Barack Obama - black but not Black

One of the things about being an editor is that you have to correct punctuation and spelling from material you receive from budding writers, not all of whom get it right. The most obvious example of a recent mistake is the gleefully pounced on misplaced apostrophe in the cover of a book by Donald Trump Junior.  It should, of course, be Democrats’ not Democrat’s as he is referring to more than one Dem.  He may wish there was only one but there are plenty of those pesky Democrats out there.  And a few democrats as well.  Thank God – or god, if you are an atheist. 

One theory is that the mistake was made deliberately in order to garner headlines through what is called guerrilla marketing.  For this editor it shrieks of ‘amateur’ (or ‘loser’ to use a Trumpism) but the people selling the book probably look on those like me who think that you should get these things right as humourless, elitist lefties who would never buy a book written by a Trump.  They got that bit right, at least.  Their market is elsewhere and they believe that there is no such thing as bad publicity.

Then there are changes which reflect the mindset of the person doing the writing, maybe attacking the attitude of the person doing the reading – and the correcting.  The latest of these is the use of a capital B for the word ‘black’ when used to describe a person.  The N-word is obviously unacceptable and African-American – which does take capitals – does not apply to black people from outside the USA. 

To me, however, the use of a capital B for black is wrong.  It is wrong simply because black it is ungrammatical.  Black is an adjective and, as such, does not command a capital – just like the word ‘white’, which nobody is suggesting should be capitalised.  The argument of the capitalisers, as I understand it, is that being black should be on a par with being Chinese, Latin or Asian, all words that describe groups based on their country or continent of origin and are, therefore, capitalised.

Being black, however, is much less specific than being Asian, Chinese or Latin.  Although black people may have originated in Africa they are now found all over the world – just like white people, in fact.  As Lenny Henry said – and Donald Trump Senior failed to realise – there is no point in telling black people to go ‘home’ because their home is probably just a bus ride away. 

There is, admittedly, not a clear distinction here.  Many people described as Asian or Chinese with upper class denominators may never have been anywhere near China or Asia and Latin America is such a loose term as to include anyone of Hispanic origin who, again, may have spent their whole lives outside the countries their grandparents came from.  

White people who arrived in another country or continent often came as conquerors, while black people often came as slaves.  They are still struggling to achieve equality in a world where white people expect to rule.  Will capitalising a racial categorisation – going from ‘black’ to ‘Black’ – help or hinder that process?  Hinder, in my view.  In order to overcome racism we need to look on a human being’s skin colour as simply no big deal.  Capitalising it to Black makes it a big deal and, therefore, increases the difference.   This in turn could mean increasing the possibility of people of colour being regarded as inferior – without intending to do, it should be said.

Slaves were defined and categorised simply and brutally by their skin colour.  White people (like me) did not have to endure slavery.  They (we) never knew what it was like to be denied freedom and be bought and sold like cattle.  They (we) never knew what it was like to struggle against prejudice and achieve equality against the odds.

Just ask Barack Obama.  His father was from Africa, which led to all sorts of birther nonsense and ill-disguised racism from people who wanted to keep him in what they saw as his place. Obama never forgot his blackness or his African heritage.  He never disrespected or condemned the people who remained in the place his father had left but he just ignored those who thought – and sometimes said – that he should be sent back there.  

He showed that the colour of your skin does not need to define you because he rose to the top in a world that had not so long ago condemned people of colour to a life of automatic inferiority.  He demonstrated that slavery and racism are not only evil but stupid because they judge people by that skin colour.  Look at me, he said, my being black has not held me back.  He led the way out of racism by example. 

Just as racism will never be truly dead until we can watch a white person playing Othello and not bat an eyelid, so will we never overcome the evil of racism until black is simply an adjective, not a celebration, not a condemnation, just a description of appearance.  Capitalising the word will not accelerate that process, but slow it down.  This editor, for one, intends to keep black as an adjective with a lower case ‘b’.

Edwin Lerner

 

PEOPLE WITH A PENIS

JK Rowling

Gerain Greer
Both are in trouble over their views on trans rights 

How do you define who is and who is not a woman?  The problem arises because people can now transition from male to female or female to male, either through surgery or simply through self-definition.  This has left those who want to create and protect what I call penis free zones in conflict with those who assert that a person can simply change their gender by self-definition, ie by saying that they are now a woman rather than a man, the gender they were born into.  There is even a term for people (like me) who are happy with their birth gender.  We are ‘cis’ men or women.

You would not be human if you did not smile a little at the thought of right-on feminists like Germaine Greer and the journalist Suzanne Moore finding themselves turned from radicals into reactionaries because they want to maintain women-only zones and cast doubt on the validity of gender self-definition.  Even J K Rowling has found herself in hot water because she holds a more traditional view of gender.

Non-cis people who transition are twice as likely to move from the male to the female gender.  This may be a reflection of male anxiety in a feminist era.  (If you cannot match them, join them.)  It could also be a result of the greater practical difficulty of a woman becoming a man.  Put bluntly, it is easier to remove a penis than graft one on to the human body, so the surgical procedure needed for someone to transition from being a woman to a man costs twice as much as the alternative.

If you do not fancy – or cannot afford –surgery but want to change gender, you have the option of simply declaring that you are now either a woman or a man, whatever it says on your birth certificate.  In certain countries (but not yet Britain) this is legally binding and a man can simply declare him/herself to be a woman. This then allows  a trans woman to enter what was previously an exclusively cis-woman space.  The problem is that this allows people with penises to go into places they were previously excluded from like the Hampstead Ladies Pond where women could swim, sunbathe and lie around semi-clothed or naked without being subject to the male gaze.  

I see no good reason why people should not be allowed to congregate in areas which are shared with those of their own gender if those spaces are for used social rather than political or financial purposes.  In other words, it was right that Mrs Thatcher was entitled to go to the Hampstead Ladies Pond – she was after all the local MP – but wrong that she could only go to the Connaught Club in Pall Mall if accompanied by her husband.  It was the club of the Conservative Party and she was its leader so it was absurd to exclude her.  (Most Pall Mall clubs realised this and have now dropped their male-only membership policies.)  People like to gather with those of their own gender and women, in particular, need to feel safe when they do so.  They do not unless they are convinced they are in a genuine penis-free zone.  

Germaine Greer thinks that a woman who used to be a man has not become one simply through a process of self-definition – or even with the aid of surgery.  The trans person insists they have and the two sides end up shouting at each other, which gets nobody anywhere.  The problem is being framed in terms of who people are, which will always be a matter of individual interpretation.  Surely it is better to define it in terms of what they are allowed to do - or forbidden from doing.

Some people might call this transphobic but everyone is subject to legal restrictions on their rights if those rights should clash with the safety or security of others.  I can have sexual relations with anyone I choose to provided I have that other person’s consent. If that is often not forthcoming, I have to do without.

How should the rights of people who may want to transition be restricted? I would say in three ways – in sport, in surgery for young people and in sexually safe areas.

No woman has yet run a four minute mile, a sub ten second hundred metres or a two hour marathon, all records that have been broken by men who are simply stronger, faster and fitter than women.  For this reason athletics competitions are divided by gender with men and women’s events.  It is wrong that men should be able to call themselves female and take all the prizes in sports from cis-women. It amounts to bullying and greed of the most unattractively masculine type and should be banned.

Surgery for children is not currently a major issue in transgenderism but it is absurd to perform life-altering operations which could impact on their fertility in later years.  If they want to transition when young they can do so.  If they want to go under the knife they will have to wait until they become adults and are free to decide for themselves. 

Penis-free zones are a trickier area.  I do not think it matters where people go to pee but the penis is used for sexual purposes as well as urination and it is not unreasonable for cis-women to exclude it form certain areas which they want to remain female only.  You only need one idiot to remove that safety barrier and this happened in Toronto where a man gained access to a woman’s shelter in by self-defining as a woman and, while there, raped at least two people.  That was inviting the fox into the hen-house and should never have been allowed to happen.    

Edwin Lerner

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com 

     

COLSTON COMES DOWN

Colston upright

...and coming down

As usual, Shakespeare got it right, not with one quotation but two: “Use every man according to his desert and who shall ‘scape whipping” (Hamlet) and “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones”.  The later remark is from Mark Anthony in his famous speech in praise of Julius Caesar in which he expertly whips up a mob against those who had assassinated Caesar.  

We saw, for want of a better word, a mob whipped into a frenzy by the sight of a statue of Edward Colston in Bristol recently.  Colston was a benefactor of Bristol who endowed schools and other institutions there but his money had come from trading in slaves so that put him beyond the pale and down he came, ending up in the River Avon before he was fished out.  After it is restored Colston’s statue will be displayed in a museum in which his misdeeds will be put into context.

These misdeeds had already been highlighted in a plaque attached to the statue.  The people of Bristol had debated what to do about this embarrassing monument, wanting to both acknowledge his generosity towards the city and the terrible trade which had made it possible.  In a good old British compromise they decided to leave Colston standing and to confine their condemnation of slavery to the new plaque.

That was not good enough for the anti-racism campaigners, however, who felt that his slave-trading had put him beyond the pale so down he was pulled and pushed into the harbour by a group of demonstrators who displayed a mixture of self-righteousness and jollity in ridding Bristol of its slaver statue.  The police stood back and allowed the crowd to take the law into their own hands.  This might seem like a sensible move but, if strength of feeling is allowed to override local democracy, what is to stop a group of racists from taking down the statue of the black nurse Mary Seacole outside Saint Thomas’s Hospital and dumping it into the River Thames? 

This is not an argument for leaving every public statue up forever, just for going through a rigorous discussion every time we see that someone had bad aspects to him as well as the good ones that he (usually) is being celebrated for.  This is what Sadiq Khan is proposing for London - a commission to examine statues.  This may be a bit slow and long-winded but it is better than mob rule, no matter how much fun it might have been in Bristol recently.

Cecil Rhodes will probably go next.  Although slavery had long gone by the time he had made his money, he believed in the innate superiority of white people, even if that same money paid for a lot of both black and white students to study at Oxford.  Lord Nelson may stand on top of his column in Trafalgar Square but he too was a keen supporter of slavery.  You had best stand well clear if he comes down.  

Even rugby union is now ‘reviewing’ the song Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, which was written by a slave, Wallace Wills, and became an unofficial anthem for the England team.  Yet singing a song written by a slave is surely not an endorsement of slavery.  It is rather an example of destroying the achievements of an enslaved people in the name of condemning their lack of freedom.  While the civil rights movement adopted the song, the Nazis banned it in 1939.  Which ship do you want to sail in? 

While the institution of slavery was despicable - and sadly still is in some places - individuals almost always have redeemable features.  Even Donald Trump is a good father to his children, if not a very loyal husband to his wives.  A crowd full of righteous anger, however, is not interested in the redeeming aspects of someone’s life and makes judgements based on just one aspect of those lives.  To dredge up another quotation, from Benjamin Franklin: “It takes many good deeds to build a good reputation and only one bad one to lose it.” 

I can imagine it was satisfying to topple Colston.  In the wake of the protests after the terrible killing of George Floyd in the USA, the righteous anger against a white man who did not question the inherent racism that made slavery possible was understandable.  In the words of local writer Philippa Gregory (who once attended a Colston school) slavery was ‘a respectable trade’, the title of her book which may have been inspired by his life.  Respectability does not make it right, however.

But Gregory’s novel was written two hundred years after the period in which it was set and attitudes have changed since then.  “That was then this is now” is what I say to people who want to take down all the statues of people who accepted slavery.  Even William Wilberforce, who opposed - and effectively ended - the trade in human beings had reactionary and what we now consider unacceptable views on the rights of men to organise themselves to campaign for better wages.  He was someone who wanted to preserve the status quo but to reform it and to give it greater humanity. This humanity would always be granted from above and would not be tainted with dangerous ideas like democracy, which allows campaigning for justice from below.

Wilberforce is one of my heroes, even if I disagree with many of his views.  He had the energy and determination to rid Britain of slavery without undermining the society of which he was a privileged member.  In fact, he probably succeeded in his campaign because less enlightened men in power did not see him as a dangerous revolutionary but as a fundamentally sound chap, if a little soft-hearted at times. Wilberforce should be celebrated as a great reformer who achieved a massive advance from a position of white privilege.  

He was also – as he would have been the first to admit – a flawed human being and might not expect to escape whipping if he put forward those some of those views today.  We should honour people for their achievements without forgetting their faults.

______________________

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com

Edwin Lerner

                                                                                       

WORK AND WORTH

Hockney - still going strong into his eighties

David Hockney said recently that the only two important things in life were love and food.  But surely he left one out by not mentioning work.  He paints or draws every day – not because he needs the money, or the fame, or even because the world is short of Hockney paintings.  He does so because it his passion – and he is lucky that it is his profession as well.

Predictions of the future often paint a picture of a society in which most of the work is done by machines and people are free to enjoy almost boundless leisure.  I have two problems with this vision: first, that people seem to be working harder than ever and second, that who wants to have loads of free time anyway?  Time to get bored to death, maybe.

Although feminism was mostly about women having equal pay and status in the workplace, this is still more of a male tendency.  Men gain a good deal of their identity from the work they do while women seem to be better at taking it easy.  My partner is quite happy to look at her phone, ride her horse and sleep until she wakes up.  I, on the other hand, have to get out of bed when (or before) the alarm rings and pretty soon get down to something ‘useful’.  

Who am I kidding?  The person who gets most use out of me being busy is myself.  I edit a magazine, write a weekly blog about my (currently non-existent) work and write a monthly essay like this to get things off my chest.  I am under no illusion that the world will cease to rotate if I do not do these things, but they make me feel better about myself.

The lockdown, which is starting to ease now, has given us a glimpse of what a leisured life would be like, if it ever comes about.  A few people are snowed under with caring for the sick and get that Thursday evening clap – and a fairly lousy income – for their pains.   The rest of us have time on our hands and need to find ways to fill it up meaningfully.

My own suspicion is that human ambition and greed, not to mention the fight against boredom, will see us working as hard as ever once we have the chance to do so again.  Reading books, watching films and laughing at silly videos on the web are all very well, but will never be as satisfying as doing a good day’s work for an honest day’s pay.  

Pay?  That is the thing that measures whether what we do is useful or not.  If someone is prepared to part with their hard-earned money to see the fruits of your labour, then that gives it a validation which a hobby does not have.  That is one of the reasons I enjoy being tipped so much – it is an unnecessary payment which shows that the tipper has enjoyed themselves.  Although, I do things for free – such as giving talks – and do not need the money, I still enjoy being paid for what I do.

Coronavirus has altered the usual cycle of life, which alternates times when I am busy with periods when I can reflect.  It is the lucky man who never feels the need or urge to retire and ‘take it easy’. Filling the parts of the day when you used to work with activity is not as easy as it sounds.  Aged film directors like Woody Allena dn Clint Eastwood still crank out a film a year because it is natural for them to go to work.

Another man who has not stopped working and is now as busy as ever is Anthony Fauci, the Director of the USA’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.  He has held the post for over twenty five years and his next birthday will be his eightieth.  Once hated by the gay community, he listened to them when AIDs started and is now looked on almost as a modern saint.

Fauci knows that his job is to give advice to people who have been voted into positions of power and that he can never presume to override them. In fact, most Americans trust him far more than their president to get this advice right so he is now taking flak from those who want to reopen the economy quickly, who blame him for his more cautious approach.

Fauci, presumably, has a fairly thick skin and can take the heat.  The USA is enduring a high death rate and a crippled economy.  He knows that he can do nothing about the economy so he concentrates on the death rate instead.  As long as he does not try to overrule Donald Trump, he is more or less unassailable in his role as a smart boffin talking to the politicians.

Although I am nominally of retirement age, I am itching to get back to work.  I have no interest in the three Gs of male retirement: Golf (never cared for the game), Gardening (occasionally and under protest) and Gym, which I never go to any more.  You can only read so many books or watch movies you missed.  Now I need something to prove my worth. 

Edwin Lerner

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com

FULL HOUSES VERSUS SOCIAL DISTANCING

Aeroplanes standing idle - BA is laying off 12,000 staff

Once, when I was finishing off the paperwork at a hotel where I had been staying with a group, I noticed what the company I was working for paid for the rooms we had used.  It was well under half what an individual would have paid if he or she had walked in off the street and bought the same room.  By promising to buy in bulk over the course of a year the company were able to beat the hotel chain down to what seemed an absurdly low price.  (Empty rooms are of. no use to an hotel.)  An individual who just needs to rest his/her head does not have the same negotiating power as a big company and has to cough up the full price for a decent night’s sleep.

The basis of many businesses is achieving bulk volume.  Some concentrate on making a lot of money out of a little group but most aim to make a little money from a lot.  Each sale produces a small profit – or even a loss if it brings in further sales – and a strong business’s selling power increases its buying power with their own suppliers.

Airlines are the classic example of making money from full houses and crowded spaces. They no longer rely on businesspeople charging the cost of their travel to expense accounts and not worrying too much about the size of the bill.  Today they need to attract ordinary travellers, who invariably opt for the cheapest fare, even if it means flying on a crowded plane.  The flight is over quickly enough and the savings are permanent.  Tony O’Reilly, who made a fortune from packing people into planes, and for whom I have a begrudging admiration, has said that they will all go bust if they have to observe social distancing.  British Airways has already laid off twelve thousand people as people stop flying.  

One of the main jobs of those who deal with clients in crowded conditions – whether they are cabin crew, tourist guides or organisers of queues – is to make people feel welcome and wanted even as they are being packed together in uncomfortable crowded conditions.  

Forgive me for stating the obvious here because in a month or two it will be far from obvious.  When we go for a walk, usually in the late afternoon, we weave in and out amongst our fellow-exercisers keeping the required two metres social distance between us.  People are understanding and good-humoured about this and we are more likely these days to say hello to and smile at other people even as we avoid coming too close to them.

It is not always possible, of course, and sometimes we come a little too near, particularly if we are shopping.  The closest I get to another human being (apart from my partner) is once a week when I go to the checkout and pay for the weekly shop.  I choose the shop on the basis of it not being crowded and I go when it is quiet, but you can never be fully safe.

What will happen when we start going back to normality as the lockdown ends?   My business is tourism which, almost by definition, involves bringing large numbers of people into a small space.  As I wrote in my other blog, when we go to Windsor, we often spend more time in the queue than in the castle.  We would not mind a queue at the moment.

But in a queue, you are inevitably crowded together, cheek by jowl as Shakespeare says, and this is a great meeting place for germs and people.  Two metres apart is simply not possible with lots of people all aiming for the same place at the same time.  Likewise, nobody makes a living from an almost empty pub, hotel or theatre.  The overheads remain the same while the income dries up as people avoid crowded space like, well, the plague.

Plague has come to us before, of course.  Back in the Middle Ages about a quarter of the population died in many European countries as the black death spread through contaminated communities.  A century ago we had the black flu which killed fifty million people, many of them soldiers who had survived the war only to be struck down by a deadly virus that arrived unseen as the fighting drew to a close.  The crowded insanitary conditions in which the soldiers were billeted was ideal breeding ground for the virus and, without today’s social distancing, there was little chance of staying safe, as try to do today.

People were not even warned about the dangers.  Newspapers were not allowed to spread news which might lower morale in wartime.  Being neutral, Spain was able to report with more accuracy – and honesty – on the disease and this gave the impression that they were worse hit.  In fact, the people of Spain were simply being given more information.

Today it is almost compulsory for news outlets to spread gloom.  My experience, has been that most people have been reasonably cheerful about the outbreak, adjusting to the new normal of avoiding crowds, dodging and weaving during walks, missing the football and other events that have had to be cancelled and using video conferencing in which the sounds and images do not always match each other and those little signals saying who is going to talk next are strangely absent, so we alternate interruptions and awkward silences.

We will come out of this sooner or, preferably later, to be on the safe side.  The habit of giving others a wide berth to stay on that safe side, will not die out for some time, however.  The problem will be to rebuild a functioning economy while still allowing social distancing.

Edwin Lerner

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com

TOP TENS

Me walking along the Sussex beach:
I would not have gone if not for corona

There is only one thing to write about, of course: the corona virus outbreak. Rather than speculate on what is, has or might happen, I will just list - in no particular order - the top ten good and bad things that have been forced upon us by the outbreak.  We are in a much better position than others materially, having plenty of money and enough tasks to keep us occupied, but I will be glad when this is all over and can get back to 'normal'. You don't know hat you've got all it's gone, as Joni Mitchell's song says.

GOOD

1. Exploring the local area on walks with my partner once a day. Rather than just going for a brisk walk I have been looking at what is around me and have discovered much more.

2. Greeting people on these walks.  We keep two metres away but usually say hello.

3. Learning successfully how to communicate remotely using the internet.

4. Establishing contact with people I have neglected, calling them to check they are ok.

5. Drinking is down, not up, which is a surprise and a bonus.

6. Doing some writing - although not as much as I would like or thought I would.

7. Learning to cook some new dishes, instead of the same old comfort food staples.

8. Spending time with my partner - and not throttling her (or her throttling me).

9. Sleeping through the night without going to the loo. (I have no idea why I can do it now.)

10. Having clean hands most of the time.

BAD

1. Missing the theatre, cinema, art galleries bookshops and all the other places I visit.

2. Not spending time with my children - or my new granddaughter.

3. Not seeing friends.

4. Not going out for a drive or travelling on a train.

5. Not learning a new language or one of the many other things I ought to be doing.

6. Failing to finish walking the South Downs Way before being stopped form going there.

7. Watching the ratings of politicians I dislike going up instead of down.  This is not surprising, as people cling to certainty in times of trouble, and it may pass. We may even get rid of them later, which means I could switch this to the first list.

8. Watching people being stupid by mingling too close.  As it has hit our Prime Minister and heir to the throne, they should realise that no-one is immune from catching/passing a virus on.

9. Panic buying, although I understand why it happens.  People have little else to do, want to get out of the house and need far more than they usually buy because they are at home. 

10. The state of uncertainty which comes from not knowing when this will all end.

Edwin Lerner

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com which I will continue to post every Monday, even though no-ne can go on tours while the outbreak lasts.

YES MEN AND WOMEN

A recent Private Eye cover sums it up

One of the creepiest things I have seen recently was our new Prime Minister Boris Johnson sitting with his new cabinet leading them in a chorus of what they were going to do – build so many hospitals, recruit so many nurses, exclude so many immigrants.  They all seemed well rehearsed and knew the numbers which they dutifully chanted in reply to Boris’s promptings.  All that was missing was a chorus of “for he’s a jolly good fellow…”  Yuck.  Pass the sickbag.

There are two types of people who are loyal to you – the unquestioning loyalist and the questioning loyalist.  The first tells you how great you are, while the second is not afraid to suggest how you might do better.  One praises your decisions. The other suggests you change them.

One thing Boris Johnson and Donald Trump have in common is that they prefer the unquestioning loyalist.  The list of those whom Trump has appointed and then fired is long.  Even his Attorney General William Barr, who seemed only too willing to do his bidding on all matters legal, has now said that Trump constantly tweeting about injustices meted out to his supporters and preferential treatment towards his enemies by the legal system is making his job ‘impossible’.  Just when you thought he was a total flunkey he seems to have shown that he can think for himself.  The future does not look bright for Barr and his newly acquired backbone.

To give them their due, both Trump and Johnson know how to work a room.  This is a skill all successful politicians have to master, particularly in the USA where public appearance counts more than private competence.  Clinton (Bill, not Hillary) and Reagan both had it; the younger Bush somewhat surprisingly had it in a folksy kind of way whereas the older Bush did not; JFK and Obama had it in a lofty kind of way, appealing to people’s higher instincts. LBJ had it but, I think, lost it as people kept asking him how many babies he had killed that day.  You need a sympathetic audience to make an effective speech and Johnson lost his as a result of Vietnam.  This is surely why he decided not to run for president a second time and retreated into himself in later years. 

Trump is not the retreating type.  He has the skill of whipping up people who troop out to listen to him, knowing which buttons to press to galvanise them:  “Build that wall!  Keep those guns!  Dig that coal!”  It may not be subtle it sure brings people out to vote for him.  You can have the best policies – and all the money – in the world but you need to sell yourself to potential voters if you are going to succeed in politics, which is increasingly a branch of show business.  Trump knows this and passes himself off as a shrewd businessman, even if he went bankrupt several times and has a record of not paying his bills.  However, he was successful on reality television which is where he learned his trade.

It seemed for a while that Mike Bloomberg, a former mayor of New York who had built up a genuinely successful business and made far more money than Trump ever did, would be best placed to defeat him.  If I was American I would probably vote for him simply as a way of getting rid of Trump but he does not have Trump’s ability to whip up a crowd so it is unlikely he will succeed against him.  Bernie Sanders does but, being an elderly left-winger who has suffered a heart attack is probably too vulnerable a candidate to take on Trump’s propaganda machine.  Just think how they will portray his honeymoon in Moscow in the mid-west.  Truth matters very little in propaganda wars.

Americans tend to re-elect their presidents, unless those same presidents face significant opposition from within their own parties as Jimmy Carter and George Bush Senior both did.  Trump has made sure that no-one survives on his watch without showing unquestioning obedience to him and his whims so there is zero chance of any significant Republican standing up to him.  Mitt Romney was the only Republican senator to vote to impeach him for a crime he had obviously committed in Ukraine and immediately the attack dogs moved to undermine him.  Romney is (I almost wrote ‘was’) one of those decent but dull politicians who failed to win the presidency until the right in America decided that they would back a winner in Trump.  At least he could win contests by bringing people out to vote.

In the same way Boris Johnson now is ruler over all he surveys, the British Conservatives realising that he is someone people will vote for.  We do not seem to mind a posh public school type like Boris as our leader.  The very use of his first name, which is not what his friends and family know him by, gives that away.  He may be a rogue but he has convinced people he is a lovable one, so people turn out to vote for him, even though his sexual history would until quite recently have disqualified him from office in the party of the family.

Boris laps up the adulation but he does not deal well with dissent, so Jeremy Hunt, Angela Leadsom, Rory Stewart and now Sajid Javid have all been shown the door, some encouraged to jump, others pushed out.  There is nobody near Johnson now who looks like he can either stand up to or succeed him.  This cannot be good either for the government or the country.  We need questioning loyalists near our leaders, not just yes men - or women. 

Edwin Lerner

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com