Today in Ghana I ran into my friend Kwame, who sells jewellery from his lap in a wheelchair in Osu and thus supports a family of five. Kwame’s dream is to be a lawyer. We shook hands seven times. We were so happy to see each other we were nearly in tears. I told him my visa trouble in Berlin: I cannot sell the lovely recycled glass beads I brought back which should include an opportunity for sponsorship or reparations to somebody like Kwame, because I got turned down for a business visa, they are worried I would not be earning enough money (true) and thus not paying enough taxes in Germany (also true). I told him I will keep trying. I rode home by trotro and jumped off when I passed a heaving Spot where hundreds of groovy people all dressed in black were dancing and drinking and ceaselessly embracing. They looked so cool and helpless. ‘Excuse me. Is this a funeral? I don’t want to intrude.’ ‘Welcome, welcome! Our friend died, he was a dancer. Only thirty years old.’ The bar man agreed he would stand me a drink even though I had no money. We both touched our hearts, I will come back tomorrow, thank you for trusting me. Funeral goers in matching black t shirts lifted their glasses and bumped fists as we all began dancing in the crowded road. ‘We all wish white people would dance like that. You are a Ghanaian now.’ I wish. What I wish is if I had my way, some combination of eco conscious Berliners and forthright outrageously excellent Ghanaians and thoughtful land respectful Indigenous Australians would be ruling this world. ‘Why can’t you tell Trump he is not allowed to do this thing?’ ‘I’m trying! I tweeted him. He doesn’t mind me.‘ In Ghanaian English this means, he takes no notice of me. ‘Why does he treat Iran this way?’ asked Pious, who had taken my number to send a selfie we all made. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. His friend chinked his glass against my glass. ‘Is it because he’s a mother fucker.’ Yes, I said. That’s why.
Tag: Trump
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Ghana get it
Today in Ghana I ran into my friend Kwame, who sells jewellery from his lap in a wheelchair in Osu and thus supports a family of five. Kwame‘s dream is to be a lawyer. We were so happy to see each other we were nearly I years. We shook hands seven times. I told him my visa trouble in Berlin: I cannot sell the lovely recycled glass beads I brought back which should include an opportunity for sponsorship or reparations to somebody like Kwame, because I got turned down for a business visa, they are worried I would not be earning enough money (true) and thus not paying enough taxes in Germany (also true). I told him I will keep trying. I rode home by trotro and jumped off when I passed a heaving Spot where hundreds of groovy people all dressed in black were dancing and drinking and ceaselessly embracing. They looked so cool and helpless. ‘Excuse me. Is this a funeral? I don’t want to intrude.’ ‘Welcome, welcome! Our friend died, he was a dancer. Only thirty years old.’ The bar man agreed he would stand me a drink even though I had no money. We both touched our hearts, I will come back tomorrow, thank you for trusting me. Funeral goers in matching black t shirts lifted their glasses and bumped fists as we all began dancing in the crowded road, ‘We all wish white people would dance like that. You are a Ghanaian now.’ I wish. What I wish is if I had my way, some combination of eco conscious Berliners and forthright outrageously excellent Ghanaians and thoughtful land respectful Indigenous Australians would be ruling this world. ‘Why can’t you tell Trump he is not allowed to do this thing?’ ‘I’m trying! I tweeted him. He doesn’t mind me.‘ In Ghanaian English this means, he takes no notice of me. ‘Why does he treat Iran this way?’ asked Pious, who had taken my number to send a selfie we all made. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. His friend chinked his glass against my glass. ‘Is it because he’s a mother fucker.’ Yes, I said. That’s why.
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the crimes of President Trump, as listed in the Declaration of Independence
The Declaration of Independence lists crimes against the American people which drove them to reject British rule. Replace ‘the King’ with ‘Trump’ and this list still makes sense.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
“That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government… when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
“Indictment
A bill of particulars documenting the [President’s] ‘repeated injuries and usurpations’ of the Americans’ rights and liberties.”
“He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
“He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
“He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
“He has called together legislative bodies at places [like Mar a Lago,] unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their Public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.”
“He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.”
“He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
“He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.
“He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
“He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.
“He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:”
“For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
“For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury:
“For transporting us [if we are Muslim] beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences”.
“He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
He is at this time transporting large Armies of [American soldiers to lands overseas] to compleat the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & Perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.”
A President “whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”
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refugee dinner
This is the lunch I had today, in a Saturday cafe set up by a refugees welcome committee (one of the many) in Berlin. When I ordered, a smiling Syrian woman plump and beautiful in her brown scarf came out to me carrying this bowl: a dish I had never eaten before, and when I was done she came back for the plate and hovered anxiously, asking in English, “Did you like it?” I told her I liked it, and we smiled at each other. The food was noodles cooked with brown lentils, tamarind, lemon peel and pomegranate. It cost five euros, around eight Australian or American dollars.
I was thinking of my lunch as I read a stranger’s post lambasting Muslims as universal terrorists and lauding Trump’s ban. Or as someone the other day brilliantly dubbed him: Crybaby-in-chief. Today I decided I would start calling him POUTUS, for his glorious petulance. I thought at first he was more of a misogynist, but now I feel sure pouting is his real superpower.
This cafe was crowded and buzzy and I had come to concentrate and write. Much of the conversation was in German, which allowed me to tune it out and focus on my page. They played lazy, sunny, splashy sitar music. I stayed for three hours. Run on Saturdays to raise money to help house new arrivals, this is just one form of the pragmatic welcome given Muslims from Syria who have turned up here at Angela Merkel’s noble instigation, now comprising about one German in one hundred, and welcomed with Refugees Welcome stickers and t-shirts all over Berlin. I wish I could organise a roadshow of new arrivals who were not too traumatised to perform and travel, taking them through the so-called flyover states in the US where Trump has been hailed a saviour. I feel sure if people could just sit down with a Syrian person, or a Moroccan person like the many interesting and cultured individuals we got to know over Christmas this year, staying in Fez, the hatred that masks fear would begin to dissolve in curiosity, conversation, and ken.
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the meagrely satisfying throne
He didn’t want to be President. Not if President means making sticky decisions, and being blamed for things (most of the world calls this ‘adult responsibility’), and being woken at four to read the papers.
What he wanted was to be Mr President. Good morning, Mr President! He wanted to star in the biggest ticker-tape parade, and have flags waving, and maybe people would make Donald masks and schoolchildren would wear them and Melania would float into his arms like a giant swan.
Same when he builds a hotel. He doesn’t really want to build a hotel: he wants to put his name on a big building in gold letters and it’ll have a glitzy big foyer and people will come in and swank around. He pays minimum attention to the hotel-building chore that gets him there, as we see when it starts falling apart, is cheaply built, and he hasn’t paid his contractors. A man who took pride in the thought that “I — have built a hotel” would pay his sheetrockers.
This expression, the day after his Presidential Inauguration, says it all. She is angry — possibly a thwarted Trump is no fun to go home to Friday night. She’s put up with him ever since the doors closed and the cameras dissolved away.But he is baffled, furious, bored, bamboozled — what is happening? This wasn’t supposed to be like this.
The greatest weekend of his life has been stolen from him — by a march. And life has not just stolen a march, it has shown him up with ratty thin combover crowds, hustled into position behind the Great Leader to swell the photographs; and dismal responses from the music community refusing to play at his party. The world is laughing at him.
Half the jokes are infuriating to Donald because he can’t understand them. How could he? This is a guy who all his life has learned that you get what you want by getting your own way. You rant and shower some half-baked ideas and ream people, and they hurry off and make it happen. You don’t need to know how it works.
He has no idea that he would now be wealthier if he had just let the fortune he inherited sit in boring bank bonds on Wall Street. His experience has taught him that success is more important than happiness or enjoyment, and success comes from making an appearance. He’s the shopping mall god. He’s a boy band with only one member, the one kept at the back of every group photograph.
He’s outclassed by his wife, the porn queen with her carefully prepared speeches, his daughter, smart enough to play along when she must surely see through him, the real King, that daughter’s husband, and now by the coterie of White House staff who have seen it all before and it was better. Poor Donald. Embodying all that’s most grating in America’s overblown sense of itself, he’s out of touch. And this weekend, the crown, the dream, the White House in the air, has taken everything away from him. If all you know how to do is bully and the most powerful seat in the land brings nothing but millions refusing to listen to you — what’s left?
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if this is democracy, I’m a jam donut
The narrative of the powerful older woman in our society is a dangerous and poisoned one. She is the evil stepmother, the wicked witch. Past her breeding prime and she knows too much. So if she survives dunking and burning, this must be proof of her ‘pure evil.’
Meanwhile, the macho demagogues, some of whom have been women. For a long time I have been understanding their appeal as a longing for certainty in perilous times. In our heart and in our gut each of us knows we are in trouble. Climate chaos, mega fires, top soil stripping to the bones of our sea-eaten land. Sea levels rising to drown whole Pacific nations. Population explosion, terrorism, and refugee crisis. Our drinking water is at risk and the world seems everywhere at war.
How to deal with this? The honest way doesn’t soundbite well. As the banner says, if your beliefs fit on a poster — think again. Any honest leader in these times is saying something like: This is unprecedented. I’m not sure how we best handle these pressing disastrous issues. All these massive interlocking crises are unbalancing each other, making our difficulties more complicated. Let’s all pull together and pool our wisdom; we need all hands on deck; all aboard, and it’s going to be a long night.
How comforting, then, to take refuge and fall in behind the skirts of a raised-fisted demagogue who claims he knows the way out of this place. “Follow me! I have the solution!”
Such simple mindedness has always had its appeal, hence the abiding popularity of sentimentality, cults, and religions: but the fact is no one on earth knows for sure how we are going to get ourselves out of trouble. From terrorism to water wars, we are facing new perils. The solutions are complex and require much sacrifice. What a relief to imagine we can evolve some magic pill that finds a scapegoat for our fears and renders us immune.
In 2006 I attended a public meeting at the edge of the desert in South Australia, Australia’s driest state. Its purpose was to discuss the state government’s plan to build a water desalination plant. The idea was they would reef in sea water and desalt it, then pour the waste salt back into the bay in a deadly, suffocating spume.
This stretch of South Australian coastline is barely tidal and is home to an enormous proportion of the world’s most exotic and rare sea animals. There lives in these waters a creature called the Leafy Sea Dragon, resembling a seahorse who’s gotten tangled in seaweed. These majestic and bizarre fellow beings would have smothered in large numbers, taking with them — as a side effect — chunks of lucrative tourism.
Meanwhile the crudity of the proposed solution seemed to ignore even its own best financial interests. A man in the crowd was wearing a red t-shirt which said: Well, At Least Sell the Salt.
A councillor spoke from a neighbouring region twenty kilometres north. Same low rainfall, same climate, same parching, blaring heat. He told us how their council had been harvesting rainwater and driving it down to store in the groundwater aquifer. They resell this water, which virtually everywhere else in Australia is wasted, to households, football clubs, schools. He told us how they had more business than they can keep up with.
Call me stupid, he said, but maybe what is working for us might also work for you.
We don’t have a manual for dealing with mass species loss and the human loneliness it leaves in us. No one knows how we’ll cope with a three-degree global temperature rise because no one has ever been through it. “The government better do something!” becomes “We Are Currently Constructing a 16 Billion Dollar Desalination Plant!” and drowns out the more realistic response of perhaps, “See, it’s like a patchwork. We all need to conserve more water, stop washing our concrete driveways and sweep, take shorter showers; and you should install a rainwater tank if you can; and let’s look at industrial waste and stormwater catchment.”
The man who says I Have a Magic Silver Bullet can sound so persuasive to a population desperate with suppressed fear. For one thing, these seemingly easy solutions do not demand that we think any further about such terrifyingly complex and new issues. To face the looming disasters of modernity takes so much courage, and it hurts. Energy crisis? “Nuclear power plant!” Or: “Well, see we’ll need to maximise our use of the sun’s energy, and use the wind; and coastal areas can harness the waves and let’s redesign our appliances so they don’t waste passive energy all night and all day, for starters.”
The delusion in our disaffected and bored suburban lives that one Good Guy with a Gun can be a hero again, as his bear-shooting ancestors were; that a single man can bring us back from the brink of disaster by banishing one group of people or persecuting another; that job loss can be blamed on something visible — migration — rather than something seemingly irreversible — automation: all of these delusions in their shoebox have brought us this week to a potentially ruinous election result in the US. It’s happening elsewhere: Egypt, Turkey, Denmark. I fear the toxic masculinity and Hollywood hero narrative that have enabled this disaster. At this instant I am watching Trump and his Trumphalist family taking the stage in New York City — he is applauding himself, like the class act that he is — and all I can see in his expression is the fearful wryness that confesses: he cannot deliver the fantasy he has promised. No one can.
Maybe it would be wonderful to be rescued, rather than having to knuckle down, ourselves. Maybe the fight against prejudice and privilege would be easier if it didn’t entail anyone making sacrifices of their own. But as Trump with his thin-skinned narcissism eloquently demonstrates, pseudo heroes and demagogues seem protective because they’re so defensive. Trump seems strong, because he is weak. It takes far more courage to face the unknown and the uncertain, to open our hearts and tune our ears to one another — even people we dislike, even people who challenge us — and to embrace the crucial issue of our time: how our fear is driving us deeper into the behaviours, such as expansionist, exploitative industrialisation, that have brought about these emergencies in the first place. You can’t fight fear with fear. The only way to fight fear is using our courage, and courage is love.
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Trumped
The Senate and the House. They are just going to do so much damage. I can hardly breathe, hardly swallow, it’s like iron in the chest. Now we see how dangerous our fears are, how fatal this cleaving to the lying pseudo-certainty that fist-raising white men seem to offer – in the face of unprecedented disaster, in the face of loss. Truthful people now are saying, we’re not sure how to deal with all these new and perilous situations, they have never occurred before and they imbalance each other, let’s all pull together and get all our wisdom, all hands on deck. The pseudo hero ‘lone man with a gun’ fantasy is now ruining the country. I feel afraid for habitats, for furry and slimy creatures, for any human who does not fit the pattern authorised by Trump’s arrogant male-centric white supremacist tune. God help us, even though there is clearly no god.
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presidential debate
Big guy who shouldered in front of me to the vegetable stall on the markets kept picking up and fondling everything, laying things lingeringly down. In between handling the produce he was adjusting his own paper bag, at the crotch, for greater personal comfort. I avoided all the produce his omnivorous fingers had touched but his wife, heavily pregnant, presumably now has to just resign herself.
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Trump, the Musical
Some lines from a musical we are idly writing, online, a bunch of strangers, in response to one of the many memes celebrating the second candidate’s atrocity, which says:
super callous fragile racist extra braggadocious
Which I realise also works as: super callous fragile ego sexist braggadocious
So far we have:
….his ideas and attitudes are really quite atrocious, by Caroline McDonald
…T’wards women and minorities he’s really quite ferocious, by Louise Gowing
…even if he were a child you couldn’t say he was precocious… by me
…if you say it loud enough he really is atrocious, by Steve Mcleod
and
superfragile egomonster expediting crisis! which ruins the rhyme, also by me
All together now!
Phew. Writing a musical is hard work. Who knew?