Week 35.
A week that did not meet expectations. Although, to be fair, James Bond finally met Goldfinger’s.
Every day and often more than once a day, for almost four years, Americans have been privy to a litany of incompetence, narcissism, malice, cowardice, abuse and disloyalty - contemptuous behaviour unequalled in the annals of their country’s history. The unintelligible gibberish, the unrelenting pathological lying, the unqualified family in high office, the unabashed cosying up to dictators, the unapologetic shunning of America’s friends, the unconscionable denigration of decent, hardworking, patriotic people in America’s security and intelligence services, the unmitigated disaster of the COVID response, the unremitting shredding of democratic norms and misuse of public office for personal gain. All of it on full display by the President of the United States. For four years. Right alongside his administration’s illusory legislative record.
And still…
For four years, all Americans have seen with their own eyes the incontrovertible evidence that the orange emperor has no clothes.
And still…
After all they have seen and heard over these past four years, no American could now be so naïve or ignorant as to believe that this President would or could improve their lives or do credit to the Office.
And still …
Almost 50% of Americans voted for Trump. Almost half of America publicly announced that it wants to be led by a self-obsessed con artist and the coterie of clowns that surround him.
That is the over-arching story of this US election.
Even if he peed the bed nightly and keyed my car daily, I would vote for Biden - faced with the alternative of Trump. Even if Biden was the Satan worshipping baby-eater that QAnonsense says he is, I would still not vote for Trump.
So while I have many relatives and friends in the United States, and it gives me no pleasure to say it, the tragic, unavoidable explanation for the popular vote can only be that almost 50% of Americans are mentally incapacitated. The Ontario Attorney General’s Office describes mental incapacity as: “when someone cannot understand relevant information or cannot appreciate what may happen as a result of decisions they make—or do not make—about their finances, health or personal circumstances.” Exactly.
In this election, almost 50% of Americans have demonstrated that they are literally thoughtless. That they have nothing in common with the other 50% except, perhaps, for opposable thumbs.
And the lunacy continues. The only thing missing from the post-election chaos has been the spectacle of Women For Trump complaining that state election officials are counting male votes –“What? Male voting? We have never allowed male voting in this country! Stop The Count!!”
I said last week that if Americans failed to rise above it all this week, America would cease to be an inspiration, but it would be an education. They have. It will. And I am sorry.
November 11 is next week. Remembrance Day never passes for me without thinking of:
My father, Flt. Lt. Ronald Lowman, D.F.C. who was a navigator in 47 Squadron of the Royal Air Force, flying Beaufighters and Mosquitos in the Mediterranean and South East Asia theatres of World War II. The survival rate of torpedo squadron aircrew was 5% when he began his first of two tours of duty.
My grandfather, James Alfred Lowman, a Sergeant of the Middlesex Regiment, invalided in the German gas attacks in the Second Battle of Ypres in 1915.
My godfather, John Herapath Q.C., M.C., an officer of a Guards regiment who fought in the trenches in World War I, and who would not speak of the experience afterwards. I keep safe his presentation sword.
Major Handley Geary V.C., a East Surrey Regiment veteran of World War I who suffered a head wound which blinded him in his left eye and who became an infamous Sergeant-at-Arms of the Ontario Legislature. I was still in short pants when I first accompanied my father to the Royal Canadian Military Institute. When Major Geary entered the room, every man stood. I have never seen the like of it, before or since.
Men of the Regiment - the famed SAS - with whom I spent a memorable week in Hereford in August 1982, just after their return from the Falklands and the extraordinary Mount Kent engagement. Men whose covert operations in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Africa and even the UK will likely never be publicly disclosed. Men who have made the world less unsafe.
What all of them had in common was that they were, when the occasion warranted, “rough” men: in keeping with George Orwell’s laudable observation: “People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf”. Otherwise, they were gentlemen. The first time I saw grown men cry was when I watched such men raise their glasses to comrades they had lost. The toast was always the same, and simplicity itself: “To Absent Friends”. Because no more needed to be said. And I remember being surprised then, that rough men could be so moved by the passing of those they had often known only for days, and who were gone in an instant.
Elder Advice? Be more like such men. While I risk sullying their memory with the odious comparison, they had all the virtues so conspicuously lacking in current President of the United States: wisdom, courage, honour, decency, humility, temperance, fairness. Such men are altogether deserving of a day. Join me in remembering them next week. And in forgetting this week.
Presume you haven’t read monsieur C. Black on the same subject you refer to as the “orange emperor with no clothes”.