Russell to Mosley, January 1962

It's frustrating that few politicians can write or say to Trump what Bertrand Russell in his 90s expressed with such elegant concision to Oswald Mosley*.

Obama's loyalty to the dignity appropriate to his high office is understandable. But it's painful to watch. I look forward, in one way only, to the moment when he relinquishes it, when he can - as he has already intimated - say all the things that have been denied him as President. Clearly his successor has no such qualms about dignity and is still churning out his semi-literate Twitter attacks. Well, maybe he will learn the hard way.

Can other politicans stop saying 'let's wait and see' and call Trump out for what he represents? This Irish senator, Labor MP Aodhán Ó Ríordáin, clearly can, but he's in a minority.

I share my dear American friend Sue Scheid's focused anger against everyone who voted for any candidate other than Hillary Clinton. All were deluded, and all are responsible for threatening to send the world to hell in a handcart, or a dumptruck, choose your vehicle. Those who did so and are protesting can do what they want but in my opinion they forfeited that right.

Fortunately it also seems, to judge from two strong features in today's Guardian, that the tide is turning against the insidious liberal notion that both this and Brexit were the result of the dispossessed kicking against the elite. And can the press stop using the word 'alt-right' and call it by its proper name, fascism?

We will watch him every millimetre of the way and fight back, or at least from the UK try to help enable others to do so.

Update (21/11): so far the President-elect's actions, apart from the horrendous people he's been appointing as his inner circle, have been to lash out on Twitter against a TV chat show and a Broadway musical.  And this is the man who promised to fight IS?

*Transcript in case it's too small to read:

22 January 1962

Sir Oswald Mosley,
5, Lowndes Court,
Lowndes Square,
London, S.W.1.

Dear Sir Oswald,

Thank you for your letter and for your enclosures. I have given some thought to our recent correspondence. It is always difficult to decide on how to respond to people whose ethos is so alien and, in fact, repellent to one’s own. It is not that I take exception to the general points made by you but that every ounce of my energy has been devoted to an active opposition to cruel bigotry, compulsive violence, and the sadistic persecution which has characterised the philosophy and practice of fascism.

I feel obliged to say that the emotional universes we inhabit are so distinct, and in deepest ways opposed, that nothing fruitful or sincere could ever emerge from association between us.

I should like you to understand the intensity of this conviction on my part. It is not out of any attempt to be rude that I say this but because of all that I value in human experience and human achievement.

Yours sincerely,

Bertrand Russell

Thursday's journey into night

So I did it more or less right by my own hard-to-keep standards on Wednesday, sticking to a vow not to read the news or listen to the radio, and - as described in the previous post - the personal good took over. Not only that; an evening at ENO witnessing Wigglesworth's last fling in the magnificent Kentridge-designed and -directed Lulu proved not to be the heavy weather I'd expected, but a rigorous and ultimately exhilarating focus on what you can achieve by working through a score like Berg's to the very highest standards. I'm going again on Saturday and taking godson Alexander, down here from Scotland on a visit. Pictured below by Catherine Ashmore, another artistic take by William Kentridge to set alongside the Maleviches which have served me well.

Yesterday, not so good. Started fine by trying to get my teeming thoughts on Lulu into order. But then I gave way not only to reading The Guardian but getting involved in commenting on LinkedIn articles. For God's sake! Do I never learn? I kept away from Facebook and Twitter exactly because of this intemperate desire to sound off. And of course when it comes to talking about Trump you're going to come up against the semi-literate trolls. This one can string a sentence better than many, but oh, the instant insults come so easily. Indulge me while I reproduce the exchange, under a piece by Martin Schulz, President of the European Parliament which also brought forth such lovely comments as one recommending the purging of  'libtard pollutants' and another opining that 'an execution of a couple of assholes ie bill n hillery [sic] would be a good start'.

David Nice
Writer, lecturer and broadcaster on classical music

Can we just stop using the word 'respect'? It was inappropriate for the Brexit referendum result and it's ludicrous to apply it to Trump.

[redacted]
Contributor at American Patriot; OurCivics; American Thinker; LinkedIn

imbeciles like you need to go to your safe places so that you do not get your feelings hurt, cream-puff. At least have the intellect to not support scandal ridden criminals if you are going to even mention respect.

DN: Well, well. We can expect a lot more of this filth now. This is clearly a thread to avoid. Of Turkish origin, Mr [redacted], as your name suggests? Then all the more shame on you for supporting a racist and a xenophobe.

KO: Trump is neither a racist nor a xenophobe (heck, he is married to a foreigner, moron!).  Advocating for a nation that respects its laws (immigration included) is no xenophobia or racism.  He never said all Latinos were criminals.  He was talking about the 35% of our prison inmates that happen to fit that bill.  Basic intellectual honesty demands that one see that much.  As you comprehend nothing of the business world, learn how business people think so that you do not buy in to idiotic talking points.[...]

DN: Big assumptions there, Mr [redacted] Please don't talk of intellect or honesty. Or have the disrespect to call someone else a moron or a cream-puff. And now this cream-puff is going to float away...

And of course there's always that option. I should have taken it sooner on one other thread, but I was curious to see if I could have a dialogue with someone who thought differently. I made the mistake of asking a young woman advertising herself as an 'Environmental Scientist' what she meant by some organisational jargon which meant nothing to me and oblique talk of sheep and elephants (turns out Democrats and liberals like myself are sheep, Trump's people the elephants, supposedly in a good way, though of course pachyderms on the rampage cause a lot of damage).

That was like talking to a person who appears sane but then says something so outlandish that you suddenly realise he or she isn't. In this case I got back the reply 'Enough with donkey empathy, your [sic] a victim of feigned political diligence and you have never have to watch an oversight committee get canned for something really important. You are a sheep that has never stood for anything...you have never had a cause, you have never really followed politics, you have never cared enough to get involved.'

Much she knew about me. Another nice person jumped in with 'Allyson will...grind you up' and as an articulate afterthought just put up one word, 'punk'. I congratulated those two and a third for taking a leaf out of Trump's rulebook of classic bullying and left. This, like the catalogue of much direr abuse catalogued in the twitter page of Day One in Trump's America (admittedly not all of it verifiable), has the imprimatur of Trump's encouragement to express hatred. We can expect much, much more of it in the years to come: the Brexit licence to abuse 'foreigners' multiplied infinitely and extended of course to the LGBT community (a regular contributor to Parterre noted how he was walking down a New York street and out of a car came 'hey, faggot! How do you like your new president?')

You'll see I manage not to put up that unbearable visage, and much as I approve this German headline I have to cut off the picture below it.

Worth having on link-record, though, the list of 'the 282 places, people and things Trump has insulted on Twitter' in today's New York Times.

As for the nature of the roughly 25 per cent's 'revolution'*, I'm having problems with my anger when friends parrot the 'disenfranchised lashing back against the elite' as the chief cause. For me, this liberal self-beating-up is one of the reasons why we are where we are. Let's say an unthinking 'lashback' may be a contributing factor - ironic that in the cases of Brexit and Trump, the vote was for a far worse 'elite' than the liberal one - but a breakdown of the demographics doesn't show anything so simple. The driving forces were racism and xenophobia pure and simple (though of course there are social reasons behind that). I'd like to see more in the press from the psychological perspective. But foreign correspondents do politics, not psychology. And since I'm not a politician and don't have to be diplomatic, this is about the gist of it for me.

That and an astonishingly prescient comment from H L Mencken in 1920.

That seems to be not quite the original quotation; I wish he'd written the 'narcissistic' bit but it seems not. Here's the full context: 

The larger the mob, the harder the test. In small areas, before small electorates, a first-rate man occasionally fights his way through, carrying even the mob with him by force of his personality. But when the field is nationwide, and the fight must be waged chiefly at second and third hand, and the force of personality cannot so readily make itself felt, then all the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most easily adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum.

The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

Anyway, back to black Thursday. Things brightened much later in the day with the mother of my young viola-playing friend Andrew Lavelle sending me a soundclip of him playing Bloch in a Juilliard masterclass. Here he is again - the original context comes in this entry - from a spontaneous mini-recital after one of my Frontline Club opera classes.

Andrew and Amanda were two people I'd unaccountably left off the list when I sent an email, with several links, to all American or America-based friends I could think of. The young will have their day - but how long, o Lord, how long? I only wish I could have held on to the delusion that half of America doesn't want this. But since a staggering 46.9 per cent didn't vote, it's only a quarter.

So what to do? Ignore social and wider media, get out into the fresh air and go walking, like Hillary with her dogs and the lady who met her while out with her daughter (the photo taken above, which I assume I reproduce with the Facebooker's blessing, is a real spirit raiser, unless you wish Hillary dead or in jail, of course). Then, replenished, get back to not accepting but fighting, find out how to turn anger into power - which, as one civil rights organiser put it 'takes discipline and focus'. And make sure you're in good physical and mental state before you plunge in. I promise a slow drip of nature shots from various walks in the entries to come.

On which final note, here's another shot from Spetses, by day this time, taken like the sunrise image in the previous post only last Sunday (can it be? A week is a long time in politics). And I've only just found out that Hydra, the further of the two islands in the distance, was beloved by Leonard Cohen, whose 'Joan of Arc' just hit me with the force of revelation. Maybe he, rather than Bob Dylan, should have got the Nobel Prize for Literature

*Bearing in mind the 46.9 per cent of eligible voters who did nothing - pointed out lower down in the piece - that leaves both Clinton and Trump on points of 25 per cent each (HC, of course, having the lead by some 800,000 votes to date, with some counting still to go).

I'm with Her...and her

Vital message from American royalty - short but to the point. Not that any of RuPaul's fans should need encouraging. Nor, I imagine, will any American readers need telling...



Over here, nothing exemplifies our own sorry state of affairs than this shrewd comparison (in case anyone's been Rip Van Winkling, the judges ruled that Parliament must be consulted before the Conservatives trigger Article 50 to leave the European Union). You are encouraged to tear up complimentary copies of the Daily Mail on British Airways flights.

Plots against America

That's Charles Lindbergh on the left, the famous aviator who was to lead the America First campaign and decry 'the Jewish race' for trying to lead his country into the Second World War, in the delightful company of Hermann Goering, presumably at the time of the October 1938 dinner in Berlin where Goering presented Lindbergh with the Service Cross of the Golden Eagle. No such photos of Trump with Putin have come to light, prompting some amusingly creative collages which I assume are copyright so won't use here. But you can be sure that if the world's worst-case-scenario comes true and Trump is elected, he'll be holding meetings with Putin like the one Philip Roth imagines a putative President Lindbergh having with Hitler in Iceland, and later with Von Ribbentrop in the White House, in The Plot Against America.

There are probably more differences between Trump and Lindbergh than similarities - no-one sees DT as a clever operator hiding behind others, for instance. But it seemed timely to read this what-if masterpiece of a novel by a great American under present circumstances. Apart from the lethally eloquent and/or direct prose style, Roth's genius is to put himself and his family into the alternative picture, building on the anti-Semitism he experienced in New Jersey as a child.

I can't tell which of the friends and relatives gathered around the Roths are real - would love to read a biography or an alternative study which sheds light on this - but the portraits of his honest ma and pa break the heart. It isn't easy to make ordinary decency that interesting, but put it up against its opposite and you have some powerful situations. If you don't think you want to work your way through the whole book - amazing how people keep on saying 'I don't have the time to read'; there is ALWAYS time to read - then the second chapter. 'Loudmouth Jew (November 1940-June 1941)', about the Roth family visit to Washington and the anti-Semitism they experience there, is a locus classicus of vivid writing. Roth also makes some powerful statements throughout the book about the kind of man his father was, both as an American Jew and as a Mensch. More often he highlights what he was not:

It went without saying that Mr Mawhinney was a Christian, a long-standing member of the great overpowering majority that fought the revolution and founded the nation and conquered the wilderness and subjugated the Indian and enslaved the Negro and emancipated the Negro and segregated the Negro, one of the good, clean, hardworking Christian millions who settled the frontier, tilled the farms, governed the states, sat in Congress, occupied the White House, amassed the wealth, possessed the land, owned the steel mills and the ball clubs and the railroads and the banks, even owned and oversaw the language, one of those unassailable Nordic and Anglo-Saxon Protestants who ran America and would always run it - generals, dignitaries, magnates, tycoons, the men who laid down the law and called the shots and read the riot act when they chose to - while my father, of course, was only a Jew.

Roth (pictured above) makes the distinction between his father and other Jews they knew, though:

For good or bad, the exalted egoism of an Abe Steinheim or an Uncle Monty or a Rabbi Bengelsdorf - conspicuously dynamic Jews, all seemingly propelled by their embattled status as the offspring of greenhorns to play the biggest role that they could commandeer as American men - was not in the makeup of my father, nor was there the slightest longing for supremacy, and so though personal pride was a driving force and his blend of fortitude and combativeness was heavily fueled, like theirs, by the grievances attending his origins as an impoverished kid other kids called a kike, it was enough for him to  make something (rather than everything) of himself and to do so without wrecking the lives around him.

As for the Jews who in Roth's dystopia kowtow to Lindbergh (pictured above before the 1941 speech which in reality toppled him), there is a devastating portrait in the shape of Aunt Evelyn who marries the self-satisfied, self-compromised Rabbi Bengelsdorf.

As always with Aunt Evelyn, there was something very winning about her enthusiasm, though in the context of my household's confusion, I couldn't miss what was diabolical about it as well. Never in my life had I so harshly judged any adult - not my parents, not even Alvin or Uncle Monty - nor had I understood until then how the shameless vanity of utter fools can so strongly determine the fate of others.

One can't take it for granted, unfortunately, that more than half of voting Americans come to understand the same thing before it's too late. If they don't, the world will sufer from a regime that might be longer-lived than the fictional presidency of Lindbergh. In the meantime, here's hope

and here may be a greater part of the reason why Donald behaves as he does - behold The Mother.