September: Monty Python's Meaning of Strife

In the absence of anything uplifting to write about in the face of the relentless clamour of dire news from around the world, let me pass on a little joke from my friend Bret. It's a simple and effective joke, which means that I can remember it. I gave up trying to tell jokes many decades ago, because I'd always miss out some key detail that rendered the punch line as flat as one of my wife's excellent Sunday morning pancakes. Here it is:

Q. What do you see yourself doing this time next year?
A. I don't know; I don't have 2020 vision.

I know it's not quite as devastating as the Monty Python joke that killed anyone unlucky enough to hear or read it, but it's pretty good, you must agree. The first Monty Python show was broadcast on the evening of my birthday in the year 1969. My parents didn't let me watch it and I'm not sure that they would have watched it themselves, since Terry and June was more their style. Or something equally cosy and domesticated. But the BBC repeated it recently for our edification. It was a little uneven, but still very funny in its best moments. I particularly liked the idea of using the deadly joke as a weapon of warfare. The Nazis tried to retaliate with a joke of their own, but couldn't come up with anything quite as fatally hilarious.

Anyway, Monty P. can't put out the fires in Amazonia or rid this world of Bolsinaro, Trump, Putin or Boritz Trumpton. However, a little light in time of darkness flickered recently this month with the announcement of Robert Mugabe's death. It was tempered, though, by the knowledge that he made it into his mid 90s before being carried off by natural causes. Like too many evil men, he never had to answer for the misery he caused. He's probably up there now, way beyond Van Allen's belt, chewing the celestial fat with Jimmy Saville and other cronies over a glass of port and a Cuban cigar.

My dentist is a nice, quietly spoken man who's unlikely to be called to account for crimes against either teeth or humanity. (So quietly spoken, in fact, that once the suction tube is working away in your mouth, all you can do is guess when his masked mumbles require a responsive unnnhh.) I went to see him for the first time in about three years and, after a good old inter-dental scraping, he gave me a clean bill of health. Those shooting pains I'd felt earlier in the summer on succumbing to ice cream must have been phantom. So that was good. The only thing that tarnished my visit was having to sit next to a near neighbour who supports Trump. Steering the conversation well clear of politics was like avoiding a very large elephant in the waiting room. 

The last time we'd had a 'conversation' was in this very house. We were doing our little bit for politesse and returning a fairly tense lunch date. The Trumpette in question is otherwise quite the intellectual, who spends her days studying economic data on her computer and reading information and mis-information from all over the globe. She also talks like a politician: in a steady stream and in such a way that only the most skilled interrogator could get a word in edgewise. Being neither a skilled interrogator nor a master of French, I had to listen impotently to her monologue as my rage-ometer mounted. 

Having had months to compose ripostes to her argument, I was sufficiently equipped to cross-question her. If Trump was out to 'drain the swamp' in Washington, how come he was so busy handing out favours to all his mates in the oil industry and similar lobbies? And if climate change was merely a distraction, how come that the earth is burning up? How come we've had the hottest summer on record and we're in the middle of a four-month drought that is turning the countryside brown? How come the land smells constantly of lightly browned toast? But of course, I didn't. Mention Trump's dangerously deranged mental state, and she'd simply put it down to propaganda.

People don't want to know or don't even care. It doesn't matter to them that their revered leader is a narcissistic fruitcake. After all those investigations, all that late-night satire, all that righteous indignation, we're still apparently no nearer to impeaching him, let alone seeing his tax returns. Which made it very depressing to read about the main Democratic Party's candidates' televised squabbles. I'd probably go with Elizabeth Warren myself, but it's said that Americans will never elect a woman as their president, and given the rabid state of at least half the electorate, one can believe it. Whoever's chosen, he or she is unlikely to knock the current incumbent off his perch by preaching health care for all. Play him at his own game; fight fire with fire: that's what I reckon. Direct action.

I never could understand why, say, the British secret service didn't arrange for Mugabe to be bumped off. Just as, on the face of it, surely it can't have been beyond the capability of the CIA to have rid the world of Saddam Hussein long before the disastrous invasion of Iraq. After all, they managed to nip Patrice Lumumba and, arguably, Robert Kennedy in the bud before they spread their dangerous liberal left-wing ideas. Therein lies the rub. And what does that say about a system that deems it more convenient to let sleeping dogs lie when the dogs are repellent and hell-bent on keeping whole populations in check. Look what happened in Libya once Qaddafi was removed, the argument would go. Better the devil you know and all that.

In Mugabe's case, of course, we didn't know the nature of the devil. He started out as a well-intentioned if politically rigid freedom fighter. Then, as so often happens, he got a taste of power and spent the rest of his political career doing everything he could to hang onto that power. In the process, he went stark-staring bonkers. There's a lot of it about right now.

At least my dad's local MP stood up to Boritz Trumpton's bullying. She's lost the party whip (whatever that really means) as a result of voting against it or him. I wrote her an e-mail commending her for her moral courage and got a nice reply by return. My dad was pleased. Old-fashioned fool that he is, he still believes that politicians should be principled. I shall be going to visit him at the end of the month. My brother and I are talking him on a little road trip to visit his old school. We'll be staying in a hotel for a couple of nights, courtesy of the Old Boy. I'm sharing a room with my brother, so I'll be doing my utmost to ignore another elephant. My brother voted for Brexit. My father, I'm happy to report, didn't. I was denied the vote. I'm quite looking forward to the trip, but not to the challenge of skirting The Big Issue to maintain family harmony.