guy, if the little guy’s in the right and keeps a comin’“. Which – in the case of the US Civil War – is underlined by the way the Confederate little guys lost even though they kept a comin’ in the worst of bad causes. In the case of Popeye, Bluto might have said “I’d have gotten away with it too, if it wasn’t for that meddling spinach.”
When I was six, I took everything literally and on faith – from stories in Sunday school to TV cartoons. I assumed that if a can of spinach would work for Popeye, it would work for me. Eating this miracle stuff would turn my sparrows kneecap biceps into surging powerhouses with tanks and battleships running through them to the accompaniment of some of Sousa’s brasher marches played at a tempo brisk enough to clear a playground full of bullies. I thought of it as a kind of personal nuclear deterrent.
It was not easy to come by in Thurrock in 1960. Eventually my parents found some small tins in a dubious looking shop in Southend Road. Not big round tins like Popeye’s, but small flat things that might have contained sardines in a previous life and could have been leftover iron rations from the Korean war. It was, of course, disgusting. And had no effect on my sparrows kneecap biceps, nor make me impervious in the playground.
The same brash Sousa marches – designed to make you feel invincible AND happy – were much in evidence in the online films of last Saturday’s pro-Trump protests in Huntingdon Beach in California. This was not huge – a few hundred – but had the wild celebratory air to it of people trying to convince themselves they had won. Denial as collective delirium; or possibly collective delirium as a condition of denial. People gathered at an intersection to cheer each other as gigantic SUVs festooned with the stars and stripes drove up and down like they were cruising the strip in a Beach Boys song.
They believe what they have to believe to make the reality around them bearable. They probably believe that they would have won if it wasn’t for those meddling Venezuelan voting machines – the latest straw to be grasped in Rudi Giuliani’s increasingly comic attempts to fool enough of the people enough of the time to bluff a different reality into being. Its interesting to note that the same machines were in use in 2016 in the same states without anyone batting an eyelid, and were adopted because they are so accurate and fraud proof – an ironic comment on the continual US claims that Venezuelan elections are always fraudulent because they keep returning Socialists to power. A gaslighter has to have some power to bluff with. Without it, he is left with the minority of the people you can fool all of the time. But there are a lot of them.
The Trumpist slogan – “can 70 million be wrong?” would skewer them on a paradox if they were self aware enough to think it through. The legitimacy of Trump’s vote is taken for granted and banked – the fraudulence of the other side equally taken for granted and discounted, so the possible counter slogan “…if 80 million say so” does not register with them. Although the momentum on their own side is smaller than that of the Democrats, that momentum is real and likely to sustain them into the bumpy period ahead.
The USA will remain in crisis. The delusions that stoke it will become even wilder, as the unbearable reality of a loss of global primacy sinks in subconsciously.
Something similar was on show in Wilhelm Furtwangler’s performance of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony to celebrate Hitler’s Birthday in Berlin on 9th April 1942, with Goebbels and other top Nazi’s in attendance. This was the subject of a recent Radio 3 programme “Is this the most dangerous piece of music ever written?” (1)
April 1942 was a point at which the Third Reich was at the peak of its power, but it must have been apparent to anyone – with any realistic sense of the balance of forces – that the only way from there was down. The Soviet Union had not succumbed to Blitzkreig and, after Pearl Harbour, Nazi Germany was also at war with the United States. Hitler’s fantasy, that the Soviet Union could be defeated almost as quickly as France, died with thousands of his troops in the frozen mud before Moscow in December 1941 and – as Vasily Grossman notes in his extraordinary novel Stalingrad – the upcoming Nazi summer offensive would only be on the southern sector of the Eastern Front, not the whole front – North, South and Centre at the same time – as they’d been able to manage the previous year. They were already weaker. But still strong enough to harbour delusions.
Furtwangler’s performance of the Ninth encapsulates this moment. The only word to describe its tempo and volume is demonic. Schiller’s hymn to humanity is turned into a thunderous shriek of ubermensch triumph – made manic by an awareness of impending disaster. The fierce urgency of then.
Furtwangler – who stayed in Nazi Germany as a significant cultural figure, but never joined the Party – has been defended with the argument that he created this ferocious performance as a piece of shocking satire or grubage; the contrast with the universalist, humane orthodoxy of what the Ninth is meant to represent designed to generate a realisation of how far the Nazis were outside it. The problem here is that the Nazis knew very well what they were and gloried in it. Goebbels, a man used to generating social force from false narrative and wedded to the notion of “triumph of the will” thought the performance was wonderful.
This difficulty with cultural satire being taken straight is also illustrated by the fate of Johnny Speight’s character Alf Garnett. The central character in Speight’s situation comedy “‘Til Death do us Part”, Garnett was an unreconstructed bigot. set up as a figure to be mocked. But much of the audience not only identified with him, but saw his tirades as a vindication of their own world view. Someone was thinking what they were thinking; and they were on the telly.
Warren Mitchell, the Jewish actor who played Garnett – brilliantly, all seething frustration and choleric rage leavened by pathos – earned a crust in the seventies with a one man show called “The Thoughts of Chairman Alf”, in which he would put on his battered raincoat, pork pie hat and West Ham scarf and monologue in front of audiences all over the country who had turned up, at least in part, to see themselves reflected on stage; then went out and voted for the National Front. What that must have done to his soul I can’t imagine.
Urban ramblings 