The Trouble with Trump

When you read that headline, what was your first thought? Probably it was the same as mine—and I wrote it! My first thought was not Trump again, haven’t we heard enough about him? Aren’t we trumped out? Surely Trump inertia has moved in.
All of which is true, though that largely depends on your perspective and—I am bound to say—level of masochism.
The trouble with that, however, is Trump himself. He won’t leave us alone. Knowingly or unknowingly, intentional or not, he seems set on feeding an insatiable media and through them each of us. If you are anti-Trump he will feed you all the material, let’s call it fertiliser, you need to grow your loathing of this buffoon. If you are a Trump supporter you will be congratulating yourself on your unprecedented level of imagination as you seek to excuse his actions. Trump’s supporters will trumpet that he—Trump—is indeed “making America great again.”
For the rest of us, he is just making it grate.
And that I think is the problem for Americans who care. They are through the actions of their President  entering a period  of self-analysis and introspection to a level unprecedented since their civil war. Some of the more enlightened will be looking with deep dismay at the way America is being perceived by the world. Those for whom the world view doesn’t matter will be looking at themselves and their neighbours and asking is this the America they want.
Of course it is wrong to blame the American people, even those who voted for Trump, for this strutting personification of Eugene Burdick’s Ugly American. Could anybody, any American, have seen this—him—coming? No doubt some did. Even more today will say they did. But even if you did, you got belted by the Bible Belt and the Rust Belt. And there was nothing you could do about it…for yourselves or for us.
You now have live with the voting decision made by others. We all do.
And there perhaps is the only silver lining—for once the world is united behind America: united in its loathing of a President who nobody saw coming and nobody deserves.

We can be heroes

Watching the successful rescue of the Wild Boars from a flooded cave system in Thailand, I immediately thought of the David Bowie song Heroes. Even the song’s opening lyrics seemed apt and appropriate:
I, I wish I could swim
Like the dolphins
Like dolphins can swim…
Unfortunately the rest of the song and particularly its inspiration—a Visconti tryst against the Berlin Wall—have nothing to with the heroism in Thailand that so engaged and enthralled us.
However, there is another line from Bowie’s song—“we can be heroes for just one day”—that for me at least evoked a key part of the magic that swept the world from Tham Luang: we were part of it.
The multinational rescue brought together the world’s best divers and cave experts. Yet it also brought us together. And this was particularly remarkable—and needed—because we live in a time when we seem to be increasingly driven apart, whether it is by the global polarising effect of Donald Trump, the internecine warfare of the religions or even the bitterness that has enveloped the political and industrial landscapes here in New Zealand.
For just one day and the day after that and so on the world was united in hope and, for those so inclined, in prayer.
There was a common will for success—that the rescue, against all odds, would come out right. Yet, if we were to be true to ourselves, we would admit to believing success was hardly possible. We would even perhaps think that we didn’t deserve success—that good news in any form was somehow something we had been conditioned against.
Yet, it happened. It happened because of the bravery and expertise of a select—very select—group of men and women and of course the bravery of the boys and their coach.
We all got to share in that.
Now we are back to what many of us accept as reality: nurses who are taking entirely justifiable action to get paid just a portion of what they are worth; Donald Trump slagging off at all and sundry (except Putin); and for the moment a Royal family that has run out of babies and weddings to distract us.
Yet, there is lingering warmth.
Because, for just a few days at Tham Luang, we all walked and swam with heroes.