CHRISTMAS THOUGHTS 2016

“For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice.
And to make an end is to make a beginning."

TS Eliot The Four Quartets

I

To look back on a year like 2016 feels like looking back upon a devastated landscape, already decaying after the storm, already a wasteland. A year, to mix my metaphors, strangled by the forces of bitter reaction, with the recently impoverished and dispossessed, fed on the lies of opportunists, cynics and demagogues, providing the coup de grâce on the prostrate body. It is a world in which, at least in the UK, those who feel cheated, have been led by those who have cheated them, rose in rebellion and rejected the post war pan European social democratic settlement. In the US even darker forces have prevailed, a Mussolini style rabble rouser has attained power in the world’s most powerful democracy.  Even before he has taken the oath of office terrible portents cloud an ever-darkening sky. The institutions of American democracy are about to be tested, Nixon era included, as never before. Thus far, the omens, particularly from the mainstream news media, have not been good.  We will need to renovate and improve on our lexicon of fascism, find a new language to describe the Trump’s and Farage’s of this world.

II

At the heart of most British Conflicts is an ongoing struggle between Puritans and Cavaliers. Brexit was a Puritan victory, a reaction to diversity, liberal values and internationalism, - the latter encapsulated by the free movement of people. It is a cry for roast beef steam pudding, the News of the World on Sunday and the imagined moral and cultural certainties of the 1950’'s. It is the revenge of the puritan calling time on the party, too many people have been having far too much fun for far too long.

The dreadful economic consequences, the lies told to win, the narrow margin of victory are of no concern to the puritan Brexiteer, all that matters are the warm glow of residual anger against the ‘other,’ as the wagons of nationalism are drawn into a tight circle. Anger too that the victory feels so empty. Soon the hunt for scapegoats will begin. For make no mistake there can never be a final victory, the ‘winners’ in the Brexit vote are chasing a chimera, a monster that can never be slain for the simple reason it does not exist.

When England Won at Football

Imagine a Sunday afternoon, some time before the Beatles first LP. All the shops are closed; you lie prostrate on the sofa after stuffing yourself with roast beef and overcooked vegetables. You are surrounded by Sunday newspapers, strewn across the floor. The Conservatives are in power in perpetuity, all the cabinet is male and white and largely upper class. The papers are full of the concerns, of middle class white men and the word Empire is still used with pride.

Having read great chunks of the qualities you now eye the News of the World, ‘The Vicar offered to show me his organ…’, but in this changeless ossified white world, lulled by the sound of women doing the washing up, sleep gets the better of you. This is the lost idyll of the Brexit crowd, a demi-paradise of stability and certainty, when England won at football and cricket and Spitfires performed victory rolls over the White Cliffs of Dover.  The disappointment will be deep and bitter and unforgiving.

None of the above is intended as satire, for this was the year in which satire, battered, bruised, fighting for breath, finally expired, unable to cope with a World in which the minister for Brexit, David Davies, wins a court case in the European Court of human Rights against the government of which he is a member. Death was a kindness.

III

All lives matter is what we say, but our actions and reactions give the lie to this. Our indifference to the events in Aleppo, to the persecution of Burma’s Muslim community or the unspeakable tortures of the Yazidi in Iraq, speak the unpalatable truth that western lives matter more. An atrocity in Berlin or Paris hits us in a way that a car bomb in Baghdad or Beirut does not. We live with the cruelty of this truth daily, only occasionally being shocked out of our complacency by the picture of a dead child on a beach or the tweets of an 8yr old girl trapped in a besieged Syrian city.

Our complacency assumes, probably correctly, that it is not the likes of we or our family who will ever end up as unwanted refugees staring from behind the barbed wire.

IV

So, we do what we do, steering our lives through an obstacle course of obligations, desires, hopes, fears, disappointments and boredom. We give to the charity appeal and spare what thoughts we can to those less fortunate. If we are ‘guilty’ it is the guilt that comes with being human in an interconnected world. And move on, we get on with our lives, treasuring those islands of warmth, hope, love and, if we are very lucky, happiness.

Christmas, though not without its pitfalls, is just one such island. I hope it proves a time that nourishes you emotionally, if not there is always mince pies.

So, to summon up the image of Fred Astaire dancing with Ginger....

“There may be trouble ahead,

But whilst there’s music and moonlight and love and romance

Let’s face the music and dance”