Friday, November 9, 2018

Composting in the Era of Trump

9th November 2018

It was my birthday the day after the election, and I figured I had won a pretty nice present in the Democrats taking back the House of Representatives, so I was planning a day of smug relaxation. History had other plans, because Donald Trump started another snowball rolling that day by firing his Attorney General Jeff Sessions who was standing in the way of him controlling the scope of the Special Council's investigation into collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. As it turned out, my birthday celebrations gave way to the slow background roll of a Saturday Night massacre. Even over a dinner of sumptuous liver in my favourite French restaurant, I was checking in with the news to see whose head would be next on the chopping block. History was being made, and I couldn't pull myself away.


Mark Twain famously quipped that while history doesn't repeat itself, it very often rhymes. Another historian yesterday announced that the Tump scandal is ten times worse than the Nixon one. Here you have a sleazy actor not only trying to eliminate his tracks, but actually conspiring with a hostile foreign government in a coup against America. And now we have a president in a panic, shooting from the hip, backing off into the bar and hiding behind the piano.

American politics at very best is a crazy arena.  Once it opened the door to big money, how could it go any other route than down the sinkhole of corruption? The antics of American politics goes largely unchecked, hence we have gerrymandering in plain sight, and voter surpression, two of the strategies that the Republican party has come to depend upon. Their aging voters cannot any more deliver victory for this backward-looking, nay backward in and of itself, political agenda.


Young people in America, like young people in Scotland, and actually all over the world, who have education and a web-wide global community at their fingertips, will not support the politics of old white guys. Their day is done, and in the future, not even their corrupt tactics will be able to hold off the tidal wave of progression (I don't say progressives on purpose because even they themselves can exhibit prejudice and blinkered optics.)
The wave that is coming will change our world, and it is neither blue nor red, but simply fresh. I have hope that the young will turn the world around, and when they do, these players we have to suffer through now will be rotting on the garbage heap of history. The Mitch McConnells and the Donald Trumps and the Lindsay Grahams and the Paul Ryans are going to create such a stink, but in the long run, some pretty impressive fertiliser.

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