Remember Trump’s wall? Then you probably also remember the perverse rallying chant of his supporters: Build that wall! Build that …! (When it wasn’t Lock her up! As an election year again approaches that such populist rabble rousing were but an aberration has been exposed as a pipe dream). I remember some sort of paper mâché (well maybe it wasn’t paper mâché exactly) prototype for sure and the haphazard erecting of or replacing of barriers in a limited way during this Trump term (I avoid saying “presidency”!). Exactly what the Biden administration’s position is could be described as fluid. But I do also remember Biden’s election rhetoric (for his more progressive clientele): No wall with me, folks!
Well, really? This week, succumbing to the pressure of numbers – especially out of Venezuela – and in the face of agitation from (mostly Democratic) mayors of the metropolises (where many of the migrants head) – the Biden administration announced the renewed construction of a physical barrier – yes, a wall! – in the Rio Grande Valley (and the deportation of Venezuelans). And, yes, I know the ‘appropriation’ argument. That is, congress has appropriated the funding, so it’s got to be spent. Really?
The Israel-Gaza barrier seen from the Israeli sideReplacement border fencing construction. California, 2019.
And, today, I think again of walls – this time in Israel, a nation that is seemingly forever building or planning to build walls. To keep in or keep out is a matter of perspective. As I write, one such, between Gaza and Israel, has been violently breached by Hamas. We are at war, says Netanyahu. Ergo: walls, like rivers (Rio Grande) or seas (Mediterranean) are limited in their function as a barrier, walls like their natural counterparts are there to be breached, and walls rarely hinder wars rather cement divisions.
This, another simmering conflict – always there, always ready to ignite. But such an incursion? Why now? Why did the intelligence seemingly fail? What next? I fear swift retaliation from Israel is assured.
Today is the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington (for Jobs and Freedom). The extraordinary visuals and atmospherics of that hot summer day, now long ago, in the nation’s capital – the warmth emanating from that place and the crowds that filled it, the affirmation to a faith that had sustained, the richness of words and music reaching its crescendo in the “I have a dream” speech delivered by Dr. Martin Luther King (Jr.) before the Lincoln Memorial – are the stuff of which legends are made. In the air was hope rather than despair, a promise of better days. A dream for all ages.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered on Aug. 28, 1963, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
What remains all these years on? The sonorous tones of Dr. King and Mahalia Jackson, imbued with the words and music according to any Gospel, soar today as then, but humanity without hope is a humanity not fulfilling its promise, and for many peoples, in all corners of the world, that is the reality. On this day to recognize that that reality still applies to many Black people living in the most powerful nation on the earth can fill one only with anger – and it especially must do so for just those people; for they the descendants in spirit of the multitudes who would have left Washington that day sixty years ago infused with Dr. King’s dreams, his lyrical words ringing in their ears. It is the legacy of each generation to embrace the spirit of that day and, in each, in their own way keep those dreams alive.
That, a lesson in positivity, now …
The year after the march, the Civil Rights Act (1964) was signed into law, but in 1967 Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dreams seemed as far from fulfillment as ever, impelling him to deliver the below embedded speech at Stanford University – sometimes titled “The Other America”. Startling, to me, is the extent to which King’s disillusionment has grown in the passing of so few years. No longer does he feel convinced that alone the good will and essential kindness of many will win over the day, rather that the few (or just as many) are embedded so deep in the power structures and institutions of the nation that a more radical approach is demanded. Eloquently he deconstructs the so-called “white backlash”; as if it describes some kind of reasonable reaction to the realignment of society brought about by civil rights and the accompanying activism (and militantism) when it was, in fact, a response triggered by inherent racial animosity.
Martin Luther King, Jr. at Stanford University on April 14, 1967
“I Have a Dream” is beautiful. Tragically, “The Other America” is closer to the reality. A year later on April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee.
I was a big fan of David Runciman’s previous podcast Talking Politics that wound down last year (here still on Spotify), and was delighted to discover that he was making a new start. Past Present Future is a weekly podcast (in conjunction with the LRB) discussing the triangulation of those three spaces of time – in culture, society, politics, philosophy, science.
Already a diverse range of subjects and guests has been offered; with episodes as varied as Ian McEwan talking about Italo Calvino’s “The Watchman”, on “Dallas” (the TV soap, that is) and the economics of oil, about the history and threats of space and that of population trajectories – and all the accompanying noise and propaganda. And gladly a return to his History of Ideas series that was previously embedded in Talking Politics. For this latter, it is only David Runciman who speaks to us – an audio essay if you will, and about a significant essay and it’s author.
Fittingly, the first episode can not help but be about Montaigne – he who all but invented the essay form. And then there was one on Hume and on Thoreau, and next week George Orwell (“The Lion and the Unicorn” – this I know!). And just now: Virginia Woolf’s 1929 legendary work “A Room of One’s Own”!
5 March 2024 ….Oh! The from Spotify embedded pod has disappeared. Here it is at LRB.
This episode an excellent companion to the Melvyn Bragg offering I mentioned not long ago. Oh! And Runciman says: the greatest essay of the 20th century. Neither imagined, nor exaggerated by me. He says that. I can say no more. But then there is always more to be said …
So, much more than rules of grammar or the world according to Disney, Past Present Future a welcome addition to my podcast library.
From my childhood I remember a large red tome embossed with crowns. I also remember its name (or think I do): Coronation Cavalcade. Having come across it during a juvenile rummage around, I remember thinking it to have been published in commemoration of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953; this probably suggested to me by reliable sources, and I have no reason to believe that was not so. It was chock a block full of black and white photos from that day but also from the young Queen’s childhood and formative years, and there were lots of words too on that shiny paper once favored for such books. There was only one color plate: a frontispiece of the newly crowned monarch in her coronation regalia. (It may well have been like this one.)
There was a fold out royal genealogy attached to the inside cover to which my mother had neatly inked in further unions (she didn’t live to see the procession of dissolutions!) and progeny. My mother was of the Queen’s generation and very much a royalist. Not a silly, fawning sort, mind, but a traditionalist just the same. (And, she did have a sort of ‘queen’ look and disposition: there were hats and gloves and handbags, she loved horses and dogs and the Anglican Church…) What she did not have in common with the Queen was a long life. What happened to that book I don’t know, or even whether I am misremembering all I have just said.
So this day, the Coronation Day of King Charles III, was spent in a state of trying to rise above a surge of sentimentality – and not succeeding , instead being swept along in the moment, nourished with tea and scones and the temptation of nostalgia. The public spectacle was awesome (despite the inclement weather, and what I thought to be my original word play on “…long may he reign [sic] over us…” ) but I was most moved by the very personal emotions that the event stirred – memories and childhood, people and places lost.
The Coronation invitation and an official portrait of the newly crowned King Charles III and Queen Camilla (www.royal.uk)
A couple of weeks have now passed. What remains (other than a renewed penchant for the much maligned scone)? This newly cast Royal Family – modest now in number, with a more modern agenda – has been dutifully going about their business. Looking good. Doing what they do. Only Time will decide whether the House of Windsor and its hereditary monarchy will continue in its constitutional role in British life. My own Re:publican sympathies are not to be denied, but the ancient isles must decide their own fate. And, that, something which they do with exceptional regularity one has to say!
Chilly – if it were not so warm – is the latest so-called Synthesis Report just presented by the IPCC and soon to be published in full.
Simply stated; the 1.5C limit presumed to be the maximum global temperature increase beyond which damage to the earth’s environment would be irreversible is more than in jeopardy – probably unattainable. That’s the pessimistic reading, and perhaps the only reading.
Direct links below to PDFs of the press release and summary; it is said that the full report – a hefty affair, that few would seriously read I would say – will be available soon.
In due course, it maybe that this year now ending will never ring with quite the foreboding of some during the last century; say, 1914 or 1933 or 1939 (or as they are so considered in retrospect rather than the lived experience of those years.) Certainly though, at the very least, 2022 will stand there in the annals as one defined by crises and disruptive influences. It may even turn out to be the year that is the pivot to a new world and economic order, a realignment of interests and expectations; and whether that will be for better or ill only time will tell.
In the short term, it is not to be denied that there are enough reasons to be found for a pessimistic outlook; climate catastrophes and their consequences, energy dependencies and their consequences, geopolitical turmoil – Russian aggression, mixed messaging from China, collective naval-gazing wherever one looks. But there is also cause for some optimism; a pandemic evolving to a manageable endemic state, signs of political and economic stability in the United States (relatively speaking!), indications of the “west” engaging with the “global south” with renewed energy (albeit born out of self-interest) and fresher ideas that go beyond mere words (and markets and profit margins!).
On a personal level, as this year ends, I admit to have well and truly run out of gas in the home stretch! Yes, yes, the pun is more than intended! What has plagued (!) me in the last weeks, I guess I will never now know. Enough to say, my bringing in of the New Year 2023 will be very quiet indeed and it is all I can do to resolve to get myself fit (in body and mind and soul) for all the fights that surely lay ahead; fuelled as they are by fires of discontent – ignited deep within where the narrative of each life resides, or fed from out there in an increasingly fractious world where the big stories are made to then settle as burden upon us all.
My own agenda and aspirations for 2023 are still being mulled over and will be written on in the next week or so.
As this BBC centenary year draws to a close, the Reith Lectures (inaugurated in 1948 and delivered by Bertrand Russell) remain a last highlight in an extraordinary year in broadcasting. Already recorded at different venues and before an audience, and with the first in the series airing this week on Radio 4, the lectures have in the past been (mostly always?) delivered by one person. This time, however, entitled The Four Freedoms – of Speech, of Worship, from Want and from Fear – the lectures are given by four individuals over four weeks: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Rowan Williams, Darren McGarvey and Fiona Hill. The first two of these I am very well familiar with indeed – Adichie through her wonderful writing and her presence in the public forum and Williams as an Archbishop of Canterbury who may have left office but has not shied from public debate. McGarvey, is a young man who has fleetingly come to my attention in very recent times – not for the rapping (Loki) but for his generous and insightful exploration of the working class experience and poverty in Britain and Fiona Hill burst onto my radar a few years ago when she seriously came to blows with Trump and since has become an oft heard voice of expertise and clarity in respect to the global rise of autocratic and even fascist tendencies, Russian aggression and their war upon the Ukraine, and all the ensuing disruptions in foreign policy.
The contrarian side of my nature must emphatically state the obvious that the idea behind this series is far from original; steeped in 20th century American mythology, inspired as it is by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1941 State of the Union speech. Delivered while war was raging in Europe and tensions rising in the Pacific, the speech focused on America’s national security interests and the threats to democracy being posed from within and beyond its borders, and indeed, by years end Pearl Harbor would be attacked and the United States would be at war. However noble Roosevelt’s words, the sentiments expressed remain just that – sentiments preached from the high western perch of possibilities. And the society he was speaking to or, at least, the segment for which he was interested, was another – best represented in Norman Rockwell’s 1943 depictions below in which these “four freedoms” apparently applied only to a very white, ‘conservative’ America. I can’t help wonder just a little that the BBC were unable to find inspiration a little closer to home.
Freedom of SpeechFreedom of WorshipFreedom of WantFreedom of FearThe Four Freedoms, Norman Rockwell, 1943
Enough diversion – the four voices to be heard this year will hopefully catapult us into the here and now! First up on Wednesday, and the one I most look forward to, is Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie speaking on Freedom of Speech. In The Guardian today there is a sort of interview and a bit of a taster; also reminding me of her first appearance on the “world stage” so to speak in a TED Talk way back in 2009 (!) – 18 minutes … and 32 million odd views I now see! – that I revisit gladly below.
Each aerial view of each mini-cavalcade of darkened Land Rovers led by outriders in royal blue and luminous yellow brings one near to all that topography of land clustered tight, then precisely coded, within the celebrated London environs of SW1; compressed there within its borders all the ruling powers of a kingdom.
The Postcodes Project – SW1: Belgravia, Brompton, Millbank, Pimlico, St James’s, Victoria, Westminster
A neck of the woods that I know well, albeit from from the vantage point of another SW (storied also but where real people live – or once lived) and from halcyon days long gone, but few I would say have ever journeyed these fabled routes, either actually or on the wings of imagination, as many have done in most recent times gone – as the late summer of 2022 turns to autumn, as a monarch departs the mortal world and another ascends to her place, as a Prime Minister goes and another comes, and as a Prime Minister goes and another comes. I am not repeating myself! Blink and history was there just waiting to be missed.
On Thursday, after 44 (!) days in office, Liz Truss announced her resignation, and today this found its formal conclusion in the requisite audience with King Charles III at Buckingham Palace and, shortly thereafter, Rishi Sunak, the newly elected [sic] leader of the Conservative Party, being invited by the King to be his Prime Minister.
From memory: After the wheels finally fell off Boris Johnson’s government at the beginning July, a convoluted process for the leadership of the Tories began with the whittling down to two contenders – Truss and … yes, Sunak! – and continued through the summer with a series of so-called “hustings”. Sunak was favored by conservative parliamentarians and Truss by Party members and, yes, the latter trumped the former. Two days after receiving Johnson and Truss (not in SW1, but Balmoral – for reasons which were sadly to become clear) and doing that which the monarch is anointed to do, the Queen died. Granted, an interrupted start extraordinaire but then Truss seemed to tout the powers of disruption. All very well, one could say, but did she not know that in times of global crisis markets and their makers crave at least the promise of stability. In a matter of weeks a complete economic framework, misguidedly constructed on a toxic mix of low taxes and high borrowing lay in shambles, and with it Liz Trusses job and reputation.
And so it was, this time round, in just a few days, and with Boris Johnson returning with fanfare from a Caribbean jaunt, the Tories heaped on the wearied Brits another leadership “election”! More skillfully modified this time round, with a set of rules that would, with any luck and some reason, circumvent interference from pesky Members. And in the end, so it did: Bojo knew when to fold, as did, albeit at the last moment, another penny pretender (called Mordaunt), and Rishi Rich was left holding the winning hand. Like democracy is a game of poker!
On Rishi Sunak, putting aside the politics, it should be said that he is the first Prime Minister from an ethnic background (okay, there is the Disraeli exception – not quite the same thing I would suggest) – his parents, of Punjabi descent, migrated to the UK from eastern Africa in the 1960s; married to the daughter of an Indian tech. billionaire (with modest beginnings); a practicing Hindu. In other words, a biography, irrespective of the advantages granted to him by good fortune, and fortune, that only a very few years ago would have made a rise to the highest echelons of power almost inconceivable. Meritocracy sometimes works it seems. A remarkable story in many respects, and that Sunak’s success should correspond with Diwali, the Hindu Festival of Light, and in this year that remembers the end of the Raj and the 75th anniversary of Indian independence, is highly symbolic and one of those strange quirks of fate.
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