A Ramble Relating to American Presidents and Lenin

Lately there has been a mixture between early autumn and summer. The leaves are still green, fall seems far off, and there is a lovely multitude of apricots, red and white and black currants, gooseberries, watermelons, and other summer fruit in the shops. But there have also been many cloudy days and rainy days, so that the summer only seems half-developed.

Yesterday evening I watched the hour-long lecture that ex-President Obama held in South Africa for the 100th anniversary of Nelson Mandela's birth. It is always strange to step from the hurly-burly of the Trump administration to Obama's (more) inward-looking worldview aimed at being thoughtful, informed or at least curious, and dignified. I suppose that one man is a mature human being, with some feeling of responsibility, while the other is a gigantic, badly-raised child.

While I don't think that all of Obama's insights are trenchant or critical enough, there was food for thought in the speech. It was also strange to see what he says and how he thinks if he doesn't need to suit his ideas and words to an American audience. Even his style changed — he used his speech in part to entertain the audience and not just as a platform to persuade his listeners or to reel off his statements. Instead of the conformity to what seems like mainstream thought, there was originality there, some half-formed thoughts that were the beginnings of ideas and not just summaries of ideas that were shaped to be acceptable. And, of course, although I have never been as awed by his speeches as many others have, I felt the same thing that I did when I heard him in person in Berlin in 2008: he does make his speeches seem as if they went by too quickly.

Of course the speech was startlingly different from the press conference that the current American President held with the Russian President in Helsinki. It reminded me of the verse that Maria Edgeworth quotes in her romance Patronage:

Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!
Whose heart hath ne'er within him burn'd,
As home his footsteps he hath turn'd,
From wandering on a foreign strand!
If such there breathe, go, mark him well;
For him no Minstrel raptures swell;
High though his titles, proud his name,
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim;
Despite those titles, power, and pelf,
The wretch, concentred all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And, doubly dying, shall go down
To the vile dust, from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonor'd, and unsung.

(From Sir Walter Scott's "Lay of the Last Minstrel," here.)

The morning after I watched Obama's speech, I read more of Tariq Ali's book The Dilemmas of Lenin. It was a funny juxtaposition. Both discuss the role of young people in improving society, and about the deep ills of economic inequality. Of course they come to different conclusions. While I admire the Lenin book for its intelligence and being properly steeped in the time it discusses, I think it smooths over a lot of rough edges. Ali presents rather awful people (not Lenin himself, only) as nature's gentlemen, who possess a few trifling quirks which one should politely ignore, while there is something intrinsically degenerate and rotten about the cruelties of the aristocracy. If I had been alive at the Russian leader's time, a little person observing the colossus, I think I'd learn more about Lenin if I were one of the people who were squashed under his boot than if I were one of the fellow wayfarers perched on his hat brim.

To return to the present, Machiavellian maneouvering in politics and diplomacy I find less distasteful than the gross sleaze that is presently fashionable. Misogyny that terrorizes and exploits women, psychologically pathological contempt of gay citizens, reactionary nationalistic fantasies, religion that has few noble or fine aspects, a brainless and heartless refusal to agree that refugees, asylum-seekers and migrants are men and brothers (or women and sisters, if you will), shabby treatment of the innocent and the criminal alike in jails and prisons by people who are greater criminals, anti-Semitism (which I'd naively thought was extinct in its most direct forms), toplofty criticisms of Islam by people who should really examine their own ideological flaws first, and lies that rely on the laziness and brainwashing of the propagandized rather than the skill of the propagandizers. To be fair, one cannot impute this all to one country. Large populations of these political diseases exist internationally, regardless of whether the bacterial strain sports the name of Farage, Orban, Duterte, Putin, what's-his-name of the AfD, or Trump. I know that political correctness and the intolerance of virtue-signalling liberals are supposed to be the great evils of this time — but perhaps one can stop inspecting this mote of self-righteousness in the eye of the other and begin examining the beam of sociopolitical despotism in one's own eye.