Making our nations laughable again

It’s always good to have a laugh, isn’t it? Laughter’s the great natural therapy for humans, in the state technically known to psychiatrists as ‘down in the dumps’. That’s a sad condition particularly common in our hard times.

Unfortunately, the laughs these days, precisely because times are so difficult, are sometimes a little bleak. We smile, but on occasion, more than a little wryly. The laughter, when it comes, is often hollow.

That’s true, for instance, of our amusement over the dark irony that those leaders, from the radical, populist right, whose proclaimed aim it is to make their countries world leaders, in fact make them into laughingstocks.

Cummings (l), the organ grinder, and Johnson
The mini-Trump combo currently running Britain

This week that has been particularly true of Great Britain. That benighted country has a government headed by Dominic Cummings, the Prime Minister’s principal adviser, a man who led efforts to put in place the country’s lockdown regulations, but immediately broke them himself when he found that they inconvenienced him personally.

His decision to travel several hundred miles around the country while ill with Coronavirus, potentially infecting rather a lot of people on the way, was curious enough, but what was truly fascinating was his apparent inability to understand that anyone might find that behaviour reprehensible. He explained that he had problems organising childcare while he and his partner were in quarantine. It was as though no one else had ever faced similar difficulties, and his case should be treated as exceptional, because his circumstances were unique.

The Cummings government is fronted by Boris Johnson, a man often referred to as mini-Trump. He owes the nickname to his apparent desire to emulate the mega-Trump across the Atlantic. Why he should want to do that is hard to understand. It may be that he belongs to the shrinking band of people around the world who think Trump shows deftness of decision-making and sureness of vision, capable of inspiring people like Johnson with a desire to emulate him.

Anyway, this week the Cummings-Johnson duopoly went seemingly out of its way to provide us with material for laughs, if of the slightly grim kind. Johnson announced policy U-turns, on quarantining visitors returning from Spain and on tightening Coronavirus restrictions in the North of England, in the late evening and without anything like proper notice.

This gave the impression of a government without a strategy or any kind of ability to adopt measures in a rational or controlled manner. An impression which, if its track record is anything to go by, is entirely accurate.

One of Maggie Thatcher’s iconic sayings was in relation to U-turns. “You turn if you want to,” she told the 1980 Conservative Party conference. Then she paused for the inevitable applause and followed up with, “The Lady’s not for turning.” And the applause turned ecstatic.

Well, the Cummings-Johnson show clearly is for turning. Gyrating in the breeze, indeed.

So we laugh, grimly, at the irony of a government whose stated aim is to make Britain’s response to Coronavirus ‘world-beating’, while in fact it has succeeded only in making it laughable.

Trump:
braying can be quite funny but is no substitute for planning

Meanwhile, what’s the latest on mega-Trump? As he constantly assures us, researchers and drug companies in the US are working at speed (warp-speed, indeed, to adopt the administration’s own term, a reference to a form of travel in science fiction which corresponds to nothing real). Their efforts to develop a vaccine against Coronavirus are such that one may yet be available before the end of the year. But, it has now emerged, the administration has developed no plan to manage the distribution of the vaccine if one is developed, or to decide who should receive it first and who should wait as supplies ramp up.

As the received expression has it, fail to plan, plan to fail.

Another hollow laugh then, at yet another example of incompetence from Trump. Not, of course, that we expect anything else from him. Or indeed from Johnson.

I suppose it’s that complete fulfilment of expectations that makes Trump and Cummings-Johnson something to laugh at. Not a merry laugh. But a laugh all the same.

We should take some comfort from that much at least. See the funny side. Find a smile as an alternative to tears.

Though perhaps we might also pause a moment to learn an actual lesson. Which we might sum up quite neatly, as:

Plan to vote Populist, plan for disaster.

A watercourse, a poet and a lot of persecution

There’s a piece of doggerel most schoolkids learn by heart:

In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue

Rather fewer people, outside Spain anyway, know that 1492 was also the year that the last Moorish – Arab and Muslim – part of Spain fell to the Christian reconquest of the country. Ferdinand and Isabella, the ‘Catholic Monarchs’, captured the Emirate of Granada that year, making the entire Iberian Peninsula Christian once more.

The Alhambra in Granada
Fell to Ferdinand and Isabella when they defeated the Moors
And gave its name to their decree against the Jews

It was barely two months later that they issued the Alhambra decree, named for the great Moorish palace in Granada, expelling all practising Jews from Spain.

One of Spain’s, and indeed the world’s, greatest poets was Federico García Lorca. He was gay, in the early part of the twentieth century, when that was hardly a safe thing to be. He was also from Granada, and replying to a reporter in 1931, he said:

I think being from Granada gives me an inclination towards sympathetic understanding of the persecuted: the Gipsy, the Black, the Jew…, the Moor, that we all have within us.

He might have added “the homosexual” but that might have been dangerous.

Lorca. Outstanding poet. Champion of the oppressed

By the summer of 1936, it had become dangerous simply to be Lorca. That was when the military uprising, against the Republic that then ruled Spain, began.

The rebel leader was Francisco Franco, who would hold Spain in a rigid dictatorship for nearly four decades. His regime had no time for a gay champion of underprivileged minorities.

The Nationalists Franco led also believed that the revolt was a crusade for Christian values. So they were particularly ill-disposed towards Lorca for the comments he made during an interview in June 1936, just weeks before the military rebellion started. Asked for his view of the Christian reconquest of Granada, he replied:

It was a very bad moment, though they say the opposite in the schools. We lost an admirable civilisation, a poetry, an astronomy, an architecture and a delicacy unique to the world, and replaced them with a poor, cowardly city, a land of piety in which the worst of the Spanish bourgeoisie operates today.

Unforgivable words for the Nationalists who, just two months later, caught up with Lorca and murdered him.

All this came to back to me while walking in the hills above Valencia the other day.

This region is remarkably fertile. Far more so than the relatively poor country around Granada. It doesn’t rain often, but when it does, the rain comes down like a waterfall, in storms that usually last three or four days.

That means there’s all the water agriculture around here needs. The trick is to manage it well, so that it doesn’t all seep away to the sea in between the storms. And, to this day, the locals are happy to acknowledge that the irrigation systems they use are based on techniques their ancestors learned from the Arabs.

Irrigation water flowing in the Sierra above Valencia

That made it poignant to walk along watercourses guiding irrigation water from the mountains to the fields and orchards. Every few metres there’s a side channel, with a small sluice to let water into the adjoining fields or keep it out. These structures are modern, not Moorish, but they use the same principles.

My mother had a refrain when talking about Spain. The two great errors of that nation’s history, she maintained, errors which ensured its long-term decline, were defeating the Moors and kicking out the Jews. With them, they lost their best agriculturalists (to say nothing of the cultural wealth Lorca listed) and their most skilled financiers and traders.

So walking along a watercourse in the hills above Valencia isn’t a simple, innocent exercise. It’s redolent with historical meaning. In the Moors, Spain had an outstanding civilisation, which it defeated and overthrew, to its own lasting harm.

In the Jews, it had another great minority with much to contribute, persecuted for merely being other.

And centuries later, Spain produced a magnificent poet, who understood and empathised. Who knew what it was to be oppressed. Who, finally, fell to that very oppression at the hands of a dictator certain he was acting for his white, Christian and Spanish nation.

And who, by doing so, inflicted further damage on that nation, just as the earlier persecutors had.

The saddest aspect of all these memories? The descendants of those self-harming oppressors are ready to do it all again. The Trumps, the Johnsons, the Leaders of the Italian League or of Spanish Vox. They learn nothing and keep making the mistake of thinking that homogeneity is the way to greatness.

Whereas, as Lorca knew, it’s stultifying and ultimately fatal.

Water, water everywhere. All for the land to drink

Boris coup: Day 7

Day 7 of the Boris coup already. Time flies when you’re dismantling democracy.

Boris keeps using democratic language to mask his authoritarian intentions. He keeps piling it on. First, he threatened any fellow Conservative who opposed him in parliament with expulsion, meaning they wouldn’t be able to stand as Conservative candidates in any future election, ensuring their careers end ignominiously.

Now, he’s followed up on that threat by warning MPs that if Parliament votes to block a no-deal Brexit, he’ll call an election for 14 October. That would make the end of their careers much more imminent than they imagined. He feels it would focus their minds more clearly on the need to bow to his will.

You see? There’s nothing more democratic than an election. But in his hands, it becomes a blackmail threat to cow anyone with the guts to stand up to him.

Johson (l) and Corbyn may soon face off in an election
They both think they’re election winners but only one’s a truly redoubtable campaigner

It’s not entirely up to BoJo to call an election. He needs a two-thirds majority in the House of Commons. But the Labour leader Corbyn has been calling for an election for so long that he could hardly have his party vote against one now. He should, though: no opposition party has won an election from as low a poll standing as Labour currently enjoys (if ‘enjoy’ is the right word).

Corbynists try to comfort themselves with the thought that their man performed so much better than expected last time, in 2017. They forget that then he was up against Theresa May, who surprised most of us by turning out to be not just a mediocre campaigner but an absolutely lamentable one. Wooden, uncharismatic, constantly repeating the same phrase, “strong and stable”, long after voters had lost all enthusiasm for it.

As the coup experience has shown, Boris Johnson is a campaigner in a different league. He’s building a solid base in the electorate. It seems a near-certainty that he would win an election held in the next few weeks.

In fact, his greatest threat was from his right, from Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party. But Farage has said he would stand down candidates if Johnson sticks firmly to pursuing a no-deal Brexit. And Johnson certainly will.

Not that he says as much. He still claims that he’s pursuing a new deal. But he has repeatedly made clear that such a deal would have to drop the so-called backstop to keep the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic open. However, even the people he’s commissioned to find alternative solutions have told him they can’t.

As always with BoJo, most of what he says is simply smoke screen. Get through the smoke and you find more smoke. If you get right through all the layers, what you’ll find at the end is the one solid goal he has: Britain will leave the EU on 31 October, and will do so without a deal.

It’s his ability to deploy duplicity so effectively and capture support, even among people who know he’s lying, that makes him so redoubtable an adversary. I think some in Corbynist ranks are beginning to realise that. But, sadly, too few. 

And far too late.