It was a shitshow. That seems to be the consensus among commentators on the first Presidential debate of the 2020 US election. Which was anything but presidential.
As others have pointed out, it was a startling contrast to the New Zealand TV debate between the two women running for Prime Minister, who contrived to stay polite and even find nice things to say about each other. The two men running for US President merely hammered on, though most of the noise was Trump’s, and it was more bullying than mere hammering.
Biden has been criticised for calling Trump a clown (a judgement unfair only to clowns), pointing out that he’s the worst president the US has seen (I can’t think of one who was worse), and saying “will you shut up, man”.
None of these remarks strike me as reprehensible. Surely, in calling on Trump to shut up he was only echoing what a lot – I hope a majority – of Americans were already thinking. In any case, I notice that the Democrats had a “Will you shut up, man” tee shirt out on sale before the debate had even come to a close, so they must have worked out that the reproach would strike a chord with many.
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| On the way to iconic status... |
After all, we’re always being told that the only way to deal with a bully is to stand up to him. So why should Biden back down? It seems to me, that “shut up” is exactly what a bully needs to hear when he refuses to stop ranting.
Juan Carlos I is the former King of Spain who had to stand down (or abdicate since royals being ‘special’ have their own word for it) back in 2014. He did a runner a few weeks ago, eventually turning up in Abu Dhabi. Good luck to him, I say, because I can’t imagine I’d want to live there, and it seems he’s not happy about it either.
So he’s pretty much discredited now. But back on 10 November 2007, he won admiration around the world.
On that day, Juan Carlos attended a Spanish-Latin American summit meeting in Santiago, Chile. Also present was the late Hugo Chávez, the man who in his drive as President to make his people prosperous, set in train the process by which oil-rich Venezuela has become a starving basket case of dictatorship and corruption.
At the summit meeting, Chávez did a Trump. That’s not surprising: these autocrats have far more in common than separates them, whether they’re from the left or the right. Chávez was just the same kind of authoritarian bully then as Trump is now.
He went into a great rant about the behaviour of the Spanish in Latin America. Spain’s behaviour in the Americas, like Portugal’s, like England’s, like France’s, was certainly appalling and unforgiveable. But Chávez tried to present it as a personal affront to him and his people by present-days Spaniards. That’s amusing, since most present-day Spaniards are descended from the ones who stayed behind and didn’t go to Latin America, whereas the majority of modern Latin Americans, including Chávez himself (despite his having some indigenous blood), are at least in part descended from the conquistadors who wreaked such havoc on the continent. If anyone needed to apologise for the historical atrocities of their ancestors, it would have been the likes of Chávez.
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| Juan Carlos, palm vertical, telling Chávez, back to camera to shut up Prime Minister Zapatero, left of the King, had been trying to speak |
The meeting applauded him. Around the world, people applauded him. As with the Democratic Party today, tee shirts were made with “¿Por qué no te callas?” emblazoned across the front of them. Why, people even used the words as a ring tone on their phones.
Sometimes “shut up” really is the only thing to say.
Which puts me in mind of my son Michael and my daughter-out-law Raquel who, coincidentally, is Spanish. Her English is outstanding, but she does sometimes have a little trouble mastering some colloquialisms.
Now I understand that rows are rare between Michael and Raquel but they do occasionally – very occasionally – occur. During one recently, Raquel did a Biden against Trump, or a Juan Carlos against Chávez, on Michael.
“Just fuck the shut up,” she told him.
After three or four occurrences, Michael could cope no longer and burst into laughter.
“What’s so funny?” she demanded to know.
“The expression,” he assured her as he tried to control his laughing, “is ‘shut the fuck up’.”
She absorbed this for a moment and then, gifted with an fine sense of humour and that vital trait, a capacity for self-deprecation (missing in both Trump and Chávez), she burst into laughter too. Which of course ended the row and re-established equanimity between them.
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| Michael and Raquel An unusual row with a memorable outcome |
Today, no one can remember what the row was about. But “fuck the shut up”? No one’s going to forget that for a long time.
In fact, this summer I told my granddaughter this story. That’s my fifteen-year old granddaughter, Aya, not one-year-old Matilda, not quite ready yet to appreciate its finer points.
Aya was amused.
The next day, I was gently teasing her, indulging as so often in a series of dad jokes – or perhaps, in this context, I should say granddad jokes – when she answered me, with calm and self-control.
“Fuck the shut up,” she said.
Hoist on my own petard! The very story I’d told her the day before, turned around and used against me. I was so proud of her.
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| Matilda and Aya Two smart cookies, only one giving backchat yet |
She (and Raquel) had underlined how enriching the demand to shut up can be, when aptly placed.
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