I have deep suspicions that my wife is secretly reading a book when she takes a bio break. It must be called something like “How to Prepare a Solid Legal Case” by Donald J Trump, ghost-written by Rudy Giuliani…..
10 minutes ago she came back from the bathroom (after a suspiciously long time) to the kitchen, where I was dutifully washing the lunch dishes.
She suddenly said out of the blue “you should never immerse that salad bowl in water when you wash it”. I looked at the unwashed wooden salad bowl on the counter. It’s rather special, and was made and given to us as a wedding gift by an old friend of my wife’s 38 years ago. I have washed it carefully many times. I have never left it “immersed” in water.
I explained this to my wife. She replied, “and while we’re talking about it, you should never use this wooden salad spoon for cooking”, plucking said spoon from the crock where we keep our many wooden implements on the counter.
“Do you have any knowledge of my doing so?”, I asked her, somewhat rattled by this point. “No”, she said, “but you should just know these things”.
I put the blame for all of this solidly on The Donald.
Now, you may well wonder what our salad bowl has to do with Donald J. Trump, so please hang on in there and let me elaborate.
Mr Trump has made an art form out of the “no smoke without fire” principle. As you will have noticed, it is never his opinion which he voices. He will say “many people are saying” that there is a question about Obama’s birthplace, or Hilary Clinton’s sexual/pizza proclivities. He will then shrug his shoulders dramatically and say, “well, all I’m saying is that it should probably be looked into”. His theory is that if he keeps puffing out massive amounts of smoke, enough people will believe there is a fire. QAnon is the ultimate manifestation of this principle.
We are all too busy dealing with massive amounts of useless information, and have lost the ability to effectively filter this input. Again, Trump makes use of this in persisting with the election fraud fallacy, well after the result has been clearly defined, and 60 or more spurious legal cases have been thrown out as having no basis in fact, many by judges put in place by the Trump administration.
This insidious erosion of the concept of truth and facts may seem laughably silly on the surface, and can be explained by the fact that Trump is a buffoon, but the truth is much, much, more serious. I realise the reach of this palpable dishonesty when, here in the South West of France, in the hills of the Haut-Languedoc, I hear my university educated neighbours say that they definitely feel that the 2020 election was stolen. This frankly shocks me to the core. What is going on?
Just to be 100% transparent, as a businessman I always considered myself right-of-centre politically, roughly speaking supporting “caring capitalism”. As a Brit this meant I would be Conservative/Independent/LibDem, and yes, OK, I will have a serious look at the Greens and also at the SNP as a patriotic Scot. Probably not “pro-union, anti-capitalist” Labour in the old sense, but never say never, I will listen to them too.
As the husband of an American, and having spent time living in the US, I am definitely a Democrat, but I do agree with the Republicans on many issues and so am horrified that they seem to be determined to restrict voting rights, and therefore dilute (at best) democracy, so that they can preserve power in a country which is demonstrably shifting demographically the Democrats’ way.
But whatever my personal view on particular parties and issues in various countries, most of all I subscribe to Voltaire’s principle that, however much I disagree with your views, I will defend to the death your right to express them. This surely is the basis for a civilised democracy. Out of healthy debate and freely disputed issues and opinions there comes a time to vote, to decide, on who will govern a free democracy for the next number of years. At this point there has to be a mutual embracing of facts and truth, and a confidence in an independently-run voting and counting system.
If this does not occur, as has been engineered by Trump, Giuliani, Sydney Powell, and their ghastly support cast of facilitators and fabricators, then we truly lose sight of any sort of believable factual truth, and vast swathes of the population harbour serious doubts about the veracity of the voting system.
Trump and company espouse a “certain type of logic”, as does, much more eloquently, Marine LePen in France. We must not confound a certain type of logic with logical certainty. We need to pay serious attention, step up to the plate, inform ourselves as carefully as possible, listen to all sides of the public debate, as distasteful as that may be on occasion, and try like hell to hang on to the true principles of a free democracy.
The salad bowl and wooden spoons, what is the future there? It seems to me that, like Trump did well prior to the election by claiming that if he lost it would quite definitely be fraudulent, my wife is putting out large puffs of smoke. She must have some inkling that the rather special salad bowl, and honestly more banal spoon, have a certain shelf life and will eventually split or splinter. She is cannily preparing the ground so that when this does happen, everyone concerned (I am honestly not sure if that number extends beyond 2) will know that it is clearly a question of bad practice on my part.
My God, it almost makes politics seem attractive…..
Notes from the 2021 Woodpile. They still seem appropriate today.
More soon from Olaf.
Skoal!!!
