Sarah Palin: the intellectually challenged would like to challenge us linguistically

Sarah Palin, firmly in the running, if not leading the field to be the most intellectually challenged candidate ever for US Vice President, has called on immigrants to her country to “speak American.”

Palin: verbally challenged as well as intellectually

There are some 400 million Americans who speak Spanish as a first language. 38 million of them live in the United States. Only about 256 million US citizens speak English as a first language, with a shade under 20 million Canadians and a few million West Indians. So if it means anything at all, the notion of “American” as a language must first and foremost mean Spanish.

Naturally, that isn’t what Palin intended. In her CNN interview, she went on to clarify – and I use the word “clarify” in a broad sense – “I mean, that’s just, that’s – let’s speak English.”

Verbal expression is perhaps not her strong point (though, to be honest, I’ve rather given up trying to find out what her strong point might actually be.) According to The Guardian, she ended her piece with an appeal to be given charge of the Department of Energy:

I think a lot about the Department of Energy, because energy is my baby, oil and gas and minerals, those things that God has dumped on this part of the Earth for mankind’s use, instead of relying on unfriendly foreign nations for us to import their resources.

She ended with this stirring tribute to her plans for the department: 

And if I were head of that I would get rid of it.

If by “American” she means “English”, then before Palin calls on others to learn the language, perhaps she could take a little trouble to master it more fully herself.

Africa, land of dreams where even nightmares can be fun

Isn’t it great when things happen just as you’d expect them to? Even if the events themselves are far from pleasurable.

At the back end of the sixties, my parents were living in what had once been the Congo, was the Zaïre then, and today has reverted to being the Congo again (the one wittily referred to as the ‘Democratic Republic’). They took my brother and me for a Christmas holiday in the bush, and as we drove at nightfall into a market town which, it turned out, the President of the Republic was visiting the next day, we were arrested by trigger-happy, drunken soldiers. Or perhaps it was the police. The town had been taken over by detachments from both forces, they were much the worse for drink, they were armed and loathed each other, so they were generating the kind of atmosphere that would make a meeting of Sarah Palin supporters look tame.

The rifles across the bonnet of our Land Rover might have been the start of something classically African with an ugly ending involving bodies in a ditch, although generally that’s the kind of thing that happens to locals rather than to European visitors. In any case, things weren’t quite as nasty in the Congo then as now, and in the end it only took the half bottle of whisky that reduced our sentry to maudlin complaints about the difficulties that beset his life and a few dollars that made them easier to contemplate, to persuade him to turn his back and let us drive away.

Now fast forward over four decades and our recent trip to the Gambia. We decided to visit a game reserve in Senegal, partly to see some impressive animals – and there were a few – partly to tick another box: ‘Senegal – been there’. Unfortunately, although those of us who had British passports had no trouble, three of us were travelling on French papers and for some reason the Gambians have it in for the French. Odd, isn’t it? I mean, the Brits were the colonial power. Why the special aversion towards the colonialists of the country next door?

Anyway, the French passport holders had had to get themselves visas, at the last moment, before we even set out for the Gambia. And at the border, we ran into difficulties again.

‘I’m afraid your visas are for a single visit,’ said the grey-clad corporal behind the desk, ‘if I stamp your passports now to authorise your exit from the Gambia, you’ll have to buy new visas on the way back. At 350 Dalassis.’ Mental calculators went to work, contents of wallets were brought to mind. Yes, three times 350 – we could do that. We’d come this far, we’d go ahead.

The cynical among us thought ‘yep, this is Africa. You can fix anything with a few banknotes.’ For a moment I felt a burst of superiority because we don’t have that kind of corruption in Western Europe, but then it occurred to me that at least African corruption is democratic: we can all practice it, whereas in Britain you can buy the whole government, but only if you own a bank or a major company.

We visited the game park, we returned to the border. Our little corporal in grey had been replaced by a large sergeant in khaki.

‘Ah, yes, my colleague talked about you. He made a mistake. A big mistake. As of January the first, the price for the visa has gone up.’ Why wasn’t I surprised? ‘It’s now a thousand Dalassis.’

Now that wasn’t so funny, even though it’s actually only £25. The problem was that we didn’t have the cash with us. Besides, I don’t mind being bent, but I dislike being chiselled. We all burst into protest.

‘But if we’d known we wouldn’t have gone...’

‘We don’t have the money...’

‘It was your colleague who told us...’

The colleague reappeared. ‘Yes, yes, I know,’ he said, ‘it was my mistake. Just wait here. I’ll go and see my manager.’

He reappeared a few minutes later. He sat and the desk and changed an entry in a hand-written ledger.

‘It was our fault. This time you will pay nothing.’

‘We want you to come back,’ explained the sergeant, ‘so even though it was you Westerners who invented visas and charges, we will waive the payment on this occasion. But next time be more careful.’

‘Next time,’ I said, ‘we’ll come to the Gambia and stay in the Gambia.’ The sergeant liked this idea, and suddenly everyone was laughing and smiling.

‘I want to give you a kiss,’ said Danielle to the corporal.

There was a horrified silence followed by pandemonium. The corporal was trying to back his chair through the wall, giggling hysterically as he tried to keep away from Danielle who had come round to his side of the desk. The sergeant was guffawing; then he issued an urgent instruction:

‘No, no, wait,’ and turning to another policeman, he said, ‘don’t let him go,’ pointing to the corporal.

He positively ran out of the room, showing a surprising turn of speed, as big men sometimes do. He returned with another corporal only slightly smaller than him, and in the same dun-coloured uniform.

‘Now kiss him,’ he announced. The chaos started again, with the sergeant and his corporal applauding loudly. Danielle got behind her target and planted a kiss on the top of his head.




Kissing the corporal: an unusual brush with African bureaucracy

And so our gloriously African brush with authority ended without our having to pay anything, after all, and with laughter all round. Because this was the Gambia, and not Rwanda or Eastern Congo, and Gambians, as they never tire of telling you, think that it’s ‘nice to be nice.’

Postscript

The Gambia is basically just a strip of land round a river. We had taken the ferry across on the outward journey; on the return, that would have meant a long wait. So we took one of the open, wooden boats that many Gambians use instead.

They often talk about ‘dancing boats’, meaning that they tip alarmingly to one side or the other at the slightest provocation, but ‘never capsize’, or so they claim. We noticed that a great many Gambians were determined to wait for the next ferry, even for an hour or more, rather than entrust their lives to those boats. Since we've returned, Danielle's turned up any number of blogs warning people never, at any cost, to take these boats.

A dancing boat seen from the ferry

It’s true that on the other side, our boat hit the pier and got caught on a sandbank – we had to help get it off by tipping it from one side to the other, and were nearly precipitated into the water for our pains. But hey, the weather was lovely, the water was calm, and the boat did at least provide life jackets. Not enough to go round, and the flotation material had mostly rotted away, and you couldn’t close them anyway, but it was a nice gesture.

And in any case we made it. And enjoyed chatting to the people round us. And having another fine African experience.

Nixon and his successors: rememberance of things past, anticipation of things to come

Little incidents can bring buried memories flooding back, so that a distant moment is suddenly with you again as though you were living it now.

For Proust, it was the taste of a Madeleine cake conjuring up his childhood.

For me, this weekend, it was seeing the latest releases of extracts from the Nixon tapes. Suddenly, I was back in a New York street, in fine rain, the street lights glistening on the wet pavements, in front of a shop window with a poster whose evocative message had stopped me in mid-stride.

Tricky Dicky: man of confidence or confidence man?

Oh, for those long-lost days when the United States had a President who was clearly not a man forced into politics only because he couldn’t make a success of any other career. With his wits and ethics, Tricky Dicky Nixon could have flourished in many other walks of life. Say, as a market trader.

Doesn’t it warm the cockles of the heart to remember those glorious aphorisms of his such as ‘When the president does it, that means that it’s not illegal’?

What’s been coming out now? It seems that ‘…the Irish can’t drink … Virtually every Irish I’ve known gets mean when he drinks. Particularly the real Irish.’ The Italians: ‘those people … don’t have their heads screwed on tight.’ And as for the Jews, they ‘are just a very aggressive and abrasive and obnoxious personality.’ Don’t limit your amazement to the sentiment, let yourself go in wonder at his command of the English language too.

As for Blacks, he commented on the view expressed by a colleague that ‘they are coming along, and that after all they are going to strengthen our country in the end because they are strong physically and some of them are smart’. ‘Some of them are smart’ and ‘they are coming along’ were, it seems, judgements that were just a little too generous. ‘My own view is I think he’s right if you’re talking in terms of 500 years. I think it’s wrong if you’re talking in terms of 50 years. What has to happen is they have be, frankly, inbred.’ Ah, yes, a little breeding is what these people need. Presumably to turn them into shining examples of humanity such as the Nixon product itself. And don’t you just admire the prescience? I mean, he was speaking over three decades before the election of Obama.

I noticed that USA Today reacted with something less than enthusiasm to one of Nixon’s utterances. Talking about the prospects of Ronald Reagan occupying the Oval Office, he had said ‘Good God, can you imagine – can you really imagine – him sitting here?’ And he added ‘I can imagine anyone ... but Reagan.’

The paper seemed to feel that Nixon had revealed a character flaw (even the finest have them) in misjudging this great man who would indeed eventually follow him into the White House.

Reagan had his own magnificent quotations. Faced with student unrest at Berkeley, he showed his resolution: ‘If it's to be a bloodbath, let it be now. Appeasement is not the answer.’ Later, he denied that he had called for a bloodbath. He’d probably forgotten he’d said it. His was another of those times that conjure up feelings of nostalgia, in his case for a President with the gifts that come from incipient Alzheimer’s.

Since then the same Grand Old Party has thrown up two George Bushes to teach us to rate Reagan more highly.

But it isn’t nostalgia that is my main emotion today, it’s that delightful tingle that anticipation of the future gives. Could the Republicans be about to serve us up another White House occupant to make even Dubya look good?

Remind yourself of gems such as:

“Refudiate,” “misunderestimate,” “wee-wee’d up.” English is a living language. Shakespeare liked to coin new words too. Got to celebrate it!’

Isn’t that worthy of Nixon at his best?

And what about:

... obviously, we've got to stand with our North Korean allies.

The command of foreign policy and sensitivity to its nuances is deeply reminiscent of Reagan, isn’t it? For instance, in his famous statement into a live mike:

My fellow Americans, I am pleased to tell you I just signed legislation which outlaws Russia forever. The bombing begins in five minutes.

Who’d have thought anyone could make us look back on Reagan and Dubya as men to miss? And to feel that Tricky Dicky, deceitful, racist and convinced he was above the law, represented something of a golden age?

Yep. Get ready to enjoy the Sarah Palin show.

Government magic

The key skill of the conjuror is sleight of hand. There's a brilliant trick being carried off by leading politicians in a number of countries at the moment, which consists of taking hold of widely-held views, often directed against politicians, and skilfully turning them to their advantage.

A curious trait of our democracies is that though we choose our governments, we loathe them as soon as they’re elected. By getting into office, any politician becomes at a stroke a lying, cheating snake who’s just like all the others. They get worse and worse until they’re finally forced out of public life, to general relief.

At that point a strange process of rehabilitation often gets under way. There are exceptions, of course: it’ll be a while before anyone starts to think any better of Tony Blair, for instance. But with most politicians, once they’re out of office, people begin to warm to them again. Jimmy Carter was one of the most reviled politicians in the West, defeated for a second term by a third-rate former Hollywood actor who was probably already suffering from the Alzheimer’s that later killed him. Thirty years on, Carter has attained a status little short of sainthood.

In part, the dislike of government takes the form of a desire to see more power exercised locally. The trouble is that we dislike local politicians even more than national ones. Who are they to strut around making themselves important when we know that all they’ve done is get elected to a job no more than a handful of people would consider worth doing in the first place?

Now national politicians, aware of our distrust of all politicians, and our particular dislike of local ones, have started to turn these feelings to their advantage.

In Britain, for instance, our smart new government has set up an ‘Office for Budget Responsibility’. This is staffed by economists, not politicians, and will make forecasts about future trends in the economy and rule on the advisability of financial measures proposed by government.

Fascinating isn’t it? We spent centuries wresting the power to tax from the unelected busybodies surrounding the king. Why, it was because Charles I was trying to raise taxes for a foreign war that we rose against him and sent him to the scaffold. When our colonists in North America in turn rose against us their war cry was ‘no taxation without representation’. Yet now we want to hand over financial control to a bunch of unelected so-called experts.

And what sort of experts are they? Economists. Please tell me that I’m not alone in seeing an irony here. As J K Galbraith, an economist himself, pointed out, the role of economists is to make astrologers look good. On the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England in the run up to the financial crash, only one of the nine experts called for reductions in the interest rate; seven voted to leave them unchanged for month after month; there was even one who called for them to be raised. It turns out that David Blanchflower, the lone advocate for a reduction, was the one who got it right. Eight out of nine got it wrong. Again and again.

Now we’re supposed to put our faith in experts like them?

But the real beauty of the creation of the Office for Budget Responsibility is the way it plays to the distrust of politicians in general while strengthening the hands of those politicians who happen to be in power. As ‘experts’, economists have an aura of authority which politicians don’t. This has been used to the benefit of the very politicians that make up the government: last week figures worked out by the Office for Budget Responsibility and showing that the impact of the government's economic policy on unemployment was, unsurprisingly, going to be catastrophic, were leaked to The Guardian. That proved embarrassing for the government. No problem: the Office rushed out some new predictions that ‘corrected’ the earlier ones. One might quibble that they were based on forecasts for private sector growth that most commentators think are wildly optimistic. But hey, they’re a lot more comfortable for the government, and they have the authority of having been produced by ‘independent experts’.

The other wonderful initiative in England is called ‘Free schools’. This is equally clever in the way that it plays simultaneously on the desire for local control and the dislike of local politicians.

Obviously, no school can be free, they all cost money. They'll be free to parents, of course, though not free to society: like any state school, these ones will be paid for by all of us, through our taxes. The freedom of their name, though, will lie in the fact that the parents will run them, allowing them to avoid the supposedly bureaucratic control of local authorities.

One of the most outspoken supporters of this plan is a character called Toby Young. He puts together a smartly constructed justification for why we should all fund a school he can run himself for his own kids, whatever impact that may have on any coherent educational strategy his local authority may be pursuing for children in his neighbourhood generally.

Young seems to be aspiring to be the thinking Englishman’s equivalent of what Sarah Palin is in the United States. I say ‘thinking’ because he's good at writing, if you have the stomach for his particular brand of Fox News-style ultra-right wing diatribe, and when Palin was questioned about what papers she consulted, she made it clear that she hadn’t even fully mastered reading yet. On the other hand, having heard Young in public argument, I’m not convinced he has her open-mindedness or her sensitivity to nuance. At one point he told an opponent ‘I don’t want to get personal’. Why do people say that kind of thing? Everyone knows there’s a ‘but’ coming, followed by a personal attack. Since no-one was forcing him to make it, he must clearly have wanted to.

In any case, since they take public money, the schools will be subject to the usual checks on their administration and their standards. If local authorities don’t do the monitoring, who will? You got it. Central government. So a degree of authority and the funding for these schools will have been switched from local to national control, and all in the name of local autonomy.

See what I mean about conjuring? Pick a card, pick any card, but whichever it is, the government wins. And there are even clever, articulate people like Toby Young who'll give a veneer of plausibility to the deception.

And just like any magic act, it ultimately only works because of our willingness to let ourselves be duped.

Ah, well. Hamlet got it about right: ‘what a piece of work is man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculty.’