In
the three months I have been preoccupied with health problems I have allowed
the purpose for which I set up this site 21 years ago to languish. That purpose
was to be a sounding board, a place where I could express myself on any subject
of my choosing. It’s not so much that I believe my thoughts about anything are
of particular significance, it’s more that after spending a lifetime at the
typewriter, writing has become a sort of reflex action for me, and this is a
place where I can continue to write.
But if I had just awakened from a
sort of Rip Van Winkle sleep, I might have been excused if I had thought I was
in a world that had completely changed, a world that I could hardly recognize.
Subjects ripe for my sounding off board
lie around by the dozen, headed, of course by the current President of
the United States. Who could have
believed it, that this great country, so proud of its democratic heritage (even
though it was founded by an elite of slave owners who set the nation up to
defend their own interests above everything), could have elected to leadership
a man totally unsuited to the job. Moreover, a man whose every fault was
already apparent, whose narcissism, prevarications, indifference to the truth, ignorance
of the world and its workings, and absorption in trivialities, were already
well-known. Yet 67 million Americans voted for him to become president and even
if he didn’t win the overall popular vote, he won through the peculiar
Electoral College system that judges the votes state by state and sometimes allows
the second runner to emerge as winner.
As if all this is unbelievable enough,
it is as nothing compared with the chaos this man has created in the brief time
he has been in office. Truly, it is amateur time: apparently he spends most of
his day glued to the television, and he writes twitter notes which are absorbed
by the millions of people who have signed up to receive these 140-character
emissions. Government by tweet? He boasts about having passed more legislation
in a short time than any president in history, whereas he actually appears not
to have passed any legislation at all. He governs by signing executive orders
that do no more than establish intent.
His Cabinet is full of billionaires whose attitudes are typical of that class of
people, and who think nothing of wiping out the hard-won regulatory framework
used to try to haul the United States back from its path of destruction of the
natural world, and its headlong descent into oligarchy. It seems to be an obsession with him to
reverse everything that Barack Obama achieved, both in the United States itself
(the modified and improved, but still inadequate, health care system); in
international agreements (the Paris climate change treaty accepted by all but
two of the world’s smaller nations; the multinational agreement with Iran
designed to prevent that country from achieving a nuclear weapon, which this
new president refuses to accept and constantly threatens to destroy)…..and so
it goes on. How can anyone say anything
good about all this?
The fact that this irresponsible and
vainglorious narcissist has his finger on the nuclear button is an almost
unspeakable fact that could plunge the world into a conflagration at
virtually any time. A new feature of every political interview with leaders from around the world is that none of them has any idea what is the current US policy in any area and they cannot express any opinion about what might happen in the immediate future. This is hardly a recipe for global stability.
As for our own little corner of the
world, our new youngish leader governs mostly by personal charm, which he is
not slow to exercise, and seems to be headed in a much more reasonable
direction than the above-mentioned US leader. Nevertheless, there are strong
signs of his trying to have his cake and eat it too: his Minister for the
Environment and Climate Change, Catherine McKenna, achieved a high level of hypocrisy when she
said that the government of which she is a part had the dual responsibilities
of playing a leading role in the international fight against climate change,
and of “getting our resources to
market.” In other words, approve and build pipelines that would not only pose a
threat to lands through which they carry the heavy bitumen oil of the Alberta
tar sands, the world’s most polluting single industry, but would also allow
that industry to be expanded, instead of being shut down as it will have to be
if the world is to be saved from irreparable consequences. Personal charm and photo ops are all very
well, but when they are used to protect such damnable industries, it is time to look around for a
more principled leader.
That’s enough for the moment: I am
just working back into form….
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