It’s been six months. Six months since I
wrote anything here. Was I waiting for the dust to settle? Was I just too
shocked? Was I trying to get on with life despite the lunacy? Probably all of
the above.
It’s been a strange year and I don’t hold
out much hope for normalcy in 2017. I just did one of those Facebook things
where an app makes a picture of the words you have used during the year with
the most used words in the biggest font. My most-used word of 2016 was Nazi. I
didn’t post the picture.
On both sides of the Atlantic voters have
made lunatic and self-harming decisions based on a consistent stream of lies in
the media, both traditional and online.
In Britain the engineers of the Leave
campaign immediately fled the scene, leaving my local MP to try to sort out the
mess. Good luck with that one Mrs May. The next couple of years are likely to
be bloody.
In the USA a misogynist, racist, narcissist
was elected due to an exquisitely aligned set of circumstances that included,
in no particular order, the Republican party being completely unfit for purpose
and unable to field a rational candidate, the Democrats choosing a candidate
who though supremely well-qualified was out of tune with the times, the
Director of the FBI keeping alive a non-story about a minor indiscretion with
email arrangements, the Russian intelligence service stealing and leaking
information detrimental to the Democrats and finally a constitutional
arrangement originally designed to appease slave-owners delivering victory to the
candidate with almost three million fewer votes. If they reran the election a
thousand times I doubt if they would ever see all those stars lining up in
quite that order.
Compared to the ructions in Britain and the
USA, the resignation of an Italian Prime Minister and the concession by the French
Socialist Party six months ahead of the first round of voting seem like minor
bumps in the road but they are both important. The tide of madness is not yet
receding. Consider the irony that probably the single most hopeful political
event of the year – to this old pink wishy-washy liberal leftie at least – was the
news that Angela Merkel intends to run for another term as Chancellor of
Germany.
So what will 2017 hold? The portents are
not good. It’s very easy to make comparisons with the 1930s and judging from
that Facebook app, I have been doing. But despite the frightening similarities it’s
not the same. There was no Internet in the 1930s and no nuclear weapons either.
The people on whom the burden of scapegoat fell represented small minorities;
Jews, Gypsies, Gays, Communists. Muslims are almost a fifth of the world’s
population and so-called “minority” groups make up over 35% of the population
of the USA. Events simply will not pan out exactly as they did in the middle of
the 20th century.
So, given that things will be different it
is reasonable to believe that they will eventually be better. We will pass
though this period of lunacy. People of goodwill will find ways to
organise and resist the worst excesses. It will be hard and there will be more
setbacks but the world will eventually be a better place.
My text for 2017 comes from a quote that I
first heard from movie critic Mark Kermode although I don’t think he claims to have coined it.
“Everything
will be all right in the end. And if it’s not all right now then it isn’t the
end.”
