US Election

There’s a small oak tree that grows beside the boarding house. It shed its leaves a couple of weeks ago, briefly covering the tarmac in a golden-brown carpet, before the groundskeepers swept them all up into the back of a truck and took them away to the tip. A beautiful gift of death tossed into the trash. Word must have got around, in that silent way that trees have, as so many of the trees around the school have since held jealously onto their leaves well into the usual falling season. My oak, stripped to the skin, looks cold. Winter will soon be here and it has lost its coat.

The world seems a little darker right now. It’s not just the longer nights. The news is full of it. Abuse in the Church of England. Treachery and death in the Middle East. A self-confessed day-one-dictator returning to the White House. Politicians who once laughed at the Man spinelessly throwing in their lot behind the future power base. Shadows creeping over Ukraine. I expected to see more of it on my social media feed, but there’s been surprisingly little said about the US elections. Perhaps the folks I know have listened to the voices in the wind and decided that now is not the time to voice their concerns online. Perhaps they vented their frustration elsewhere. Or perhaps – and I suspect this to be the grim truth – most of them just didn’t care overmuch.

There’s a quote often attributed to the Anglo-Irish philosopher Edmund Burke that runs along the lines of ‘evil triumphs when good men do nothing’. As is the way with so much these days, there’s almost no evidence that he actually said such a thing. We have learned to doubt everything. In that light, how can you blame a nation for putting their confidence in a self-confessed liar?

Burke did, however, say something similar, albeit a lot more profound:

When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.
Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770)

He might have been writing a little over two hundred and fifty years ago, but he might just as well have been describing the world as it is today. It is always rather chilling when the voices of history stretch their pale and clammy hands into the present.

Until we learn to put our differences aside and work together – even with those with whom we do not, cannot or simply will not see eye to eye – our future will be in somebody else’s hands. Until the educated West accepts this reality, there will be no end to the head-scratching and the bewilderment. I have beat upon this drum since my schooldays, where it was doubtless drummed into me by my teachers, but I still believe this to be true: that you should always be prepared to listen and engage in conversation, no matter what you believe. Cancel culture does not work. It just fans the flames of those who feel their needs are being ignored and their voices silenced. We are marching into an increasingly intolerant age, and it worries me that those who fight for tolerance’s sake are among the vanguard, whether they know it or not. Men like Trump ride into power on the backs of such virtue-signallers.

I’m reading my way through a number of books to try to see the world through somebody else’s eyes. It’s my way of dealing with the situation – particularly when my profession is to help children to make their way in the world. I’ve started with Douglas Murray’s The Strange Death of Europe in an attempt to understand the growing immigration frustration in my country (having been an immigrant myself, however briefly). Ilan Pappé is in the wings. I can’t say I agree with everything I read, but it’s broadening my perspective a little more, and that’s no bad thing.

In the spirit of remembrance, they read the list of names of former students of the school who lost their lives in the two world wars in front of the war memorial yesterday. All of the numbered fallen had one thing in common: not a single one had died on the field of battle. Died in a collision during training. Run over by a lorry near base camp. Killed by an explosive during a training exercise. Shot down by friendly anti-aircraft fire after returning from a successful mission. The senseless waste of war was never more plain. When I was younger I had the morbid suspicion I would see another such great war in my lifetime. It was only ever a whimsy, but these days I am not so sure.

Some of the students were dressed in their military uniform. I had a grim vision of a towering cenotaph. Etched into the cold marble slab were names from every corner of the globe. I hope it does not come to that.

On closer inspection, my little oak has not lost everything. Not yet. A few golden leaves have held onto life, a full fortnight after the rest bowed to the inevitable. It just so happens that they are growing on the branch that reaches closest to the light. I wonder if that is what is keeping them alive.

We can’t give up hope. Hope is one of the things that makes us human. As winter draws near and the world darkens a little more every day, remember to hold on to the light in whatever form that takes for you. It is a warm and precious thing. BB x

If I let the events of the last few days go by without a word, I’d be failing as a writer.

The hysteria is real. Donald Trump is the next President of the United States. Social media has exploded. Race hate is on the rise. Politics has, after so many predictable years, suddenly got very interesting indeed. The UK’s decision to leave the EU is old news: there’s a larger finger on the big red button. The race for the White House may have split the States, but everybody would agree that America’s new president can mean only one thing: change.

In one of the strangest turns of events I’ve ever witnessed, the man widely heralded as the most laughable of all of the presidential candidates of the campaign has defied all expectations and, despite a slew of racial slurs, misogynistic remarks and just about anything and everything else that might have destroyed any other runner-up, Trump has surged into power and we must now accept the fact that, like it or not, the controversial tycoon is now one of the most most powerful men on Earth.

That is, as long as there is an Earth for him to police. There’s no denying it: so many of us believed that a Trump presidency would be the forerunner of the apocalypse.

But is it really?

Now bear with me, as I’m going to do something very radical and very out-of-character, and I’m going to suggest that a Donald Trump presidency may be exactly what the world needs right now.

Now, why on earth would I say something like that? How could a see-sawing, prejudiced, misogynistic, arch-capitalist with his hands on the nuclear codes ever be a good idea? Well, for starters, I never said it was a good idea, nor that it sat well with me at all. However, I’m slowly coming around to thinking that it might not be the travesty it first seemed (Or maybe I’m just disillusioned with reality after Brexit).

I’ll do my best to explain. Firstly, the mere fact that a firebrand like Trump managed to beat the system and defy all expectations means that the status quo has been given a serious shakedown. The slump of pendulum politics is officially over. Granted, Trump was no saint, but Clinton’s track record made it difficult for the Democrats from the very beginning. Bernie might have been our hero, and it’s easy to believe that he would have led the Democrats to victory, but something tells me that the United States would have sooner seen a certified bigot in the White House before electing a socialist. Old habits die hard. But it’s this desperate adherence to the status quo that has brought us to this. People are sick and tired of the ways things are, the way things have been for so long. Trump offered to give them that change. Clinton had a tried-and-true dustpan and brush, Trump was offering a Dyson. It’s as simple as that.

In that sense, the election of Donald Trump ought to be seen as a triumph, not just of prejudice, but of change. Maybe next time the Democrats will provide a more idealistic individual, one unmarred by scandal and unfettered by the chains of regularity. In the interests of good politics, let’s hope so.

So why now? Here’s the sticky bit. Think back to the last time there was ever all-out war between the world powers. I’m not talking Cold War meddling, I’m talking boots-on-the-ground assault. 1945. That’s over seventy years ago. Since then we’ve meddled with countries across the globe, but it’s been all quiet in the Western Front. And seventy years is a very long time to go without war by Western standards. Meanwhile the US, the UN, the EU, all of these ‘peace-keeping’ bodies have been policing the world, trying to resolve conflicts left, right and centre – and, in many cases, deliberately capitalizing on them. But the clock is ticking. If history tells us one thing, it’s that nothing ever stays the same forever.

I believe that we’ve been living through a Pax Romana, a necessary ceasefire. As long as everybody did as they were told, the peace would hold. But this isn’t the way it’s supposed to be. Humans are naturally belligerent, and we’d be fooling ourselves to believe otherwise. We have so much capacity for love and compassion, but instinct cannot be denied. Conflict is one of the most natural elements of existence and we’ve been stemming it for so long. It may not have looked like it until recently, but we’ve been sitting on a volcano for a long time now. The pressure is mounting and it’ll blow before too long, with dire consequences for us all.

How could that ever be good? Again, it’s not. It’s terrible, and when war comes, I will be just as distraught as the rest of us. But, sooner or later, it is necessary. Resolving conflict by removing it from the equation can only work so many times, just as taking painkillers is no substitute for a cure. In the end, perhaps the best thing to do is to fight it out, to let it all come to a head. The rise of terrorism, the refugee crisis, pitifully low voter turnouts and the wave of race hate that’s sweeping the West… These are all the signs of a world that’s bristling for a fight. Between who, I cannot say. But it’s in the air.

Previously, wars have not only brought long periods of hostility and dissatisfaction to a decisive end, but they’ve resulted in massive social upheaval, often with various positive side-effects. In that one instance, war may save us all. I dread to think what may happen to this world if things go on the way they are.

Trump might not be the one to start the War That Is To Come, but you could interpret his election as the first of many thrown stones. Of course, it could all be a storm in a teacup, and the Mexican Wall and the ‘complete shutdown on all Muslims entering the United States’ may be as likely to materialize as UKIP’s £350m pledge to the NHS, but if we’re due a decade of change, for good or ill, this seems like the obvious trigger.

So what can we do? For starters, we can try to learn from our mistakes. The Democrats lost because they believed their idea of democracy would work. It didn’t, and now the age-old system has failed. It’s time to search for a new way of doing things, before it’s too late. I don’t pretend to have even the first idea what the new way might entail, but I can see plainly enough that holding to the status quo is no longer a reliable option.

We should also get learning languages. Now. Obviously as a linguist I have more than a touch of bias here, but I mean it. In the current climate where nations the world over are becoming more and more insular as ‘us and them’ politics take the floor, it is more important than ever that we learn to interact with the world outside our own. Whatever you think of Trump or his policies, blind, beer-touting isolationism is a one-way road to destruction in the long run. So the EU has failed? Don’t walk away from it. Work on it. Change it. I’ve met so many non-Europeans who fell foul of the EU and had little love for it, so – despite espousing the Remain camp myself – I can see why people think it has failed them. But we could do so much more by working together. It’s just a question of time. English may be the world language for now, but there’s no reason to believe that’s the way it will always be, nor should it.

When Trump takes office next year, it’s difficult to know exactly what will happen. The bookies have been wrong time and again this year, so it’s hardly worth consulting them anymore. But if war comes, in ten years or in twenty, don’t say I didn’t warn you. BB x