Porter’s Pensées

‘Who do you think you are?’ is the title of a TV programme going into celebrities’ genealogies. (Sweden has an identical series, as I’m sure have other countries.) I’ve always objected to the title, which implies that ‘who one is’ is rooted in one’s genes, rather than environment. For this reason, and because it looks a bit narcissistic, I’ve never been tempted to trace my own family back, though my father did many years ago. (He stopped when he got back to an ancestor who, he told me, had been transported to a penal colony in Australia for keeping a muck-heap outside his house in Writtle.) It must have been difficult then, reliant as you were on written records kept all over the place. Nowadays, however, it is far easier, with many of these records having been digitalised, and put on the internet.

A friend of mine, Sylvie Slater, who is interested in doing this for other people – I can see why – the other day offered to trace my family back. She’s brilliant. Within a few days she came up with a family tree which goes back to the early 1800s, and which, in spite of myself, I found fascinating. One ancestor on my mother’s side was a publican; on my Dad’s side another was one of the last ‘boot closers’ in England before the trade became mechanised. (‘Boot closers’ hand-stitched the uppers to the soles.) My mother’s family seem to have been marginally ‘higher’ in class than my father’s – bobbing in and out of the lower-middles – which was why they refused to attend the wedding of their daughter to a mere working-class lad. His side was consistently proletarian: peasants, factory workers, and – in the cases of the girls and women – domestic servants. My father’s family also remained living all this time in rural Essex, while my mother’s family moved around: a sure sign of aspiring lower-middle class ambition. Instinctively, I tend to go for the Essex ones. They give me some solid ‘roots’ in a part of the country I love and spent my teens cycling around. I also like the fact that none of them was a nob. ‘Salt of the earth’, no doubt.

Sylvie’s only just started. I’m looking forward to hearing more from her. I don’t suppose she’ll get much further back – peasants don’t often leave records – but in the very unlikely event that she’ll reach, say, 1066, I’d be eager to see whether I was a Roman, a Saxon, a Norman, or a Dane. I’d much prefer Saxon; the others were all colonial conquerors (I dread coming across a poor innocent young girl in my blood-line raped by a marauding Viking), and being Saxon might explain my anti-imperial tendencies and academic interests today. If, that is, there is something in the ‘who do you think you are’ assumption.

Of course I’ve conveniently left out the fact that the Saxons, further back, were invaders themselves, imposing themselves on the original Celts. Perhaps if Sylvie can find some Welsh for me? Or Irish? (One of my mother’s forebears came from Liverpool. That was enough to get me into the hard-drinking Hibernian Society at Cambridge.) But I still like the idea of being Saxon. That would also account for my good looks.

Amoral capitalist con-artists are a fairly common feature in literature – off-hand I can think of Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now (1875), and HG Wells’s Tono-Bungay (1909) – and of course in historical reality: lots in the early 1900s, then Robert Maxwell, Sir Philip Green and scores of others in more recent times. A few of them achieve political influence and power, though that’s a phenomenon usually associated with post-Soviet Russia and post-colonial Africa. Now we have it in the USA. This documentary from 2000, which Trump apparently prevented from being broadcast at the time, fills in the commercial background to The Donald’s tricky rise. It’s all there – lies, fantasy, denials, amoralism, vanity: the lot. Hopefully it will be released for free-to-view TV shortly.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Documentaries/comments/5pdw64/donald_trump_a_narcissistic_sociopath_2000_a

However the story develops from now on, it’s bound to be – if you’ll forgive the cliche – ‘stranger than fiction’. No-one would believe all this if it came out of Hollywood, or from a BBC satirist’s pen. By rights Trump’s hubris should end in nemesis. But none of us can see exactly how that can work out; unless my chilling New Year prediction – https://bernardjporter.com/2016/12/31/2017-prediction/ – comes true.

Demonstrations and marches – and I’ve been on a few in my time, beginning with Aldermaston (well, the Trafalgar Square bit) – can be terrific. There’s a great spirit of what I suppose you could call ‘solidarity’ there, mixing and shouting alongside people you agree with; making new friends, however temporary; reading new jokes (the placards); and getting some exercise in, to boot. Solidarity is an elusive atmosphere in our present-day ultra-individualist and fractured culture. Your first whiff of it as you emerge from the tube station into the crowd is like a stiff shot of whisky, or – I imagine – the first puff of a spliff. After it’s over, and the crowd has dispersed, you feel uplifted, warmed and strengthened by the support for your cause you’ve felt all around you, even at the darkest times. That can linger for a few days; until you start thinking: well, what on earth did that really achieve? Did it stop Britain developing its H-Bomb, or Blair from invading Iraq? Did it materially contribute to the fall of Apartheid? Or wasn’t it all, in truth, just a self-indulgent waste of time; in the Alt-Right’s new terminology, a ‘snowflake’ occasion?

Whatever the general truth may be of that rather depressing conclusion, I’m hoping it can’t be true in yesterday’s case. The crowds in Washington – mainly women for their own causes, provoked by the appalling misogyny of their new President, but joined by many men too, demonstrating against the same thing: isn’t women’s liberation also men’s liberation? as well as against the prospect of a Trump Presidency more generally – truly were amazing, and far larger than predicted; as were the scores of sympathy – ‘sister’ – demos in other cities and capitals nation- and world-wide. By all accounts far more people protested against Trump than attended his inauguration the previous day, and much more enthusiastically – certainly more entertainingly. Surely this must have some effect on an administration elected, legally but by a minority of American voters – 25% of the total possible electorate, and 3 million fewer than voted for Hillary – to give it pause for thought, at the very least.

Of course Trump isn’t the sort of person who pauses for thought – ever. He’s far too confident of his own instincts – he doesn’t have to read or be advised by ‘experts’, he says, because he’s ‘smart’ – and, essentially, vain. (As evidence of this, look again at that picture of him and our own dear Michael Gove giving ‘thumbs-up’ signs in Trump Tower, and in particular the framed pictures on his walls: most of them – including the sexy Playboy covers – portraits of him torn from the front pages of magazines like Time: http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/internets-toes-curl-after-michael-9631162). But it’s this last weakness that I think might make him peculiarly vulnerable to the implications of events like yesterday’s Women’s March.

Part of his vanity consists in his insistence that he’s supported by virtually everyone in America apart from the ‘lying media’ and the despised intellectual – that is, book-reading – élite on the geographical edges of America; and even loved by the majority. In his election campaign he was always drawing attention to the huge crowds he gathered to hear him and chant his ridiculous catch-phrases: ‘Build the Wall!’, ‘Jail the Bitch!’, ‘Drain the Swamp!’ He lived by this, breathed it in, was warmed and enervated by it, just as we poor protesters were – temporarily – in Trafalgar Square. (So we can understand.)

But then yesterday came the hostile demos, which I don’t think he had predicted, or at least in such numbers; which is why he spent yesterday evening – when a new President should surely be concentrating on more important things – rubbishing the estimates of the numbers the ‘lying press’ were putting out, and even claiming that journalists were doctoring airborne views of his inauguration crowd to make it look smaller than it was, and in particular smaller than Obama’s. Of course it was smaller, and the number of protestors larger. Quite apart from that, however – the facts of the matter – isn’t it curious, and possibly alarming, that a President should be so obsessed with this kind of thing, a matter, only, of personal vanity, in his first day in post as ‘Leader of the Free World’?

We should have known. Remember the times on the election trail when he continually mentioned, quite irrelevantly, how ‘successful’ his Miss World competitions were, and mocked his successor on The Apprentice for getting lower ratings than he had? Together with his funny golden hair, and sensitivity about the size of his hands and other physical attributes, it seems to indicate a degree of sheer narcissism that goes far beyond any normal person’s, and might even be classed as ‘pathological’. One of the speakers at the Women’s March yesterday – Gloria Steinem (thanks, Kajsa) – listed a number of his faults, including delusions of grandeur, sensitivity to criticism, and the inability to separate fantasy from reality, which she thought might qualify as psychological illnesses. Narcissism should obviously be added to these. Does it make America’s new President mad? (Or madder than you need to be, to put yourself up for President?)

Whether yesterday’s demos will make any practical political difference, we can’t tell. If so, however, it will be by targeting this huge character flaw of the new President. What effect that will have on him and on all our lives in the next four years is a matter of guesswork. He’ll probably just deny it all as ‘fake news’; the ‘fantasy/reality’ thing.

My immediate reaction: Trump hasn’t changed at all, isn’t going to tack even a little from his position during the campaign. He’s genuine. It was a pretty good speech, I thought, for his audience. I kept imagining it spoken in 1930s German: the content was very similar. Leftists could, or should, agree with a lot of it. The tragedy is that it was mouthed by a quasi-fascist and socially reactionary American nationalist. He touched on grievances that, rightfully, should be being exploited by the socialists: people like Saunders and Corbyn – but weren’t by Clinton. And of course – I guess – he won’t be able to achieve half of what he has promised. What happens then is anyone’s guess. Hopefully not what happened in 1939.

Well, the day has come. I’ll be watching the inauguration on the telly with a couple of friends and fortified, hopefully to blessed oblivion, by a bottle or two (or three) of cheap French wine.

Who could have foreseen it? Yes, the crisis of unregulated global capitalism, possibly its ultimate one – a number of us predicted that, going right back to the blessed Karl. But not a crisis with someone like the Donald, and his cabinet of gross capitalists, as its main political beneficiaries. That’s an irony too far.

Historically there’s no close precedent – unless it’s Caligula’s horse. Reagan isn’t one: an extreme free trader, which Trump isn’t, and with a great deal of political experience before becoming President. I suppose ‘showmanship’ is the main similarity between them, and the thing that makes this a characteristically American phenomenon: BT Barnum, Hollywood, et al.

Another big difference is the extent and persistence of opposition to Trump both in the US – amongst the sizeable majority who voted against him, we must remember – and everywhere else in the world outside Russia. (Putin’s support for him is understandable, I think, not only or mainly because they’re both reactionaries and ‘dictators’, but because Trump says he wants to bring an end to the often paranoid and always dangerous hostility between their two countries which has blighted international politics for the past 70 years.) In Britain you can find hardly anyone who has a good word to say about Trump, at least publicly, apart from the ridiculous Farage and Gove. On a discussion programme on TV last night no-one in the audience raised a hand in his support. Anti-Trumpism is not only the dominant discourse in the UK, but a near-universal one.

Will this make any difference to his presidency? You would have thought it ought to – to make him pause before grabbing the nation’s pussy – but there’s been little sign of this so far. His inauguration speech will have been penned by others, I guess, and so coated with a statesmanlike veneer. If on the other hand it’s anything like his campaign speeches – ‘me me me’, mocking ‘losers’, thin-skinned, and with all those rhetorical gestures: the outspread arms, jutting jaw, pointy fingers, ‘believe me’s’ and so on – we should probably dive for cover straight away. Or, if we’re more sanguine, wait a while for him to plunge down in flames before long, through impeachment – there must be some financial as well as sexual scandals to be unearthed – or (God forbid) assassination at the hands of a gun owner: the true ‘American way’.

The best principled case for Brexit was always going to be the ‘internationalist’ one, painting the European Union as a protectionist cabal and a ‘white men’s club’, by contrast with the truly free trading, non-exclusive and friendly-to-everyone nation that Britain might become. That was the line taken by many of the opponents of Britain’s original entry into the Common Market (as it was then) in 1972. For at least two centuries up until then Britain had been a far more ‘international’ nation than any of her neighbours (France came closest), with her extra-European trade greatly exceeding her commerce with the European continent, and her people – emigrants, tourists, missionaries, explorers, scientific enquirers – venturing all over the globe. In this ‘wider world’ view, Europe even as a whole appeared almost parochial, and no-one in the nineteenth century would have regarded relations with it alone as meriting the term ‘internationalism’.

However, the fact that many of Britain’s relations with that wider world took the form of ‘imperialism’, implying domination, rather tarnished the idealistic aspect of this ‘outward-lookingness’ (as I called it in one of my books); with the result that a great effort was made in the early twentieth century to make it less obviously imperialistic, and therefore more genuinely ‘international’, by seeking to evolve the old Empire into a new, equal and multi-ethnic ‘Commonwealth of Nations’: a bit like a proto-UN. But of course not many people outside Britain – or even Leftists inside – could see or credit this; which is why Euroscepticism right up to the present day has often been confused with, or seen as the legacy of, the more old-fashioned or ‘Blimpish’ kind of imperialism.

Theresa May began her policy-defining talk on ‘Brexit’ today –  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/01/17/theresa-mays-brexit-speech-full – by appealing to this older kind of internationalism, which nowadays of course doesn’t need to carry any imperialist connotations. (No-one thinks we’re going to try to annex India again. Or America – though that might not be such a bad thing for it just now.) Unfortunately most of the press commentary seems to have ignored this part. But it’s important, and was fair enough to point out, harking back as it does to a venerable British tradition; which wasn’t an ignoble one, until it was hi-jacked by the empire builders and capitalist exploiters. – But of course the capitalist exploiters are still out there, no longer needing ‘nations’ to back them up, and indeed more internationally powerful than any single nation can be on its own; which is why I voted to ‘remain’ in this white men’s club, in the hope that it might be able to resist the behemoth collectively. I can’t see an independent Britain doing that. Which rather detracts from the idea that we can ‘regain control’.

I wonder what the Brexiteers thought of the speech? Many of them were racists. Exiting Europe certainly won’t do anything to stop the nig-nogs coming in. Indeed, May’s clear implication was that Indian doctors and students would be welcomed more than Polish plumbers. Jolly good, I say; but what about Nigel?

(I’m booked to give a paper on this in Genoa in April. These are my first thoughts.)

Yesterday a friend reminded me of a story I’ve been telling for years, but not yet on this blog, I think; about an incident at O’Hare Airport in Chicago some time ago, when I came off a plane, only to trip over a kerb in the tunnel you walk through to disembark, and hurt my ankle. I writhed there in agony.

Immediately an Airport employee came running up to me. Her first question was: ‘Can I get you a lawyer?’ Only afterwards did she offer to call a doctor. – ‘OK’, I thought. ‘I must be in America’.

I turned down her offer of a lawyer: ‘My own silly fault’, I said. ‘I should have looked where I was going.’ She looked surprised and relieved. The ankle turned out to be broken (it still gives me arthritic pain), and had to be set and plastered; which gave me some interesting experience (mainly good) of American hospitals, and a talking point at the conference I was attending, now on crutches. Everyone there said I should have sued the airport. ‘You could have won a million dollars.’ I was just grateful for the free treatment (on my travel insurance). But then, I’m British.

Some people don’t believe that. But I swear it’s true.

For those frustrated and even frightened by the West’s current unseemly rush back to the supposed comforts of nationalism and tribalism, and for those who, like me, don’t wish to restrict ourselves to single identities, national or otherwise, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s recent re-orientation of Canada as a ‘postnational’ society offers some hope, and even joy (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jan/04/the-canada-experiment-is-this-the-worlds-first-postnational-country?). Theresa May wouldn’t like it, of course: ‘if you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere’; as neither would the Ukippers, who have just stolen the European part of our identity away from us; or most of Trudeau’s neighbours south of the 49^th parallel. But for us cultural hybrids it’s like a breath of reason and enlightenment, and a glimpse of a better world.

Canada is rapidly becoming the other, ‘good’, side of the American coin; the shiny obverse to the US’s rusted reverse; the Dr Jekyll to the latter’s Mr Hyde. (Here’s something I wrote on it earlier: https://bernardjporter.com/2016/04/11/boring-canada/.) Which must vindicate all those American ‘loyalists’ who rejected independence in 1776, stuck with the Empire, and made their homes in ‘British North America’, as it was then. It illustrates what the United States might have become if they had remained under the British colonial yoke – which was gentle enough, after all – to develop culturally and politically in more British ways. (Only joking.) (Well, in part.)

Thanks to my postnational friend Marie Clausén for putting me on to this; and for her own excellent and moving FB commentary on it:

“Is this the world’s first ‘postnational’ country?” Oh, I do hope so.

It would mean that even people like me would finally be given the chance to belong somewhere without that nagging sense of imposture that we have come to know all too well. People like me with parents from different countries; people born in one country, but raised in three others; people who on growing up feel the need to move to a fifth country and after that to a sixth country, where they live with passports (and a driver’s licence) from countries they no longer reside in, and reside in a country in which they don’t have citizenship (or a driver’s licence); people whose most meaningful affiliations continue to be situated in a country they neither reside in nor have citizenship in; people who in spite of these complications do not subscribe to the notion of being multicultural, since they perceive themselves as complete, single, whole individuals and not bowls of broken-off, jumbled bits of various (presumably national) “cultures” maladroitly stuck together.

The more the nations of the world pull up their drawbridges and insist on making a Big Thing out of ethnicity and nationality and heritage and “where, oh where, are you FROM?” the more people like me, the root-weak internationalists, the cosmopolitans, the in-betweeners, the “third-culture kids,” who just want to get on with living our lives, such as they are, will be left out in the cold.

So, well done, Canada and Justin Trudeau, for embracing the possibility at least of acknowledging that there are other ways of thinking about, seeing, and organizing us human earthlings than by “national” “identity/ies.”

Amen.

Talking of conspiracy theories: it was good to see another bucketful of icy water being poured over the heads of the Bard deniers in the Observer today. I’ve always believed – to misquote Theresa May – that ‘Shakespeare means Shakespeare’. He wasn’t really Francis Bacon, or the Earl of Essex, or Christopher Marlowe, or perhaps a reptilian shape-shifter, in a clever disguise. Recently the American James Shapiro published a brilliant book, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? (2010), which put the cap on this. His conclusions, which seem to me obvious, are now corroborated a little further by some painstaking work done among the archives by ‘willowy, bright-eyed manuscript scholar’ Dr Heather Wolfe, reported here: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2017/jan/08/sherlock-holmes-of-the-library-cracks-shakespeare-identity. Of course it doesn’t ‘prove’ Shakespeare’s authorship. Nothing will. But in the absence of any evidence at all that any of his rivals penned his plays, it should be good enough for any but the most irredeemable conspiracy nutters.

Of course, the reason why those nutters, and even distinguished non-nutters like Derek Jacobi and (in the past) Mark Twain and Sigmund Freud, held to the belief that Will Shakespeare of Stratford on Avon couldn’t have written Hamlet and all the rest of the plays (we’ll make an exception for the co-written ones), was that he was too common. How on earth could the lower-middle class son of a glove-maker, living out in the sticks, have possibly known enough about royal courts and classical history and Italy to have been able to re-create them so convincingly? – Well, there were books (remember them?): Holinshed for the history plays and Lear, for a start. Stratford wasn’t such a dump then, and its grammar school certainly taught Latin. People travelled abroad and talked about it. Shakespeare will have got to know about Denmark from his actors, who were members of a troup that toured there, and probably performed in Elsinore. Of course the inquisitive young Will of Warwickshire had access to all the materials he needed to stage his plays; plus the genius and imagination to make something brilliant of them.

Above all, he was lower-middle class. That wasn’t a handicap (just as being a woman wasn’t a handicap if you wanted to be a novelist in the 19^th century), but an advantage. Moreover, he was an aspirational lower-middle. (Heather Wolfe’s researches have mainly been into his efforts to achieve the status of ‘gentleman’ by getting a coat of arms.) Contemporaries made fun of this: ‘an upstart crow beautified with our feathers’ (Robert Greene). But it was what made him what he was; just as a similarly uncomfortable or aspirational lower-middle class status enormously helped just about all Britain’s greatest artistic geniuses in history: Shakespeare, Turner, Dickens, Elgar: lower-middle max, every one of them; resulting in their being similarly mocked for it by their ‘betters’. How many world-class British artists or writers or composers have been fathered or mothered by bankers? Or gone to Eton? Or spoken posh? There must be a few (Parry? no, he was good, but second-rank); but in general genius and creativity – in many fields, not only artistic – are grown and nurtured in ‘lower’ soils. You can only hold on to the belief that Shakespeare must have been an aristo, or have been to Cambridge (like Marlowe: my college, as it happens, so I’d be rooting for him if anyone), if you’re entirely blind to social context, and – probably – a snob.

Of course I might be biased by my own lower-middle class origins. But I’d be interested to hear of any significant exceptions to my generalization. Naturally, it’s up to me to judge their significance.

This alleged Russian conspiracy behind Trump is fascinating. I can see where Trump is coming from in denying it, or at least in insisting that it made no difference to the result of the election. If his victory was influenced by Russian hackers it must devalue it, if not delegitimise it. It’s what a ‘bad loser’ would be bound to claim, whether it were true or not: although I’ve not noticed Clinton, who seems to have been the Russians’ main target, openly blaming Putin (yet). The secret services who are the source of the story, in common with most of the Washington establishment, hugely distrust Trump, and so might be motivated to try to destabilise him with stories of this kind. And we all know, don’t we, that you can’t ever trust ‘spooks’ generally: recruited as they are for their ability to lie and dissemble, and shown to have misled and even worked against their own governments in times gone by. That at any rate was my conclusion from the researches I did into the British secret security agencies in the last two centuries (Plots and Paranoia, 1989). Not that they always mislead, or that they don’t often do a good and essential job in protecting us; but that it is easier for them than it is for most other agencies to get up to dirty tricks if they feel it’s for the ‘security of the state’ as they conceive it. So, in this instance, I don’t blame Trump for being sceptical.

There are four questions at issue here. Firstly, was Clinton’s campaign deliberately destabilised by these means: hacking, embarrassing revelations, black propaganda (now known as ‘false news’)? Secondly, was any of this directed from the outside? Thirdly, was the Russian state complicit in it? The answers to these seem to be: certainly, probably, and possibly, in that order. But I obviously can’t know the answers to any of these questions; if indeed anyone outside the dastardly Russkis and the slippery spooks knows, or ever will.

Which leaves us with the fourth and final question: which has to do with the effects of plots and conspiracies, like the ones the Russians are supposed to have been responsible for last year, on ‘democratic’ politics. This is the one that defeated me when I was working on, for example, the ‘Zinoviev affair’ and the ‘Wilson plot’ – both anti-Labour conspiracies by right-wingers including members or ex-members of MI5 – whose objectives appear to have been successful, with a Labour election defeat and the resignation of Harold Wilson following shortly afterwards, but not necessarily as a result of these plots, with other factors clearly pertinent as well. There can be no conclusive proof in either of these cases, or in Trump’s. Post hoc does not always mean propter hoc, as history teachers are always warning their pupils (or should be). It depends on, as well as ‘evidence’, one’s general assessment of the vulnerability of people – voters – to ‘false news’ and other forms of black propaganda. It may be that most are only deceived by the propaganda that reflects views formed by other – for example material – circumstances. This is a much bigger and more complex question.

Most democrats would prefer not to believe that people’s ideas can be manipulated in this way. So would most historians; who in general, when it comes to questions of causation, would prefer great events (like Trump’s election) to be effected by greater, more general and rational causes, than the machinations of small cabals of Machiavellis, Goebbelses, Breibarts, Farages, or ex-KGB. That tends to make better books, with thick strong historical themes. And it prevents their authors being lumped in with the tribe of ‘Prince Philip as a reptilian shape-shifter’ ‘conspiracy theorists’; which would be ruination for any academic historian’s career.

But – whisper it – this doesn’t mean that conspiracy versions of some historical events, like Trump’s election, might not be true….