It's Not About Him, It's About Her.

Voting FORward.

Just in case I’ve never bored you about it before, I spent (almost all of) the year 2016 backpacking the globe. My ex-wife Posie, myself, and our then 11-year-old son took in a dozen countries by train, plane, automobile, rickshaw, ferry, tuk-tuk, minivan, the occasional motorbike pillion, and very much by foot, and it was the most wondrous experience of my life. Even before we reached the end of the world, I did not want to come home.

One of the beauties of being away that year was that we didn’t – indeed we couldn’t - religiously follow current events, because we weren’t slavishly devoted to our phones and we only had one iPad between the three of us. Even David Bowie’s death in January, while we were still in Spain, came to us via the next day’s newspaper headlines. By the time the Brexit vote rolled around, we were in Thailand, and I felt genuinely out of touch, unsure of what it meant to my former homeland, the UK, and what I should read into it regarding the attitudes of voters in my current one, the USA.

He followed us around, like the proverbial bad penny. A headline on the back of the Times of India, March 13, 2016, Kolkata

…Because, for all that we were so glad to be away from the noise of the 2016 US Presidential Election, still it followed us around. Or rather, he followed us around, like the proverbial bad penny. The first time I was asked what his being elected would mean to the world was also in Spain, in January; I was trapped in a dentist’s chair, doing my best to reassure the German dentist – the EU, remember, one giant labor market – that it wasn’t going to happen. I doubted he was even going to get the Republican nomination; the moderates in the party – well, all things being relative, the moderates by Republican standards – would see to that. I was wrong.

I remember the question coming up again in George Town, Penang, Malaysia, in July. The 18^th Century Kapitan Keling Mosque there had opened its doors to non-Muslims, in conjunction with the George Town UNESCO World Heritage Day, and I was talking to the Iman whose son, Noel’s age, was showing us around. The Iman expressed great fears of what might happen to American Muslims should he get elected. “Can he really deport them all?” he asked. I assured him not to worry, he was not going to get elected. I was, of course, wrong on that too, and though he was not able to deport Muslims, he initiated a ban on them almost as soon as he got into office. He wasn’t fooling around.

Inside the Kapitan Keling Mosque in George Town, Penang, Malaysia, July 2016.

By the time we got to New Zealand in October, where we spent 40 days and nights living out of a beat-up old campervan that somehow didn’t die on us, it became harder to escape the US election. But still there was a sense of absolute certitude about the result. So much so that when my ex- and I, having successfully received our absentee ballots, went to mail them  back to the US,  I allowed my confidence to get the better of me. Knowing what people in NZ thought of him, I said something about who we were voting for, or that I was excited about a first female President, and maybe threw in a comment about how the kind of Americans you’d find traveling round New Zealand weren’t exactly going to vote otherwise.

“I don’t know,” replied the Postmistress. “I had an American woman in here the other day, she’s been traveling the country for months. She was voting for him. She said she didn’t trust Hillary as far as she could throw her.”

That was the first moment I had doubt about the outcome. We’d only met one proud Republican on our travels, in Borneo. He was a very cool guy, a semi-pro photographer, a seasoned scuba diver, and a committed traveler. You could have a conversation with him, even if he had worked, officially, in the offices of George W. Bush. In part that was because he’d made it clear early on in what turned out to be a series of evening conversations: “I won’t be voting for Trump.”

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And there is that name, the name I hate to utter because, now, as then, as always, until eternity, it sucks the oxygen out of the room, clamors for attention, imposes its oafish presence on conversations from Malaga to  Malaysia, from Semporna to New Zealand. It’s the name that more than half the US would prefer never needing to utter, ever again. Yet it’s the name that dominates our headlines, takes over the news cycles, obsesses the late-night comedians, provokes and enthralls the opinion writers. It’s the name that made the US a bad, largely unfunny joke, for four truly frightening years, and barely receded  to the shadows for even part of the last four; the prospect of that name once again occupying arguably the most important position in the world now fills the rest of that world with absolute dread. 

The tragedy of all this is that in 2016, people around the planet loved Americans. I had expected hostility, pretty much everywhere, and was prepared to fall back on my British citizenship if it helped (not that would be an advantage in, say India, let’s not kid ourselves about British colonial history), but it proved unnecessary. In the farthest reaches of the poorest countries we visited, I learned that if locals could say but two words from the international lexicon, one of them would be Messi; football is the global language.

And the other would be Obama, always uttered with a smile. And a raised thumb. Or whatever the local symbol for positivity may have been.

“American? Obama!” Smile.

Politicians are inherently imperfect, and Presidential politicians, by nature of the weight of their office, that much more so. Barack Obama made some mistakes. But I don’t know if people realize or remember, that Barack Obama was one of  the greatest Ambassadors the US ever had. Maybe the greatest. He sold a vision of the American people that gave the rest of the world – especially the rest of the world’s rising poor, those who have the good fortune to interact with travelers/tourists, even if their English is limited to just two or three international words of celebrity recognition – hope. (Does anyone remember Hope?) Barack Obama not only looked like someone the rest of the world – the non-white world - could identify with, but he was a superb orator, a people person, a decent human being with dignity. He had traveled the world extensively during his Presidency, enthralling crowds across all continents, doing his best to bring people together. He was everything that the USA should aspire towards. He was everything his successor was not.

…Because Barack Obama‘s successor turned out to be him, not her.

The message in my new neighborhood is loud and clear, with the occasional Trump flag or yard sign vastly outnumbered. Down-ballot votes are incredibly important in their own way.

So here we are eight full years later, and this time we take nothing for granted. And maybe that’s why I feel so exhausted by this election cycle, as I’m sure my fellow American readers do too, because so much of it seems to be a recurring nightmare, except that the familiarity of this sequel appears to have bred not so much a visceral contempt but an existential fatalism.

I admit, these last couple of weeks, up until the renewed urgency of the final few days, I have largely tuned out. And I am a politics junkie, you should know. (As many of you do.) I subscribe to newspapers and podcasts. Normally, I read, I listen, I debate with people who I feel I can debate with. I may not be actively engaged in front-line politics, but I make a massive point of being informed. Yet there comes a point, when you know who you’re voting for and you sense everyone else knows who they’re voting for – and yet, and yet, there are somehow still enough undecided voters in enough swing states that apparently this election remains up for grabs – that it feels like there is nothing more for me to read or to listen to.

Meantime, the media have their jobs to do, and so they continue to do it, themselves almost whiling away the time until they have to report on the voting – and the challenges to the voting – itself.

And though I am generally supportive of the Fourth Estate, not least because I have spent a  significant part of my working life inside of it, I blame this self-same media for him. I blamed them back in 2015-2016, and I am sure I can find you witnesses to the fact that my message was as consistent then as it continues to be. Giving him attention, if even just to laugh at him, is what he wants. It’s what he craves. Narcissist megalomaniacs don’t shy from criticism, they don’t flinch from caricature. Nor do such criticisms or caricatures cause them to self-reflect, let alone genuflect. They are incapable of learning, of pivoting, of changing, of improving.

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My UK-based band-mate Tony Page wrote a song insisting that politicians give him a reason to vote for them. When it came to recording the song for the Dear Boys, I wrote my own verse directed at him (not my band-mate, but him), though it also is intended to be universal. So while the song was released ahead of the UK election this year, I believe it has relevance here in the US too. Especially as we have a stark choice when it comes to our vote for President: between someone who genuinely cares, and someone who only cares about himself.

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Someone who is only in it for himself will not become a better person for you giving him more airtime or print space than his rivals; he will not go away because he is the easiest target in the world to poke fun at on late-night TV. He will simply continue to suck the oxygen out of your outlet and squeeze the legitimate candidates and their legitimate perspectives – earned perspectives, even if we disagree with them - off to the margins. He will suck that oxygen until there is none left and the only one left standing in the room is him. Some horrible sci-fi monster caricature of the human race, the last survivor. The Man Who Felt Nothing But Himself.

Yes, I recognize it is impossible to make this critique without perpetuating it, but that’s also why you haven’t seen me write previous essays or posts about him, let alone Facebook memes, nor respond to his many provocations or accusations, most of which only fuel the fire by our taking the bait (something he learned with the whole “Birtherism” that served both to prep his candidacy and put Obama on the defensive; morally irreprehensible, it was nonetheless politically brilliant). To me, it was obvious from 2015, when he got media coverage completely out of line with his Republican challengers for the nomination, and then in 2016 got media coverage out of proportion with his Democratic rival, that allowing him to dominate the news cycle had the effect of legitimizing his claim to the Presidency - regardless of the fact that he ultimately lost the popular vote by 3,000,000, regardless of how close it was at the electoral college.

This tee-shirt was designed as a positive response to my friend Chip Hamer’s poem “Ice Age,” written in response to the white-right race riots in the UK earlier this year. That key line is my mantra. You can read the whole poem here.

After the election of November 2016, the mainstream media, the same media that he called an enemy of the people then and “the enemy from within” now (a phrase perfectly familiar to the British under Thatcher) did some post-election navel-gazing. They admitted they had fucked up, albeit not in so many words, and yet, after a brief period of actually covering the news, continued right down their same merry old path of enablement – especially these last four years, four years  during which he should have been in jail for any number of crimes, only one of which has been adjudicated.

As a result, we are right where we were in 2016. Except this time, once bitten twice shy and all that, we know there’s a very good chance he could actually win again (regardless of the fact that he will lose the popular vote, regardless of how close it will be at the Electoral College, and this post is long enough already without me detouring into why the good intentions of that Electoral College are now horrendously outdated and non-democratic). And also, we know based on evidence that if he doesn’t win, he will still claim to have won, because he learned a long long time ago in his life, that a lie told often enough, a lie told with enough conviction, becomes a form of truth regardless.

Yes, I also recognize that ignoring a problem does not make it go away. You don’t cure your cancer by pretending it isn’t there. But nor do you feed your cancer with further carcinogens in the hope that somehow it will grow bored with being indulged and wander off contentedly, fully sated. You cure your cancer as best you can by fighting it, with all the science you have at hand, all the expertise you can draw on, all the willpower you have in your body. Laugh at it if it makes you feel better, but laughing at it alone will not make it go away. So to be clear, I do have a fundamental problem with the so-called comedians who claim to despise him but are clearly caught in a co-dependent relationship – people who I admire otherwise, the Jon Stewarts, Stephen Colberts, Seth Meyers, Colin Josts and Michael Ches of this world. If they still think the joke is on him, well I guess that I think that joke isn’t funny anymore.

(for those who can still bear the satire, I do recommend this incredibly well-edited audio msah-up below, from

Turn On The News

)

Turn On The News: Hitler Fan Re-enacts MSG Nazi Rally

Back in 2016, when it was all about him, I wanted it to be about her. Unlike many of my friends, unlike my older son, I was not a big Bernie booster. I didn’t want to see two old white guys going at each other, and I say that as a white guy who isn’t getting any younger. I was ready for a female President; I felt Hillary Clinton to be eminently qualified, and if she carried political baggage, well, so does anyone who comes to a national race with experience. Him? He had no political baggage, because not only had he never taken a political office, but he wasn’t (and still isn’t) a politician. He was merely a bullhorn, an amplification of all the worse tropes of the most entrenched of American traditionalists, a snake oil salesman determined to prove a maxim wrongly attributed to that carnival barker supreme, P.T. Barnum, by all accounts uttered first in a column by H. L. Mencken, that “No one in this world has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.”¹

But because she was a woman, Hillary was an easy target. She was held to double standards that he was able to slide away from. Long caught in the crosshairs of a right wing that perhaps always recognized her presidential ambitions, she had already been demeaned and deconstructed over a period of many years. People - otherwise good people - had been prepped to fear her, dislike her, even to despise her, for being the worst thing a woman could be: ambitious. Yes, a double standard. The result: somehow we got a narcissistic megalomaniac patriarchal sexist racist pseudo-Christian nationalist male in office instead. Can anyone say déjà vu all over again? Evidently so, because despite enough “buyer’s remorse” that another old white male, Joe Biden, comprehensively beat him at the ballot box in 2020, we once again find ourselves having to defend what we should instead be promoting.

We have before us a candidate for President, in Kamala Harris, who is fully qualified to hold that office. The child of immigrants, hard-working, educated parents, raised in the urban environment of San Francisco’s Bay Area, educated at a Montreal, Canada public high school (during the years her mother held a job in Montreal) and then at the esteemed HBCU Howard University in D.C., she is on the one hand the shining example of “the American dream.” And because she benefited so much from that dream, but also because of the urban environment in which she grew up, she sought from the beginning to become a lawyer, because “I saw the law as a tool that can help make things fair.”

After graduating law school, she chose to work as a public prosecutor, a role in which she would open every case with the self-identification, “Kamala Harris, for the people.” She worked her way up from Assistant District Attorney to District Attorney, from Attorney General (of the largest State in the country, California), to Senator, and then found herself in the second-most important position in the western world and yet one ironically without portfolio, Vice President. While some of her legal roles necessarily involved making decisions (or being a party to decisions) that some voters may not like, the most simple scan of her career biography clarifies that she did indeed act, at all times, as best she could, “for the people,” the often voiceless poor and discriminated against, the abused and defenseless, and in doing so, she was willing to take on the wealthy and the discriminatory, the abusers and the attackers, from the big banks to the drug traffickers. She started out as a lawyer, and she ended up a lawmaker. That’s a logical transition based on a life of service that merits a vote based purely on objective reasoning.

Then there is Kamala the person. She is everything he is not. A mother. A daughter. A loving and loyal spouse. A first-generation American. Brown. Black. A cook. A family person. A jazz aficionado, a gospel fanatic, a soul woman. Compassionate. Caring. And capable of smiling and laughing naturally, because underneath all these qualities is a decency that could, yet, bring us back to the Obama years when, imperfect as the world may be, at least that world believed that the American vision was continuing to move in the right direction.

I remain grateful to whoever put this book out at our neighborhood Little Free Library, before Biden stepped down. I have learned much from it.

I have hated living in the USA at times. Guns, health care, those heartless Republicans who seek to concentrate ever more wealth in the hands of ever fewer individuals, all those things have caused me over the years to think about other options. And I do aspire to live somewhere else at some point in my life. But still, for the most part – the years 2017-20 being an exception, though even they had their good personal times - I have loved living in a country that is multi-cultural, where gay marriage is legal, where we are increasingly tolerant of our children’s gender issues and their sexual preferences. I am proud of this country’s cultural history when it comes to the music, the art, the literature. And I especially love the Hudson Valley, where I have lived for almost decades now, with its mountains and lakes and river, its farms and its breweries, its restaurants and bars, its rail trails and running tracks, its thriving music and arts scene. I like additionally that most people are polite most of the time, and especially that New Yorkers are open and honest, and willing to engage.

Besides, I am a parent; I have two children born in New York City itself, and though they are both now semi-officially out of the house, I am reminded constantly that one never stops being a parent. For now, I am still needed here.

And as a citizen, I will not be chased out by demons. I have a voice. I have a vote. I will be using it. As a white European male who has spent a life time enjoying the privileges that come with it, I am more than ready for a non-white, non-male, non-European to occupy the White House. Especially when they are the more qualified candidate. Especially when they offer me Hope.  

Like so many of you, I am holding my breath, but I am not holding my nose. I believe in the positivity of progress. I am optimistic about moving forwards. I am voting for Kamala Harris.

Shepard Fairey, who designed the famous Barack Obama image shown higher up, recently contributed this to the public domain. With thanks.

1. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2020/03/01/underestimate/