TOO BUSY DODGING BETWEEN THE FLAK [474]

I had only one reason to think that Donald Trump could be re-elected President of the United States, and that was the event of his attempted assassination in Pennsylvania in July 2024, when the imagery of someone getting back up, punching the air as they were led away, eclipsed everything he had said or done, or could say and do. We live in the age of the moving image.

I have no intention of writing about Donald Trump again after this article, because I have done it more than enough times for one lifetime. I could find myself writing about the consequences of his actions, because you don’t have to be in the United States to have it act upon you in some way. Trump will do what he does, like he did last time, we will all resist again, like we did last time, and when he leaves office, because he cannot run for President again – and realistically will be too old to run for a third time, even if he somehow changed the rules – the next President will overwrite his proclamations with new ones, just like last time.

Meanwhile, most Americans that did vote for Trump may consider that choice to be as transactional as any other interaction he has made, because they cannot have voted based on character to have re-elected as known a quantity as him. Fears over the future of classical liberalism and democracy will fade, because people can still think, choose and act for themselves, regardless of what the rules are – how else does Trump think he can behave as he does? The search for a Democratic answer to this victory will be found, but by a younger generation of people.

It has already been noticed that sales of dystopian fiction, like “The Handmaid’s Tale” and “Nineteen Eighty-Four”, have surged in the days following the election. However, I had already thought about the fictional megacorporations that would have benefitted from a Trump presidency, like Wayland Utani (“Alien”), the Tyrell Corporation (“Blade Runner”) and Omni Consumer Products (“Robocop”). Elon Musk, having slotted himself into a prospective governmental position has also, through his use and misuse of his own social media platform, also fulfils the role previously filled by newspaper press barons like Rupert Murdoch and William Randolph Hearst. 

What am I going to do? I will leave below what I have already said before, leave it at that, and be thankful that the only reason the United Kingdom is on its sixth Prime Minister in a decade is because, when they are no good, either as a political leader or as a person, they are either voted out, or kicked out.

This could apply in so many cases, but in the next four years or less, read thoroughly, have a sense of history, and don’t repeat your mistakes.

Back when Trump was first elected in 2016, I said that “the weight of [the Presidential] office demands respect. However, the holder of that office cannot afford to be given the benefit of the doubt, especially when Trump has never appeared to need it before.” (“Who Says a Miss Was Made to Kiss?”, 21/11/2016)

In 2018, I mistakenly consoled myself knowing that 2025 could have been the latest possible year Trump could remain President: “What I do know is that everything will find its centre, or equilibrium once more, even if it has to make a new one, as people take stock of where everything has reached.” (“You’ll Never Live It Down Unless You Whip It”, 28/05/2018)

When Joe Biden was elected in 2020, I said that scrutiny of Trump will continue to intensify: “Trusting only his decisions, there is no history to learn, no precedent to observe, no dignity worth honouring... Perhaps your experience of life is tainted when the only people that come close to you will eventually sell you out for profit, but when you define your life by the deals you make, you can’t reasonably expect fealty from anyone.” (“Spank The Pank Who Try To Drive You Nuts”, 08/11/2020)

Finally, after the 2021 attack on the Capitol building, I thought I never had to consider Trump again: “Donald Trump became the de facto 'Gatekeepers' bogeyman: a man whose choppy utterances and half-formed, half-stolen slogans enraptured millions, and radicalised thousands more. Words were often beyond him, left to those in his administration to make sound reasonable, but the longer the noise, the threats against the media, and the pronouncements on Twitter went on, the more it became the stifling daily rhythm to everyday life... He really was the worst of us.” (“All About the Love Again”, 24/01/2021)

AROUND THE WORLD, AROUND THE WORLD [365]

The Ford Escort was the biggest-selling car of the 1980s, a statement that applies both the United Kingdom and the United States.

 

Whether that statement applies to one car is another question. Created as a “world car” between Ford’s American and European divisions, ostensibly to share both expertise and production costs, the Escort on sale in North American showrooms from 1980 shared little more than its engine with its European counterpart, and its design is different enough to call the effort of sharing its development into question.

 

I had not heard of there being a separate Ford Escort until a couple of weeks ago, but looking at pictures of it brings a sort of an “Uncanny Valley” effect – the European version was so prevalent on British roads, seeing something that purports to be the same thing, while looking almost like it, but not quite, produces an unwarranted feeling of unease.

 

Reading the 1982 brochure for the North American Escort reveals the difference in approach with Ford of Europe: placing emphasis on its “world car” status, and on having outsold every imported car in the US in 1981, Ford introduced the Escort to replace both the Pinto, a “subcompact” coupé-looking car with a poor safety record, and the Fiesta, Ford’s first attempt at a “world car” that was too small for the United States (and which I have talked about here: link). Both the targets and the stakes were set high, but this situation was only found in North America, and its half of the plan must have inevitably diverged to meet them.

 

The European Version

Meanwhile, the focus of the European Escort was squarely on aerodynamics, fuel economy and simplicity of design, having launched in the UK with the slogan “Simple is Efficient”. Unlike Ford of America, which attached a globe logo to every Escort sold there in its first year, Ford of Europe make no mention of having developed the car with anyone else. The European Escort’s straight line design was by Uwe Bahlsen and Patrick Le Quément, following it with the futuristic, for the time, Ford Sierra (also discussed previously: link).

 

The North American Escort could serve to indicate the main differences between American and European cars in general. It has the same wheelbase as the European model, but is nine inches longer, two inches wider, and one inch shorter in height, with a more sloped nose, and chrome trimmings on even the base L model. Only a 1.6 litre engine was offered initially in America, the largest of the engines offered in Europe, and the interior was entirely redesigned, with black, fawn and blue colour combinations joined by an all-interior blood-like colour known as “Medium Red”. The “Squire Option” of faux wood panelling was available on the estate car.

 

Contributing to the design changes to the North American Escort may have been differing safety standards. Many European manufacturers in the 1970s seen their sleek designs essentially ruined through the process of “federalisation” to meet US safety regulations, often through the addition of thick black shock-absorbing bumpers to protect the headlights and engine in a 5 mph collission – Ford would do this with the Capri coupé when it was sold as the Mercury Capri in the US. This led British Leyland to redesign the MGB and MG Midget to suit, but because the US was their main market, it had to be done.

 

The Escort would become more of a “world car” through the 1980s, adding production at Brazil, Argentina and Venezuela to the factories in the UK, West Germany, Spain and the United States. However, the Escort produced in South America was the European version – the North American version was only sold in North America, and was only made there too. When Ford of America updated their Escort in 1990, it opted to rebrand the Ford Laser, a car sold mostly in Asia and Australasia, and based on the Mazda 323. Meanwhile, successive updates of the European Escort continued until the Focus began replacing it 1998, the Escort name disappearing in 2002... until it reappeared in 2015, on a redesigned Focus saloon car sold in China and the Middle East. Perhaps the name travels further than the car.

"Medium Red"

ALL ABOUT THE LOVE AGAIN [279]

A Donald Trump cake delivered to Trump Tower, New York,
ahead of 2016 election festivities.

When Joe Biden finally took over as the 46^thPresident of the United States, it was at 5pm GMT, meaning I listened to his speech on the way home from work. That evening, and through the following day, I felt very distracted, almost like I felt anxious about having much less to feel anxious about.

Hearing a politician sincerely recognise the problems besetting the nation they must now guide, promise to address them, and pledge to lead on behalf of all their people, and not just those that voted for them, reminds you these actions are meant to be fundamental to being a leader - it is just nice hearing from someone that actually wants to do the job.

I can now understand what Barack Obama meant about the “audacity of hope”: democracy standing defiant, and in splendid progress, despite the events of two weeks before, and of the previous four years.

The attempted coup on the US Capitol building was the Kmart Blue Light Special of insurrections. (For UK audiences, read as the Debenhams Blue Cross Sale – two dead department store chains for the price of one.) It was like there was a cheap 4K television in every room. People were so excited to be there, they made sure others knew they were, helping the CIA and FBI most efficiently. Most shocking was the level of entitlement, both to storm their own seat of government, and to base their indignation out of something conducted from nothing but unsupported prejudice.

I didn’t think Donald Trump had it in him to incite sedition and insurrection, but when his businesses have declared bankruptcy as often as they have - six, between 1991 and 2009 - perhaps it was worth a go. I sincerely thought that the election of Joe Biden, a man now declared President more often than Franklin D Roosevelt, would be the end of the matter, and Trump would slowly realise his game was lost, and he would allow us all to get on with our lives. But too many people were wreaking havoc in his name for his ego to back down. If a second impeachment trial in the US Senate doesn’t convict him, something else will – there must be a lesson for him to learn.

Often repeated are the lessons taught to Trump by his lawyer and mentor Roy Cohn, formerly chief counsel to Joseph McCarthy, of the witch trials, and defender of mob bosses: “Dominate in every interaction, never admit wrongdoing or defeat, never pay your bills, and sue anyone who objects to your behaviour into financial submission.” Cohn, who denied he had AIDS up to when he died of it – he said it was liver cancer – was given a square on the AIDS Memorial Quilt: “Bully. Coward. Victim.” 

Trump achieved all three before being exiled, a pariah from American life. Trump bullied so much on Twitter that it had to be taken away from him, the benefits for American democracy and discourse in the short-term everyone outweighing the later questions over free speech and the nature of social media – that Trump effectively disappeared until the end of his Presidential term confirms how much he relied on it. Meanwhile, the domestic terrorists now arrested for storming the Capitol wonder why their leader has deserted them, leaving other extremist politicians in the Republican party to continue a pyrrhic crusade against the truth, at the expense of their party’s unity. For anyone still interested in ever thinking of Trump as a “victim,” his niece Mary L Trump, the best-placed psychologist in history released, in May 2020, the timeliest book with the clearest title: “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man.”

With “Dancing with the Gatekeepers” having begun during the 2016 US Presidential race, Donald Trump became the de facto “Gatekeepers” bogeyman: a man whose choppy utterances and half-formed, half-stolen slogans enraptured millions, and radicalised thousands more. Words were often beyond him, left to those in his administration to make sound reasonable, but the longer the noise, the threats against the media, and the pronouncements on Twitter went on, the more it became the stifling daily rhythm to everyday life.

Fewer articles will be written, and fewer minutes on television will be aired, about Joe Biden’s presidency because it will simply be less eventful, and conducted more conventionally, than Trump’s presidency, which is entirely to be expected. Good – the time freed up to all of us, as consumers of media, can be put to greater use. Therefore, outside of any impending arrest, conviction and imprisonment, this will be the last time I feel the need to write about Donald John Trump. He really was the worst of us.

AND YOU MAY ASK YOURSELF [276]

Memphis “Big Sur” sofa by Peter Shire

Judging from what I have read, we already appear to know how the year 2021 will unfold. A new normal is coming, and when it is unlocked, we must be ready to make up for lost time, and to take up new opportunities. As we breathe out, politics and economics can settle, as the United States gains a president that wants to do the job, and the United Kingdom trades from outside the European single market for the first time since 1973. With these long-standing conundrums solved for now, and with shops back open, the indignant heat of social media may simmer down. Why make your own New Year’s resolutions when the whole world is changing?

This year could be the latest chapter of renaissance and progress. Especially after a year blighted by disease, it is natural to embrace this hope - it is the grand narrative we all share. But for someone that has written as much as I have about postmodernism – the broad artistic social and philosophical movement that, among a large number of things, is meant to be distrustful of grand narratives – why am I thinking about the coming year in this way?

Nothing says that someone who deals in scepticism and irony can’t also be an optimist. It pays to have all your discursive tools to hand, and have a full understanding of them, but giving yourself time off from work is also nice. You can try to live your life via philosophical concepts of criticism made to use in cultural and textual analysis – Roland Barthes’ “death of the author” concept is not intended to help you read a book written by someone whose views you don’t like, unless you plan to judge only the text, and nothing else.

However, I plan to spend some time looking further into the concepts of postmodernism, in something I will be calling “Postmodernism 2021.” I have been looking into this rabbit hole for close to twenty years, with time for breaks. There is something attractive to deconstructing ideas to find new connections, or to play with different ideas and smash them together, whether that is by looking at a skyscraper that was built to resemble a grandfather clock, new music that evokes nostalgia for the 1980s, or blending genres together in a science fiction novel.

As I understand it, we are largely supposed to have moved on from postmodernity into a sort of modernity powered by the internet. But when you have people like Jordan Peterson, talking about “postmodern neo-Marxists,” and the UK Government’s Minister of Equalities, Liz Truss, blaming postmodernist thought for dominating debates on equality, in a speech made in December 2020, it is clear that postmodernism, or at least the concepts that exist at one end of a movement that has influenced art, is still very vital.

The most egregious part of Truss’s speech, later removed from the Government’s online record of it, having been placed under the title “The Failed Ideas of the Left,” read: “These ideas have their roots in post-modernist philosophy — pioneered by [Michel] Foucault — that put societal power structures and labels ahead of individuals and their endeavours. In this school of thought, there is no space for evidence, as there is no objective view — truth and morality are all relative.” Foucault’s 1966 book “The Order to Things” looked at how truth is constructed, and how this has differed through history, but that does not mean the same as “nothing is true, everything is permitted.”

With May 2021 marking five years of Leigh Spence is Dancing with the Gatekeepers, I will use the time until then to take stock of what postmodernism means to me, what it means to how I see the world, and how a movement most relevant in the 1980s and 90s continues to be so today.

As I work out where to start, I shall provide links to when I first talked about postmodernism and postmodernity back in January 2017 [link], my first touch upon its being used to blame for “alternative facts” [link], a look at the key concept of nostalgia [link], the fact that poststructuralism means you can’t say what you like [link], my trying to explain the concept of hauntology [link], and my walk around Manchester’s Trafford Centre, a shopping mall engaged entirely in postmodern architecture [link].

I'M SO TIRED, MY MIND IS ON THE BLINK [275]

Autopsies of 2020 were complete long before the year’s end. Only war could have made it worse, then I remembered it began with the United States and Iran on the verge of open conflict, after a drone strike killed an Iranian general.

Meanwhile, Covid-19 has been detrimental to the extent the United Nations Development Programme, on Tuesday 15^th December, said it threatened human progress, publishing a report detailing how a global lurch from one crisis to the next could reverse gains in health, education and social freedoms. There is nowhere left for us to go but upwards.

The signs are good. The United States will soon have a President who favours diplomacy over disruption, and while on its way out of the European Union, the United Kingdom has somehow managed to make a deal with the union on trade that was achieved using negotiation and compromise – the protectionism, nationalism and sovereignty ingrained in politics in the last few years has made the announcement of the Brexit deal more of a surprise than it really should have been.

The lesson I learnt from 2020 is that the truth is bigger than you are. This has come from the overwhelming number of times that opinions have had to change in the world due to uncovered, emerging and overriding opinion. You cannot ignore coronavirus, you cannot dispel climate change, and you cannot decide that evidence for either doesn’t exist just because you don’t personally believe it, or that a conspiracy theory puts those facts in a more acceptable order. You cannot wish away disease and death. (I am doing my best not to mention Donald Trump, but after all the rubbish he talked about coronavirus, I was just waiting for him  to contract it himself, and he did.)

In an already notorious speech given by Liz Truss, Minister for Women and Equalities on Thursday 17^th December, she mischaracterised postmodernist philosophy as having led, in the 1980s, to Leeds City Council prioritising equality legislation in schools over learning to read and write: “These ideas have their roots in post-modernist philosophy – pioneered by [Michel] Foucault – that put societal power structures and labels ahead of individuals and their endeavours. In this school of thought, there is no space for evidence, as there is no objective view – truth and morality are all relative.”

Did Liz Truss intend to take what sounded like the truth, and present it as fact?

I describe myself is a postmodernist, because ideas about “grand narratives,” deconstruction and relativism prove useful in my processes for understanding the world, especially when it comes to writing about different subjects, but I don’t get out of bed in the morning because I feel like it. If I don’t do it, I won’t achieve anything, and I know this to be objectively true, even if saying this makes it sound like I had given something so obvious even a moment’s thought. My understanding of coronavirus has been shaped by the Government’s representation of scientific evidence, and I have taken their word on it because the information provided – the evidence - has proven to be reliable enough to prevent death. I have objectively chosen to live. No-one chooses to live on edge either.

I am tired of 2020 as you are. See you in 2021.

SPANK THE PANK WHO TRY TO DRIVE YOU NUTS [268]

Joe Biden has been elected President of the United States of America, and the world can breathe again. The extraordinary scenes of a country biding its time for five days, agonising as it awaits the outcome of an exercise in both democracy and due process, won’t be seen again for decades. The American people won’t allow their national character to be decided by ballot ever again, and has elected a President that has regard both for himself and the people. With Biden having won both the popular vote and the Electoral College, the victory is that bit sweeter, and that bit more legitimate.

This is a victory for all those made to feel unwelcome in their own country by their leader: the black people brutalised by their police, the immigrants demonised for their otherness, the LGBT people nearly legislated out of existence, and the women objectified and abused by the people that think they are there for the taking. Kamala Harris is, symbolically and in reality, a more qualified Vice President than the moralising ignorance of Mike Pence, let alone a President that flouted and ridiculed his own administration’s advice on coronavirus, only to get it himself.

The vote counters in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, North Carolina, Nevada and Alaska deserve applause for their days of hard work in the light of the largest turnout in over a century, and the increased absentee ballots due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

I once helped count the votes in a UK general election, for the Gosport constituency in 2005, which chose my Member of Parliament. I remember being told that you don’t have to answer the poll observers’ questions, as they stood over you, trying to tally who voted for their side, because your job is to make sure the count is done correctly – we recounted some batches of ballots if any inconsistency was found. Six hours later, and with over forty-three thousand votes counted, we could go home. If I’ve lost sleep just watching the US elections this time around, I couldn’t imagine having to wake up to go back to the convention centre to continue counting, but it just underscores how important the whole exercise of democracy is to be treated.

Joe Biden conducted himself the best following election day, guiding the tone for the country as it waited for the time when the result becomes final, and when he could legitimately claim to be the winner. I don’t know too much about Biden, apart from his serving as Barack Obama’s vice president, and for making occasional gaffes that reveal the regular guy under the politician exterior, but he proved himself as Vice President, and actually appears be human, which is enough. Living in the United Kingdom is no excuse for not following the US General Election results, especially when your country’s post-Brexit future may depend in part on what the winner is prepared to accept or offer, but I am assured that Joe Biden will consider what is best for everyone before making a deal with the UK, not only what is best for him personally.

Elsewhere Donald Trump, a man that makes gold look cheap, while looking and sounding like a drag queen version of his younger self, sequestered himself in the White House to feed from the conspiracy theories concocted about the count, attempting to convert them to fact by writing them out on Twitter, breaking their terms of service one more time. Perhaps his repeated claims of “fraud,” that Biden “stole” the election, votes being counted “illegally,” and the media deciding the election ahead of time, is all the nuance he can muster. With Twitter having decided to remove his “newsworthy individual” privileges the moment he stops being President, expect Trump's malicious and indiscriminate account to disappear very quickly, as he faces the world without Presidential immunity.

In November 2016 [link], I said that the holder of the office of President “cannot afford to be given the benefit of the doubt, especially when Trump has never appeared to need it before. He will be given the opportunity to govern in the way he sees fit, but he will be under constant scrutiny, for every single decision, for every public utterance, for the rest of his life.”

For Donald John Trump, that scrutiny will only intensify. What I had not expected is how half-arsed a leader he turned out to be. “Let’s Make America Great Again” was Ronald Reagan’s campaign slogan in 1980, and later used in speeches by Bill Clinton in 1992, so it doesn’t take much imagination for the real estate heir, taking advantage of Reaganomics and tax breaks, to copy the words, remove the inclusivity of “let’s,” and make it into a catch-all dog whistle. Trusting only his decisions, there is no history to learn, no precedent to observe, no dignity worth honouring.

Meanwhile, the politicians and White House staff that aided and abetted him have been a revolving door of “Dick Tracy” villains that either ended up in jail or wrote a memoir. Perhaps your experience of life is tainted when the only people that come close to you will eventually sell you out for profit, but when you define your life by the deals you make, you can’t reasonably expect fealty from anyone.

Posted to the telephone cabinet at the end of my street in 2018... in the UK...

What I am most wary about, despite Biden’s victory, is that over seventy million Americans still voted for Trump. This has already been indicated as meaning that neither Trump, or Trumpism, is going away, and that his political conduct over the previous four years has effectively been endorsed - his associates, acolytes, or even his family, may try to replicate the same disregard for America’s institutions and rules, with the expectation of a similar level of success. Talk of the United States being as divided as during the Civil War may subside, but it may leave a new Confederacy-style grievance in place, if Trump's die-hard followers try to turn "America First" and "Make America Great Again" into a new "lost cause." The next four years will be difficult, but Joe Biden already knew that.

Between now and 20^th January 2021, Trump and his staff will most likely continue to obfuscate the election results, spread disinformation, and use all the tricks they can to pull off the win that exists in his head. But there is a word for that, a Middle English word derived from the Old French “tromper” (“deceive”), and meaning either attractive articles of little value or use, or something that is showy or worthless: “trumpery.”

The news cycle will not quiet down yet, but it’s nice to know it could. But for now, Joe Biden won, and a lot of people are saying the big stupid low-energy bully Donald Trump (never met him) is a loser, and a nasty, terrible person, the likes of which you’ve never seen before - everybody’s talking about it, that’s just what I had heard, a lot of people tell me. It’s very sad - he just took no responsibility at all.

...and in 2020.

SINCE THE WORLD’S BEEN TURNING [214]

With so many end-of-year and end-of-decade lists scattered around, I decided to draw a line under the 2010s by recounting a couple of things that happened to me in 2019 that could not have been contemplated in 2010, and what that means for me in 2020.

The thought of starting a video version of “Leigh Spence is Dancing with the Gatekeepers” had not entered my mind even at the start of 2019 but, starting with equipment I was using for other things, namely my iPhone, iPad, and a £10 tripod, I ended the year having already made seven videos – expect more of these in 2020, because bringing my words to life appears to be working out very well. Making semi-professional video as easy as possible to create was the iPad - introduced in 2010, was by no means the first tablet, but it was the one that eliminated the desktop PC from many homes. Using your fingers on a screen to correct colour levels in videos, when you have overlaid a picture of yourself onto a photograph via a green screen, now appears to be any old day of the week.

I also did not expect to end 2019 being blocked on Twitter by comedy writer Graham Linehan, he of “Father Ted,” “Black Books” and “The IT Crowd,” because he, presumably, did not like a joke. Linehan has achieved notoriety for being outspoken, mostly on Twitter, against transgender rights, particularly if it is seen to infringe on women’s rights. Far from a civilised, adult conversation, discourse on the subject a bunfight of labels, from “TERF” to “gender critical,” from “beard” to “trans natal male,” technical terms to alienate the other side, limiting both the scope and understanding of the conversation, rejecting identity politics while also embracing use of the labels created during the “culture war.”

On 23^rd September 2019, when I saw that Linehan had decided to take a “Twitter holiday,” but carried on sending out messages, I turned a news story into a pointed joke: “Did Thomas Cook arrange your Twitter holiday or something?” The holiday company had collapsed that morning, and their management should remain ashamed of that. About three or four minutes later, my sole interaction with Graham Linehan led to him blocking me from ever doing so in future, his crusade carrying on in its enclosed bubble, or some other metaphor. The joke wasn’t even that good.

In the 2010s, online discourse became, to use a word employed across the British Commonwealth, knackered. The blame has been laid at the feet of postmodernism, but rejecting old narratives is not the same as believing whatever you like. Meanwhile, the immediacy of social media, once used to save cancelled TV shows, is now being used to “cancel” people deemed unfavourable like they were TV shows. Social media platforms have a responsibility to step in when the effect of offence outdoes the ability to ignore – I stopped looking at Donald Trump’s Twitter page because he became repetitive, but I await the day he becomes bored enough himself to stop tweeting.

I would expect a few more articles about politics from me in 2020, as the United Kingdom begins exiting the European Union, and as the United States has another Presidential Election, the current incumbent having started campaigning for it as soon as he won the first time. The 2020s may not truly start until those events are dealt with, leaving us with a clearer road ahead.

In the meantime, I have a lunchtime metaphor: at a café based where I work, I went in for a “Brexit” sandwich and a Coca-Cola. What I ordered turned out to be tomato relish with three different types of cheese, served in a fish and chip shop wrapping. I then found out I had enough money for the sandwich, but not the drink. I will review this not-even-a-joke in 2021, to see if I dropped the sandwich on the floor on the way out – in real life, I got what I paid for, and it made me feel ill.

LET ME KNOW WHAT SPRING IS LIKE [188]

At a time when society and politics has never felt more tied to the ground, the pride and nostalgia engendered in us all by the Apollo 11 Moon landings fifty years ago was, for me, swiftly replaced with nostalgia for the world into which we thought we would step, but never really did. We are haunted by our past visions of the future we thought would come. (I have also covered “hauntology” here: link)

I am talking about everything from missions to Mars to meals in pill form, from lunar outposts to “The Jetsons.” The Space Age started in the 1950s, and appeared to be declared over when the last of NASA’s space shuttles were decommissioned in 2011, eight years after the last commercial flight on Concorde – regardless of the ticket cost, it is hard to accept that flying from London to New York in under three hours is something no longer possible. Meanwhile, space travel itself is becoming a private enterprise, under people like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, but I don’t see someone like Arthur C. Clarke, the science fiction writer that posited the idea of geostationary satellites, in their midst.

It is sobering to think that what launched humanity into space was imagination, rocket fuel and slide rules. The world was already transistorised by 1969, but the microchip had yet to open homes - the electronic pocket calculator was still a year away. Irrespective of that, and armed with rocket fuel and slide rules, humanity reached, well, Peak Humanity – it is difficult to top that sort of achievement without looking at what remains undone at home, as concerns over the state of the Earth became more important. It is hard to advocate a “Space Force” if you deny climate change at the same time.

Nationalism could also play no part, even in the space race with the Soviet Union, it was imagination that drove the United States to the Moon. In the May 1961 joint session of Congress where President John F. Kennedy stated the goal to land a man on the moon and return them safely, he said, “Space is open to us now; and our eagerness to share its meaning is not governed by the efforts of others. We go into space because whatever mankind must undertake, free men must fully share.”

I have only one recurring dream, and it’s a big one. In it, I have been invited to fly to the edge of the atmosphere, if not into space – one day, I may have the chance to fly Virgin Galactic. As the craft reaches the highest point in its journey, I look out of a window, and witness the curvature of the earth. I experience deep emotion, mixed with not a little megalophobia. My whole life flashes before my eyes, because the location of all that has ever happened to me is now within view. I close my eyes for the descent. I am quiet for the next few days, but when I eventually say something, it is to ask why we spend so much time looking down at our feet.

This dream makes far more sense that the one where someone keeps stealing my coat hangers, or when a giant spider clasps onto me as I say, “honestly, this just keeps happening.” These unconscious thoughts may even preclude me from being “the right stuff” for space travel, as if I was the only person who dreamed of going up there. However, as Kennedy had intended, we had to make preparations for the next big steps we wish to take as a race. As much as some don’t think that will be regarding climate change, it will be, but will a return to the space age be next? Perhaps, when we find a way of saying that humanity hasn’t yet peaked.

AND BUTTERFLIES ARE FREE TO FLY [132]

...aaand time’s up. At noon today (Monday 22^nd October), the UK Government’s consultation on reform to the 2004 Gender Recognition Act ended – it was meant to end at 11pm the previous Friday, but a last-minute minute flurry of responses crashed the online portal – it had been open since 3^rdJuly. I answered its questions two weeks ago, later than I really should have, but with the discourse, or argument, over transgender rights having become what they have over the last year in the UK, I would be doing a disservice to myself not to say something.

The proposed reform to the Act will update the process by which transgender people can apply for a Gender Recognition Certificate, so their correct gender can be recognised in law. I don’t have any irons in that part of the fire anymore – in fact, this week will mark one year since I received my certificate. The first thing I did with it was to update work, then obtain an updated birth certificate – the system for this is run, oddly enough, by the UK Passport Office.

The Government wants to make applying for a Gender Recognition Certificate a self-declaration process, already in place in the Republic of Ireland, Malta, Norway, Denmark, Belgium and Portugal – the Irish application form is four pages long, not unlike applying for a passport. The current British form, meanwhile, has sixteen pages, and has a twenty-four-page guide on how to fill it in. When you send it away, you must also send two medical reports - one from a gender specialist confirming a diagnosis of gender dysphoria, and another from your GP – a statutory declaration, signed by a solicitor, confirming I will continue living in my gender, and at least five types of document that prove you have been living in your gender for at least two years. I ended up sending practically everything I had, to avoid any doubt. The cost of making the application is £140 – once you add in the costs of acquiring medical reports, photocopying, special delivery for all your valuable documents, and finally getting your updated birth certificate, I spent nearly £200.

There has to be a better way. In my reply to the consultation, I said that all you needed was to supply the evidence that you were living in your correct gender, and that the two-year timeframe could be too inflexible. As it turns out, all that is needed in Ireland is the statutory declaration, which is pages 3 and 4 of their form. In both cases, there is a statement of intent: you won’t be doing this more than once. The hoops I had to jump through, under the “old” system, meant that I, and the approximately five thousand other transgender people that had to jump through those hoops since 2005, earned their right to feel happy in themselves, and would rather not have had to jump so many times.

I have heard too many arguments recently that trans self-identification will mean that men can use it to access women’s spaces inappropriately, as if the Gender Recognition Act, and the Equality Act, didn’t already make provisions for situations like this. The consultation asked many questions on whether I think there is a potential impact on everything from women’s refuges, the armed forces and public services, to sport, insurance and religious marriage. I found myself saying that these provisions can stay as they are, because they all require any issues to be dealt with by communication, and consideration, by adults. Someone can be questioned for unfairly providing access to a service, as much as unfairly denying access, whether that is to a transgender person or not. However, I did say that religious marriage cannot be stopped if it is found that one person in the couple has a Gender Recognition Certificate – I only found out that was a thing when I read the question.

The consultation has been taken by some as a referendum on transgender people, as if everything is to play for. Advertisements stating “Woman: Noun, Adult Human Female” have been taken down because of why they were placed, and not because of what they said. As a transgender woman, I could be accused of being a man infiltrating womanhood, of redefining what it is to be a woman, of reducing being a woman to being a feeling, of confirming the dominance of the patriarchy. Even worse, I could be told I am mentally ill, that I don’t know what I am, that people like me don’t really exist. All I can possibly know, in my experience, is this: when I realised what I was all along, why did my life become so much easier to understand?

The consultation is over, and the law-making must begin. I am not going anywhere.

[Update: “The New York Times” is reporting that the Trump is trying to redefine gender as being defined by genitalia at birth, stripping transgender people of the rights they have under the law. Firstly, that won’t happen – too many Americans will have too much to lose, and too many Americans are good people to allow it to happen. Secondly, what is the point of the word “sex” if you are planning to do that?]

NOW THE FISH JUMPED OFF THE HOOK [123]

The following should have been what caused me to think, for once and for all, “that’s enough.” The use of capitals confirms both who wrote it, and where it was posted:

“There is nothing that I would want more for our Country than true FREEDOM OF THE PRESS. The fact is that the Press is FREE to write and say anything it wants, but much of what it says is FAKE NEWS, pushing a political agenda or just plain trying to hurt people. HONESTY WINS!”

Under the same lack of awareness, the same person later spent time moaning about how the platform he was using discriminated against right-wing voices, saying it cannot be allowed to happen: “Who is making the choices, because I can already tell you that too many mistakes are being made. Let everybody participate, good & bad, and we will all just have to figure it out!” I think he said this because there have been already many calls for him to be kicked off the platform.

Recent news from the United States often consists of news surrounding its President, which just caused his lawyer, Rudolph Giuliani to blurt out that “truth isn’t truth,” in a ham-fisted attempt to make the idea of truth into a subjective, “he said, she said” thing; the usual backlashes to things said on Twitter and Facebook; the cavalcade of far-right people, alt-right people, racists, incels and so on; arguments over political correctness and free speech...

...and then there was the mayonnaise. In the magazine “Philadelphia,” an article published under the title “The White Stuff” was given a clickbait makeover: “How Millennials Killed Mayonnaise.” In it, a mother bemoans how her mother’s salad recipes are not eaten by her children anymore, and once globalisation is mentioned, along with salsa and kimchi, things went haywire: “It’s too basic for contemporary tastes — pale and insipid and not nearly exotic enough for our era of globalization. Good ol’ mayo has become the Taylor Swift of condiments.” I prefer salad cream, and that is the end of it.

The furore over mayonnaise, even more than what Donald Trump was saying that day, was what drove me over the edge: can we just put the United States on “mute” for a bit, just as I probably should be doing with its President? For a country whose issues are currently in a feedback loop, and whose technology, especially through social media, facilitates and relies on the continuation of that feedback loop, wouldn’t it be easier to leave them to sort themselves out elsewhere? Rather than the onus being on me to reduce my own access to information to avoid being overwhelmed, shouldn’t the system that does the overwhelming try dealing with itself in its own time?

The reason the answer is “no” is because I am from the UK, where our own feedback loop, Brexit, has caused its own set of problems, even if it feels more like a localised dispute than anything that ever comes out of the United States. When our information systems depend on the American-created internet, and American technology companies the size of countries, any issue from any other company could be rendered a localised dispute.

However, the UK has a Commonwealth, while the United States currently has “America First” – countries as people, versus countries as land, and dialogue versus boundaries-then-dialogue. Engaging with an opponent is easier than waiting for it to tire itself out, especially when it has its own feedback loop. I would rather have that hope when I see the words “fake news” in capitals on Twitter again.

YOU'LL NEVER LIVE IT DOWN UNLESS YOU WHIP IT [111]

When you can no longer tell yourself that all will be OK in the end, and how it can’t possibly get any worse, you confide in the relentless march of time: it must be over soon.

The twenty-second amendment of the United States Constitution means that Monday 20^th January 2025 is the latest possible date that Donald Trump must vacate the office of President, even if he ends up serving two consecutive terms.

With the prospect of a Trump presidency lasting into my forties – hell, “The Simpsons” may still be producing new episodes by then – I need to plan for what lies ahead.

When the date of a meeting with North Korea was first announced, I refrained from writing about a post-Trump world because I was prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt, even if I previously said that was something he never needed before [link]. However, after the commemorative coins were minted, Trump cancelled the meeting, then said it was back on, then said “we’ll see,” then attacked “The New York Times” for the umpteen thousandth time, I feel safe that the level of chaos Trump has created around himself is enough to imagine I may, one day, be able to look past it.

I do not expect public discourse, let alone politics, to return to how it was, because people have been emboldened by what Trump has said, either in opposition or in agreement to them. It is all the news has become: racial hatred, sexual assault, cultural wars, identity politics, immigration, democratic processes, the due process of the law, and “alternative facts” – everything is conjecture, everything is debatable, and we all have to live with that, apparently.

What I do know is that everything will find its centre, or equilibrium once more, even if it has to make a new one, as people take stock of where everything has reached. All the rhetoric of “drain the swamp,” and “Make America Great Again” – originally Ronald Reagan’s slogan, without the inclusive “Let’s” – implies that the core of what the United States was has been lost, or destroyed, although you would only talk your own country down in the way Trump has if you were insistent that you were the only person who could fix it.

The only reason I can feel sure of this, apart from hope, is that this situation sounds a bit like what happened to the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, as people failed to grasp his concept of “deconstruction,” which he intended to be a continuing re-evaluation of Western values, as done by previous philosophers, and not a destruction of them, with the intent of making your own ones. Derrida had to explain that the notion of there being a “centre” was a functional one, as there had to be a centre that helped to form our understanding. Then again, when all you have is the text, the words, to hand, you have to see them in the sense of how they have been used. For Trump, this is all we have, no matter how badly it is presented, or spelled, on Twitter, in a form that relies on impulsivity, ahead of deliberation, time, and thought.

I hope it is clear that this isn’t a repudiation of the way politics is currently conducted in the United States, but of the way conduct is currently conducted. The lessons that the next President may take from Donald Trump may be to engage with their population in a similar way, or find different ways, but any American who may feel the same as me, a non-American, does not have a President that effectively represents them – we’ll just have to wait and see how long before that changes.

LIKE BREATHING OUT AND BREATHING IN [66]

UPDATE (26/10/2017): I received my Gender Recognition Certificate in the post, and the world became, for once, demonstrably better. The soundtrack to my celebration was “Land of Hope and Glory,” followed by “Look Back In Anger” by David Bowie, and the live version of his “Station to Station” title track, from the “Stage” album... and then "Sunrise" by Eric Carmen, for some reason.

*

There has been a lot about transgender rights in the news recently, especially in the last week – to those in the United States, still enraged by the President planning to remove thousands of trans people from the military, your President is Donald Trump, so what did you expect?

The one group you don’t hear, apart from left-wing pressure groups, right-wing pressure groups, and media commentators, and media commentators, are ACTUAL TRANSGENDER PEOPLE. I then remembered that I see a trans woman in the mirror every day, so here I am.

[You take five pictures, and the first one was the best.]

On Sunday 23^rd July, the UK Government announced two consultations. The first, ahead of the fiftieth anniversary of the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality – the age of consent wasn’t the same for everyone until January 2001 - is to ask the LGBT community’s experiences of discrimination, and on accessing and using public services. I completed this survey online - you get the feeling that these questions are being asked for the first time, especially those on discrimination.

The other survey would have been important to me, but I already decided not to wait for the answer. In the autumn, the Government will canvass opinions on whether applying for a Gender Recognition Certificate, to change your gender in law from female to male, or vice versa, should be streamlined, allowing people simply to identify how they wish, instead of needing evidence about why you needed to do it.

Many people have not waited to be asked. We already know that Germaine Greer, “Woman’s Hour” presenter Dame Jenni Murray, and the novelists Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Fay Weldon are all on record as saying that transgender women are not real women, while on Twitter, Piers Morgan has a profound dislike for the idea of people not identifying as male or female, although “third gender” or “two-spirit” people, among other names, are found in cultures for centuries.

The reason I am not waiting for the Government here is simple – I am applying for a Gender Recognition Certificate, under the existing system. There had been a bill in Parliament to change the process, but after the first reading, months of delays, and a General Election, nothing more happened.  Therefore, I am pressing on with what the existing process, which costs £140, requires me to do.

It relies heavily on evidence that you are on your final-destination path, including medical reports, passport, utility bills, official letters, and a statutory declaration I have signed in the presence of a solicitor – there may have also been something about collecting all the gold rings, jumping over a ravine, and rescuing a princess, but I haven’t seen anything more about that. A panel then decides if I should be given the certificate that has “female” written on it, but with what it has taken to get there, both in years of personal experience as well as paperwork, it may as well also say “sane.” Either way, it unequivocally leaves no room for doubt.

Even if I am choosing to do this the hard way, it doesn’t mean it will be a harder-won victory than those that may only have to fill in a simple form later. For the record, I think having a statutory declaration will weed out those who don’t realise how serious changing your gender, in the eyes of the law, really is. Only 112 people submitted applications under the existing process in the first three months of 2017, so making that process easier won’t open the floodgates for women’s toilets and changing rooms to be invaded by men, which is an understandable fear, but unlikely. The Republic of Ireland already have a simpler process, introduced in September 2015, and only 240 people have used it, out of a population of five million.