Saying goodbye to the US at the end of the pre-Donald era

It’s the day before the US Presidential inauguration. I’m at the end of a two-week packed stay in the States, full of small but telling experiences in the run up to the country being Trumped, the end of what I suppose we shall have to think of as the pre-Donald era, an era we may shortly look back on with nostalgia.

I’ve always liked the character of Blanche Dubois in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar named Desire. She “always depended on the kindness of strangers” and, when I’m travelling alone, so do I. They’re not always kind, of course, but on this trip I met many that were.

In a Boston museum, I became aware of a woman pushing another in a wheelchair (her mother? I think it might have been). I sped up a little to get to the door ahead of us and hold it for them but, before I even got there, I heard the mother say, “why, thank you,” and when I looked around, she explained, “I see your intention.” I could only tell her I was pleased to have had it correctly interpreted.

In a restaurant, the Italian colleague who was with me on that occasion chose to apologise for a misunderstanding over our order by saying, “I am sorry. We are both foreigners.”

“Please don’t confuse me with Donald Trump,” came the answer.

Both in Boston and further up the coast north of the city, I could find no one with a kind word for the soon-to-be 45th President. But this of course is Massachusetts, which voted by a nearly two-to-one majority against him. In any case, as my mother pointed out when I told her, she had found it practically impossible to find anyone who had voted for Nixon when she was living in New York in the seventies, “and he was elected twice.”

Later I travelled to Philadelphia, in Pennsylvania which voted for Trump, giving a Republican the preference for the first time since Ronald Reagan. There I visited the hall where a bunch of insurgent liberals gathered back in 1776 and decided they’d had quite enough of British Tory government, just as I have today. It was ironic that it was in the city where Thomas Jefferson wrote the ringing appeal for liberty in the Declaration of Independence, that I first came across open backing of the Trump presidency.

Where the Declaration of Independence was adoptedCould they imagine they were preparing a Trump presidency?

I had lunch in a simple cafe where I had to return to the counter to fetch my meal. The tables were packed close and I must have bumped the man at the next table to mine. I didn’t hear what he said to me but apparently he’d sworn at me aggressively. When I returned, the young women at the table on the other side of mine pushed it aside and invited me to come through that way and not chance provoking the hostile diner. I thanked them.

“Strange things are happening to our country,” one of them replied.

It struck me as a neat metaphor of the division in the US, between brutality on the one hand and a degree of tolerance on the other.

Later that day, I was sitting in an alcove of a hotel bar when a mother and daughter (yes, another pair) came in and took the seats opposite me. Most of the time they talked about everyday matters – you know, “well, you can always phone me”, “oh, I don’t want to disturb you, I know how busy you are”, the usual family things – but at the end they came to politics.

“Obama demeaned the presidency,” Mum assured us, “I’ve never seen the presidency reduced so low.”

There was a shocked pause, which struck me as the appropriate reaction to such an assertion.

“You mean…,” the daughter replied, “you expect Trump to raise the standing of the presidency?”

It seemed that was exactly what she expected. “He’ll speak for the nation, and won’t let special interests push him around or buy him off.”

As she was leaving, she pointed out that I’d probably listened to the conversation, and asked my view.

“I’m from the other side of the Atlantic,” I told them, “you won’t find many of us over there who are keen on the Trump presidency.”

The daughter smiled.

“Well, we are,” said Mum, with emphasis. “Friday. You’re going to see. We’re on the way back and not a day too soon. We have a lot to fix.”

Oh, well. That Friday’s nearly on us. Trump and his team start “fixing” things tomorrow. It should be quite a spectacle.

I’ll be watching it from a distance. I fly back on the eve of his triumphal entry to the White House. Back to the relative safety of Britain.

Where can I have the joy of watching my own country embrace its version of Trump: the ghastly retreat into walled-off isolation we call Brexit.

I see nothing to justify my indulging any sense of superiority over our American cousins...

A good book prompts a trip down memory lane

What could be better than a book that offers a quick burst of pleasurable nostalgia? Especially if it’s a good book.

It was years and years ago – perhaps as many as fifteen – that I first travelled to Toronto. It was February and I’d been given to understand that the winter was cruel in that part of the world, with eight-foot snow drifts and most of the life of the city taking place underground. Imagine my delight when I turned up to blue skies and balmy temperatures, with only small traces of snow still lying around. Why, I even went for a walk along Lake Ontario (OK, not in shirtsleeves) and I think the word to describe it is charming.

Funnily, I’ve been back once more since, again in February, and again to the same weather. So I enjoy informing Canadian friends of the pleasure I’ve had enjoying the mild winters of Ontario.

At that time, Borders had opened few I any bookshops in England – certainly I hadn’t come across any. Later of course they mushroomed, all replete with their inbuilt Starbucks, offering a satisfying experience of being able to browse huge numbers of books and then have a coffee. Satisfying, that experience, but not sufficiently to resist the competition of Amazon – order the book from the comfort of your own couch, make your own latte and avoid all the hassle of traffic and finding a parking spot. So like mushrooms they opened, and like mushrooms they vanished, without even filling an omelette.

Since it was all new to me, I took great pleasure in spending a couple of hours in a huge Borders (with coffee, of course) in central Toronto. And inevitably bought three or four books. But considerations of economy, and luggage weight, made me put back on the shelf one that had attracted my attention.

Inevitably, once I was home, I decided that of all the books I’d looked at, that was the one I should have taken.

Now roll forward a few years, to January 2006. Danielle and I visited New Orleans, just five months after the havoc wreaked by Hurricane Katrina. Our hotel room was up high, and everywhere we looked we could see blue sheets on roofs that had been stripped of their tiles. The streets smelled distinctly of mould, like a damp cellar that’s been neglected too long. And everywhere one could feel the shortage of people – restaurants all had signs up, “looking for cooks – se busca cocineros” or similar.

New Orleans, returned to life

There was also, however, an atmosphere of staunch resistance. The city had been struck. But it was going to re-emerge, and do so with all the beauty and charm for which it is famed.

A little way from the centre, we found a pleasant bookshop. Not a huge affair like the one in Toronto, but something much more comfortable and human in scale. It suddenly occurred to me that they might have that book I’d failed to buy.

There were two women in their thirties running the shop. All bookshops, at one time, seemed to be run by two, sometimes three, women aged something between 30 and 60. They were always polite, friendly and fiendishly well-informed.

“I was looking for a book,” I started, always an intelligent way to open a question in a bookshop, “and I don’t remember what it was called, but it seemed to be contrasting the lives of Thomas Jefferson and John Marshall… I’m sorry, I know that’s pretty vague…”

“Do you mean James F. Simon’s What kind of nation?” asked the thirtyish woman, in her glasses and cardigan (did I say they always wore glasses and cardigans?) “I think we have it in stock.”

She marched me over to the other side of the shop and knelt at a low bookshelf.

“Yes, here it is,” she told me as she handed over a copy of the very book I was after.

Now, last month I finished listening to, rather than reading – I’m into audio books these days: they’re great when walking a dog or vacuuming a floor – Lincoln and Chief Justice Taney which, like the earlier book, compares a president with a Supreme Court Chief Justice. It’s an interesting formula, because we tend to know a little about Presidents, but usually next to nothing about judges. And yet they can fundamentally mould the direction of a nation.

That was certainly true of John Marshall, a last minute appointment by the last Federalist President John Adams before he handed over to his nemesis (but also friend – yes, it’s a great story) Thomas Jefferson. By naming Marshall, Adams hoped to leave some Federalist influence to reign in the Republican Jefferson, whom he regarded as dangerously radical. Marshall made a great many key judgements, not least one of his first, which established that the Supreme Court could carry out judicial review – specify, in fact, whether a law was actually legal – a pretty key power.

So it made for a good book. But so was Lincoln and Taney. Lincoln was, of course, the President who won the Civil War and outlawed Slavery. On the way to that happy outcome, he encountered one of the most significant, but infamous decisions of the Supreme Court, made by Roger Taney: the judgement of the Dred Scott case buttressed slavery and, worse still, authorised the principle that blacks in the US could never be citizens and ““…had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

Strong stuff, and well handled by the author. Who turned out to be James F. Simon.

I should have guessed, of course, since the formula was so similar. And Simon has the rare distinction of being both a fine historian and a lawyer. So this approach works particularly well for him.

Both books were a pleasure.

But the greatest pleasure of all was to be reminded of the conditions in which I first discovered their author. In the pleasant winter weather of Toronto. And the charm of a stricken city that was quickly emerging from its pain – with intelligence, grace and elegance.

The traces of that great convenient institution, slavery

Hasn’t it been interesting to watch the recent incidents in South Carolina? First there were the killings in Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church that left nine dead. And then State legislators voted to take down the Confederate flag flying outside the State Capitol.

The events reflect the greatest unresolved issue of US life, a deeply ingrained racism that has its roots in the belief that it was perfectly legitimate for one people, simply on the basis of its skin colour, to enslave another. Not that this was a specifically American abuse: the slaves were supplied to the Americas by European Whites. The cities of Nantes in France, or Bristol and Liverpool in England, owed much of their prosperity to the slave trade.

One of the benefits of the institution, for slave-owning (and therefore wealthy) white men, was that it provided what I suppose we could call comfort, on demand, on their doorstep. It’s now generally accepted that Thomas Jefferson fathered several children on his slave Sally Hemings. The practice of taking a slave as a concubine was not at all rare on the plantations. In fact, it was in that same State of South Carolina, that a lady name Mary Boykin Chestnut, quoted by Jon Meacham in his masterly biography of Jefferson, commented:

Any lady is able to tell who is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody’s household but their own. Those she seems to think drop from the clouds.

However, there was a benefit – again for wealthy white males – that I hadn’t been aware of until I read another fine Meacham biography, this one of Andrew Jackson. He talks about Colonel Richard M. Johnson, a Kentucky congressman who later became Vice President, and who claimed that he had himself killed the great Shawnee chieftain Tecumseh during the War of 1812.

He lived for a time and completely openly in a common-law marriage with a biracial (“mulatto”) slave called Julia Chinn, and their two daughters. When Chinn died in 1833, he took up with another slave, but discovered that she was being unfaithful to him. So he sold her, and moved on to her sister instead.

Richard M. Johnson
US Politician who knew how to make the most of slavery

Ah, yes. I can see how that would work. It provides a whole new meaning for the notion of a “mistress”, if she’s someone you can simply sell to someone else if she displeases you. A mistress entirely subject to your authority? Must be convenient. And it only needed her to have a small proportion of African descent (one sixty-fourth was enough to hold someone in slavery) to produce that convenience.

It’s not hard to imagine that the possession of such attitudes would leave a mark. Nor is it surprising that two centuries on, they haven’t been entirely expunged.

Again, though, don’t think that this kind of thinking applies only to the US. Today, there’s a serious problem of illegal migrants trying to get through the Channel Tunnel into Britain. And David Cameron, our Prime Minister, referred to them as “swarms” of migrants.

"Swarms" of migrants at Calais
Trying to take advantage of a strike to get into Britain

Human beings reduced to the level of insects. No wonder that back then we had no problem selling other humans to America. To provide convenient but not exactly ennobling services to their new masters.

Greek debt: parallels and contrasts with the US

Greeks who remember the German occupation, according to the BBC, are now talking about another invasion by Germany without a shot being fired.

Greece will, it seems, stay in the Euro. At least for the moment. It will do so at the cost of measures that apparently represent more severe austerity than the terms rejected by Greeks in a referendum just over a week ago. It feels like Greek voters have lost, but German politicians – apparently the fiercest critics of Greece and the harshest in their demands of them – have won.

Merkel may have avoided this destiny so far
But certainly not be being gentle with Greece

This reminds me of how the United States dealt with a similar crisis, when it faced debt problems not unlike those of Greece within the Eurozone.

The original constitution of the United States was deeply unsatisfactory, giving almost no power – certainly no power to raise funds – to the national government, and leaving most authority in the hands of the States. It became increasingly clear over just a few years that the situation was untenable and something with a more serious Federal government at its centre would have to be set up.

A Convention met and drew up the Constitution of the United States that we know today (though at that stage without any amendments, of course). George Washington became the first President and, among an all-star cast of Ministers, he appointed Alexander Hamilton as his Secretary of the Treasury (Minister of Finance).

Now there’s little on which I agree with Hamilton, particularly his views of popular sovereignty, but that’s for another debate. On finance, he was something of a wizard. And one of his first major measures concerned what came to be known as Assumption – not a religious moment, except for those whose God in Mammon, but the initiative by which the Federal government would take over the debts incurred by the individual States in fighting the War of Independence.

That was great news for Massachusetts and South Carolina, which were saddled with heavy debts (viz Greece) but not so good for Virginia and North Carolina which had cleared most of theirs, and didn’t appreciate having to pick up the tabs for the others (viz Germany). There was a battle royal. James Madison, destined to become the Republic’s fourth president, was a Congressman at the time and led the campaign against Assumption. He defeated the proposal.

The story has it that Alexander Hamilton met Thomas Jefferson, then Secretary of State but destined to be the third President, in the street outside Jefferson’s house. He was distraught and Jefferson invited him in. Hamilton explained that without Assumption, certain States would be driven towards bankruptcy, and also the Federal government would be shown to be powerless to face up to dealing with a financial crisis (viz the Eurozone).

What’s more, Hamilton maintained the apparently paradoxical view that the Federal government would be accepting a “national blessing” by taking on the debt: it would oblige it to collect taxes and establish it as creditworthy (viz the Eurozone again).

Jefferson was a close ally of Madison’s and increasingly an opponent of Hamilton’s. But he allowed his then-colleague to convince him, and took it on himself to win Madison round.

The two allies came up with a compromise solution: Madison would not block the question of Assumption coming up again in Congress; he would vote no, but would not speak against the proposal. That’s what happened, and Assumption was adopted, over the silent opposition of Madison.

At the time, the US had a population of under 4 million. Even the UK had 8 million, and France 20 million. GDP was around $200 million, corresponding to about $4.5 billion today – when US GDP is about $17.7 trillion. The US was, in other words, a minor sideshow in geopolitics back then; today it is the wealthiest and most powerful nation on Earth.

There is no need for Europe to aspire to that status. European nations have been massive global players in the past, and places like Amritsar or Algiers testify to how badly that went. But it strikes me that Europe needs to get its act together if it is only to defend its status in a world increasingly dominated by huge nations, such as the US, China and Russia.

The success of the US wasn’t naturally entirely down to acceptance of Hamilton’s proposals on handling debt. But they certainly contributed: they set up the notion of the Union has owing a duty to all its components, and therefore being more powerful than any of them, capable of playing a full role on the world stage.

So the US passed its test over Assumption.

I’m not sure the Eurozone has done anything like so well over Greek debt.

US Independence Day Thoughts

Happy Independence Day to my US friends.

Today’s a good time to think a moment about the main architect of the document whose signing you’re celebrating, the Declaration on Independence.

Fourth of July: a time for celebration in the US,
Perhaps also for reflection everywhere...

At a time when rising racial tensions are belying the hope raised by the Civil Rights movement and the reforms that followed, it’s worth recalling one of the principal denunciations it hurls at the British King, George III:

He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where Men should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce.

Don’t worry, if you know the Declaration well and don’t recognise these words, it’s not your memory letting you down. They appeared in Thomas Jefferson’s draft, but were excised from the final version. He explained later that they were removed to satisfy slave-owners in Georgia and South Carolina, and slave-traders from the Northern States.

Besides, although this passage denounces the transatlantic slave trade, it stops short of condemning slavery itself. Jefferson was a slaveholder till his death. The only slaves he ever freed were Sally Hemings, with whom he had a near forty-year affair, and the children he fathered with her.

However, he undoubtedly disliked slavery. That shouldn’t be taken as implying, though, that he was a champion of the kind of integration the US still needs so badly:

Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate, than that these people [African Americans] are to be free; nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion have drawn indelible lines of distinction between them.

Gary Younge is an outstanding (Black) British journalist with The Guardian. He and his (Black – or perhaps I should say African) American wife and their children are about to leave the US for Britain after twelve years. In an excellent valedictory piece, he mentions the hopes for progress on racial issues many expressed over the election of Barack Obama. He didn’t believe much would improve:

…one person cannot undo centuries of discrimination, no matter how much nominal power they have… He was the most progressive candidate viable for the presidency, which says a great deal, given the alternatives, but means very little, given what would be needed to significantly shift the dial on such issues as race and inequality.

Centuries of discrimination indeed. And we can see it deeply embedded in the writings of even so liberal a figure as Thomas Jefferson.

Still, none of us is free of the assumptions of our times. Jefferson is remarkable for his ability to adopt thoughts that were revolutionary for his epoch. Some of them have become part of the fabric of societies that aspire to democracy, sometimes to the point of being so familiar we run the danger of forgetting them altogether. It’s salutary to remind ourselves of what some of them were.

Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence
Contradictory as we all are, but he got a lot right
as well as a few things badly wrong

For instance, in his first inaugural address, he called on his fellow citizens to bear in mind:

…that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression.

What of his political opponents, those in particular who might oppose the very existence of the Union or its republican basis?

…let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.

A couple of years earlier, Jefferson wrote to a political ally:

I am for freedom of religion, and against all manoeuvres to bring about a legal ascendancy of one sect over another: for freedom of the press, and against all violations of the Constitution to silence by force and not by reason the complaints or criticisms, just or unjust, of our citizens against the conduct of their agents. And I am for encouraging the progress of science in all its branches; and not for the raising a hue and cry against he sacred name of philosophy…

Well worth reflecting on these thoughts. Especially at a time when many are calling for restrictions of liberties in the US for the sake of religious faith (such as the refusal to perform legal gay marriages), while others are resisting the progress of science (for example by denying climate change).

More important still, on both sides of the Atlantic, is the principle that the majority is not entitled to trample on the beliefs and behaviours of a minority, simply because we dislike them. We don’t like the burqa? That doesn’t give us the right to ban it.

Worst of all, we keep forgetting that it’s essential in a democracy that “error of opinion may be tolerated.” Today the talk is all of resisting radicalisation, principally among young Muslims. But the holding of radical views isn’t and should never be illegal – that’s a net that would have caught Jefferson himself. To believe that ISIS is right and deserves support may be a view so misguided as to be imbecilic, but we have no right to forbid it.

Pick up a gun for ISIS, or conspire to give it material support, or even incite others to do so, and you have broken the law and can and should expect action against you. But espouse the opinion? That must be legitimate.

Ah, well. July 4th is not a day for too much heavy thinking. I’ll stop there.

Enjoy the fireworks!

Separated by a common language? Over-united more like. With some odd quirks

On both sides of the Atlantic, we love to quote the Shaw view that England and America are two countries separated by a common language.

A completely different view was expressed by the first US Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton. He’d been a leading aide to George Washington during the Revolutionary War, but emerged in the 1790s as an outspoken Anglophile. Which made him the nemesis of Thomas Jefferson, Anglophobe and friend of the French.

Hamilton told a leading British agent “I have always preferred a connection with you, to that of any other country. We think in English and have a similarity of prejudices and predilections.”

Indeed. There is something out there which the French call the “Anglo-Saxon” mentality, and not as a compliment (they move quickly on to talk about globalisation and neo-liberalism). It tends to come out in a joint obsession between the two countries to put profit before pretty much anything – if Britain, as Napoleon claimed, is a nation of shopkeepers, the US is a country of mall operators – and to use military force against anyone who is even suspected of possibly jeopardising such a sacred way of life.

As a result, even an ostensibly Centre-Left government could end up trotting obediently into Iraq at the beck of possibly the most inept of US presidents, Dubya Bush. We’re still paying the price twelve years on. And it’s likely to get worse. Just because ISIS are a lot grimmer even than Al Qaida doesn’t mean we won’t face something still more dire down the line.

Yep. That’s the one we chose to follow into Iraq
Might have been useful to have spoken a different language:
he made no sense in ours

The community of thought which makes possible this kind of consensus, with all its beneficial consequences, surely owes much to the fact that on both sides, “we think in English.”

So – it’s more a matter of two nations (along with New Zealand, Australia and Canada – predominant whiteness plays a role) bound together, for better or for worse, by a common language.

What differences exist, are pretty insignificant. Does it really matter that Americans wear their pants outside, covering their underpants, while we keep our pants inside, with trousers over them? I think not.

Even so, from time to time I find some of the differences a little quaint. Quaint to the point of bizarre. Here’s a curious contrast between the two sides of the pond in the use of prepositions (little words that really matter in this common language of ours).

If I were to call in on my friend Tom, I would reckon I was visiting him. In the language the French persist in calling “Américain” I would, however, be visiting with him. That always strikes me as slightly odd. I feel that if I’m visiting with Tom, then we’re popping in on someone else, George perhaps. Together.

On the other hand, an American desiring to enter into correspondence with him, would write Tom. Without a preposition. Again, that puzzles me. Surely if you write Tom, you have to be penning a piece of fiction? Shakespeare wrote Touchstone, and pretty clever it was too. If he’d wanted to send him a letter, he’d have written to Touchstone. Which, if he’d expected a reply at least, would have been pretty silly. 

Branagh playing Touchstone in As You Like It.
He did well to write him, but never wrote to him.
And wouldn't have had a reply anyway

Occasionally I listen to books instead of reading them. Recently, I was listening to a book being read by someone called Edward Herrmann. What struck me about him was that, despite being American, he pronounced the word “era” in a way that distinguishes it from “error”. As I do. Generally, on the other side of the pond, the words are indistinguishable when spoken.

This is awkward if we wanted to describe, say, the time of Dubya, if I can return to that sad period. In British English, even in the spoken language, we can distinguish the two words in “error era.” In Américain, they’re the same. You’ve got to admit that would sound a bit silly.

On the other hand, you might argue that to sound silly when talking about the Dubya presidency is entirely appropriate.

And you may well be right.

Immigration: aiming at the wrong target

We never seem to stop talking about immigration these days. And yet the real problem we face isn’t immigration – it’s precisely all that talk about it. Or more generally, the someone-else-to-blame mentality that lies behind all the hot air and bad temper.

Anti-Immigration: it's all the rage
Even among people descended from immigrants

One of the more remarkable women I know of was Emilie du Châtelet. She became a champion, in the eighteenth century, of what the best recent student of her life, calls “feminine ambition”: she forced the scientific world to take her seriously, publishing extensively on physics, including a translation of Newton’s Principia which she raced to complete before her premonition of death was verified.

She had a servant called Sébastien Longchamp, who would ultimately be dismissed from the household she shared at the time with Voltaire. Decades later, after his own death and even that of the man who published them, Longchamp’s Memoirs of his time with the illustrious couple appeared. One has to question the reliability of such a source; even so, there are some stories he tells in his ‘what the Bulter saw’ document, that ring true.

He tells, for example, of a summons to her bathroom, to fetch more hot water from the fireplace and pour it into the bath. As he came to edge, he realised that she was entirely naked, and the water completely transparent. To avoid being scalded, she parted her legs so that he could pour the water safely away from them. When he tried to do so with his eyes averted, she admonished him for getting the hot water too close to her body, so he was obliged to watch what he was doing and therefore view her naked.

Mme du Châtelet was by no means promiscuous. She would certainly not have appeared naked before a man. But that precisely is the point: Longchamp was not a man. He was a servant, and to a noble such as Emilie, that is less than a man. There was no need for modesty before him.

An outspoken champion of rights – hers at least – against the stubborn conservatism of her time could harbour such views. That may make it less surprising that men who took their commitment to freedom and equality so far as to engage in armed rebellion against British rule in North America, could nonetheless condone slavery. There’s no doubt that men like Thomas Jefferson were made uneasy about keeping slaves, but not enough to free them, at least in their own lifetimes.

Surely the answer is that they didn’t see their slaves as truly men or women (they certainly saw them as women in some measure: Jefferson fathered several children on one). Like Longchamp, the slaves were lesser humans, different enough from the masters to warrant denying them their liberty.

Now fast forward two and a half centuries.

We live in a world that is more unequal than at any time since the end of the Second World War. In England, 1.4 million people have an annual income of under £6000 a year; 6000 have an income over £1 million. On their own, the income of each of those super-rich is worth over 150 times that of the people at the bottom. And there many hundreds of people who take many more times still that lowest level.

With that excess money, they can fund politicians and buy them. They can threaten to move their wealth elsewhere to get their way. They have in particular bought the British Tory Party, and are now buying UKIP; it is no accident that while their earnings have grown over the last four years, those of the poorest have fallen still further.

The people who take that money and exercise that power know they deserve it. They know they are exceptional. They excel those who have, and receive, less. In other words they know themselves to be superior. The rest of us may be human, but we are a lesser kind of human. 

 There are 6000 of them which, funnily enough, was the size of the French aristocracy in the eighteenth century too. Like them, their position is based entirely on wealth. It’s no surprise that they preserve and maintain the same attitudes.

There are so many more of us. And we have votes. Why don’t we put an end to their domination?

Because instead of opposing them, we aspire to be like them. We protect the rights of the wealthy in the hope that some day we’ll join their ranks, and enjoy that protection.

However, since we certainly don’t want to blame ourselves for our troubles, we have to find someone else to blame. How about immigrants? There are relatively small numbers, they’re relatively easy to spot, and it’s easy to come up with some kind of justification based on our being the true possessors of this land while they are interlopers in it. Though the English took the country from the Celts, as did the French, and the Americans took it from the Natives who were there before them.

That’s the trap that UKIP or the Tea Party or the Front National in France lure us into. Blame the other, the foreigner, the alien. The lesser human.

The death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, and above all the fact that his killer has avoided any kind of justice, shows how those ideas are as strong today as they ever were. American Blacks may not be slaves, but who can say that Whites regard their lives as equally valuable?

Here one in six of our voters rally to the xenophobes of UKIP, and a higher still proportion of French voters flock to the Islamophobic Marine Le Pen. So we talk endlessly about the perils of immigration and do nothing about those who steal the bread from our mouths.

What of those people, the ones who really run the show and cause our problems? 

They’re laughing at the lot of us. All the way to the bank.

The US: autocracy and tolerance, ever since the founding fathers. And the men who inspired them

Jon Meacham, in his fine biography, tells an anecdote of Thomas Jefferson’s about a meeting with his colleague and nemesis, Alexander Hamilton. At the time Hamilton was Secretary of the Treasury and Jefferson Secretary of State in George Washington’s first administration, though they were already becoming political adversaries. 

Hamilton called at Jefferson’s lodgings.

... Jefferson had decorated the walls of his quarters with a collection of portraits that included Sir Francis Bacon, John Locke, and Sir Isaac Newton, all men of the Enlightenment. Hamilton asked Jefferson who they were: “I told him they were my trinity of the three greatest men the world had ever produced, naming them,” Jefferson recalled.

Taking this in, Hamilton paused, thinking. After a moment, he broke his silence.

“The greatest man that ever lived,” Hamilton said, “was Julius Caesar.”

Julius Caesar, military autocrat, inspired Alexander Hamilton

The story matters not only for what it says about the two men, but for what it reveals of the two currents that have always battled with each other in the United States, down to our days.

Jefferson was the author of significant works on politics and the philosophy of government; most notably, he drafted the Declaration of Independence. Hamilton was the leading writer of the Federalist Papers, spearheading the campaign to convert the loose confederation that won independence from Britain into the tightly structured United States that persist today.

Both men had accepted political responsibility when called on to serve, but Jefferson had never been a soldier. In fact, his blackest moment came when as Governor of Virginia he retreated in front of advancing British soldiers and was accused by opponents of not doing enough to defend his State. Hamilton, on the other hand, had been an aide de camp to Washington during the War of Independence and arguably his leading adviser (certainly, he would have argued it).

Both were thinkers, both were men of action. That makes it all the more interesting that they chose objects of admiration who were so different.

Of Jefferson’s trinity, perhaps the most influential was Locke. In Two Treatises of Government he wrote:

The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions: for being all the workmanship of one omnipotent, and infinitely wise maker; all the servants of one sovereign master, sent into this world by his order, and about his business, they are his property, whose workmanship they are, made to last during his, not one another’s pleasure: and being furnished with like faculties, sharing all in one community of nature, there cannot be supposed any such subordination among us, that may authorise us to destroy one another, as if we were made for one another’s uses, as the inferior ranks of creatures are made for ours.

Reason is derived from God and is the bedrock of the rights of Man. Remind you of anything?

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

It’s true that it’s hard to reconcile a view that there can no subordination of one man to another with the ownership of slaves, and Jefferson was a major slave owner. That has long been the great unresolved and probably unsolvable paradox of Jefferson’s existence.

A little later, Locke wonders about considers what power one man may have over another who has committed some offence. He can have:

... no absolute or arbitrary power, to use a criminal, when he has got him in his hands, according to the passionate heats, or boundless extravagancy of his own will; but only to retribute to him, so far as calm reason and conscience dictate, what is proportionate to his transgression, which is so much as may serve for reparation and restraint.

That’s a principle that deserves reasserting: punishment is to be calm and reasoned, and its aim must be reparation and deterrence, not hotheaded vengeance. Some of that thinking emerges in the US Bill of Rights, particularly in the Eighth Amendment:

Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

John Locke, apostle of reason and government by consent,
inspired Jefferson

Locke’s spirit presided over the very foundation of the United States. But Hamilton didn’t recognise his portrait, and instead gave his admiration to a wholly different man, Julius Caesar. 

Caesar turned a rotten and corrupt Roman Republic into a vehicle for his personal ambitions and by doing so, ultimately undermined what little was left of its republicanism. If he failed to take imperial power himself, it was only because he was assassinated first, but by then he had created the conditions that would sweep his adopted son Octavian to power as the first Emperor Augustus.

The great drive behind his ascent had been his military prowess. He had stormed through Gaul (with even a brief incursion into Britain) and crushed all his enemies.

So Hamilton chose the soldier and autocrat. Jefferson chose the man of moderation and of government by consent.

And aren’t those the two trends that have run like golden threads through all American history to today?

The successors of Hamilton are the gun lobby, worshippers of the armed warrior. They sing the praises of the men and women of the armed forces, strong, brave and powerful. They cling to their firearms, even at the cost of the lives of the innocent. They like fierce punishments, the 900-year sentence when they can’t be granted an execution. Their influence ensured that Chelsea Manning was subjected to treatment that even the authorities eventually found excessive.

The successors of Jefferson stand for the subordination of interest to law, to the treatment of all men and women as equal because they are all human. They care for the warrior too, but not just when powerful and victorious, but also when they’ve returned broken, incapable of re-assimilating, living rough and desperate for help. They try to moderate the behaviour of government, and plead for its authority to be limited to respect the rights of the citizen. They understand why Edward Snowden won’t return to face a US court, while a public interest defence is barred to him, against charges carrying a sentence heavier even than Manning’s.

The great unanswered question is which of these trends will ultimately predominate, Jefferson’s or Hamilton’s, Locke’s or Caesar’s. On that question, the jury is still out. Sadly, for all of us.

It’s Martin Luther King day in the United States, a nation which even a man with a dream like his, could hardly have imagined would have a black President within half a century of that great speech.

Not of course that it really does. Funny how we all accept that someone who’s half black is black, whereas the fact that he’s half white doesn’t make him white.

In any case, in the Presidency of Obama, it seems appropriate to mark Martin Luther King with a few thoughts about the first ever black head of state, in that part of the Western world that used to be considered the preserve of whites.

That head of state was not Obama, though like him he was part black. Which made him, like Obama, entirely black, of course. Black ancestry, it seems, is just far more powerful than white, so the slightest trace of the former wipes out any effect that could have been exerted by the latter.

The earliest white state with a black ruler was the newly created Italian dukedom of Florence, rich financially from centuries of banking, culturally from being the cradle of the Renaissance. And the black leader, back then in the sixteenth century? The first Duke, Alessandro de’ Medici, nicknamed ‘Il Moro’, the Moor.

He was, it seems, the son of a Medici Pope, Clement VII.

The son of a Pope? I hear you gasp. Yes, yes, those were lax times. Catholic priests were sometimes less than irreproachable in their sexual behaviour, hard though that may be to believe these days.

I say ‘it seems’ he was the son of that Pope, because he was passed off as the child of a different Medici so he could be treated as legitimate. These days, people tend to treat that story as no more than a smokescreen.

And his mother? A mixed race serving woman in the household.

In other words, a great Florentine family was indulging, nearly three centuries earlier, in the same practices as Thomas Jefferson applied in Virginia, when he fathered several children by his slave Sally Hemings. They were light enough in complexion to pass for white, but naturally, like Alessandro and Obama, they were black all the same.

Alessandro de Medici, the Moor
Remember, a bit black is black

Things didn’t work out too well for Alessandro. Seems he suffered from Bill Clinton syndrome and couldn’t turn down the opportunity for a sexual adventure if one presented. His cousin, Lorenzino (popularly known as Lorenzaccio, and the ‘accio’ ending in Italian never means anything good), invited him over to enjoy the favours of his sister (Lorenzaccio’s, not Alessandro’s). And then bumped him off. 

Sad. At least Obama seems well above all that kind of stuff. Shame Clinton wasn’t. What a presidency his might have been, without all that impeachment mess.

Still, these are gloomy thoughts Americans shouldn’t be contemplating on a public holiday. Have a great MLK day, cousins across the pond. Have a dream in his tribute. And a ball.

Happiness? Not all it's cracked up to be.

The nine-year old and I stood looking at the Alpine Ridge ahead of us. The sun was beating down and we were drenched with sweat. The mountain rising above us - still rising above us – was serene and seemed contemptuous of our puny struggles.

‘That’s got to be the top, doesn’t it? There can’t be any more, can there?’ I asked him.

The nine-year old, the son of friends, nodded. ‘Got to be. This has got to be as high as it gets.’

But it wasn’t. We breasted the ridge only to find yet another beyond it.

When we’d started out on our epic, two and a half hours earlier, it was to get to the top of the hillside above us in order to look down on into the valley beyond onto one of Europe’s most majestic sights, its greatest glacier, the Aletschgletscher. We’d decided that the best way to get there was straight over the top. 

Sadly the ‘hill’ surmounted by a ridge ahead of us had only turned out to be a shoulder of the mountain, with another ridge beyond it, and another beyond that, for hour after hour of hard graft. We did eventually make it to the top but it took over three hours.

Still, the view was worth it. That broad strip of white stretching down between the dun and grey cliffs, with stretches of scrub and grass too, gleaming in the hot light. The glacier was an incongruous reminder of winter in a sun-drenched summer landscape.

The Aletsch glacier
Rock and stone, even grass. And then the ice

Actually, it looked rather refreshing.

‘Let’s go and cool off,’ I said.

Well, even getting downhill wasn’t as easy as it seemed. But eventually we stood on the glacier and felt the cold of the ice under our overheated shoe soles. And we stepped inside, into crevices filled with blue light, running our fingers over icy water coating the walls and making them smooth. It had all been worth it.

Then of course we had to get home. We took one look at the climb and another at the path, broad, smooth and well maintained by the amenable Swiss authorities. We went for it and were back at our chalet in 45 minutes, instead of four hours.

Why am I telling this story?

I keep seeing posts, on Facebook or Twitter, about happiness. It’s inside you, some people proclaim. Or you only have to reach out for it rather than turn your back on it, as others maintain. Or indeed, and I hear people say this regularly, I don’t care what she/he does, as long as he/she’s happy.

It seems so obvious, doesn’t it? Everyone deserves happiness.

Except I’m not so sure. I mean, isn’t the value of happiness just a bit overstated?

Firstly, because it’s seldom unqualified. There’s usually some little fly in the ointment. The meal’s romantic enough, the candles are wonderful, you both look your very best, but it’s pissing down with rain outside. Forget the lakeside stroll.

Secondly, even if it’s pretty well sustained, isn’t happiness just a short step away from contentment? And isn’t that just what the sheep feel in their field, until the day they get loaded into the lorry for the slaughterhouse?

Now I know that in a sense that’s the fate of us all. But do I really want to spend the time up to the point the truck draws up in the farmyard grazing for a few decades, with no more to show for my passage through the world than a few piles of droppings?

It seems to me that this fixation with happiness ignores a whole lot of other emotions that are worth far more. Incomparably more. Elation. Achievement. Fulfilment. Satisfaction. Joy. Even pleasure.

You may say these are just aspects of happiness. I don’t agree. And the experience with the Aletschgletscher makes that point strongly, at least to me. Happy? I wasn’t happy. Why, I felt ashamed. I’d imposed a gruelling trial in a young lad who was in no state to take it – why he spent the next day in bed, exhausted, and though I didn’t, by evening I wished I had. He had nothing to reproach himself with, he was a child. But I was forty, for God’s sake. I should have known better than to take us over the mountain.

And physically too my state could hardly be called happy. My feet were killing me. I couldn’t remember the previous time I’d been that tired. And I was burned by the sun.

And yet – I felt real elation. We hadn’t walked round the mountain on the path, we’d taken it on. A frontal attack. And we’d won. And we’d had the glorious view from the top. Followed by the extraordinary sense of satisfaction that standing on, and inside, the glacier had given us.

Bought at the price of pain. Far more effort than either of us was used to. But far more satisfying than just standing in a field and grazing. A hell of a sight more interesting than mere happiness.

So why do we go on about happiness so much? Is it just because we’re so afraid of pain that we’d rather settle for second best? Rather than pay the price for something rather better?

It’s striking that, when he drafted the Declaration of Independence, what Thomas Jefferson considered an inalienable right wasn’t happiness. It was the pursuit of happiness. Maybe that’s the key: pursuing happiness is a lot more fun than achieving it.

As I discovered among those hellish ridges, all that time ago.

Slavery: seems the Blacks were just fine with it. Like victims of any abuse

A Polish émigré, Julian Niemcewicz, who visited George Washington in 1798, commented ‘Either from habit, or from natural humour disposed to gaiety, I have never seen the blacks sad.’ 

So that was OK, then. The slaves were happy. What was wrong with slavery?

Niemcewicz’s words are a striking example of the capacity we all share to convince ourselves of any belief we find convenient. At the time he expressed that view, the Northern US states were busily abolishing slavery, and yet the South would cling on to the ‘peculiar institution’ for nearly seven more decades, and only give it up after a crushing defeat in a bitter civil war.

Not many miles from Washington’s home lived another major figure of the early United States, Thomas Jefferson. He wrote those stirring words that inspired the revolutionary war: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.’ Yet he too was an owner of slaves, and even fathered several children on one of them, Sally Hemings.

In fact, those very words were used against African Americans by Chief Justice Roger Taney, when he wrote what must be one of the most shameful documents in US history, the final judgement of the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott case:

‘The general words above quoted would seem to embrace the whole human family [...] But it is too clear for dispute, that the enslaved African race were not intended to be included, and formed no part of the people who framed and adopted this declaration [...] The unhappy black race were separated from the white by indelible marks, and laws long before established, and were never thought of or spoken of except as property, and when the claims of the owner or the profit of the trader were supposed to need protection.’

So a proclamation of the equality of all men was turned on its head, into an argument in favour of the inferiority of the ‘black race’ and a justification for its enslavement.

What makes this kind of self-delusion particularly extraordinary is that, not only was slavery repugnant, it was also known to be economically inefficient, even in Washington’s day, as Dr David Stuart, from his extended family, made clear: ‘[Slaves’] support costs a great deal; their work is worth little if they are not whipped; the [overseer] costs a great deal and steals into the bargain. We would all agree to free these people, but how to do it with such a great number?’

I say nothing for Taney, but Washington and Jefferson were outstanding men who understood the issues. Yet even they felt powerless to act. It’s that ‘how to do it’ in David Stuart’s words that is most striking: he knew what was right and he knew it was expedient but he saw no means to do it.

Curiously the same impotence to overcome entrenched wrong has marked many of the other great abuses in history, whether discrimination against religious minorities, the denial of rights to women, the use of child labour, the refusal of minimal protections to workers. They have been preserved either by a self-delusion worthy of a Taney, or by a failure to act by those who knew that change was needed. ‘All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing,’ wrote Edmund Burke. Slavery is a classic case of an evil that was not extirpated because good men did nothing (and a few bad ones did a great deal too much).

Edmund Burke: understood how evil could triumph

Once the abuse has been ended, a new consensus appears which finds it extraordinary that it had ever been tolerated. Slavery? Appalling. The wonder is that it lasted.

But when we look at the Washingtons and the Jeffersons and wonder how they could have lived with that abomination, we should pause a moment and ask ourselves a few questions too. Because right now, in our own advanced, democratic countries we’re tolerating abuses which may in turn come to be regarded as just as incomprehensible as slavery.

In Britain, thirty people a week are dying after having been deemed fit for work by an agency acting for government. This means that terribly ill individuals, often disabled, are being denied benefits, their suffering hugely increased as they go to their deaths. This is presented as tough but intelligent economics.

On both sides of the Atlantic, huge numbers of people are being denied access to healthcare either because it is being sacrificed to shareholder interest in the US, or subject to increasingly draconian restrictions in Europe. People are dying needlessly, and in greater pain, than they would if we were prepared to invest more in their care.

The kind of racist thinking that inflamed Roger Taney continues to poison the debate about immigration or about Islam, and the greatest ‘minority’ of all, women, are still far from attaining equality with men or the full protection of the law, as casual attitudes towards domestic violence or rape constantly attest.

We can look back on those grand old men of the eighteenth century and puzzle at their blindness and wilful self-delusion. If we don’t want future generations to look back at us with the same condescending contempt, we need to take a look at what we’re doing wrong in our time.

And fix it. Fast.

At the brink of the Fiscal Cliff

So the US House of Representatives went to the brink of the fiscal cliff, peered over and wisely decided this was not the moment for a great step forward. 

Averting disaster by compromise only became possible because, for a brief moment at least, its opponents were able to wear down the stubborn resistance of a group viscerally opposed to any tax increase, the Tea Party. It draws its name from the insurgents who, rather than pay the tax Britain had imposed on tea, dressed as Indians and invaded three ships in Boston in 1773 to empty the chests they contained into the harbour. Their action came to be known as the Boston Tea Party.

The modern Tea Party supporters see themselves as heirs of those rebels. The claim only shows how little they understand the history to which they appeal.

The reality is that they are the heirs of the other side in that dispute. It wasn’t between tax-loving Britain and tax-hating Americans: on the contrary, the Brits hated tax at least as much as the colonists. The problem was that they had wracked up huge debts, not least in fighting successful but massively expensive imperial wars; like most people who are keen on military spending, such as the modern-day Tea Party, they wanted their cake and they wanted to eat it, to enjoy the fruits of war without paying the taxes they entailed. So they came up with this brilliant wheeze of getting the Americans to pay instead.

Backfired, of course. Within ten years Britain had been forced to recognise US independence. In trying to dodge its own fiscal responsibilities, the British government had lost a prized possession. If only the Tea Party had enough sense of history it might see that it’s running the same risk – of cutting off its own nose, and that of most of its compatriots at the same time – if it doesn’t learn that sometimes you need to be ready to pay for things.

It’s not as though no-one can see that. Even within the Republican Party, people are beginning to speak out. I’m indebted to a Facebook friend who shared this comment of Jon Huntsman, briefly a candidate for the Republican nomination for president at the last election: ‘In my party, compromise cannot be seen as analogous to treason, which it has been recently.’

Jon Huntsman: closer to the spirit of the founding fathers...

Absolutely right. Again, if the Tea Party knew anything about its own country’s history, it would appreciate its tradition of seeking compromise. As early as in 1790, within a year of the formation of first George Washington administration, there was a dispute over the public finances and taxation.

At stake was whether the Federal government should take over – ‘assume’ – the debts of the states, as promoted by the Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, to establish the credit of the new nation on a more stable footing. A number of States had cleared much of their debt, notably Virginia and all the other Southern States apart from South Carolina. Why, they argued, should they be funding the debts of the feckless North East?

Leading the counter-attack against Hamilton was James Madison, a Virginian and leading ally of Thomas Jefferson, then Secretary of State, also from Virginia. As a result of Madison’s tireless campaigning, the Hamilton plan was stalled twice in Congress.

Shades of today? You bet. The parallels are extraordinary.

But here’s where the two stories diverge. Appealed to by Hamilton, Jefferson didn’t simply indulge the knee-jerk instinct to side with his ally Madison. Instead he hosted a dinner for the two men. Over that table, Hamilton and Madison worked out the details of one of the first great compromises of US history: Madison would not support the Hamilton bill in Congress, but he would stop organising against assumption of debt; in return, Hamilton would agree to shifting the national capital from its temporary home in New York, not to one of the great commercial centres of the North East, but to a patch of land on the Maryland-Virginia border, where it stands today; in addition, Virginia would be offered a deal on its remaining debts to sweeten the pill.

Jefferson, and then Madison, had subordinated their narrow sectional interests to the needs of society as a whole.

Compromises by their nature satisfy no-one. They’re messy and unappealing. But, wow, they’re preferable to national bankruptcy. Jefferson, Madison and Hamilton understood that.

Jon Huntsman understands that.

What’s with the Tea Party that stops them understanding it? Do they really think that politics is all about dressing up as Indian warriors, breaking into ships and throwing tea into a harbour? Will they learn that it sometimes requires statesmanship too?

The event of 2012: Obama's re-election

Before wishing everyone much pleasure and success in 2013, and in the midst of all the retrospectives for the end of the current year, I want to concentrate on just one of its many events: the re-election of Barack Obama to the Presidency of the United States.

Obama: his re-election the defining moment of 2012?

This was in a way more remarkable than his original victory in 2008. That was won in the shadow of the lamentable presidency of Dubya Bush, a front-runner in the race to be the worst in US history. Facing him was a ticket which included Sarah Palin as possibly the worst candidate for vice-President: Aaron Burr was even creepier, hard though that may be to believe, but was probably less intellectually challenged.

So the first Obama victory might have owed a little to chance. To be re-elected, though, was a confirmation that enough at least of the US electorate really meant it.

That’s a great outcome, and not just because Obama is one of the brightest US Presidents there have been – though certainly he benefits by comparison with his predecessor – and, if the Tea Party can be persuaded not to take the country over the Fiscal Cliff or some other precipice – he may yet achieve remarkable things. What’s even more fascinating is what it says about how far the US has come.

Back in July 1776, one of the outstanding figures in history, Thomas Jefferson, drafted the Declaration of Independence. The first couple of paragraphs are extraordinarily impressive – you’ll remember all that stuff about ‘we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness’ – but then comes all the stuff people tend to ignore because it is, frankly, rather dull: a long list of all the grievances of the British colonies against the British King.

Thomas Jefferson: admirable, though not without faults...

For instance, ‘he has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures,’ we’re told, and I have to say that as a rallying cry to armed revolution, it lacks a certain je ne sais quoi, doesn’t it? These days we have a European parliament that travels, with all its papers, from Brussels to Strasbourg ten times a year and though that’s led to some pretty horrible consequences (e.g. UKIP) it still hasn't gone as far as a descent into bitter war.

Interestingly, not all the grievances originally intended for inclusion by Jefferson were adopted by his colleagues. In particular, they left out one that starts:

‘He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain.’

Great, isn’t it? Denouncing the slave trade as un-Christian. It’s like telling today’s Christian right to be nicer about the rights of, say, Moslems.

Now Jefferson of course never freed himself from slavery, even fathering several children on Sally Hemings, who as well as being his slave was even, by today’s standards, under age when he first began his long relationship with her. However, it is admirable that he at least rose far enough above the sentiments of his time to want to denounce the trade in slaves.

His colleagues would not go that far. Jefferson's denunciation was cut from the final draft of the declaration, and this was not without significant consequences.

In 1857, 81 years later, with the country Jefferson helped found slipping inexorably towards Civil War, a powerful push in that direction was provided by a majority decision of the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott case. In the judgement, Chief Justice Roger Taney pointed to the founding documents of the United States and in particular to the Declaration of Independence, declaring that they made it clear that blacks:

‘had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect, and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.’

Roger Taney: vilain of the piece. And doesn't he look it?

Hardly what Jefferson intended in his original draft, but what far less noble men among his successors made of the final version. Blacks had no rights in law; whites had no obligation to treat them with respect.

It took 155 years to achieve the re-election, and not merely the election, of a half-black President of the United States. But given Roger Taney’s words, the road travelled is still extraordinary, even in such a time.

Enough on its own to make 2012 a seriously important year.

And now, as promised, I wish you all every possible prosperity and joy in 2013. Wouldn’t it be good if it contained at least one event as outstanding as that one from 2012?