Trump and Jesus? Do Me A Fucking Favour!

Only a day after I write my first blog in months I find myself back on the computer writing a second. What reason could there be for this hasty return? The reason is a video that was retweeted by someone on my Twitter feed which reported on US President, Donald Trump, receiving several senior Evangelical Christians at an event in his honour. At this event, it was reported, Trump was presented with a Bible "to commemorate his greatness". The video I saw and subsequently retweeted along with my disbelief was inter cut with some of the statements of those Trump was receiving. As you might expect, these were a mish mash of homophobia, Islamophobia and even some passive antisemitism.  The whole thing, to my eyes was a total mess. In fact, it vindicates the fact that on my Twitter feed I actually have the word "Trump" filtered out. I do not what my existence daily sullied with a knowledge of his. However, thanks to a new tablet I was recently in receipt of, Trump is not filtered out if I check Twitter on there and so this abomination confronted me.

"Well what's the problem?" you might now be thinking. The problem, the thing that has annoyed me all morning, is that anyone might think to associate Trump with Jesus, the nominal founder of Christianity (he wasn't, but that's another story), in the first place. Even if we step away from an historical appreciation of Jesus and simply approach the question at the level of acknowledged Christian texts then Trump is the last person to be associated with such things. Let's look at some evidence:

"You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart." (Matthew 5:27-28)

"As he was setting out on a journey, a man ran up and knelt before him, and asked him, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone. You know the commandments:  You shall not murder; You shall not commit adultery; You shall not steal; You shall not bear false witness; You shall not defraud; Honour your father and mother.’” He said to him, “Teacher, I have kept all these since my youth.” Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said, “You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.” When he heard this, he was shocked and went away grieving, for he had many possessions." (Mark 10: 17-22)

"Blessed are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of God." (Luke 6:20b)

"I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another." (John 13:34)

There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. (Galatians 3:28)

Tell me, are these the kind of sentiments, found in the four Christian gospels of the New Testament and the writings of Paul, those we might associate with Donald Trump? Is Trump, factually a serial adulterer with every wife he's ever had, factually a very rich man who builds huge towers he then puts his name on in capital letters, factually a despiser and disregarder of the poor, factually a man who does not love others but demonises them and incarcerates their children, factually a man who preys on differences between people and uses them to stir up enmity between people,  someone we should even rhetorically dare to associate with Jesus in any way? Is he remotely a Christian person by any Christian textual definition of this term, even as we find in the New Testament? To me, it simply beggars belief.  In the text of John's gospel before the words I have quoted above Jesus, thought of most highly by the text of John as a pre-existing son of God, is to be found washing the feet of his disciples and teaching that even the greater should humble himself to perform service for the lesser. Could we imagine Trump performing such a deed or even performing a selfless act for someone else at all?

To be honest, the whole scene sickens me. Its not just about Trump, of course. The Evangelicals reflect nothing of Jesus of Nazareth either. What does it say about people who use the memory of a person to build kingdoms for themselves and cultural empires over which they rule oh and, by the way, please keep on sending in those dollars? Who, reading the text of the gospels, or even of the New Testament, could get from this the notion that what Jesus really wants is for you to become as rich as possible and to pontificate to people in general about issues most of which Jesus himself never even reportedly had a single word to say? (For, of course, not a single word of the New Testament was actually written by Jesus.) Who, reading the New Testament, thinks that what we need to do is not help hurricane victims in Puerto Rico, imprison children, fan the flames of white supremacist hate and utilise the presidency of the United States for their own personal enrichment and aggrandisement? I can tell you without fear of contradiction that it is not people who have taken the canonical texts of that religion seriously. It is, however, people with at least two faces.

So, by all means, be the vile, self-serving, hate-filled, despicable and disingenuous people that you are. But not in the name of Jesus. Not even in the name of those who claim to be his followers (of which i am not one). Your lives and the lack of morals by which you guide them are nothing to do with the man from Galilee. They are your own artificial creations, a travesty of anything the Galilean stood for. On your own heads be it. You are responsible not him.

Disturbia

It seems to be based on what is left of a bombed out building as you can see what is left of some of the floors of what was once, I guess, a tower block. Now, destroyed, a Syrian artist by the name of Tammam Azzam has, with the addition of some other bits of rubble, turned it into a forlorn version of the Statue of Liberty. A statue of liberty in war torn Aleppo, Syria. Who knows what liberty there is there as people use weaponry against each other fighting for... well, I'm not sure what they are fighting for. Power? Land? Resources? Ideology? Does anyone actually know?

                                           Tammam Azzam's Statue of Liberty

Meanwhile, in Calais, France, a migrant (or refugee) camp known locally as "The Jungle" is about to be broken up and got rid of by French authorities who have tolerated its existence for well over a year now. Many in this camp are from Syria. Others are from Afghanistan or other places. They want to get to the UK. Who knows why? Maybe they have family or friends there. Maybe the UK's historical influence in their homelands makes it a natural magnet for those seeking escape from their own private hells. I would be surprised if many of them realized the country they were coming to though. It is a place lately marked out by hatred, division, rhetoric and ugliness. I admit, though, that it has not yet turned into Aleppo although, as I emerged from my sleep last night into a waking state once again, I had a half awake, half asleep dream in which people showing compassion for foreigners were sentenced to death and shot. 

You might find this idea a bit extreme. But I think its a logical conclusion from some of the thinking I am seeing now openly spoken, thinking which, in more restrained times, was whispered amongst like minds or spoken of only under rocks. Lately, though, those with such views have become emboldened. They have found leaders who at least wear the veneer of respectability even if it doesn't go very far down. In the UK, Nigel Farage became the voice of several million closet racists with his advertisements which were barely disguised Nazi propaganda. His task was to blame everyone's problems on Johnny Foreigner and he seems to have surprised even himself that he did it. Before the Brexit result was announced he was already conceding defeat. But he won. There were more old folks with a fond remembrance of empire and younger people with nothing being rounded up by the vitriol of tabloids owned by billionaires than he had realized. Farage is a key player if you're American too. Donald Trump sees Brexit as the model for his own, very similar uprising and hosted Farage at one of his rallies. "The victory of the ordinary guy over the elites" they see it as.

Of course, its not this. Its the victory of hate over hope. Its the victory of division over unity. Its the victory of self over community. Its the victory of a few self-interested people over everybody else. Nigel Farage and Donald Trump don't care about the people who support them. They care about themselves. They care about living in the world they want in their heads. Everybody else, well, they are just those that can be used to hinder that ideal or bring it about. What Farage and Trump have shown, along with a compliant media especially in the UK where newspapers still hold some influence, is that hate for someone who doesn't look like you can indeed be nurtured and grown. A number of tabloids here in the UK have been consistently and often virulently anti-foreigner, anti-refugee, for years. Those chickens were always going to come home to roost. And they have. We see today in the UK white supremacist groups, defence leagues for Englishness (whatever that is) and an increasing number of incidents against people of other races and nationalities. This isn't coincidence. Its the pay off for the investment the hatemongers have made. This stuff doesn't exist in a vacuum. Nor does it just disappear.

Now in America, a land riven with racial angst and hatreds as far as I can tell from across the water, this is coming home to roost too. Trump has himself been sowing hate and discord during his campaign. He suggests the elites control everything and that they will rig things to fix the election. He says he might not accept the result unless he wins. He says there are more murders now than ever (a lie he continues to repeat). He demonizes non-Americans as reprobates looking for a free ride. Now Trump is characterized by many as a habitual liar with no concern for the truth at all. The message is what matters. For he knows that some already want to believe the things he says. So if he just repeats lies over and over again the effect of this will be to engrain these things in people's minds. Many of his supporters now see the press as the PR wing of the elites they've been taught to despise. They chant "Lügenpresse" at the press corp, a chant that Hitler used against the German press in the 1930's. He boldly boasts in private of sexual assaults yet when women come forward to say he indeed sexually assaulted them he claims that everyone is a liar. Even though he has himself admitted he sexually assaults people. His supporters shrug it off, unable to link his own words to the accusations of others. Trump seems to threaten to sue someone else 10 times every day. It is a mentality in which Trump is always right and everyone else, especially the elites and foreigners, is out to get him. Trust no one but him is his campaign message. Yes, you should trust a habitual liar who is clearly one of the most irresponsible and self-serving people alive today.

The way these demagogues have risen to such dizzy heights is similar. Both have played off the powerful, who, of course, they are not in this rhetoric, against the little guy, the ordinary person with nothing. That is, the ordinary WHITE person with nothing. In the UK we might call this the working class. In America it seems slightly different in that it is the hard pressed blue collar guy who is the backbone of this body of resentment. In each case, however, these respective men sought to radicalize these naturally quiet people who, in normal times, would just struggle along with their daily lives with a grumble. What Farage, Trump and their media partners such as Rupert Murdoch have done, however, is play on the fears of people like this and tell them that everything they think is true. Other people are getting stuff for free. Other people are getting an easy ride. Other people want to kill you. Other people are making monkeys out of you. The rhetoric is constant and quite deliberate. But these people are being played. Would Trump, Farage or even Murdoch, given a chance, actually make the lives of these people better? No way. Its not even genuinely in their minds to do it. These people are entirely negative in their motivations, driven by what they are against as opposed to what they are for. And I genuinely believe these people are racist at their core. 

Sometimes the supporters of these people and the positions they espouse speak more clearly and sensibly than they do. After all, Trump and Farage must at least pretend to appeal to more moderate people. Farage cannot say he wants a white England. But some of those who support his views do. This week in the English press I've read quite genuine comments from people who want a white monoculture in the UK and who think compassion for refugees is "Anti-British". People talk of those wanting compassion for the refugees as "traitors" and as "treacherous". Some bright spark actually started a petition to make talk of wanting to stay in the EU or rejoin it again a matter of treason. Another, an MP, wanted refugees teeth pulled out and tested to determine if someone was under 18 and thus a child worthy of help as opposed to an adult not worthy of it. "The foreigner" has become a very contested notion in the UK. In America it is even more scary due to the gun laws there. I have read accounts of people who intend to intimidate people of other creeds and colors and it seems many are convinced that people of certain colors or who speak certain languages are out to kill them en masse, terrorists in waiting. Such is the rhetoric, for example, regarding "Islam". The situation in the USA is also more febrile because there is already a historic background of racial injustice deeply woven into the fabric of the country's history. The American Civil War may have sealed the fate of slavery but one hundred years later social justice causes were still being fought for and needing to be won by those like Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King. Even 150 years after this war there is still need for campaigns such as Black Lives Matter and American police departments continue to gun down black individuals at a rate much higher than those of other ethnic groupings.

I have come to refer to this age we are now living in as "Disturbia". The world of my experience, white, English-speaking, does not seem safe anymore. The dissonance, anger and hate cannot be blocked out or ignored anymore. It is horrible to live in. It is deeply ugly and being made deliberately so by charlatans who want nothing more than their 15 minutes in the bright lights. These men are morons who just want to poke the wasp's nest with a big stick and say "Look at me!" They do not have the wit or intelligence to see what permanent damage they are doing or how their stupidity will change things for the worse for many years to come. They are men who have not recognized, as most sane observers have, that the post World War 2 prosperity that many have shared in was due to shared aims and common goals across nations. Trump, Farage, even Murdoch, are not internationalists. They are small-minded nationalists. They buy in totally to the Ayn Randian notion that for me to prosper and survive then you must not. For there can be only one winner, right? Look at how Trump avoids his civic responsibility by avoiding federal taxes and then laughs in his supporters' faces and suggests it just means he's smart. What if everyone decided to be "smart" like Donald? You see, its always the have nots or the can nots that will pay the price for this kind of self-seeking "smartness". The irresponsible will always be happy for the responsible to pay. And then call them dumb for doing it. By their actions they willfully seek to create disconnected people and disrupt both bonds of compassion between us and any ideas which encourage togetherness. In its place they create a white tribe of disaffection as if its somehow us who have been exploited.

I cannot foresee how any of this plays out. But I don't think it can be good. I live in a country now where a compassionate comment said in good faith about those with nothing leads to many days of press coverage calling for the speaker to be sacked from his job. (Google "Gary Lineker".) I live in a country where the compassionate tears of a singer (Lily Allen) for children living in squalor are mocked and vilified. I live in a country where if you are under 18 we might grudgingly help you but if you are so much as a minute older we will denounce you as a lying scrounger seeking to deceive and defraud us. I live in a world where people are denominated by nation and this label then determines whether they are worthy of help or not. (Although if you're not white you might need to go to the back of the queue.) I live in a world where "looking a bit foreign" is enough to regard you as a danger to me and as completely other. It didn't get to this by accident. Its been done on purpose. Its every bit as insidious and deliberate as was the agenda of the Nazis less than 100 years ago. Indeed, its telling that the overt Nazis and racists, so emboldened of late, openly support the Trumps and Farages of this world. I don't know about you but if it were me being supported by such people I'd want to take a look in the mirror and think again. 

Now I am a white man. I cannot help this for, like everyone, I was born what I was. Some may say that this shields me from the real horror of our current situation in the world. But I am not blind and, unlike many people of all colors, I do not simply accept the agendas I am handed. Neither should you either. I fear for those who are not white in the world that is before us. As the power and influence of the Trumps and Farages rises it changes things for the worse for those who are not white and for any who speak up for them who are. And it doesn't even matter if they win. Brexit has passed here in the UK and the future is uncertain. We have deliberately been goaded into an act of self-harm. In the USA, even if Trump loses, as is now increasingly predicted, the hate he has sown will remain. The lies he has sown will continue to bear fruit. And its not as if Obama himself was that concerned about droning random foreigners anyway. All this hate and division will play out in a thousand acts of unknown ugly consequence reported by victims and their families sporadically as the price is paid. The uglification of the world by small-minded people who cannot think past their own grievances will continue. And my problem is I cannot see how you stop it. "Where good people do nothing there evil will flourish" is how the saying goes. But as I think about this and survey the scene it seems to me as if it is a never-ending war. Victories are won for fairness, equality and justice but the war rumbles on anyway. You come to the conclusion that its perpetual war. 

So then you turn and you ask yourself whether what matters is not who wins but what you stood for. There are reasons to suggest this matters, not least that you can look yourself in a mirror. But is it enough? Anyone can only make a difference in the here and now, that is for sure. A worldwide peaceful co-existence has not yet been known on our planet and what reason do we think exists that there will ever be one whilst there are people in the world who actively define their success as someone else's failure? I guess those who fight social justice causes must have a reason why they do and maybe this is simply as simple as not wanting to accept the station others in life would give them, to live a life not dictated by others.

"People are people so why should it be you and I should get along so awfully?" sang Depeche Mode.

What's the answer?

Politics and Morality

During a very recent discussion it came to light that there are allegations of sexual misconduct against Gandhi, the man who brought freedom from the British Empire to India and set it on a path of democracy. I admit that these allegations were news to me and I was directed, during my conversation, to a webpage that detailed the allegations. Now I don't know the truth of the allegations, what the evidence is for them, who the accusers are or anything like that. But for my purposes here today none of this really matters. My subject is to be the intersection of politics and morality which might raise a belly laugh in some as they ask what morality has to do with politics. Our politicians all seem to have feet of clay, overactive dicks and lots of friends happy to look the other way, you will probably say to me. If they are not abusers themselves then they are people who know things but say and do nothing. They are "enablers" in the parlance of our times. And its certainly not restricted to Gandhi. Martin Luther King was at least accused (some would say smeared) of sexual misconduct. In Britain numerous past and present political figures are mired in variously disgusting sexual accusations. Most famously, the two current presidential nominees, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, are completely mired in sexual allegations. Trump boasts that he can just grab any woman he wants "by the pussy" and, what's more, they will let him because he's famous whereas Clinton, it has been alleged, has actively covered for her husband Bill's many indiscretions and even taken action against those he's accused of being involved with to shut them up.

Now, hearing all this, some people despair. I understand that reaction. There are those who think we need standards, moral standards, and that these things should not be voluntary and left to the whims of individuals. For these people standards are not things you abandon when it suits you. Morals, for such people, are not things you forget when its the person who is on your political side that's being accused. Take Trump, for example. There has been widespread condemnation of his recently released tape where he boasts of forcing himself on women and his fame meaning they won't stop him. And yet tens of millions of Americans and many high profile Republicans still support him. They either deflect criticism by saying "But look what Bill did!" or they try to dismiss it as just "locker room talk". Neither of these excuses works though. Trump also has active court cases in progress against him alleging sexual assault and worse and has, or had, friends who are now convicted pedophiles. Can we be sure it is "just talk" in his case? Trump is a man who has a history of sexual misconduct accusations against him and his "locker room talk" does nothing to discourage outsiders or casual observers from believing them. But my point here is this: what if it were Obama who had been caught on tape? What if Obama was accused in court documents of sexual assault and even rape? The same people who sit on their hands or defend Trump now would be demanding impeachment and incarceration! Their morality is not absolute: it shifts with the circumstances.

For some people this is wrong: morality should be absolute. But is it ever? Really? Is it really so beyond your experience that you might give a little leeway to someone you know or support, leeway you might not give to someone else? I submit to you that you recognize this possibility and may even have done it yourself. Of course, you may argue that rape and a casual attitude to sexual assault are so serious that we cannot allow personal preferences to come into play. Whilst in no way wanting to excuse either crime here (and they are both CRIMES) I would say its easy to pronounce from the outside. But its altogether more difficult when you might be the one with consequences. Some of you might read this as me trying to excuse or explain away sex crimes. I'm not. I'm saying the stakes are very different when it is you in the firing line and that morality, like it or not, is changed by the relationships between those involved. I'm saying that if your husband, wife, son, daughter, mother, father, were accused of such things you wouldn't see it as you do when its some political hate figure you only know from the TV or the media. There has been recent criticism of so-called "situational" morality but I'm afraid that I have to blog here today about why I cannot but see that morality is exactly that.

Morals are a personal choice inasmuch as we can say that anything is a choice at all. You and I, we would like to think, both get to decide what is right and wrong, acceptable and unacceptable. This encompasses both a set of general beliefs about these things but also an ability to triangulate cases on the fly as the general principles are applied to specific cases. It is integral to this understanding that you and I need not agree on these rights and wrongs either in general or in any specific case. It can be said that we would even value this ability to think differently and come to differing points of view. This is because if I am forced to agree with you, or you with me, then morals and values are not volitional anymore, they are not free. And we hold it as possibly in the highest esteem that we must all be free to come to our own conclusions without coercion. This, of course, risks the possibility that I may hold a set of moral values I judge much higher than yours. It also risks the possibility that I may choose to hold values much lower than yours or even have very few values at all. But, it seems, we judge the freedom to choose as more important than the consequences of the freedom of choice we esteem so highly. This freedom allows Donald Trump to think its in order to grab women by the pussy and it allows many other politicians throughout history to justify a litany of sexual misdemeanors. It also allows their supporters and opponents to take sides accordingly.

Now I am certain that I make moral choices every day, and have values that, if you knew about them, you would think less of me. In the political sphere this is obviously true as well because we have case after case, year after year, where people resign or are forced out of various offices due to the public perception of their choices. (This is to ignore those who try to "tough it out" regardless.) But what can we do about it? I've already pointed out that we hold freedom of choice in the highest esteem. Can we, somehow, make people more moral? Can we, as was recently suggested to me, expect more from people in public office? I don't honestly see why. People in office are just people. They are prey to the same temptations and vices as anyone, potentially, could be. They are members of the same moral or immoral societies as we are. "But I am not a person who wants to commit sexual assault" you may, correctly, reply to me. I accept that and it is not my argument here that we could all be horrible people if we really wanted to. What I am saying is that our standards don't bind anyone else. Our choices are not mandatory for others. We could impose absolutes on public office. We could say no one with any allegation against them could be eligible. We could suggest that only candidates who are whiter than white could stand. But could we say that every candidate's thoughts, beliefs and values must pass some quality threshold? Could we hold their morality to account? And, if we could, what then has happened to that freedom of choice we formerly held in such high esteem? We may want to stop Donald Trump from actually grabbing women by the pussy but do we also want to stop him thinking, in his private thoughts, that he thinks its ok? Do we want to start living in the world of Minority Report?

In action, morality is basically a belief or a value we can justify with reasons. Its nothing more than this. When speaking about a moral choice or a value all we do is say why the choice was a good or bad one or the value is a value worth having, what makes it important. This is all rhetorical. Some would want to argue that morals and values can be absolute. I'm not one of those people. For me, this is just rhetoric too. I am not a moral absolutist for I can find no way to ground morals in anything other than people's views about them or their consequences. Morality for me is always a matter of consequences, of perceived goods and bads and of the reasons given for seeing things in certain ways. So, to give a concrete example, I cannot say that grabbing a woman by the pussy is an absolute bad. I do not believe in absolutes. But I can give a reason why grabbing a certain woman's pussy might be bad, and, I think, it would be hard to imagine a case in which it wasn't bad. The important thing here is that I can give reasons for my choices. Morality is a matter of choices that can be justified even if that is only to yourself. (It will often, if not usually, be to some social grouping, however.) In politics this is much more public. You routinely have to justify your choices and values publicly for your electorate will want to know if they share your views or not. And its because of this that I cannot see how there can be any higher standard for the practitioners of politics, the politicians. Let me explain. 

I wrote earlier in the year on my blog about "the shit sandwich conundrum". Basically this is when you have two political choices and they are both, well, shit. Trump and Clinton are, in my estimation, such a choice. Both are equally shitty without redeeming features. Both, in addition, are immoral figures as I judge them. Both are venal, mendacious and self-serving amongst a litany of other "sins". Should we have some kind of morality test for these people? I say no. Let them be whoever they want to be, holding whatever filthy, degrading and disgusting values they choose. But let them be exposed to the voting public so that these views not be hidden away only to be revealed in secret. Let us really know who these people are. Let us know they lie and cheat. Let us know they cover things up. Let us know they regard women as things to fuck and discard or embarrassments to be covered up. My argument is that you cannot impose a moral test upon politicians but you can submit them to other people's morals. And it may be that this is what they fear most. Of course, only in a world where people stopped caring at all, stopped having morals, would this test not work. But then, I suggest we'd all have a much bigger problem than Trump's out of control libido or Clinton's desire for corruption. Indeed, it may be argued that this is the case right now. The problem is not that Trump is a "mutt", as Robert de Niro so eloquently put it, or that Clinton wants to turn the world into a corrupt, corporate hell, its that our world itself is a self-serving, immoral chaos of unjustified beliefs, base urges and gut feelings.

When talking about both politics and morality it is as well to remember that there is no perfect answer or universally acclaimed choice. We should also remember that one person's justice is another's injustice. At any one time there will be people free others say should not be free and those pronounced guilty who others swear are innocent. This is all to re-emphasize, yet again, that this is all rhetorical, a matter of reasons and persuasion. We should be consistent in our judgments, people say. But this is only true until we reach a point where making an exception seems to be supported with better reasons than the consistency we formerly found holding the best of the arguments. If morality is about reasons and reasons are a matter of persuasion then there can be no absolute value, only the most persuasive one supported by the best reasons and providing the most sought after consequences. In that context the most I think we can ask for is exposure, light shone upon our public representatives. We cannot invade their minds and bend them to our will. Whose will would that be anyway? Mine? Yours? But we can force them to be as open as possible. Then, if the public choose a pervert or a sex pest, at least we will know. Democracy means a free public choice not the tyranny of the public.

And, of course, there has been an elephant in the room of this discussion all along: POWER. But that is a blog for another day...

A Mentality I Just Don't Understand

I've been agitated recently and in more ways than one. You may have noticed this if you follow my tweets which often give a clue as to what is currently animating me. But now it seems to me like several different thoughts actually turn out to be related. 

First of all, being from the UK, there is the current debate over if the UK should leave the EU or not. Like a number of notable cultural commentators on this (random picks: writer Irvine Welsh and comedian Frankie Boyle) I take the view that this is not necessary about those in charge of both the EU or the UK. These people are clearly equally as bad and equally as unpalatable. This is like asking yourself if you want a bad person from another country in charge or a bad person from your own country. Of course, you'd rather have a good person. But good people don't seem to go into politics and they certainly don't rise to the top. Yes, I'm a cynic but with good reason to be cynical.

I have steered clear of the public farago around this event with its stage-managed addresses and bullshit arguments. We have the spectre of leading government politicians, who are routinely impoverishing people and taking sides with the "haves" as opposed to the "have nots", people who think nothing of claiming thousands on their own expense accounts but will snatch a few pounds from the disabled that they need to survive in something that can barely be described as comfort, suddenly saying they are on your side and that the "elites" (a useful bogey term for whoever the bad guys are meant to be this week) are on the other side. You don't want to be siding with the elites now do you? By the way, these now apparent men of the people were all very well and privately educated and are all millionaires. But, hey, they still care about the little guy, they say. Sweet.

As many people have observed, the EU debate in the UK has been a lot of shouting about increasingly ridiculous and unsupportable claims and very little facts or genuine information. I doubt you could find 10 good British people who could even explain what is at stake. The OUT people don't seem to have any clue as to what they would do if and when they were out. They just know they don't want some foreigner making the decisions. The IN people don't necessarily even believe we should be in but they think they might be richer if we were. Compromises abound.

Yesterday, like many in Europe, I woke up to the news of Muhammad Ali's death. Ali was a star when I was but a boy. I was only born at the end of the 1960s and, until yesterday, was blissfully unaware that at the time I was being born Ali was actually banned from boxing altogether because he had refused to be drafted in the Vietnam War. I learned about this only yesterday as I delved into his life story and found out that Ali wasn't just a prodigious boxer with a knack for amusing witticisms but a man with beliefs who was prepared to act upon them to his own personal cost. The best years of his career taken from him by his refusal to be drafted, he spent time making speeches and became a civil rights figure. I saw many gushing tributes to Ali yesterday but not many of them pointed out that Ali was three things that some of these gushing tributers don't normally seem to be too fond of. Because let's tell it straight: Ali was BLACK. Ali was a MUSLIM. Ali was against war. As a number of black and Muslim tributes to Ali pointed out yesterday, don't let them sell you anything else.

Now the question is should we forgive someone like presidential nominee, Donald Trump, when he tweets about how Ali was a great champion and a great man? This is the same Trump who, a year before this tweet, had called out President Obama for talking about great Muslim sports stars. He seemingly thought there were none. Trump has had a lot to say about Muslims in the last year and most of it can be summed up as "Go away!" Is Trump aware that Ali was a proud Muslim, one who, so I read, regarded Islam as a faith of peace? What does Trump think about that? What do all these anti-Islam people in America who think Muhammad Ali (an arab name) was "a great man" think about that? What do they think about the Ali who said he refused to fight the Vietcong because they had never called him nigger (implicitly, unlike the many white men he regarded the war as being fought for)? What do the muslim haters and the black haters think about the Ali who refused to be defined by other people and who seemingly ignore the fact he was proudly black and proudly Muslim? I saw one Fox Sports reporter yesterday who actually tried to completely gloss over the fact that Ali was these things. But how can you do that when Ali himself did not? It seems to me that if whitewashing is anything then this is exactly what it is. Ali was not some generic human being. He, like everyone else, was a set of very specific things. And you can't ignore or brush over those things without attempting to erase or deny them. These are POLITICAL moves. I don't know if Ali ever spoke about the Black Lives Matter campaign but even a brief study of his life shows that he certainly believed it and he was far from ignorant or uninvolved in racial and religious matters. So if you discriminate against blacks and think Muslims are heathen killers trying to destroy your way of life do you get to call Muhammad Ali a "great man"? 

There are other things I could talk about here but I don't what this blog to get too long or complicated. Save it to say that it all seems to come back to something that I tried to compose as a tweet a day or two ago. This is to do with the mentality of some people that I just don't get. There seems to be an idea abroad with some people that the only people you have common cause with are what we might term "people like you". This can be defined in many ways and its not always obvious. Feminists have this mentality just as much as do rabid racists, for example. In the UK's EU debate we see this attitude manifested in that some people genuinely seem to think that only people who were born on the same piece of land as you are, in this sense, "like you". We shouldn't be ruled over by people from over there because we are from over here. Is it only me that finds this kind of thinking completely absurd? Does everything come down to a factor which, let's face it, none of us could ever have influenced anyway? No one decides where they get born but on this basis it is decided that my interests and Jean's from France or Jörg's from Germany or Michal's from Poland are different? This is baloney.

Those who think this way seem to have a very warped sense of reality for as I look out I can see very many people just like me in a political sense even whilst being different socially and culturally. But all too many people get these things mixed up. Yes, people from different places have different cultural traditions and different social understandings. But politically they might have exactly the same needs and politically they might be very much the same as each other. In fact, the differences politically may be more between themselves and the elites above them than between each other. Lines on a map do not stop people have common interests or aligned needs. Far from it. They don't even need to be from Europe. All the nasty foreigners (as some would see it) who are grabbing on to anything that floats and trying to reach our Promised Land have political needs the same as the rest of us who, through no fault of our own, were already born here. They need stability and security so that they can have a means to survive. Should anyone begrudge them trying to achieve it? The ultimate answer may not be that everyone lives in the same space. Indeed, it certainly won't be. But while the lights are on and fires burn to cook food in one place do not look down on those who have none of these things and head towards those who do. It was through no credit of our's who have that we are where we are. No god decided to bless us and curse the suspicious foreigner.

And so for this and other reasons I find the "pull up the drawbridge" mentality confusing. It all comes back to this "people like us" mentality and this is always the heart of most political issues. Our identity is focused too narrowly whether what we care about is the rights of women, a particular race, an ethnic grouping, a religious body or anything else. The focus always seems to be on the differences and not the similarities. These differences divide and determine who is to be heard and privileged and who is to be ignored and who deserves nothing.

So allow me to be radical enough to say that this is all bullshit. Its the differences that kill us, start wars, empower enmity and generally add to the shitty pile of miseries that we have to endure in life. Like the American philosopher, Richard Rorty, I see human betterment as a matter of every human being, not a few. I see the direction of human travel to be in forever WIDENING the category "people like us" so that whoever is in trouble or has a problem is a matter for us, so that everyone ends up being "like us". I see that if one person is in trouble then that is a problem for all of us. I say that no one should go to bed perfectly peaceful while anyone else cannot. I say that my good is bound up with everyone else's good. And theirs is with mine. I say imagine what it would be like if everyone actually believed this. I say that human beings need to get beyond tribalism, need to get beyond thinking that the good of me or those like me is at the expense of the them or those like them. So, sorry Mr Trump, the future is not in walls to keep all the good stuff for ourselves and to keep out the filthy foreigners. The truth is that building worthwhile lives everywhere for people so that lines on a map become irrelevant, so that life in not a lottery of where you were born or who you know, is what we should do. And, sorry UK people who want to leave the EU, the future is not in thinking that where your birth certificate says you were born says anything genuinely important about you or your politics. We are all citizens of the world. We are all cast adrift on the same planetary lifeboat.

So, sorry, I don't understand the mentality that says differences count and similarities, the most profound similarities of all, we are all human, don't matter. I say what are you thinking if you think this? I say that life does not have to be cast as a battle or a competition for resources. I say think differently, change your mind, wake up. I say that the fact we are different is one of the things that makes us who we are but it is NOT a reason to draw lines. I say that we can be different within an understanding that recognizes we are all basically the same. I say that we need to stop being lazy and simplistic.

Is anybody listening?

PS Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek, is a useful guide here. In Star Trek the world has no countries and, incidentally, no money. Both innovations would solve a lot of Earth's current problems and be for our common good, common meaning everyone and not just the next privileged group. If we are to advance, Roddenberry seems to sense, we must end the tribalism and come together as one. People in many walks of life need to hear this message and take it to their hearts.