Undone by the Undoing?

One of the pleasures the HBO series The Undoing has given me is reading the negative reviews it has received. 

Hugh Grant and Nicole Kidman in The Undoing

Lucy Mangan talked about it as “a lesson in the value of low expectations”, which she regards as entirely in keeping with our times, since “if 2020 has taught us nothing else, it is surely that things never turn out as well as you’d hope”. No startling twist at the end, you see, so that “what had been enjoyably slick became silly. What had been sombre became cheesy. Tension dissolved into disbelief.”

Well, perhaps. Except that surely the aim of a twist is to shock us, to take us somewhere we didn’t think we were going. In a gloriously meta way, denying us a twist where we were expecting one, sounds like a twist in itself. 

Besides, as Mangan has the decency to admit, there actually is a twist. It’s just that it isn’t in the investigation of the crime, as such things usually are, it’s in the testimony given in court. But that didn’t satisfy her either:

… what I suspect was meant to be the real and/or unexpected twist, involving a rogue witness, failed even to deliver on its own, already unsatisfactory terms. It wasn’t clear how it was engineered – the viewer was left to guess and infer too much about method and motive to believe in it.

Again, well, maybe. I understand that someone who wanted a chocolate dessert might be disappointed to be served chocolate sauce on the side. But it was still delivered, as was what we might call the side-twist in the series. So, you had to do some guessing and inference to work out how it was done? Well, I thought viewing that actually challenged you to reflect a little yourself was rather better than the other kind. Or have we gone back to the days when viewers needed everything served up to them with a bow on top?

Interestingly, Mangan does give the show credit for one of its aspects, if slightly sarcastically, pointing out that at least “it was a six-hour do, not eight or 12 or 24”. A similar backhanded compliment was paid to the show by Arwa Mahdawi:

Perhaps the best part of the Undoing, however, was its length. The six-part limited miniseries was long enough for you to get invested in it; short enough not to get tedious. 2020 feels like it is dragging on and on – giving me a new appreciation for TV shows that know how to swiftly wrap things up.

That was the conclusion of her review, with its reference to the nature of 2020 neatly picking up the title, ‘The Undoing was the perfect pandemic TV’ – again, hardly glowing praise. Still, taking it at face value, there is indeed much to be said for brevity – I’ve sat through far too many shows that take eight or ten episodes to tell us enough story to fill two or three.

What’s more, Mahdawi apparently lives in New York, and it was amusing to read her comment, “it’s weird to feel homesick for the city that you live in, but seeing New York in all its pre-pandemic glory did exactly that.”

She also mentioned another fault in the show which amused me:

You also spent half the time wondering why everyone’s accent kept changing; Nicole Kidman, in particular, seemed to forget she was playing an American.

Even more striking was the actor playing the District Attorney, Sofie Gråbøl (the surname, I once learned from an interview she gave, apparently rhymes with ‘Trouble’). Now, you can probably tell from the spelling of her name, that her roots are not in a nation that speaks English as a native language. In fact, you may remember her in the original version of The Killing, where she displayed impressive command of Danish. Which, as it happens, is her mother tongue.

Now, during my single visit to Denmark, it struck me that English actually is a native language to the country. But the second native language. It’s spoken with extraordinary fluency by huge numbers of people (at least in Copenhagen). There’s a local accent, but so there is in Yorkshire, Kentucky or Queensland.

Queensland, incidentally, is strange, because Australians insist on pronouncing it Queens-Land. Which is odd, because they talk about England, not Eng-Land. Just as they don’t talk of New Zea-Land.

Funnily enough, Kidman was brought up in the country that mispronounces Queensland and, though she plays many American roles and has lived in the US for many years, I suppose the Australian tones might sometimes re-emerge. I didn’t notice them, but I can imagine that the more sensitive ear of a New York resident like Mahdawi would pick them up.

As for Gråbøl, her command of English was superb. I wish I could be as proficient in a foreign language. But certainly there were moments when, even to my insensitive ear, she sounded nothing like a District Attorney from New York.

Still, none of that stopped me enjoying the series. Perhaps it is just good Covid entertainment, as the reviewers seem to suggest, much enhanced by its brevity. But, hey, what’s wrong with that?

Rule Britannia? Or Black Lives Matter?

In 1745, Bonnie Prince Charlie, as he came to be known, landed in Scotland, with the aim of seizing the throne that had once been held by his benighted forefathers, the Stuart Kings. He failed, not least because he was no more competent than Charles I or James II (James VII of Scotland), his great-grandfather and grandfather respectively. Defeated at the Battle of Culloden, to a great extent because he mishandled it so badly, he then fled (“over the sea to Skye” as the sorrowful song later claimed), instead of sticking around to fight again, even though the major part of his forces was still intact.

Bonnie Prince Charlie wasn’t beaten by the dastardly English (it’s likely there were more Scots fighting against him than with him) but by himself, and by the lack of enthusiasm across Britain for a return to the Stuarts. 

What happened next, though, was very much down to the English and their allies in Scotland. The British Army went on a killing spree, a true attempt at ethnic cleansing, wiping out whole villages, burning the houses and even destroying their crops and cattle. Think Sudanese troops in Darfur or Burmese forces against the Rohingya for a modern analogy. 

The first British colonial war was directed against the Scots, and it was as brutal as any in the long, sad history of that Empire.

As part of the drive to wipe out the old Highland Scots culture, the London Parliament banned of the traditional plaid. But there was one curious and significant exception to that ban: men serving in the British Army, who were positively encouraged to wear it. And tens of thousands over the next decades did. As so many Scotsmen also travelled through the Empire to assist in the colonial effort. 

They’d fought the British Army. But now they were partners in the British Empire. 

Those two sides of Scotland’s soul may explain how, nearly six years before Culloden, the Scottish poet James Thomson could have written the poem Rule, Britannia! Set to music by the Englishman Thomas Arne, it is one of the best known British patriotic songs. It celebrates British control of the Seas, in particular as the powerful protector of that most precious of British qualities, its liberty:

When Britain first, at Heaven’s command
Arose from out the azure main;
This was the charter of the land,
And guardian angels sang this strain:
"Rule, Britannia! rule the waves:
"Britons never will be slaves."

Of course, British sea power didn’t just defend British liberties at home, it helped ensure that Britain could make a gift of those same liberties to its proud and no doubt grateful dependencies in its huge overseas Empire.

Take Barbados, for example.

As Britain grew in strength, wealth and power, growing numbers of people became able to indulge their taste for certain luxuries. One of the greatest of those luxuries was sugar. In the past, honey had been the main sweetener used in Britain. But in the eighteenth century, sugar began to be far more readily available, and at far more accessible prices. 

For a time, it was only provided by possessions of foreign powers, such as Spain and Portugal with their extensive tropical colonies. But then Britain realised that in its Caribbean possession, the island of Barbados, the conditions were just right for growing sugar cane and producing sugar from it.

Unfortunately, few Europeans could stand the conditions there, especially given the rhythm of the work required. When the cane is ready for harvesting, it has to be brought in quickly and sent immediately for processing, before the sugar begins to break down. But Englishmen, and even Native Americans, had trouble surviving work that hard in the heat of Barbados.

Fortunately, the Portuguese had found an ingenious solution to the problem, for their own plantations in Brazil. They had taken to importing slave labour from Africa. Not to be outdone, Britain set out to do the same. It worked a dream. Slaves could be worked as hard as one liked, even to death – there were plenty more where they came from and prices, for a long while, weren’t even that high – and they could cope with the conditions.

By the end of the century, Britain had some 70,000 slaves in Barbados, and another 400,000 in Jamaica.

Jamaican cutters in the late 19th century
Post-slavery, but note the cutters are all black,
the overseer white

Of course, managing slaves wasn’t always easy. Discipline had to be maintained. But the British became good at that. In 1736, for instance, according to the historian Simon Schama, some 77 slaves on Antigua were burned alive to teach them not to rise up against their owners again (I don’t imagine they did). He also quotes Hans Sloane who described the techniques used in some places when it came to burning slaves, which is that they were burned “by degrees, from the feet and hands”, to make sure that they felt the most possible pain.

Still. The British weren’t always quite that cruel to their black slaves. Others, guilty of lesser crimes, might merely be hanged, or castrated, or mutilated in some other way. For really small offences, they might just be whipped and salt and pepper weren’t always rubbed into the wounds to make sure the lesson stuck.

Such was the civilising mission of the British Empire. With such sweet means did the British make sure they could indulge their sweet tooth at home. It may be true that Britons would never be slaves, as Rule Britannia! claimed, but that didn’t stop them being slaveholders.

It’s interesting, isn’t it? It strikes me that a nation that could regard a whole race as so little human that it could be treated this way, has more important issues to address than singing about ruling the waves. It needs to start by learning to rule itself, and to come to terms with its past.

But above all it has to come to terms with its present. Because those attitudes don’t vanish in a generation or two, or even ten or twenty. The disproportionate number of arrests among black people in Britain, and the disproportionate number of black people amongst victims of police violence, in some cases fatal, show that indifference to black lives is still with us today.

My preference is for ‘Black Lives Matter’ over ‘Rule Britannia’. Because ‘Black Lives Matter’ sums up the lesson that needs learning. A lesson particularly needed by anyone who replies ‘All Lives Matter’, since they clearly haven’t grasped the special level of aggression black people face.

Toffee doesn't do thunder

 It never rains but it pours. 

You want to see that old chestnut verified? Come to the charming Spanish province of Valencia. Where we live.

Just a week ago, we were out hiking through the rice-growing area of the Albufera. It was shirt-sleeve weather. Practically sun-block conditions. Which we’re still not used to in late November, up here in the northern Hemisphere, when you’d expect grey skies and biting cold at this time of year.

Shirtsleeve weather in the Albufera less than a week ago

Well, that’s the Valencia region for you. The weather tends to be wonderful. If you like your weather generally dry and warm.

The Valencia region: green despite the warmth

The trouble is that the region is also surprisingly green for a place quite that warm and dry. So, you’ll have no trouble deducing, it must get watered from time to time. And, since it’s dry for so long, when the rain comes down, it has to come down hard. Hard, and for hours. Which is what it’s been doing since this morning, as I write these words.

Not raining but pouring
The view from our front door this morning

I suppose I prefer having heavy rain from time to time with lots of great weather in between, than interminable drizzle three or four times a week. But while the storm’s on, it’s sometimes difficult to remember that I prefer it that way. 

Especially as it really is a storm. Accompanied, as it generally is, by lightning and thunder, the latter often extremely loud. Valencia is the city whose main festival, the Fallas, is principally concerned, as far as I can tell, with letting off tons of firecrackers. That would be irritating enough if it were only the usual small things most of us think of as firecrackers, but the diabolical Fallas-fans have come up with a type of firecracker which is about the size and shape of a stick of dynamite. Obviously, it doesn’t create the explosion of a stick of dynamite, but the noise it makes compares to an ordinary firecracker a bit like heavy artillery compares to a child’s cap gun.

So maybe I shouldn’t be particularly surprised by the noise of Valencian thunder.

Not that we particularly worry about it. Sadly, however, we have one member of the household who has lately become extremely sensitive to it. I don’t know why. Her pal takes it all in her stride, and she used to too. But not recently.

I first noticed her change in feeling to such loud noise when I was out for a walk with her the other day. There was a sound of shotguns being fired, quite a long way off, but even that startled her. She was in the middle of what we euphemistically refer to as “her business” when this happened, and she stopped dead. She took a look at me to see how I’d reacted, so I composed my expression into one of complete tranquillity, and my posture into utter indifference, as I’ve been trained to do, and that seemed to reassure her a little. 

She found herself another spot to carry on with her business.

You’ll have guessed by this point that I’m not talking about a human. No, this is Toffee, our toffee-coloured toy poodle. She’s been in a bad way today, as the thunder thunders around the place. While her friend, the black poodle Luci, just takes it all in her stride.

At one point, she started to dart upstairs, perhaps thinking that in a bedroom, generally a safe place in her view of the world, she would be in a refuge from the noise. But then she realised that she was going to be on her own up there, and solitude in such conditions was just not to be borne. So she sat on a stair trembling. And looking at us pitifully.

After all, she’s a very little dog.

Toffee, not happy about the thunder
Please make it stop...

I had to pick her up and take her downstairs. I sat down in her favourite place, the living room couch, and took her on my lap. As an afterthought, I wrapped her in a blanket. She seemed pleased with this arrangement. And, I’m glad to say, she soon stopped trembling.

Comforted at last

Ah, well. It’ll be over soon. The fine weather will return. Perhaps not quite shirtsleeve weather for a couple of months now. But at least withtout the rain and, above all, without the thunder.

Toffee will feel a lot better for that.

Have you no decency?

“Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” 

The words weren’t addressed to Donald Trump, though they might have been. 

Let’s skip over some of the obvious instances of Trump’s lack of decency – such as the payment to a porn star, the pardons to corrupt friends, the incitement of violence towards journalists or anyone else asking the harder questions – and go straight to a single, telling and more recent example.

On 12 November, Chris Krebs, then head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and therefore the top expert on election security in the US, declared that the 2020 presidential election was “the most secure in American history”. He had the backing of a group of other senior officials.

There’s a popular belief that “speaking truth to power” is a good thing. From my personal experience (at a far lower level), it can get you sacked. As indeed, happened to Krebs. Faced with a truth that didn’t fit his narcissistic view of the universe, Trump simply fired him. And he did it, as usual, with a Tweet, accusing him of inaccuracy, and publicly declaring that he had “terminated” him.

The quotation at the start of this post was from 9 June 1954, and the words were spoken by an attorney, Joseph Welch, attacking Senator McCarthy, the man who gave his name to the McCarthyite anti-Communist witch hunt of the 1950s. Three months earlier, on 9 March 1954, the journalist Edward Murrow had already begun to sound the end of McCarthyism, when on national TV he attacked its author, then  the junior Senator from Wisconsin:

… we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home. The actions of the junior senator from Wisconsin have caused alarm and dismay amongst our allies abroad and given considerable comfort to our enemies. 

The baleful face of the autocratic bully:
Joseph McCarthy and Donald Trump

Doesn’t that sound like Trump? He likes to present himself as the champion of American liberties – indeed of America – though he stands by as heavily armed radicals intimidate or murder peaceful citizens exercising their constitutional rights. 

His ‘America First’ doctrine has seen the US abandon longstanding arrangements with his allies, whether by pulling out of the World Health Organisation or the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, or by undermining NATO. That has caused consternation among allies and comfort to enemies, such as Putin in Russia, who still won’t recognise Joe Biden’s victory in the election, such is his investment in Trump.

Even more striking is how Trump, by dropping the Trans Pacific Partnership, has left China as the major trading power in the Pacific region. That was confirmed by the recent signing of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, the world’s biggest trade deal, dominated by China and without the US.

Murrow made an even more serious accusation against McCarthy just before the passage I quoted from him before. He said:

We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof, and that conviction depends on evidence and due process of law.

Wow, that has a contemporary ring, doesn’t it? Disagree with the present tenant of the White House, and you can expect a fusillade on Twitter, and dismissal if you’re in a job Trump can fire you from. Distinguishing dissent from disloyalty? “What’s the difference?” says the President.

As for conviction depending on “evidence and due process of law”, well, we only need to look at the string of frivolous court cases brought by the Trump campaign with not a shred of evidence between them. His view of justice is that if it advances his interests it’s right, and if it doesn’t, it’s fake and probably criminal. 

Murrow’s denunciation of McCarthy marked a turning point in the Senator’s reign of terror. The final blow were Welch’s words, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?”. They revealed the Senator for what he was, a sadistic bully and a bigot, for whom there could be no role in a nation dedicated to the pursuit of freedom.

The McCarthy era ended. We’re not quite out of the woods yet, but it looks as though the Trump era will also close in a few weeks’ time. That says something important about the nature of the US system.

There’s plenty wrong with it. To take a key fault, its foundational sin is the belief that one group of humans, marked by African descent and darker skin, is so far below the dominant whites that it’s legitimate to treat them as inferiors, even to the point of enslaving them and inflicting on them cruelty no white man would regard as tolerable if inflicted on another.

That attitude remains, only party attenuated, and resurfaces with depressing frequency in killings of black people for which the perpetrators face no penalty. That’s especially true if they’re policemen, which they often are.

But despite those terrible flaws, there is a fundamental strength in America, embodied in its Constitution. That document enshrines not so much liberty itself as the aspiration to that liberty. And that means that as long as there are enough people sufficiently wedded to that Constitution, the US will recover even after venomous aberrations from decency, such as McCarthy’s or Trump’s.

But let’s return to Murrow. He had denounced McCarthy for having behaved abominably, and went on:

And whose fault is that? Not really his. He didn’t create this situation of fear, he merely exploited it, and rather successfully. 

Trump didn’t create the divisions in the US, the disrespect for law, the abandonment of tolerance, that he exploited. He simply took advantage of them. And then he fanned them.

But Americans need to look within themselves and their neighbours to find the sources of these threats. That’s where the disease needs to be lanced. And that’s where they’ll find the courage, if anywhere, to keep defending their Constitution.

The same applies to Europeans tempted by our own bullies, such as Abascal in Spain, Salvini in Italy and Marine le Pen in France. 

Or, come to that, Boris Johnson in Britain.

Age of Sociopaths

Hitler’s responsibility for the Holocaust, and indeed for the Second World War in Europe, tends to overshadow everything else he did. However, some of his other wanton and cruel acts would, in anyone else, have been regarded as awful enough to condemn him as the sociopath he was.

Among these, was his behaviour towards his half-niece Geli Raubal. Nineteen years his junior when, at seventeen, he had her move into his Munich apartment. She stayed there, for six years, increasingly closely sequestered.

No one knows whether there was a sexual relationship between them: it seems likely that Hitler suffered a number of sexual problems, and one of the most serious was his confusion of dominance with gratification. Geli wanted to study; he forbade it. She got into some kind of an affair with Hitler’s chauffeur; Hitler ordered her to end it and fired the chauffeur. She wanted to go back to Vienna (like Hitler, she was Austrian); Hitler wouldn’t hear of it.

That final refusal tipped her over the edge. He left for one of his great rallies in Nuremberg. Within hours, she was dead, killed by a bullet in her lungs from Hitler’s own pistol.

Geli Raubal with her uncle Adolf Hitler
who, it turns out, was as unbearable at home as outside

There have been suspicions that the death was a murder. There have been suggestions she was beaten. The most likely explanation is that, driven to despair by becoming a virtual prisoner of her uncle’s, she took her own life.

This is one death, and probably suicide, which fades into insignificance compared to the millions who were murdered in the Holocaust. But, as Stalin said, one death is a tragedy while a million is simply a statistic. The story of Geli Raubal highlights something about Hitler’s character, even in the intimate sphere, away from the adulation of the rallies or the cowed obedience of soldiers and secret policemen.

Hitler simply didn’t care what Geli wanted. She saw her simply as an agent to satisfy his wishes. When she showed any sign of independence of will, he reacted with fury and took impulsive action, such as firing the chauffeur or denying Geli’s right to go have any kind of life outside the apartment.

These are the classic symptoms of the personality disorder which used to be known as sociopathy: an inability to feel empathy for other people, egocentrism to the point of narcissism, a refusal to follow social conventions, emotional instability and impulsiveness that can lead to aggression and violence.

The world paid a high price to free itself of the sociopathy of Hitler. But the evil wasn’t wiped out, merely driven underground. It has re-emerged in our times.

Obviously the great sociopath today is Donald Trump. 

• Unable to feel, let alone express, sympathy for victims of racist violence? 
• Unmoved by the cruelty of separating the children of immigrants from their parents at the US border? 
• Callously telling victims of Californian fires, made far worse by the global warming he refuses to recognise, that they should rake their forests? 
• Describing American war dead as losers? 
• Pretending that an epidemic responsible for the deaths of quarter of a million Americans, isn’t serious? 
• Firing collaborators by Tweet?

All these are the behaviour patterns of a man incapable of empathy, so entirely absorbed in himself as to be unable even to imagine how others might be offended by his actions. And hasn’t his behaviour since the election shown his refusal to live by normal social standards? 

His narcissism, too, comes through strongly in his refusal to believe that any election can be valid if it doesn’t crown him. He has retreated from his defeat into denial and absence from the public sphere, engaging in practically no governing except for the occasional bursts of impulsive action – firings, troop withdrawals without planning – while spending most of his time sulking in his room, watching too much TV, firing off the occasional disgruntled tweet or emerging occasionally to play golf.

Trump the loser

Well, unless he can pull off what looks increasingly incredible, and snatch election victory from Joe Biden, we may be rid of him by 20 January. Without fighting a war, which is some progress since Hitler’s days. But that would only be the start.

Alongside Coronavirus, there seems to be an epidemic of sociopathy around the world. The latest case has emerged in Britain, in the form of the Home Secretary, Priti Patel. An official investigation into her behaviour has found her guilty of bullying. The Prime Minister’s adviser on ethics ruled that she had breached the Ministerial code of conduct. Boris Johnson, however, decided that she had not, so it was the adviser that resigned, not Patel.

The most telling comment by Patel on the affair was her public apology: “I’m sorry that my behaviour has upset people and I have never intentionally set out to upset anyone”. I suspect it’s true. She had no idea her behaviour would offend people. Why? Because she’s incapable of placing herself in another person’s place and imagining how she would feel, if she were subjected to the same actions.

In other words, she’s incapable of empathy. 

Priti Patel and Boris Johnson
In their sociopathic comfort zone

So, it would seem, is her boss. Boris Johnson is saying that, in his view, there’s nothing reprehensible about Patel’s behaviour. This isn’t the first time he’s reached that kind of view. When his then principal adviser, Dominic Cummings, flagrantly breached the Covid restrictions he’d been instrumental in framing, and drove several hundred miles while infected, Johnson did nothing about it. 

It’s hard to know just how much effect that had on compliance with the rules. You know, “if the PM doesn’t mind, why should I?” That kind of thing. There must have been some of it, and certainly compliance hasn’t been good, so Johnson’s behaviour can hardly be regarded as Prime Ministerial, any more than Patel’s was Ministerial.

Even more striking is that when Johnson finally fired Cummings, it was because he’d got up the nose of Johnson’s girlfriend Carrie Symonds. While it was the anonymous populace, Johnson didn’t care. But when it was a matter affecting his own domestic arrangements, his reaction was swift, sure and brutal. Cummings was out, like Hitler’s chauffeur.

Yes, indeed. Sociopathic behaviour in power seems common these days. And that’s without even mentioning Erdogan, Bolsonaro, Duterte, Orbán and a host of others. The infection has spread to many places. Perhaps if and when Trump goes, it will start to recede. But we shall need to fight it all the way, and stay vigilant.

Sadly, just wearing a mask won’t be enough.

My grandfather and (maybe) a dark secret

Although I’ never seem to have any trouble writing the odd post about my maternal grandparents – especially about Yetta, my grandmother – I seem to have far less to say about my father’s side of the family.

This is sad but unsurprising. Although we lived in different countries – they in England, we in Italy – we visited my mother’s parents regularly, once or twice a year, and they would come and see us, until they grew too old for the journey. We knew them well, we were close to them, there were the bonds of love between us that make what we mean by family.

Eleanor and Leonard Beeson
My paternal grandparents, during WW2

My other grandparents, on the other hand, we rarely saw, and they remained kind but distant strangers to me until they died. The explanation may have been perfectly simple, even if it wasn’t particularly attractive to most people who cherish their grandchildren: my paternal grandfather Leonard and grandmother Eleanor may simply not have been that interested in being grandparents.

There may, however, have been another and far less creditable motive for their remoteness. I don’t know whether it’s the explanation or not, but Leonard was an intriguing man in any case and that, together with this obscure aspect of his character, strikes me as worth exploring.

Mary Ann and Alfred Beeson
Leonard’s parents, my great grandparents

He was the son of Alfred Beeson, who had a bright business idea. Britain did not allow the importation of live cattle during the dying decades of the nineteenth century. He decided to set up in Belgium, importing cattle from Argentina (the state of the cattle during that long crossing doesn’t bear thinking about), slaughtering them there and exporting the carcasses to the UK. 

On the fact of it, that seems like a good idea. Unfortunately, it would only work as long as the law remained the same in Britain, which of course in time it didn’t. Once cattle could be imported on the hoof directly into Britain, the business lost its basis for success.

My great grandfather Alfred died young, at 39. I don’t know whether the business was still a going concern then or not, but I do know that Leonard, only fifteen, suddenly found himself the head of the family and of the family business, at a time when that kind of position was taken seriously. His mother may still have been alive, but his word mattered. The family remained in Brussels and Leonard took responsibility for its wellbeing.

I remember by great Aunt Irene, Leonard’s sister, explaining to me many years later that she had wanted to study, but Leonard was adamant: the family simply couldn’t have that. So she never got to university.

Leonard wed Eleanor in his early twenties, so when World War One broke out, he was already a married man. He joined the British Royal Artillery and served on the Western Front, where he was gassed once and wounded by shrapnel on another occasion. Eleanor visited him in hospital after the gassing, but had it firmly in her mind that he’d lost a leg. He had to go so far as to pull the bed clothes off himself to show that he still had two legs, both of them functional.

The other wound left bits of shrapnel in a hand, in a position where surgeons felt they couldn’t operate. So the hand kept closing for the rest of his life and couldn’t be fully opened. A keen, perhaps even fanatical golfer, by the end of his life he had to force the club into his almost closed hand.

It was golf that meant that he was in England for a weekend of his favourite sport when the German army invaded Belgium in May 1940. He was stuck there with only the contents of his suitcase and the clothes he was wearing, while his wife frantically packed and closed the house in Brussels ready to flee to England. My father and one of his siblings was with them.

They caught the last train to France out of Brussels before the German army arrived, which was just as well, as the previous train was strafed by German fighters. 

Leonard decided that he owed it to his country to serve in the Second World War as he had in the First. By 1940 he was, however, already over fifty, so he didn’t go back into combat. Instead he joined, of all branches, the Fleet Air Arm, the air service attached to the Royal Navy. However, he didn’t go to sea, but was posted to an aerodrome in Scotland.

Leonard as a Volunteer lieutenant
in the Fleet Air Arm in World War 2

My father was astonished that, with no previous connection to the Navy or to military flying, Leonard was in the Fleet Air Arm at all. But he was amused when he visited him and discovered that Leonard had spotted a patch of unused land at the back of the base and obtained permission to build a golf course there. So when my father turned up, he found a nine-hole course available within the base itself. 

Which is one way, and certainly not the worst, of contributing to a war effort.

That frenetic departure of his wife from Brussels had, however, had one casualty. Leonard had completed the typescript of a major book. And Eleanor left it behind. It would be lost for ever: when they returned to the house after the war, they found it gutted with no trace of any of the belongings they’d left behind, including the book.

And what was the subject of the book? It was the ‘Jewish question’.

Now talking about the ‘Jewish Question’ then is like proclaiming today that ‘All Lives Matter’. It’s code. ‘All Lives Matter’ is a denial of the fact that Black lives are the targets of particular persecution in the world today. The ‘Jewish Question’ supposes that there is some specific problem concerning the presence of Jews in non-Jewish societies, and from there it’s generally a short step, taken by most authors on the subject, to blaming the Jews for the problem.

In other words, behind the code is the implication that the victims of anti-Semitism bear some or a great deal of the responsibility for their own suffering. Which rather suggests that Leonard’s book was likely to have been anti-Semitic in tone.

I don’t know how he reacted to the news that my father was marrying a Jew.

Did that make him less inclined to have much to do with us? I don’t know. On the few occasions we met, he was always pleasant and affable. So maybe anti-Semitism had nothing to do with his remoteness from us. I’d like to believe that it was just reticence to be a traditional grandparent and nothing more sinister.

On the other hand, I’m afraid I have no regret that his great book was lost to the world. I think it’s unlikely that it’s any the poorer for that loss…

Trump and Cummings: a glimmer of hope?

After a pleasant interlude to talk about more entertaining subjects, like some great TV series, it’s time to return to uglier business. Such as the weird but far from wonderful doings of Donald Trump and his little imitators littering the world today.

At least the outlook’s beginning to seem less bleak. Trump showed as much in his first public statement since his defeat was confirmed. Speaking of the need for Coronavirus lockdowns, he said:

I will not go – this administration will not be going to a lockdown. Hopefully the – whatever happens in the future, who knows which administration will be.

He stopped himself in time, but he did seem to be on the brink of admitting that it might soon be another administration taking those decisions. 

Trump: is it beginning to dawn on him that he is, after all, a Loser?

That leaves the question of why he’s bothering to keep on flailing around and insisting that it isn’t over yet. A possible reason I’ve seen announced is that, just so long as he keeps fighting the result, he can go on raising money to support his efforts. Apparently, he’s diverting perhaps as much as half what he raises to fund the debts of the election campaign.

The other possibility is that he’s simply stuck in Denial, or one of the other five stages of grief. You’ll remember that one of those stages is Bargaining. I reckon that could include another ‘B’, Begging, like Trump in Pennsylvania early in October:

Suburban women, will you please like me? Please. Please.

Then there’s the Anger stage. Well, there’s plenty of examples to pick from. Take what he tweeted about Fox News, when that network, so slavishly supportive of his Presidency for four years, started calling a win for Biden: 

Very sad to watch this happen, but they forgot what made them successful, what got them there. They forgot the Golden Goose. The biggest difference between the 2016 Election, and 2020, was @FoxNews!

There’s plenty of Denial too. Remember Trump’s recent all-caps Tweet, “I WON THIS ELECTION, BY A LOT!”? Over 5 million popular votes and 70 electoral college votes behind, but he won by a lot? Yep, that’s Denial all right. 

The next stage is Depression. Disappearing from public view for five days? Clearing off to play golf on two of them? Something between Denial and Depression, perhaps. There’s plenty for Trump to be depressed about, after all, above all that there’s no term in his lexicon more insulting than ‘Loser’, and he’s lost. 

So maybe he’s sliding towards the last stage: Acceptance. Perhaps that’s why he seemed to be starting to recognise that decisions about lockdowns may not be his to take too much longer. 

If he can persuade himself to go quietly, he’ll be doing everyone a favour. Above all the country he claims to care for so much. Because the alternative explanation of his behaviour today is chilling. 

It is that all those failing lawsuits he’s launched aren’t even intended to win, but merely to spread confusion and doubt about the election. That would reinforce the constant flow of misinformation coming out of the Trump camp. That’s because in an atmosphere of suspicion about results in a handful of key States that voted for Biden but have Republican legislatures, those legislatures might feel they have the grounds to override the popular will. Then they would appoint slates of electors themselves. Pro-Trump, of course. So those States would submit two rival slates for authorities to choose between.

Something like that happened in 1876. And, back then, with a Democratic candidate who only needed one additional elector to become President, the process adopted for deciding between disputed slates in four states, awarded every one of them to his Republican opponent.

I don’t say that Trump is deliberately following such a strategy, if only because I don’t think the man has ever shown the intellectual firepower needed to think strategically. But it’s possible that some of the people in his campaign have the brains to develop something along those lines. And they have the impetus given them by the strange silence of leading Republicans. 

These are people who must know Trump has been beaten but won’t say so. Why not? Because they know even Loser Trump has a huge following, and they don’t want those votes turning against them when they’re next up for election themselves.

Trump stealing the election would massively undermine democracy itself. It’s a move that Biden and the Democrats generally have to be ready to fight all the way. That’s why it’s so significant that Trump may be moving towards accepting defeat instead: that would spare his country a truly devastating event.

Getting Trump out would also benefit many other countries around the world. If he goes, then we may find that the wave of autocratic government by right-wing populists has at last crested. The likes of Bolsonaro in Brazil, Orbán in Hungary or Duterte in the Philippines might all be under threat.

It’s already beginning to happen in one regime headed by a mini-Trump. That’s in Britain. The British government is ostensibly led by Boris Johnson, whose incompetence is rivalled only by his idleness. His richly undeserved reputation for decisiveness has repeatedly been undermined by his evasions or U-turns, reversing today a decision taken a few weeks earlier, often against the advice of experts, the Opposition and even members of his own Party.

Dominic Cummings: a baleful presence leaving Downing Street

Given Johnson’s extraordinary idleness, the chief architect of this shambles has been his principal adviser, Dominic Cummings. That’s a man who believes himself above the law, who can issue Coronavirus lockdown restrictions and then break them himself with no retribution from his weak boss, a man whose very reputation is based on a lie (the campaign for Brexit which claimed, spuriously, that it would release £350m a week for the NHS) and who’s known as a bully and authoritarian.

But Cummings has now gone. Not because he’s a liar and a bully, but for reasons much more characteristic of the chaotic government he was directing: the jousting for personal power within the coterie that surrounds the Prime Minister. And, finally, for having been offensive towards the Prime Minister’s girlfriend, another unelected figure who seems to think her views should matter in government.

The departure of Cummings, however belated and however badly motivated, is another weakening of authoritarian populists’ grip on power. It’s too early to say that these autocrats are on the retreat. But at least there’s now a glimmer of hope.