So now we have president elect Donald Trump. The next president of the USA is to be Donald Trump. Over 60,000,000 people, many of whom have presumably had some form of education, voted for Donald Trump. The person leading the so-called 'free world' will be Donald Trump. The Commander-in-chief of the most powerful armed force on Earth will be Donald Trump. The majority parties in both the Senate and House of Representatives will be led by Donald Trump. The most powerful person on the planet will be Donald Trump. It is surely wholly appropriate that it is only in the fantasy world of a cartoon series some fifteen years ago that such an outcome could have been imagined. Fantasy and reality are now indistinguishable.

How can this have happened? Well, there's certainly been a lot of analysis in the media, ranging from the simplistic, 'what do you expect from Americans? They're mainly morons drip-fed by Fox news' to the, at least more sophisticated, 'it's the inevitable fall-out from thirty years of neo-liberal economic policies that have denuded the American working-class of jobs and security.' Other explanations focus on a resurgent white racism, citing the approval of Trump by a number of white supremacists, including David Duke, ex leader of the Ku Klux Klan. They argue that Trump's comments on minority groups have given a license to a barely concealed racism that has always been there and now has a freedom to express itself more openly, particularly among working-class white males. Others have focused on gender, seeing Hillary Clinton as a victim of entrenched misogyny that is so widespread in American culture that she never really had a chance. Then there are the idiosyncrasies of the voting system that allows someone with a minority overall vote, albeit by a slender margin, win the top prize. There is certainly some truth in all these explanations, but we are still left with the mystery of how someone so odious to most people with a modicum of education and human feeling could find himself - it seems to his own surprise - elected to the most powerful role in world politics. Most people like this who achieve power do so by military coups in impoverished countries often, of course, with the decisive backing of the CIA. So far, no-one seems to have suggested a role for them in this debacle.

What is really surprising is that so many people were utterly and genuinely, surprised. This is, of course, an understatement. They were dumbfounded and devastated. Even after Trump had rampaged through the Primaries and come out on top, even after the attacks upon Latinos and Muslims had only increased support for him, even after his advocacy of sexual assaults on women did nothing to impede his progress, even after twelve women came forward with accounts of his actual assaults on them made no dent in his ratings, still people were amazed that he was the winner. Any one of these could have sunk a candidate in most elections, but Trump brazened it out and was swept to victory on a populist tide of rejection of the status quo and admiration for bigotry dressed up as straight talking. How can we explain this?

Well, as I said earlier, there is some truth in all the explanations popularised in the mainstream media. The idea that many, or most,  Americans are simply stupid is clearly a stupid position to take. It is true that, in most senses of the word, America is a deeply conservative society, both politically and culturally, despite the many radical movements that have sprung from there, but in a different manner from the conservatism of British society. Since 1982, Gallup has polled Americans on whether they believed in Creationism (that mankind was created by God,more or less as it is now,  within the last 10,000 years) or evolution (that man has evolved over millions of years from earlier life forms). 46% of respondents held the creationist view. This statistic has been supported, but with more sophisticated analysis,and some qualifications, in the General Social Survey polls in the same period. The belief in Creationism is generally stronger among those with no higher education and the elder age group. It is inconceivable that such a statistic could be replicated in any other developed Western society. Religion is more deeply embedded in American society than other Western countries and the conservative attitudes, particularly on social issues, that flow from this, - patriarchy, hostility to women's rights, particularly over their own bodies and negative attitudes to other faiths and cultures. It also suggests that public education in the USA has some way to go in encouraging critical thinking and an evidence base for core attitudes and beliefs. It was not long ago that Theresa May was seriously suggesting we should look to the USA for someone to oversee our education system!

Donald Trump made no overt religious appeal, other than to ban Muslims, in his erratic electoral addresses, but he did offer a number of policies that would appeal to the conservative mind-set: economic protectionism, withdrawal from military conflict areas, attacks on immigration and the deportation of illegal immigrants, repression of Muslims and other minority groups, rejection of the overwhelming evidence on climate change as a 'Chinese con' and economic regeneration through infrastructure renewal providing working-class employment (not, interestingly, through reviving manufacturing, which Trump is shrewd enough to know would be a non-starter). How this was to be financed was left somewhat vague. In fact, how any of these policies would be paid for was never made clear except the famous wall (now maybe a fence) which would apparently be financed by the very people it was designed to suppress! He would also make extreme conservative appointments to the Supreme Court which could have a devastating impact on progressive politics.

 It is undoubtedly true that the destruction of working-class jobs, initiated through the globalised economy that found cheaper production in parts of the world where labour was cheap and unorganised, has taken a severe toll on millions of American blue-collar workers. Equally true that unscrupulous politicians like Trump can make easy capital out of this by blaming immigrants as they reap the financial dividends of their own outsourcing of labour intensive work, and/or using these same immigrants as cheap labour in their own industries as Trump has done in his property speculations. We must be wary of ascribing the success of maverick politicians in the developed world simply to 'populism'. Millions of people are experiencing very real hardship and see no relief or future for themselves or their families from conventional politics. 
James Fallows, in an interesting podcast for the American Fresh Air Public Radio service (http://www.npr.org/podcasts/381444908/fresh-air) travelled throughout small town America in the months preceding the election, and points out that, among many other pertinent observations, manufacturing jobs are now being decimated, not by cheaper outsourced labour, but by automation. The old manufacturing / industrial economy will not return to advanced countries like the USA. The traditional blue-collar worker, once the foundation of American prosperity, is now a dispensable commodity and knows it.

To me there is no doubt that another major factor in Trump's triumph was the Democratic choice of Hillary Clinton as candidate. She was hailed as the most qualified candidate ever to stand for President in terms of political experience in stark contrast to Trump's total lack of any electoral political experience at all. The Democratic machine seemed completely unable to see that, in an era of profound disaffection for mainstream politics, this would not be seen as an asset by many ordinary people - witness our own Brexit debacle - but a serious disadvantage. Not only did she have a long history at the top of American politics but, because of this history, she was not trusted either by those on the left or the right.

 As First Lady during her husband's tenure in the White House, Hillary Clinton was deeply disliked by those on the right politically, tainted by association, though admired by some on the liberal side of Democratic politics, especially women who sympathised with her personal travails. As Secretary of State under Obama she pursued traditional American Foreign policies, which has always been to fix the world, as far as possible, in the interests of the USA. One incident in particular, when she was Secretary of State, tells us what kind of candidate she really was. 
The 2009 coup in Honduras that removed a democratically elected left-wing President, Manuel Zelaya, and replaced him with a right-wing military regime was directly supported by Clinton, and the USA, under her direction, duly backed the new government. Clinton has since admitted she used her power to prevent the return of Zelaya - she certainly didn't want another socialist leader in S. America since the recent election of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. She subsequently lied about her reasons for supporting the overthrow of an elected president. It would have been impossible for Zelaya to extend his term of office, as Clinton well knew. Honduras quickly descended into a nightmare of drug cartels, political killings and dire poverty resulting in huge numbers of desperate child refugees at the USA borders. Add to this the support for the Iraq war, the war in Afghanistan, intervention in Libya (demonstrating she had learned nothing from the Iraq catastrophe) and Obama's drone killings in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Afghanistan which have killed, at a conservative estimate at least 1500 civilians including around 300 children. Not, of course, that these deaths would trouble many Trump supporters, but the overseas operations would. Hillary Clinton was not undone by misogyny but by her own tainted history and being seen, truthfully, as 'politics as usual'. In James Fallows' view, and he knows the heartlands of America well, Bernie Sanders would have had a much better chance of taking on Trump than Clinton.

We are left with a position of such uncertainty - a man both unstable and completely unpredictable in the White House - that the future is simply unknowable. I am indebted to James Fallows' political blog for reminding me of a poem by the great W.B. Yeats:

To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing

Related Poem Content Details

BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

Now all the truth is out,

Be secret and take defeat

From any brazen throat,

For how can you compete,

Being honor bred, with one

Who were it proved he lies

Were neither shamed in his own

Nor in his neighbors' eyes;

Bred to a harder thing

Than Triumph, turn away

And like a laughing string

Whereon mad fingers play

Amid a place of stone,

Be secret and exult,

Because of all things known

That is most difficult.

Back in 1961 as I ground through my first year at Secondary school, I never really thought about my future at all. It was just getting through each day that preoccupied me totally. I now had homework to do, so even my evenings were commandeered by the hated school. We were still going to my grandparent's house after school to be looked after until my mother picked us up from work. My two sets of grandparents were Granny and Grandpa Towers and Nanny and Grandpa George. Nanny George set me up on the tiny landing of their house at a folding card table they had there and I would attempt to do the work set while listening to the sound of the television drifting temptingly up from the front room below. Maths was always the subject that drove me to feelings of desperation as I struggled to make sense of the tasks set. I remember one occasion when we must have been staying the night at my grandparents still sitting in front of an impossible set of abstract signs until after ten o' clock when Nanny George came up and tried to help me. She gave up after a few minutes and I went to bed fearful of what my lack of success would bring in the aftermath of the punishment I have already described at the hands of my Maths teacher. As it turned out, it was complete indifference.

I was now eleven years old and fast approaching my twelfth birthday. Not just school was dominating my life; sex was also a matter of obsessive interest, as it was to all of us going through puberty in the hot-house atmosphere of a boys only school. Of course there was no internet to explore this area of interest - there were no computers - and the subject was pretty much taboo in the entertainment offered on the two TV channels. Films were heavily censored and age-controlled and this was long before page 3 of The Sun. Occasionally at school, someone would bring in a copy of a magazine like 'Parade' or 'Titbits', and the images of busty women in swimsuits or low cut dresses would be passed around at break-time, and, despite their tame content, always attracted a small crowd of us younger boys.

                              

 This made me remember that, among my grandfather's huge collection of body-building magazines stacked in orange-boxes around his spare room (see earlier post), were several copies of 'Health and Efficiency' magazine. These were full of pictures of young women ecstatically enjoying playing volleyball or sitting tastefully on seaside rocks in windswept parts of Britain and all completely naked - though some random object or awkward sitting position always managed to mask the bits we were most interested in. Although purportedly for naturist enthusiasts of both sexes and all ages, the magazine featured - unsurprisingly - almost exclusively young women.

On my next visit to my grandparents, I took the opportunity to rummage through his magazine collection and sneaked two or three of the H & E's  out tucked under the back of my shirt ((I never wondered what the 'efficiency' referred to but am now  puzzled). These had completely naked women, albeit strategically covered by various kinds of sports equipment and I decided the best thing to do would be to cut out single pictures that I could easily carry to school in my pocket. This worked well, and I soon had an interested crowd handing round the selected items in the playground at break-time. I was taken by surprise when one of the boys offered me a few pennies to buy a couple of the pics, presumably for future reference. Pretty soon I had sold out and realised there was a potential market here. I had enough cash to buy a bottle of Tizer - my drink of choice, but I rarely had a choice- and some sweets on the way home. The problem was, that I only had one more set of pictures to deal with.

I took these into school a few days later, now having graded the pictures in order of explicitness and priced accordingly. I sold out. But now I was out of stock. I decided I had to invest my new capital in more stock, which I duly did. If I got off the bus to my grandparent's house a stop early, I passed a small newsagent and, after a lot of indecision, I plucked up the courage to go in and pick up a copy of 'Parade' and 'Health & Efficiency'. The lady behind the counter seemed completely unfazed by this transaction, but I was overwhelmed with embarrassment. On my way out of the shop I noticed a rack of magazines hanging behind the door which immediately caught my attention. They were glossy, thick and featured naked women in carefully posed black and white photos, and seemed to be American - and expensive. However, I knew that these would find a top price among my more affluent peers.

That evening, I carefully cut up my purchases, priced them up and realised that if I sold them all I'd have more than enough to buy one at least of the illicit mags I'd seen in the newsagent. I duly passed round my latest batch of material at lunch-time and, once again, I sold out. Now the dilemma. Was it to be Tizer and sweets, or re-investment? With admirable self-control, I once more got off the bus early, entered the newsagents and found to my surprise that I had enough cash to buy two of the 'artistic' glossy magazines hanging on the exotic magazine rack behind the door.

These magazines were presenting themselves as 'artistic' photography, all black and white and featuring artfully composed nudes floating in swimming pools or draped over rocks. I knew these would sell out at higher prices than I had ever tried before. I could buy all the Tizer I could drink. Loads of sweets. And enjoy the photos as well. I cut them up into individual packages of one to three images and priced them higher than any of the others, for obvious reasons of quality. 

The next day I had Art first thing in the morning, but the teacher had decided that, rather than do anything practical, we'd have a lesson on some period of art history, which he proceeded simply to tell us about from behind his desk in the corner of the room. Nothing for us to do but listen. I was sitting at the back and soon grew bored as he droned on. I decided I'd organise my new cache of exotic photos, and, under cover of the desk, began to sort them into the best lots and think about the highest price I could reasonably expect for each batch. I quickly became totally absorbed in my entrepreneurial activity when I was brought startlingly back to the class by the loud sound of my own name. "Towers".. pause... "bring what you're looking at under the desk out to me, NOW." I had several piles of incriminating images balanced on each knee. There was nowhere I could dispose of them at all. All I could do was gather them up into one pile and, with hideous embarrassment, slowly walk to the front, up to his desk and hand over the incriminating material. I was suffused with fear and shame. The teacher looked slowly through the first few pictures. He leaned back in his chair and looked steadily at me. I didn't have any idea what to expect, but after what seemed like an eternity, he simply said, slowly, "I think I'd better take charge of these, don't you?" He looked at me and I nodded and returned sheepishly to my desk with every eye in the class fixed on me.

The only positive I could take from this humiliation was that his response allowed me to pretend to some bravado in the playground when I, with a totally false nonchalance, was able say to my peers - "Yeh ... I know why he wants to take charge of them, don't you? Eh?" I felt inside, not only humiliation, and a strong feeling of shame, but also the certain knowledge that my burgeoning career in the adult entertainment business had come to a shuddering halt and my financial stream had well and truly dried up.   

I watched 'Question Time' on TV last week because one of the participants was the film director Ken Loach whose films have consistently, though variably, offered a powerful critique of the dominant ideological forces that have directed our, and  other countries', political culture over the last fifty years or so. There was a time when Loach was the kind of director that the BBC was proud to employ. Now that pride resides in 'Strictly Come Dancing', innumerable celebrity based mind-sapping shows and 'edgy' (time for a moratorium on this word) dramas featuring serial killers, British and Scandinavian, graphically mutilating young women. These are often, mysteriously, lauded by women reviewers in the liberal bourgeois press.
Question Time perfectly reflects the BBC's woeful idea of political 'impartiality' by being primarily focused on representatives of the three main political parties, thus defining the parameters of acceptable political debate. A 'celebrity' or controversialist of some description will also be allowed in to add a dash of populism to the proceedings. This role is usually filled with cartoonish figures from the right -Peter Hitchens, David Starkey, Melanie Phillips et al - so  Loach was an uncharacteristically perceptive voice who was unlikely to fulfil the usual demands of the brief. That is, he is thoughtful, intelligent and has been a thorn in the side of establishment figures for decades.
 His answers, though not given too much space in the proceedings, cut through the usual blather that passes for political debate in our mass media, and placed issues in a wider and more comprehensible historical framework than the other panellists could manage. He also showed his customary deep understanding of the lives of ordinary people and the difficulties they face. He was, interestingly, warmly applauded when urging the Parliamentary Labour Party to get behind Jeremy Corbyn rather than continually undermining him.
The final question asked whether Britain had become less compassionate since the making of 'Cathy Come Home', Loach's powerful 1963 drama, made for the BBC, about the housing crisis and its human consequences. Someone called Dia Chakravarty, representing a group called the Taxpayer's Alliance, whoever they are, (I've paid taxes all my life and I have never 'allied' with them and I object to being yoked into this appalling little clique) began the answers with such a wilful misunderstanding of Loach's film that even he, the epitome of politeness, felt constrained to intervene and take apart the fatuity of her answer. Ms. Chakravarty could easily be mistaken for the gauche head girl of a 1950's public school a little too eager to win a sixth-form debating competition, her every intervention (and there were many) showing a spectacular unfamiliarity with the lives of most people in the 21st. century.
Ken Loach began his answer with the simple observation that he felt that Britain had become less compassionate, and that this change began with the destruction of the idea of the 'common good' during the 1980's and its replacement with the selfish individualism that now dominates our culture. I'm sure he's right, but it set me thinking about what the purpose of compassion is and what or who should be the object of our compassion. Should compassion be our response to injustice? When all the forces of the state are organised to defend the rich and powerful and the relatively powerless are made to suffer in order to maintain the status quo, should our response be compassion or anger?

This train of thought led me to a poem I have mentioned in an earlier post, 'The Human Abstract' by William Blake, written in the 1790's, but as relevant now as then. The poem begins:

                                    "Pity would be no more
                                     If we did not make somebody poor;
                                     And Mercy no more could be
                                     If all were as happy as we.

It's a brilliantly confrontational opening seething with a deep moral anger contained in its challenge to traditional thinking and succinctly and powerfully states the hypocrisy underlying our socially determined impulses. We tolerate inequality and injustice and applaud ourselves for our magnanimity in feeling pity and being merciful rather than acting upon the righteous anger we should feel in order to eliminate the causes of this suffering. The philanthropy of some of the super rich is often lauded in the media and used as a justification for the obscene levels of personal wealth that some enjoy while the living standards of the vast majority inexorably decline, and thus we are encouraged to tolerate the ever growing levels of inequality. The poem continues:

                                     And mutual fear brings peace,
                                     Till the selfish loves increase
                                     Then cruelty knits a snare
                                     And spreads his baits with care


                                     He sits down with holy fears
                                     And waters the ground with tears
                                     Then humility takes its root
                                     Underneath his foot.

Blake, of course, lived at a time when religion held a much stronger hold over people's lives than it does today, but the ideological hold of the church has simply been replaced with the secular ideologies constructed in an age of consumer capitalism. Our society is deeply divided and different kinds of fear maintain those divisions - fear of the power of those who have more than us, of the state as it defends the interests of the powerful, of those at the bottom who may rebel, of foreigners, immigrants,  of the precarious state of our own lives and how quickly we too could become the objects of pity and so on it goes. This leads to selfishness and cruelty towards any group who we are encouraged to fear by politicians and the mass media. They collude with the powerful to encourage us to see this state of affairs as largely the product of the victims own doing and incapable of change. Thus now, as then, we live in the shadow of this 'dismal shade of mystery', the ideological forces that control and determine much of our thinking. 

                                     Soon spreads the dismal shade
                                     Of Mystery over his head;
                                     And the Caterpillar and fly
                                     Feed on the Mystery.

                                     And it bears the fruit of deceit,
                                     Ruddy and sweet to eat;

We learn to live a lie - that poverty, hunger, injustice, inequality -  are 'natural' states and we should simply accept them - while, of course, showing some pity and mercy, or, as we are more likely to say now, compassion. Blake shows us that there is nothing 'natural' about this state of affairs; it is the product of our own doing. And we will need more than 'compassion' to challenge and change it.

                                    The Gods of the earth and sea
                                    Sought through nature to find this Tree;
                                    But their search was all in vain:
                                    There grows one in the human brain.
    

 We are locked in - to use another Blake phrase - the 'mind forg'd manacles' we have constructed for ourselves. In Blake's original 'illuminated book', humanity, in the shape of an old man, lies bound and shackled amidst a landscape of death and decay.

In September 1961 I was feeling in need of a great deal of pity. Indeed I was consumed with self-pity. I'm still not sure why I reacted so badly to my new secondary school. I just felt completely disoriented by almost every thing about it. It seemed huge to me and the corridors were both confusing and policed by prefects (the ones with the silk bands on their blazer cuffs I mentioned in my last post) who had the power - seemingly used completely arbitrarily - to suddenly bellow at you and put you in detention for no reason I could ever fathom. The teachers were remote and uninterested in any pupil as an individual. And, unlike my junior school, I really had no friends at all. I just felt an indeterminate sense of fear of the place and my heart would sink the closer I got to the school each morning. This was made worse by an incident that occurred some weeks into my first term.
We were lining up outside the classroom of our Maths teacher while his last class were leaving. We must have made too much noise because, when we had entered he ordered us all outside to do the manoeuvre  again. He was a very tall man, probably in his mid thirties and, though I never understood anything that went on in a Maths lesson, he always seemed okay to me. He never seemed very interested in any of us, but this was true of all the teachers, but he had a presence in the classroom that made the lessons pretty predictable and straightforward affairs. To send us out to line up again was unusual and I must have made some remark to another class member that he overheard.
When we had returned to the classroom, I was summoned to the front. This was so unusual, I had a real sense of foreboding. "I won't stand for insolence" he said, rather wearily, "bend over." He pushed my head forward until I was bent right over the side of his desk in front of the whole class. I heard a drawer open and, looking awkwardly from one eye since my face was pressed against the desk, he produced what seemed to me to be an enormous gym shoe - more the size of something a clown might wear. But there was nothing funny to follow. There was a pause, and then the sound of a short run and I was hit with a force I had never experienced in my life before. The pain took a second to register, but I felt my whole body jerk as though from an electric shock. My head was pushed down and the sound of the short run recurred and then another almighty shock wave right through me. I couldn't believe that this could possibly happen again, but it did, a third excruciating blow. "Next time it'll be six" he said. I straightened and had to walk back to my desk with the eyes of the whole class fixed upon me while I desperately tried to prevent the tears that threatened to shame me even more.
From that moment on, the school became simply a place of fear for me. I dreaded having to get up in the morning knowing where I was going. I often cried myself to sleep at night, feeling like a baby for doing so, but being unable to control my feelings. I had been able to adapt to life on the council estate and to deal with the threats from the likes of Georgie Burton (see earlier posts), but this school seemed so arbitrary, so unpredictable in its punishments and threats that I was powerless to find any means of dealing with it. I, of course, had no choice but to continue as best I could with this new, and profoundly unwelcome, phase of my life. And there were some brighter moments, particularly my brief, and unlikely, career as a minor entrepreneur in the 'adult' entertainment business. But more of that next post.