I Only Live Once

I’m writing this after Trump finally flew into history and whilst watching All The President’s Men.

So, it’s time to take stock.

Let’s start with how truth became a relative concept. The main culprits were social media, hiding behind DCMA and literally monetising lies by the barrel load. Then there were the traditional media outlets who conveniently confused their news and opinion output.

We have lived through an age where media has been able to mind bend like never before, and it has been done by using peer groups. The Pals’ Battalions of the First World War are the discussion groups of social media.

Reasonably rational people became racists, revolutionaries and domestic terrorists in vast numbers. Families were split apart, not over a cause like slavery, but over the whipped up rhetoric deliberately implemented by bots and AI engines.

As Hearst and Murdoch knew and know so well, conflict sells. You can monetise extremism a lot easier than the mainstream.

And the shock telly jocks – Hannity, Carlson and Dobbs, none of whom are stupid, knew exactly what they were doing. There’s little question that their own motivation was money, not a sick, racist ideaology.

After all, Donald Trump was once a New York Democrat. But that wasn’t going to make him money. The media is full of New York – and Hollywood – Democrats. What the US needed was a Tea Party figurehead. Sarah Palin didn’t cut muster. So Trump reinvented himself by moving to the extreme right.

Given his family history of racism and exploitation of coloured people, this was hardly an ask.

This is a guy who had to import his wives from Eastern Europe, whose mother and paternal grandfather were immigrants.

The US has the First Amendment. But it’s worth remembering that this was instituted to stop the US Government from censoring citizens – it does not cover the media, let alone social media.

So maybe it’s time to implement some laws to protect demcracy. Laws that defend the truth, or what normal humans regard as the truth. The truth may have two sides that need representing, but the way that mainstream media re-published the lies, the outright, outrageous lies perpetrated by Donald Trump was pathetic. Balance does not involve indulgence. Balance involves weighing the versions of the truth and ridiculing lies.

But he was a great showman, wasn’t he? A clown and an entertainer. All the things politicians are not.

So, 74 million people are disappointed tonight. 74 million people who believed in lies, or used these lies to underpin their world views.

Let’s call them out for what they are: greedy, racist, hateful, stupid. Trump managed to tap into the lowest sentiments of humans and manipulate them.

He also operated a scorched earth policy – you were for him or against him, and the wind could turn in a blink. One after another, Manifort, Cohen, Bannon, Comey, to name but a few, were used and dumped. Yet many remained loyal, like dogs left at the side of the road, longing for their abusers. This approach has proven hugely successful in politics – Hitler, Stalin, Mao and many other successful political leaders have deployed this tactic. Fear works.

The strongman took no prisoners, and his fans loved it. When you’re weak and pathetic and stupid, what else do you need but a poweful leader and icon.

But now it is over. As a Brit who refused to visit the US whilst this psychopath roamed the country, I feel relief. In the UK we have our own morons and fascists to deal with, but the truth is sort of intact, if you can look beyond the fact that it was owned by Murdoch and now usurped by Facebook, Twitter and youTube et al.

For some reason, Brits aren’t as naive as Americans, but we still have idiots heckling nurses outside of hospitals in the middle of a pandemic.

The truth isn’t a relative concept with alternatives, it is what it is, and can elicit different responses, many of which may be valid. The Big Lie now lives on at Mar-a-Lago where it is an insidious seed, like Japnaese knotweed.

Well, it has been a mad week to start a mad year in the middle of a crazy pandemic.

Donald Trump was finally defeated, as was GOP, but he managed to egg his followers for one final violent throw against logic and ended up, basically, disavowing those who supported him.

I cannot understand why anyone would vote for Trump, let alone be prepared to spend many years in Guantanamo Bay as domestic terrorist for this psychologically disturbed man.

But this isn’t unique, is it ? Anyone who is religious has suspended all reality and believes in utter garbage and dogma, and this has been going on for milennia.

I was trying to explain the concept of religion to my six year old niece in her home schooling this week and I utterly failed. I have no understanding of what religion is, beyond a belief in lies requiring ‘faith’, usually for the financial or social advancement of a small number of people (sorry, a small number of MEN).

Why do humans need these crutches, these ‘beliefs’, these idols to fawn over and follow dogmatically ? People who have sharp intellectual minds turn them to mush in the thrall of ‘faith’.

In the case of religion eternal life and heaven seem like sensible, if somewhat implausible, endgames, but in the case of Donald Trump, what is the outcome ?

Well, my observation is that people project what they wish they could be even though they realise that they will never be it. Trump supporters, like Christians and Mohammedans, see themselves as extensions of their idols. They want to be them, they want their power and influence, but failing this, they just want to be mates with the powerful guy (or the guy they have been told is powerful).

How did homo sapiens get to 2021 and still be in this quandary ? Why are we, ironically, incapable of original thought ?

The Government is pouring money into the economy. The vast majority of it is going to Amazon, Apple, Comcast, Google, Facebook, Etsy and many other American Big Internet companies.

It’s also going to European companies who control most alcohol sales and other US companies who control fast food sales and online payments such as Paypal, Square and Stripe.

There are UK companies capable of benefitting – Deliveroo, for example, and some supermarkets, where taxpayers have long been subsidising zero hours wages. But we have no competitors for the major US monopolies and we are no longer willing to even recognise monopolies, or fatbergs…

The Tory party exists totally within a property development bubble, which pays their way and sustains them both politically and economically. The online world and the high street are, frankly, irrelevant to them. BoJo made his fortune from bribes as MoL from million pound rabbit hutches developed for Russians and Chinese. BoJo would not recognise a British person if they stood in front of his face.

You can tell that he just hates being PM. Being accountable and building a consensus is well beyond his megalomania.

This guys was once one of the most admired men in the world. Now his own daughter thinks he’s a schmuck and he regularly makes an absolute idiot of both himself and the truth.

What does Trump do to make successful, independent men destroy themselves ? Rudy Giuliani will forever be remembered as the guy who defended the indefensible, on the back of his two predecessors ending up in jail. 9/11 is Trumped.

Need I add any more ?

This guy has broken planning laws, COVID laws, tax laws and still, unelected, gets to tell us what to do.

That would be dandy if he was any good, but the U.K. is a shit show thanks to him and his ‘boss’ Boris.

45k dead and counting. No Brexit. An economy in free fall. Massive debts.

There’s little doubt that things would be significantly better if we adopted the Former Belgian model of having no government at all.

And as for all those Brexiteers who voted for Boris, what did they expect apart from bluster and lies and failure?

I spent a lot of my college days protesting apartheid outside the South African embassy in Trafalgar Square, often taken into custody. At the time apartheid seemed the most egregious sin on earth. Having sat in Brixton and Toxteth as they both burned, perhaps I was over-reaching, and I had my own gripes as part of a heavily oppressed minority in the UK (MI5 were actively framing Welsh speakers at the time).

Naturally, I believe that the forgiveness and compassion showed by Nelson Mandela in a world full of Reagans and Thatchers was my moral code.

When I moved to London in the 80s I worked with an African partner to bring music from the continent to the UK and got involved with Amandala, the cultural wing of the ANC. I had never visited the country at this time and would not do so for a long time. Still, I played my part based on morals, not geography.

Madiba has sadly passed and South Africa has now matured and hosted the soccer world cup for the first time on the continent of Africa.

In the meantime, Invictus has matured into a rugby world cup win under Kolisi and a more representative team.

The country is still a long way from where it needs to be and divisions and tensions remain palpable, although perhaps less so than in the US, a country that seems to have reverted badly into dark times.

My ambition now is to take my latest venture, an educational platform, into South Africa and make a real difference, not scoring some political points.

But I still wonder how my life and destiny got sucked into a country so far away, where I have no natural affinity.

We like to believe in democracy, don’t we ? But what does democracy mean ? In its homeland of Great Britain it used to be largely made up of ‘rotten boroughs’, constituencies constructed to favour a few landowners. Even after reformation, emancipation and universal suffrage we still do not get to select the leader of our country. The country votes for a small number of Members of Parliament and they select their leader, who becomes our de facto leader.

In the US, the situation is even more arcane. People vote for a President, but then their votes are abstracted into an ‘electoral college’, of which only half are legally bound to follow the votes of their State or district. The last election saw the President loose the ‘popular vote’ by a massive three million people but still take office.

Of course, this is all laughable to countries like Russia, where the dictator running the country (with a huge amount of popular support, it has to be said) makes up his own election numbers.

And in many places, there are good reasons not to elect a leader by majority vote, countries that have significant minority populations, for example: this has resulted in horrible conflict in countries ranging from Fiji to Rwanda to Sudan.

Polemicism is on the rise – tribalism will always exist. But we live in an information age where the political models of the industrial era need overhauling.

I left London when it was ruled by Boris. He literally sold the city to the Chinese and Russians. Thousands of empty flats. That was Boris’ legacy. Along with a failed bike scheme and overpriced buses.

A scheme to plant lots of trees planted none. Hammersmith Bridge was collapsing, Boris supported a new ‘garden’ bridge.

An utter buffoon.

Let’s face it, any Trump supporter reading that Trump has paid no tax will wish they were him. Like they wish they were him as they sit in their trailer drinking beer and gouging on Big Macs.

There are no politics of envy in the US, just the politics of hope, that one day an uneducated looser living in a trailer can be a NYC property millionaire.

Trump is them, they are voting for their vicarious selves. America 2020 is Germany 1933. Everything else, in their petty little deluded minds, is media lies.

As with many, possibly most, people, musicians have been my heroes. But, one by one I have seen them for what they are.

Cat Stevens, a Swedish Cypriot kid from Soho, became a fundamentalist Muslim.

Bruce Springsteen became the foil for Trump and his supporters. His songs were about racist, redneck Americans.

Queen supported apartheid in South Africa, despite Freddie Mercury being an African himself.

We hear sad songs and inspirational lyrics and we get enamoured with the visions of drug addled idiots. Try The 1975.

Van Morrison thinks everyone should die of coronavirus, as far as I can tell, and has written songs that would kill off his Mama and Brown Eyed Girls alike.

It’s time to treat the troubadours for what they are – talented chancers, not prophets.