Trumping versus Tramping

America has finally eclipsed Hitler’s appointment as German Chancellor in 1933 by electing an even more toxic leader 83 years later—such is the treachery of democracy—someone even more open about their reactionary and despotic intentions than was the Führer at the time of his election. So much for the march of civilisation, which has now finally gone into reverse. 

In voting to express their frustration and dissatisfaction with the complete failure of the capitalist project, as represented by successive dynasties of corrupt U.S. politicians, business moguls and bankers, what have those folks angry at being denied the American dream decide to replace it with—an even uglier face of capitalism and selfish greed, this time combined with a pathological hatred of anyone who is not ‘white’, Christian, and heterosexual. And as for the latter, certainly in Trump's case, after 100 years of women's struggle to be treated equally to men, a return to the worse kind of open misogyny.

My response to the events of November 8th 2016 is triggered by my last post, the story of a middle aged, white woman who, in the late 1960’s tramped and hitchhiked alone from Britain, through France and Spain to Morocco, onwards through Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, then by boat to Turkey and onwards again to Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Tibet. Kathleen Phelan had tramped for over 30 years, inspired by her personal philosophy that the thrill of life on the road, with only the clothes and few possessions she stood up in, was preferable to a life in the West—straightjacketed by conventional society’s obsession with acquiring money and material possessions—as a means to survive in an increasingly selfish and oppressive world.

Kathleen Phelan took little from the world but gave much. The profession listed on her passport was 'vagabond and storyteller', and she performed for her supper as much as eight hours a day. Kathleen followed an honourable tradition of vagabond philosophers going all the way back to Diogenes the Cynic whose ‘performances’ in Greek cities, such as walking the streets in daylight with a lighted lamp (looking for an honest man), represented his own unique treatise on the bankrupt state of human civilisation in the 4th Century BC. How little really has the human project progressed in over 2000 years.

Reading Kathleen’s story, one is immediately struck by the grim reality that there would be no way a single woman, or even Western male, would be able to make such a trip today. Not just because of the rise of national and international conflicts, religious fundamentalism, and the diaspora of increasing numbers of displaced people, but the corresponding fear and intolerance of the ‘foreigner’ by Western nations as evidenced by Brexit and Trump’s election as US President. 

The idiocy of America’s newly expressed desire to ‘make our country great again’ (expressed by the Brexiteers also) by withdrawing into itself and closing its borders to ‘foreigners’ (particularly Latinos and Muslims), and accompanied by an increasing intolerance of non-white, non-Christian, non-heterosexuals, is that, with the exception of the displaced Native Americans, all Americans are foreigners. The country was built and inhabited by foreigners for christ sake, from every corner of the world, many escaping persecution from elsewhere, and latterly drawn there by the iconic Statue of Liberty and everything she represented in terms of freedom and tolerance of diversity.

And so in what sense do white Christians like Trump—increasingly the minority in America—claim that they have the moral imperative to mould the country into their obscene image? America is already close to a police state, in which its own citizens (mainly Afro-Americans) can be murdered by police officers with impunity. Imagine the scenario once Trump and his lunatic henchmen get their hands on the judiciary, the police and the armed forces. Oh yes, of course he encourages the civil protests currently taking place across America, so much so that when he has his hands firmly on the reigns of power, he will be able to declare a state of emergency, implement martial law, and finish the job he has been gagging to get on with—supported by large swathes of the baying, redneck mob who elected him. Americans must ask themselves exactly what does 'make America great again' actually mean to these white supremacists; a return to segregation, even slavery?

A footnote concerning tramping

It was Trump's new demonic lieutenant, Rudolph Giuliani, who in 1998, passed a law to fine pedestrians $50 for jaywalking and fenced off sidewalks in some of the busiest areas of New York City. But then America has been clamping down on the free movement of pedestrians for decades following an idiotic Los Angeles planning report in the 60's noting that 'The pedestrian remains the largest single obstacle to free traffic movement'—following which over 1,000 pedestrian crossings were removed in California. As Jim Christy puts it in his book, The New Refugees:

'In America the hitchhiker, the drifter, is not regarded as a seeker of freedom or knowledge, as an explorer of his land and the ways and doings of his fellows, but, rather as a breed of criminal, a jobless, shiftless no-count, out to rob and rape and worse. A man on the road meets all the narrow paranoia, the fear and ignorance of that "pettiness that plays so rough".'

The British EU Referendum: triumph of ignorance, prejudice and stupidity

I try and avoid political commentary but find myself temporarily departing from my tramping journals to pen some cynical reflections on the vote to leave Europe. What happened on the 23rd June, and might happen in the US if Donald Trump is elected president, is no more than a re-run of Hitler’s rise to power in Nazi Germany.

Certain British politicians, with the help of the media, have played a cruel trick on those British citizens who have already been systematically disenfranchised within their own society. Large swathes of the country have been ignored and forgotten in the mad scramble by bankers, speculators and a capitalist elite, mainly based in London, to consolidate their own wealth and power—aided and abetted by politicians who have slowly stripped away the benefits and opportunities on which a flourishing civilised society depends. But all this has back fired, and in the most spectacular way. So when I ridicule the baying human herd, I also understand the strategy of diverting ordinary people’s anger and frustration onto others, often more disadvantaged and vulnerable than themselves. I am prepared to believe that the majority of those who voted ‘leave’, and those who did not vote at all, were misguided and ill-informed rather than bigoted and malicious.

Be that as it may, the sights and sounds of xenophobic white British blockheads baying for ‘foreigners’ to be sent back to where they came from and cheering in the streets that they have got their country back, is not only a nauseating spectacle but a flawed aspiration. Their stupidity is that in voting to get their country back, they have triggered a break up of what is misleadingly referred to as Great Britain: recalls for Scottish independence and a united Ireland are now an inevitable consequence of yesterday’s result. The idea that in voting to quit Europe, Britain will return to some fantasy Bisto land of white mum’s in starched aprons roasting beef in the oven while dad is playing cricket on the village green, or the Victorian era where Britons were bringing back the spoils of their murderous plundering from around the globe, is a sad delusion. 

One of these sad characters recently interviewed on a city street barked, “Look around, how many British faces can you see?” Apart from the fact that Briton is now a multi-racial society, and so what does that absurd statement mean, let’s take the argument about sending ‘foreigners’ home to its logical conclusion. Surely such a move would have to be reciprocated. Are expatriate Britons to be returned in their tens of thousands from all the countries they have felt free to make their home—and not just from Europe, and how far back should we take this repatriation of foreigners? Should native Canadians insist that the millions of Britons who appropriated their country be returned home? Should native Australians, New Zealanders and South Africans do likewise? Don’t these people understand that the world moves on and, like it or not, we have no choice but to move on with it. Never mind the British Empire, any notion of Britain as a powerful independent entity, is a nonsense. Italy and Greece are where they are today in spite of Alexander’s conquests and the Roman Empire. And Germany’s recent aspiration to rule a Europe free of Jews, Roma, homosexuals, and the disabled was short lived indeed. So why do individual nations remain so arrogant about their ability to control their own destinies in isolation from the rest of the world? The world will move on without them.

This begs the question of how can British politics ever be the same after the 24th June 2016? What does Labour, Conservative, etc., any longer mean? It seems that in order to get out of the mess that politicians have made of Britain’s place in the world, never mind the welfare of its own citizens, new political parties, along different fault lines, will have to emerge. Whether any of them will have the courage to form a new political party and fight the next election on a mandate to take Britain back inside Europe, is another matter. After all, the bunch that took us out had no manifesto at all for how an independent Britain would move forward isolated from its European neighbours, just a promise to ‘take Britain back’—but back from what or whom?