Giant Slaying Time

When I was a little boy, I read, or was told, most of what was the then canon of classic children’s stories, and, decades later, retold the best of them to my own children in turn. Probably a key factor in making a kid’s story a classic is making it teach one or more useful life lessons, whether subtly or overtly. Perhaps, if the story has enough depth, it can be reinterpreted with a different lesson from a context of autres temps, autres moeurs. Thus, to me, with my 20th Century small “L” liberal upbringing, the hero of The Emperor’s New Clothes is the boy who called him out, but, to tell it to a generation that venerates the likes of Trump and Farage, you would maybe have to spin the story to be about what a masterful scam the tailors pulled off. Whatever; the primary lesson of the story is that vanity and credulity make unfit leaders, and Trump and Farage fans could do with being taught that!

The train of thought that gave me the urge to start typing involved another of the classic tales. I have known the story of Jack And The Beanstalk for longer than I can now remember. I think that if anyone had asked five or six year old me for my opinion on it (nobody did), I would have said “Jack was so brave!”. However, retelling it forty years on, I did wonder whether I ought to be doing so: Jack was a swindler who dishonestly disposed of his mother’s cow, a burglar who repeatedly raided and stole from the giant’s home, and a murderer who ultimately killed his victim. Not a great role model! However, all was well that ended well for the protagonists, so it is a feel-good story. 

Many more years have passed since I was telling fairy stories at bedtime, and I have had time to read a lot of learned, or at least opinionated, articles on matters including politics, economics, society , and political psychology. Two important things that I have come to know about in recent years are “ othering”, where rhetoric denies some people’s humanity until the audience are no longer inclined to treat the subjects as human, and the existence of a hyper-elite, with substantial power and near-total impunity, waging a reverse-Marxist class war against both the proletariat and the rest of the bourgeoisie alike. The one in service of the other is doing much harm.

Let us take those two things back to the story of Jack. Or more specifically, the giant in that story. The giant has language, feelings, a home and chattels, but no telling of the story ever gives him a name or grants him humanity. The story wouldn’t work if it did. Making him a victim would ruin the feel good factor. Instead, he is just a resource to exploit and then an enemy to slay, when he seeks to stop the exploitation. If you have told that story to a child, and they didn’t feel sorry for the giant, you have conducted a successful demonstration of othering in action. However, on another level, the giant can be considered an allegory or symbol. This is a brand new thought for me, although an obvious enough one that there are likely to have been other essays saying so before me. The giant could have used his might to be the hero of the ordinary people, but instead isolates himself, sequesters vast wealth with him, that could have been circulating in the land, and uses his power to menace the little folk. In setting himself apart and above, he has forsworn his claim to humanity, so there is no injustice in Jack violating what would have been his rights, had the giant still any moral claim to them.

 Now maybe the lesson that we subliminally learned form this story, but haven’t thought about all our adult lives,  is due for application. The Epstein clique, and, at most, a few hundred others around the world, live like Jack’s giant, above and apart, hoarding the money the world should be living on, casually destroying little people who displease them. The time has come for those of liberal values,  and a sincere belief in the preciousness of rights for all, to accept that these people, or ex-people,  have abjured their own humanity by how they have chosen to live and behave, and we don’t owe them the care we would offer all others. They have othered themselves by choice.  Seize their gold. Confiscate their magic hens. Chop the beanstalk away from under their feet. We don’t need to wipe out the whole billionaire class. Making examples of a few would incentivise the rest to change their ways, so let them live to pay appropriate taxes, but the old fairytale does provide the moral lesson that we should be doing something about those who would make bread flour of our bones.

The stories we learn in early life do much to shape who we grow up to be. If we grew up knowing greedy giants need cutting down to size, then we need not scruple to cut people who would live like greedy giants down to size in the same way.

This was written nearly 15 years ago, but I just noticed that the publication hadn’t gone through at the time! 

When I responded to a call to comment on the school milk fiasco last week, I was taken to task by one of Jersey's leading bloggers for not directly linking the matter to the even bigger fiasco of the mandarins' payoffs. However, I think that they are galls growing on different branches, and you have to go back nearer to the trunk to find the connection.

Free school milk was of immense nutritional value in harder and poorer times than we now live. But starving paupers have, for our era at least, been eliminated. Should you ever have cause to drive down La Motte Street on a weekday morning, and see the Income Support queue, it is striking how an overwhelming majority are conspicuously overweight. However, milk's own advantages, and drawbacks, as a food supplement do not disappear just because there is plenty else available as well or instead. Risky though a high dairy consumption may be for the middle-aged, it is the natural staple for all young and growing mammals, humans included. Therefore, it is still a good thing to make it available for children, and a better thing than most alternatives that they may wish to drink in school instead. (Except for the minority who outgrow their ability to digest milk by puberty.)

Farmers do not produce milk just out of an altruistic desire to nourish the public, of course, but to earn their own livings, and the processing and distribution are also business propositions in pursuit of profit. So “free” milk has to be paid for by somebody. Once, there was a clear case for that somebody to be the States. Now, when every family's food budget will buy rather more calories than it takes to lead an active life on, that case is no longer so clear. It would still be reasonable and practical for the state to facilitate the provision, and some level of subsidy may help to encourage takeup and stabilise supply. However, it would not be an outrageous burden on the vast majority of parents to divert a small part of their children's weekly sweet money to a milk subscription, and certainly no burden on those children's health. When we have a need to be very careful how we spend public money, 100% funding of school milk is hard to justify in the context of 2011 Jersey.

“When we have a need to be very careful how we spend public money...” I can work back towards that along another branch altogether:-

The previous rant was not enough to satisfy my anger at the ridiculous payoffs made to rid us of a couple of failed mandarins. When a man is hired to provide high level management skills in a politically sensitive environment, blundering through with respect for neither due process nor public opinion can only be viewed as gross incompetence. Gross incompetence has always been a deal-breaker in any job, and urgent departure has always been the remedy. It is ridiculous to suggest that massive inducements should be necessary to persuade the failed incumbent to pre-emptively resign. The ignominy of the alternative is generally enough. If the sky-high payments were a bribe to keep the departing staff from blowing the whistle on orders from above that made their jobs impossible to carry out competently, then they would be at least understandable, although still inexcusable. But, although there are allegations that the beneficiaries of these jackpots were involved in untoward conspiracies with certain politicians, their downfall has been very much due to their own failings in how they played their parts.

Had it been insufficient to just point out that their positions were becoming untenable, to make them step down, it should have been possible to remove them by disciplinary procedures. In fact, there is some circumstantial evidence that Ogley's departure is closely connected with the disciplining of an unidentified civil servant, the details being much too sensitive and confidential for public consumption. Unless they could produce some very embarrassing evidence in their own defence, though, it is hard to see why it would not have been better to simply remove them. It may be a bit of a fuss, and leave a bad taste in a few mouths, but it would take even more mismanagement to run up a six-figure bill on the sackings.

I would contend therefore that buying the delinquents off instead of sacking them was not so much a necessity as a luxury. Only, we have a need to be very careful how we spend public money, and this is not a careful use of it. This is a quite different matter to school milk, but it touches on the same issue: How do we prioritise the claims on the public purse? There are several aspects to consider: How good is something? How desirable? How necessary? How important? How valuable? How expensive? All the same kind of question, but not exactly the same things, and certainly not all the same answer.

Even if there are objective answers to at least some of that list of questions, others have inherently subjective answers, and weighting or ranking those answers is more subjective still, which is where the politics come in. The idea of a representative democracy is that you vote for the candidate whom you expect to make the judgements that seem most right to you. If you squander your vote by choosing on spurious grounds like having a nice glossy poster, then tough luck, if you dislike the consequences. If you are outvoted by those who think priorities should be different to you, that is tough, too. All you can do is try to persuade them that they would like your ideas better, if they tried them next time.

Anyway, to return to the examples in hand: School milk I would categorise as good, myself, but see Tom Gruchy's comment two posts back for another viewpoint. But does it score enough for necessity and importance to balance out the high score for expense? VFC says it does, I say not quite, and Phil Ozouf says not at all. Paying the ministers' right-hand men vast sums just to go away is certainly not good, desirable, important or valuable. However I can imagine circumstances where it is necessary from the viewpoint of those who can authorise such payments, not that such circumstances would be to anybody's credit; like knowing too much about cases of gross maladministration or corruption, for instance. (Imaginary and hypothetical circumstances of course.)

To sum up, both cases are matters of priorities, and priorities of democratic governments are matters of voter preferences. So, if you don't like the current incumbents' priorities, drag yourselves away from the TV for a few minutes, next election day, and vote for someone else.

Looking For The Silver Lining

From my safe and privileged position, I look out on a world with far too many needlessly bad things going on elsewhere , some of which stand out as particularly egregious. However, that outlook is subject to perspective. The worst of the egregious situations to be clearly in my view is Israel’s cruel and brutal slow extermination of the people of Gaza, but that is on the very horizon for me; I can see that it is inexcusably horrible, but it does not loom large. Russia’s attempt to conquer Ukraine is another large wrong in the world, but at the end of the terrible carnage, it seems likely to ultimately fail, and the burden of the tragedy will mainly rest on Russian shoulders. However, the third great horror standing tall above the others does loom large over me. Despite the much greater geographical distance than Palestine or Ukraine, culture and economy make the United States of America very significant in my own life, perhaps more so than the other end of the British Isles. And so, although their current predicament does not directly involve me, it is right in my face, and I can not help but be worried by it. 

They say history does not so much repeat as rhyme, and I agree: similar situations do arise again and again, but the differences in details make them play out a little differently, for better or worse, each time. Donald Trump is an open admirer of Hitler, and he is clearly modelling the approach for his second term on mid-20th Century Fascism, and especially 1930s Germany. This is profoundly worrying, even for citizens of neighbouring countries, let alone those Americans sharp enough to realise what they are getting into.

Fascism is not a casual and exaggerated insult: Trump’s current administration is embracing as many of its defining characteristics as it can. We have the general poisoning of public discourse with systematic lying about all sorts of subjects as the softening up. Then we have the running of the country for the benefit of magnates at the expense of workers. This is not an exclusively Fascist thing, it is a general feature of right-wing and neoliberal countries, but it is a fundamental one. Then we have the establishment of a brutal political police operating above the law, and the building of concentration camps, probably intended to develop into death camps in due course. That is not being staunchly conservative, that is outright Nazism. Thus we have the stage set for the coming of some very dark times for America, and for America to drag other countries to their doom too, if they cannot disengage quickly and thoroughly. 

The murder of Renee Good was a shocking wake up call. The IDF murder civilians in cold blood on a massive scale day after day, but, as I said,  they are on my horizon. Renee’s terrible fate was just a petulant whim, perhaps frustration that an attempt to to bully was met with polite and good natured compliance, when he craved confrontation . The murderer Ross’s vainglorious posting of his own video of the incident shows he has no reasonable defence for his action. The murder was a dreadful thing in its own right, but the aftermath exposed worse: instead of being promptly arrested, ICE helped their delinquent colleague flee justice, and, worse still, the highest levels of government extended their support. That was the turning point; after a year of being at growing risk of becoming a Fascist state, the USA now objectively is one.

The dark cloud hangs overhead, but does it have a silver lining? Maybe. There are enough historical examples of the establishment of Fascist states to see how America has followed their playbook, and it has now achieved enough in common with them to be added to their number. To find hope that  American Fascism might rapidly fail, we need to look to the differences between this time round and when long-term Fascism has endured. One of the common threads of Fascism is the concentration of power in a charismatic leader. Not one has successfully bequeathed their power to another charismatic leader though, Fascism has always collapsed in the months following the demise of its beloved strongman. The Fascist leaders who ruled for decades, started in the prime of life, and could spend a couple of years on consolidating their power. Trump is already into his dotage, and has no time on his side for building his structures of oppression solidly, he must rush. Of course, another potential point of difference from the playbook, is that Trump could hand over to someone who could carry on his work. However, the succession is already settled on JD Vance ( unless Trump’s doctors can improbably nurse him along to the end of his term) . He has the youth, the energy and the malignity to be a Fascist dictator, for sure, but the lack of charisma, that made him a good strategic pick as VP to a President who hates being upstaged, will be a fatal handicap. For all his manifold inadequacies, Trump at least still carries an air of mobster menace from his decades of organised crime, while Vance is just a creep. It is hard to manage him commanding the level of personal loyalty that so many people misguidedly lavish on Trump. Sexually abusing young girls is scandalous, but sexually abusing furniture is just weird, and although the story may be apocryphal it does resonate with how unrelatable Vance is. Vance’s Indian wife won’t endear him to the bitter racists making the hard core of Trump’s support, either. 

Apart from the likelihood that Trump will soon die and Vance fail to fill his shoes, another way in which America is unlike anywhere that Fascism endured for any length of time is the absolutely vast number of civilian guns in circulation. ICE won’t be able to pull off many more Renee Good type murders before the citizens start shooting back. Ironically, the right wing have traditionally been the keenest on their Second Amendment rights, but now ICE are shooting white citizens, they are going to start reflecting on just why the Second was passed, and using their guns to defend against an oppressive Federal government the way the Founding Fathers foresaw a potential need for one day. That will change everything. Five or ten ICE thugs shot on duty might just be taken as a provocation, but once the casualties climb into the hundreds, ICE will have a morale crash - they became secret policemen to bully people - not soldiers to do battle. If this scenario comes to pass, it is hard to guess what the final outcome will be, quite likely still a messed up and dangerous America, but the neo-Nazi project will crash and burn, whatever follows.

So, although the chance of  Trump successfully establishing a Fascist state that menaces the rest of the world while crushing its own people is high enough to seriously worry about, I don’t think it is a foregone conclusion. There are also likely ways it could fail and save us all. I think we have now seen the de facto leadership of the free world pass from the US to Canada as a consequence of Trump’s diplomatic ineptitude, but it will remain a substantial player on the world stage, and it would be terrible if it could play dirty for any length of time. Let us hope that sanity returns soon