jamescalumcampbell

In Dunblane Cathedral this morning, the minister preached on the Beatitudes, taking a text from Matthew chapter 5.  Jesus used the word “blessed” nine times.  The litany of the blessed seems highly unlikely: the spiritually poverty-stricken, the mournful, the meek, those deprived of justice, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, the persecuted, especially those reviled for Jesus’ sake.  How can you possibly be blessed when you are down and out?  What can it possibly mean?

It occurs to me that it might mean something similar to Kipling’s poem If, which challenges us to rise to the occasion if we are blamed, and hated by those bearing false witness against us; if we are patient in adversity; if we entertain hope without recourse to delusion; if we are resolute both in good times and bad; if we are misrepresented; if we see our life’s work destroyed; if we are undaunted by adversity; if we have nothing left but fortitude, yet we remain the same to all men, and despite everything we keep going…       

Listening again to the Beatitudes, through the prism if you will of If, I thought of an incident that occurred in the Royal Opera House Covent Garden during the week, in a performance of Puccini’s Turandot.  During the evening, the principal tenor took ill.  There was a short intermission, while the performers decided what to do.  In the end, a back stage staff member, not a professional singer, volunteered to sing the role from the wings, while a mute player acted out the character on stage.  When it became evident that the substitute singer was not going to sing the very famous aria Nessun Dorma, no doubt made more famous by its performance by three certain tenors during a certain football world cup, the theatre audience showed extreme displeasure with a series of catcalls and boos.  Well, not the whole audience.  At least according to an account on Broadcasting House (BBC Radio 4, Sunday 9 am), the expressions of disgruntlement were coming mainly from the posh seats.

I must say when I heard this, and no doubt this expresses some of my own hard-wired prejudices, I thought, “That figures.”  I’m not an opera buff.  I don’t really get it.  I like a lot of the music, and the arias, but I’m no longer prepared to sit in the stalls for four hours.  Life’s too short.  They played an extract on Broadcasting House of Luciano Pavarotti singing Nessun Dorma, and the audience went absolutely wild.  It’s all completely over the top.  There seems to me to be a deep core of unpleasantness about it, a touch of the Fascisti.  That’s what I thought when I heard all these nobs, or snobs, booing and jeering.  I just hope the stand-in singer said quietly to himself,

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you…

Talking of Auntie, the BBC are looking at the licence fee again.  Apparently they are short of cash, and finding it increasingly difficult to rival the bigtime global competitors who gain huge revenue from multinational companies who advertise.  One possible source of income that has been mooted is to charge us for listening to the radio.  Currently we can listen to BBC radio programmes for free.  If we want to watch the telly, it costs us £174.50 per annum.  That allows us to watch live television, or programmes on BBC iPlayer. 

I pay the licence fee, although I haven’t actually switched on the TV this year.  It has crossed my mind to stop paying the licence and get rid of my TV set, but I’m not sure I want the hassle of getting letters, and perhaps even doorstep visits, from prying officialdom who frankly would not believe that my house is a television-free zone.  So I cough up, and remind myself that I’m sponsoring the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the BBC Philharmonic, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, and the BBC Concert Orchestra.  So if radio listeners who didn’t own a TV were suddenly obliged to subscribe, it wouldn’t materially affect me as I already pay.  But for some reason I’ve got a deep-seated aversion to the whole idea.   

Still, Public Service Broadcasting has to garner revenue from somewhere, but if there are no adverts, from where, precisely?  Actually it isn’t exactly true to say that there are no ads, even on the radio.  There are lots of ads, but they are all inward looking, for the BBC itself, advertising forthcoming attractions.  I find them increasingly irritating with each iteration, and reiteration.  The trailers for radio drama are particularly tiresome.  Everything is gritty.  Even The Archers are gritty these days.  I recently heard a trailer for something called The Night Manager which was such a litany of noir clichés that it could have been compiled by Artificial Intelligence; perhaps it was. 

But how could you possibly enforce, and police a radio licence?  Would we have to pay to listen in the car, on the phone, or in an earpiece while out for a jog?  We might have to go under cover, like members of the Maquis, tuning into the BBC somewhere in Normandy, in 1944.  “This is London calling.  This is a message for Pierre in Caen.  The foie gras is in the oven.  The foie gras is in the oven…”

I have a notion that if the BBC Radio Licence goes live, I will do largely what I’ve done with the telly, and switch it off, not so much as a matter of principle, but because the content (with a few notable exceptions) is growing increasingly uncongenial.  The preoccupation, nay obsession, with the multi-media landscape is oppressive.  “And now, on line, on digital, on your smart speaker and on 88 to 91 FM, this is BBC Radio…”  There is a constant reference to “content” that is “in your feed”.  In the real world, the news is so bad that it has become common practice for people to switch off, or retreat into an echo chamber that has been designed, algorithmically, to broadcast that which they want to hear. 

I suppose this is what it means to advance in years.  Life qua relinquishment.  Ich bin der Welt abhandengekommen. I’ve given up the telly, and the opera, and now it would seem, radio.  Whatever next?  Newspapers?  There is a particularly irritating article in today’s Sunday Times by Jeremy Clarkson on the topic of net zero.  Net zero is unhuman.  Who wants to be cold and sad?  The burden of the piece is that all human progress has been characterised by a move from discomfort towards comfort.  But Ed Miliband (referred to sequentially as Sillyband, Stupidband, and Millipede – talk about an argument ad hominem) is taking us in the other direction.  Chickpeas and bamboo cutlery are why Milliband’s crusade will fail.  I suppose in a way it’s quite amusing, but the trouble is, it fails to address the central issue of climate change, just as the US National Security Strategy fails to address it with its simple assertion, “We reject the disastrous ‘climate change’ and ‘net zero’ ideologies that have so greatly harmed Europe, threaten the United States, and subsidise our adversaries.”  That is an assertion without any backup.  So it is with Jeremy Clarkson’s piece.  You cannot write about this issue without answering the questions – (a) Is climate change real?  (b) Is it man-made?  (c) Is it potentially catastrophic?  (d) Can the catastrophe be avoided or attenuated?  If you’re not going to address these issues, there’s really no point in expressing contemptuous derision, and cracking a few jokes.  I’m surprised the Sunday Times’ editor’s blue pencil wrote “stet”.

And as for the media frenzy over Mr Mountbatten-Windsor…

Go placidly amid the noise and haste.               

President Emmanuel Macron is fast tracking a French ban on the use of social media, and of mobile phones, by children under the age of 15, so that the legislation may be in place before the start of the school year in September.  He has said, “The brains of our children and our teenagers are not for sale.  The emotions of our children and our teenagers are not for sale or to be manipulated, neither by American platforms, nor by Chinese algorithms.”  I thought President Macron looked very cool in his ray-bans.  (Other shades are available.)  I don’t know, but I assume he had suffered a subconjunctival haemorrhage, which sounds, and looks, frightful, but is entirely benign.  Naturally, the Donald mocked him. 

The expression “not for sale” has a certain potent currency.  Mark Carney has said of Canada, and Mette Frederiksen of Greenland, that they are not for sale.  In the social media context, the implication is that powerful forces target a vulnerable market with a commodity that is addictive.  The cigarette companies did the same, and still do.  Vapes are colourful and flavoursome, targeted at children the way supermarket confectionary is sited, or sighted, at toddlers’ eye level beside the checkout counter.  The social media companies utilise algorithms that are designed to keep the user hooked, by providing what has been erroneously described as a “dopamine hit”.  Don’t shoot the messenger. All over the world, children are spending hours staring at their smart phones.  You hand children a book and they attempt to interact with it by tapping the page, or scrolling down.  On social media, most of the content they devour is aptly puerile, but at the sinister end of the spectrum, unbelievably, children can be encouraged to do away with themselves.

Here en Grande-Bretagne, the government is closely watching events in Australia, where the social media ban for under-sixteens is already in place.  In Australia, the platforms Facebook, Instagram, Kick, Reddit, Snapchat, Threads, TikTok, X, YouTube and Twitch are banned.  The British Government is minded to follow suit, but the Lords are introducing their own amendments and the whole thing could easily be stymied by parliamentary procedure.  The last word you could use to describe the Mother of Parliaments would be “nimble”.  And interestingly, many of the parents whose children have taken their own lives as a result of exposure to harmful content on social media are not convinced of the wisdom of an outright ban.

But it seems to me that an important question has not been asked by, and of, the body politic.  If social media are harmful to children, why are they not also harmful to adults?  If children need to come off social media, should not adults do the same?  Should not, in fact, adults be an example, lead the way, and show their children how to log off?  We elders, after all, are as prone to addiction, and to manipulation, as anybody else.  If I were going to impose a social media ban on any segment of society, I would target politicians.  Is there any sight more depressing than that of a Member, seated on the green benches, staring at a mobile, impervious to the debate that is going on? 

But of course, politicians would not dream of coming off social media.  They are terrified, much like children, of being out of the loop.  So they don’t communicate directly with one another, or with us, by word of mouth, or in print.  They post on X.  Or the Donald posts on his own Truth Social, an oxymoron if ever there was one.  His Board of Peace is Orwellian.  Didn’t the Ministry of Truth say “War is Peace”?  

The fact is, the whole of society is in the vicelike grip of an addiction.  You only need to turn on the radio to be swamped with society’s overwhelming obsession with the virtual world.  The reference to “your feed” never stops.  We seem to be bombarded by a welter or information, or misinformation, or disinformation, from a multitude of sources.  And yet direct communication between human beings is becoming increasingly rare.  We have all been faced with the problem of trying to communicate with a multinational conglomerate, or trying to negotiate on the phone with an endless algorithm, or to talk to a robot who does not understand our accent.  I see that when the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party decided to ban Andy Burnham from standing in the by-election in the Greater Manchester seat of Gorton and Denton, they never told him.  They said they tried to contact him but couldn’t.  Incidentally, I have an idea that the decision made by the committee will come back to haunt them.  I predict David Yelland and Simon Lewis will talk it over on When it Hits the Fan, and I reckon will pronounce it a PR disaster. 

Of course we’re all addicted to something.  I’m addicted to books.  What is the difference between an interest, or an enthusiasm, and an obsession, or an addiction?  Interests and enthusiasms good, obsessions and addictions bad, I suppose.  But why bad?  Bad, presumably, because bad for our health, physically, mentally, and spiritually.  I don’t suppose my book addiction is doing me much harm, other than by cluttering up my house, but all the same you know you have a problem when you buy a book you already have.  Last week in Waterstones I picked up Goldeneye by Matthew Parker (Hutchinson 2014), read it, thought it was terribly good, and put it on my shelf only to discover I already had it, and had already read it.  I did exactly the same with Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam, and it won the Booker Prize.  Bit of a worry.

Other people’s addictions are incomprehensible to those of us who don’t share them, like gambling, or indeed like social media.  New Zealand Gewürztraminer yes, but then again may I smugly crow I’m having a dry January.  Twenty five days down, six to go.  I’m tempting fate; races are often lost at the last hurdle, but I celebrated Burns Night last night with a cuppa tea, so bar the totally unforeseeable I should make it.  I might even stay on the wagon, who knows?  Not drinking is as much of a habit as drinking.  Poor old Ian Fleming, in his Goldeneye hideaway on the north shore of Jamaica seemed to be hooked on gin and nicotine.  Gin makes me sad.  I call it the Juniper Blues.  No wonder the melancholy Old Etonian was, well, so melancholy.  And, like Bond, he smoked sixty sticks of cigarette a day.  His alter ego killed him.

Sugar is another addiction targeted at the vulnerable.  We are back at the supermarket checkout, with the sweeties two feet off the ground.  And this also takes us back to France.  There was recently an “aux barricades” moment in a French supermarket when customers, frustrated at the lack of staff at the checkout counters, took matters into their own hands, loaded up trolleys with goods and gridlocked the aisles until the checkouts were appropriately staffed.  It could only happen in France. There was communication about this in The Herald, which prompted me to write this short missive, published today:

On the subject of supermarket checkouts (Herald Letters, January 24), the French have a nickname for the checkout lady… la beepeuse.

And the Germans have a word for the item, often shaped like a well-known Swiss chocolate bar, that separates customers’ shopping on the checkout conveyor belt… die Kassentoblerone.  Here en Grande-Bretagne, if we’re stuck with automatic checkouts, I have an idea to make the process more amusing.  Why not make the scanner a Dalek?

I would love to hear it say, in characteristically harsh tones: “UNEXPECTED ITEM IN BAGGAGE AREA!”  The kids would love it.                                                                     

President Trump has written a letter to the Norwegian Prime Minister, Jonas Gahr Store, which contains the following sentence.

“Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace.”

He goes on to say that he intends to focus on “what is good and proper for the United States of America”.  This included having “complete and total control” of Greenland. 

In his reply Prime Minister Store pointed out that the awarding of the Peace Prize had nothing to do with him, nor with Norway, but is solely in the gift of the independent Nobel Committee.  Or, as we say in Glasgow, “It wuzznae me.  A big boy done it, and ran away.”  But seriously, we should take President Trump’s beef seriously.  He is stepping back from his role as peacemaker, because he has not been handed a gong.  Well, at least, not first hand.  He got one from FIFA and one from Maria Corina Machado.  But that’s not quite the same.

As gongs go, Nobel Prizes are about as prestigious as they get.  A sure fire way of not getting one is to make application for it on one’s own behalf.  You are supposed to be surprised by that early morning telephone call, and in your acceptance speech in Stockholm, express humility, avowing that you have merely sat on the shoulders of giants.  But this is not President Trump’s style.  I think we can now be sure that he will never receive a Nobel, unless he carries out a compulsory purchase of Norway, and takes over himself as the Committee’s Chair.

Most people would regard the idea of turning your back on Peace because you have not received an honour as being utterly farcical.  You wouldn’t make it up.  Is it conceivable that the President bases his foreign policy on what he perceives as a personal snub?  That would certainly go a long way to explaining why so many world leaders fall over themselves in an effort not to offend the President in a personal way. 

But irrespective of all these diplomatic efforts, President Trump intends to acquire Greenland, one way or another.  Russia and China have their baleful eyes upon the world’s largest island, and Denmark can do nothing about it.  No doubt Denmark, alone, could not defend Greenland, but Denmark is not alone.  Denmark is part of NATO, and NATO comprises 32 member states, including the USA.  But the USA has taken to denigrating NATO, and Europe.  When Denmark, and some other NATO countries, recently sent some troops on exercises in Greenland, somebody in the Trump administration remarked that Denmark had sent along a sledge with a pack of huskies, or words to that effect.  It was a typical remark from the strong to the weak.  When during the 1930s the Pope was critical of Stalin and his purges, Stalin purportedly asked, how many divisions does the Pope have?       

We shouldn’t be surprised by any of these developments.  They are all written out, in black and white, in the National Security Strategy (NSS), published last November.  It is remarkable how completely devoid the NSS is of any moral code or ethical framework.  The NSS is entirely concerned with the acquisition of power, wealth, and territory.  I remember when Gordon Brown, a son of the manse, was British Prime Minister, he made reference to a “moral compass” which he had been bequeathed.  At the time he was ridiculed for this remark.  Tony Blair once invoked the Almighty in a draft speech, but the Almighty was expunged by his press secretary Alastair Campbell, who said, “We don’t do God.”  Realpolitik is Machiavellian.  The electorate, it is said, is not interested in what is right, rather in what pays the bills, and what amuses.  Bread and circuses.  It’s the economy, stupid. 

It is seldom useful to invoke the spectre of the Führer when examining current affairs, yet it is impossible to ignore the similarities between US expansionism and Nazi Germany’s desire for Lebensraum during the 1930s.  That was achieved, initially, little by little.  The Rhine, the Austrian Anschluss, the Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia, Poland…  What comes after Greenland?  Iceland? Scotland?  The President has a bridgehead here already.  It will all be done in the name of global security, this formation, in Orwellian terms, of Oceania, and Airstrip One. 

Keir Starmer made a statement from Downing Street this morning.  President Trump is applying 10% additional tariffs on imports into the US from the UK on February 1^st, to be increased to 25% by June 1^st, if Greenland is not yet under his control.  But Sir Keir will not reciprocate.  He does not intend to start a trade war.  He has stated that the President’s desire to take Greenland is wrong, but he still hopes to keep onside with the US, and to provide a bridge between the US and Europe.  He is looking increasingly like Mr Chamberlain. 

All last week I listened to BBC Radio 3’s celebrations of the 250^th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, showcasing some of the great American orchestras, and then at the weekend, opera from the Met; in other words, everything that is good about America.  I heard a performance of Aaron Copland’s Lincoln Portrait.  Sometime before Lockdown I had heard the Cincinnati Symphony perform it at the Edinburgh Festival, the words of the 16^th President spoken by the actor Charles Dance.  The world premiere of Lincoln Portrait was given by the Cincinnati, so it is in the blood.  The effect was overwhelming.  So much of the text seems applicable now.

The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present.  The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise to the occasion.  As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew.  We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country. 

I have a notion that Sir Keir needs to think anew.  Diplomatic-speak is all very nice, but there comes a point when you have to call a spade a spade.  At the time of the 250^th anniversary, it is hard for us to call it out.  The President doesn’t seem to be much concerned with the opinion of the Greenlanders themselves over their own future.  Doubtless he thinks he knows what’s best for them.  We ought to remind him of Lincoln’s resolve that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”  We have thought of the Trump administration as being merely a blip.  We say he is “unpredictable”.  He will do diplomacy his own way.  We may say that he is touchy, narcissistic, chaotic, and that he is making it all up as he goes along.  We say, disparagingly, that he is a joke.  Yet the one thing that we have stopped short of saying thus far is that he, and his administration, are malignant.  We will only say that when the USS Gerald R. Ford anchors off Nuuk.  We may not have long to wait.                            

During the southern hemisphere’s summer of 1997 I visited Antarctica.  I wasn’t a tourist; I was a ship’s doctor.  I wonder now that I had the nerve.  If anybody were to fall ill, seriously ill, I would not have the option of referring them to the nearest district hospital.  Healthcare-wise, I was it.  Fortunately, nobody came a cropper.  Most of my patients were suffering from mal de mer.  I’m pretty sure one patient, incongruously, had malaria, but she had just come back from a trip to Vietnam, and fortunately she had brought her anti-malarials with her.  For myself, prone to motion sickness, I knew there would be nothing worse than trying to manage patients if I myself felt like death.  So I dosed myself up with my antihistamine of choice, and was walking on air. 

I flew from Auckland across the International Date Line to Buenos Aires, courtesy of Aerolineas Argentinas, thence to the most southerly city in the world, Ushuaia, at the bottom of Terra del Fuego.  The crisp air of the Patagonian mountains reminded me of Scotland.  In the streets of Ushuaia I was menaced by a vicious looking dog and I wondered if it could be rabid.  I had no idea.  But I wasn’t bitten. 

Down at the dock, there was a billboard looking out to sea, designed after the fashion of a gilded picture frame you sometimes encounter, encapsulating a beautiful view; but the vista was cut out in the shape of the Malvinas, the Falklands.  Quark, who organised global adventure tours, had advised me not to advertise my origins.  Memories of 1982, of the General Belgrano, of Goose Green, were still very raw.  Best say I was a New Zealander, which was true. 

The ship was The Professor Multanovskiy, formerly a Russian spy ship.  Indeed the ship’s captain and crew were Russian.  The passengers were all Belgian, and the lingua franca on board was Flemish.  The only English native speaker was the barman, a French Canadian, with whom I played chess.  I conducted most of my consultations in schoolboy French. 

It was a ten day trip, two and half days spent crossing the Drake Passage, two and a half back, with five days on and around the Antarctic Peninsula.  Aside from the penguins and the seals, we largely had the place to ourselves.  This was just before the dawn of the age of mass tourism.  Now the great and the good, the very rich, go down on their cruise ships, anchor off Deception Island and semaphore to one another, because while they have their gin and tonic, with ice, no lemon, they have run out of Perrier water.  But ours wasn’t merely a sightseeing trip.  There was a film crew on board, making a documentary about the hundredth anniversary of the discovery of the Gerlache Strait, which separates Brabant Island and Anvers Island from mainland Antarctica, by a Belgian explorer, Gerlache, whose grandson, the Baron, was present.

Of the trip itself I have written elsewhere.  There remains in my memory only a collage of impressions.  Admiralty Bay, Hanna Point, Telephone Bay, Pendulum Cove, Whaler’s Bay, Melchnikoff Point, Melchior Island…  And some of the bases – Arctowski (Polish), Bellingshausen (Russian), Argentinean and Chilean bases whose names I can’t remember, and of course the British Base at Port Lockroy.  There was a lot of joshing and banter at Port Lockroy, and I realised after days at sea (in more ways than one) conversing in French, how much I’d missed irony.  I think I sent a post card from there.  To whom I sent it, or whether it turned up, I can’t say.

We were very lucky with the weather.  The seas were calm, aside from the pronounced swell across the Drake Passage, the skies blue.  The sun shone and the ambient daytime temperature was about three degrees Celsius.  I actually managed one day to sunbathe, after a fashion, on deck, and I made a point of dawning shorts and running vest and going for a run on the Antarctic beach. 

But I bring all this up today to provide a backdrop to a very vivid experience I had, which left a lasting impression, towards the end of the return trip to Ushuaia.  The good weather held and the ship’s captain made a diversion in order to go round Cape Horn.  I remember seeing, on the Chilean coastline, a stone’s throw away, green grass, and experiencing a tremendous sense of relief.  I was returning to an environment where I belonged, having been a visitor to a region which was totally inimical.  Visiting Antarctica is not that different from visiting the moon.  You can’t go there without a substantial backup of life support.  The penguins, sociable cobbers, Adelie, Gentoo, Chinstrap, are right at home, but we are only there under sufferance.  Antarctica definitely changed my world view.  I had thought of the whole of planet Earth as our home, yet in fact our natural habitat is even more circumscribed, within certain latitudes.    

Yet we are reliant upon Antarctica.  We need it, in its pristine state, for the equilibrium of our ecosystem.  This has been recognised in the – somewhat fragile – international agreement that Antarctica should not be mined, should not be exploited.  Precisely the same can be said for the northern, polar regions.  And yet look at what is now happening up there, and with extraordinary rapidity.  President Trump wants to exploit Greenland.  If he doesn’t, the Russians or the Chinese will.  It is therefore imperative, he says, that he have control of Greenland.  He says he doesn’t want Russia as a neighbour.  Doesn’t he realise that Russia, fifty one miles across the Bering Strait from Alaska, is already his neighbour?  He is already a close ally of Greenland, through NATO, and is welcome to increase his military presence there.  But apparently this is not good enough.  Complete commitment only comes with complete possession.  This is going to happen.  We can either do it the easy way, or the hard way.  In this blog I’ve previously compared President Trump to Harold Potter, the wheeler dealer in the film It’s a Wonderful Life who changes peaceful Bedford Falls into the grotesque, dystopian Pottersville; and to Shelley’s Ozymandias, he of “wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command”, the haughty and disdainful king who eventually is rendered extinct in a barren wasteland.  Yesterday I heard somebody compare the President, appropriately enough in this season of Epiphany, to King Herod.  Such is his paranoia. 

The irony is that all this rapacity, this compulsion to extract every last fossil fuel, mineral, and rare earth from the earth’s crust, is being unleashed at the same time that the Arctic ice is melting and the Northwest Passage is opening up.  That which looks like a business opportunity is actually the intimation of a dire threat.  President Trump might well be advised to leave 57,000 Greenlanders alone.  They are looking after their island very well, as their ancestors have done for thousands of years.  But no.  President Trump is going to “double down”.  It’s all there in his National Security Policy:

We reject the disastrous “climate change” and “Net Zero” ideologies that have so greatly harmed Europe, threaten the United States, and subsidise our adversaries.

We can’t say we weren’t warned.  In this 250^th anniversary of the founding of the United States, we may ask, what does President Trump stand for?  For the past eighty years we have thought of the US as the house on the hill, a beacon of light.  But there is no reference in the National` Security Strategy to whatsoever things are good, whatsoever things are true.  President Trump stands for national aggrandisement, and the accumulation of wealth.  He says so, quite explicitly, and proudly.  Last week, almost unnoticed, he pulled out of 66 institutions of international cooperation, some UN, for example, the Peacebuilding Commission, and the Peacebuilding Fund, some non-UN, for example, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  He has little interest in the United Nations, or NATO, or the World Health Organisation, or the Conference of the Parties.  He is only interested in cooperation with allies if it will swell the Federal Reserve, whose interest rates had better be controlled by him.  When the USAF used RAF Mildenhall, and then Wick John O’Groats Airport, en route to commandeering an oil tanker between Iceland and Scotland, I couldn’t help recalling that, once more, Orwell saw it all coming.  Britain was a satellite of the US, renamed “Airstrip One”.  Now imagine threatening to attack an ally of 57,000 peace-loving people.  You could hardly conceive of a victim who posed less of a threat.           

He needs to be told.  He is quite explicitly, after all, threatening to destroy the planet.  He needs to be confronted with the truth.  It won’t be pretty.  He won’t like it.  He could make things very unpleasant for us all.  But sometimes you have to rise to a challenge, because the alternative is so unthinkable.  As Ernest Shackleton once said, we all have our Deep South.              

“If you don’t have a Sphere of Influence, then you are in one.”  According to Sir Alex Younger, former head of MI6, the chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov said that.  It is an arresting aphorism.  A characteristic, perhaps the defining element of any form of subjugation, say, that of the abused spouse, the decrepit elderly relative being gently coerced towards Dignitas, the bullied, the gaslit, the downtrodden, the despised and rejected, is that, unless confronted, the controlling behaviour of the strong over the weak is invisible.  Customs officials have politely enquired of me, when passing from Portugal to Spain, or from Canada to the United States, “Why on earth do you want to go there?”  It’s a form of passive aggression, the only mode of expression available to the underdog. 

I wonder if Garry Kasparov was thinking in terms of chess strategy when he passed his remark.  People often liken international politics to a game of chess.  The Masters of the Universe look down upon the field of play, conjure scenarios of “if this, then that…” into the future, and make their move.  The balance of power is all important; either you are evenly matched, or you are in a dominant position, or you are being dominated.  But the trouble is that real life is not remotely like a game of chess.  Chess can be played, and won, by a computer, because there is always a demonstrably optimal move, available to those with a big enough brain.  Chess can be played out.  Real life is more like a game of poker.  There is the element of chance, both in not knowing what is in the mind of your opponent, nor in having any control over the hand you’ve been dealt.  How can you play for a grand slam if you’ve been dealt a chicane?  As President Trump memorably said to President Zelenskyy, “You don’t have the cards.”  Then again, real life isn’t like poker either.  The stakes are too high, or, as President Zelenskyy replied to President Trump, “This isn’t a game.”

It’s hard to comprehend that, almost, but not quite, within living memory, Great Britain in its Empire controlled the greatest, or at least the biggest, Sphere of Influence the world has ever seen.  It was an accident of the amalgamation, or conglomeration, of the industrial revolution and the rise of naval power.  We had command of the high seas.  As God made us mightier yet, we exported a kind of swashbuckling Christianity.  We were self-confident.  We ruled the waves, and were quite sure we would never ever be slaves.  We espoused noble causes.  We even abolished slavery.  We were happy to bestow upon others the Pax Britannica, so long as it was not challenged.  By the time of the death of Queen Victoria in 1901, it looked as if the empire upon which the sun never set would indeed last a thousand years.  George Orwell did not take such a sanguine view.  As a young man, working as a policeman in Burma, he came to the conclusion that Empire was essentially a money-making exercise.  

What went wrong?  Within a single generation, it seemed likely that Great Britain would be invaded and occupied.  The Royal Navy would have been requisitioned by the Kriegsmarine, and the Empire would have ceased to exist.  This was certainly the prediction of the US Ambassador to the Court of St James, Joe Kennedy, at the outbreak of the Second World War.  The US might have, to borrow a recent expression Sir Keir Starmer, “shed few tears”.  This might have happened, but for the pigheaded bloody-mindedness of a maverick PM, and the valour of a handful of airmen.  As it happened, we survived, but although Winston said he had not become PM to preside over the dismantling of the Empire, that, like it or not, became his role. 

So the Empire became the Commonwealth and, for his second term, Winston devoted himself, insofar as his failing health would allow, to the formation of international institutions and the cause of world peace.  He didn’t get very far.  He tried to organise a “summit” – he even coined the term – of the three great powers who had periodically met in conference during the war.  But the US and Soviet Russia weren’t interested, and Winston quietly resigned during a newspaper strike. 

Still, there remained close ties with the US, the Commonwealth, and Western Europe.  Out of the ashes of the League of Nations arose the phoenix of the United Nations.  The idea of a “rules-based international order” took root.  The stakes were very high because two opposing ideologies were nuclear armed.  They glared at one another across the “Iron Curtain” that stretched from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic.  But at least there was an international forum based in New York, and a “permanent security council” originally formed by the allies of World War II.

The collapse of the Soviet Union was even more spectacular than the demise of the British Empire.  For no apparent external reason, German youth climbed on to the Berlin wall, and started to demolish it, without fear of being shot.  Two years later, the historians pronounced “the end of history”.

But it seems to be easier to win the war than to win the peace.  Russia was arguably taken over by the mafia, the oligarchs who were content to send their children to the English public schools, and flood the City of London with laundered money.  Mr Putin deeply regretted the eclipse of Russian power.  He kindly laid out for us a blueprint of his conception of the Russian Federation’s “Sphere of Influence”, and prepared to attack Ukraine.  He advised us not to interfere in this sphere, lest he, if we understood him correctly, unleashed nuclear weapons. 

All of this was arguably quite predictable, but could we have predicted the attack upon Caracas?  Well, yes.  The build-up of naval power in the Caribbean was a hint, and President Trump did tell us that he wanted to purge the area of “narco-terrorists”.  In fact, in his recently published National Defence Strategy, he gave us a blueprint, much like Mr Putin, of his conception of his own particular Sphere of Influence.  This is described as the Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.  President Trump wants the US to dominate the entire Western Hemisphere.  When he said he wanted to make Canada the 51^st State, and to take over Greenland (not ruling out the use of force), we all thought he was joking.  Donald just being Donald.  Now it doesn’t seem so funny. 

Some people think that untapped Venezuelan crude, the largest oil resource in the world, is the real reason for President Trump’s preoccupation with Venezuela.  Not the traffic in fentanyl.  After all, if it were all about drugs, why not attack Mexico, or Bolivia?  Some people think – are they being uncharitable? – that the accusation of “narco-terrorism” resembles Mr Putin’s accusation, levelled at Ukraine, of “Nazism”.  A pretext.   

When President Trump was asked on board Air Force One whether President Maduro had been kidnapped, apparently he nodded and said, “That’s a good word.”  The rules-based international order has gone, to be replaced by the Rule of Might, the Big Beasts with their Spheres of Influence. 

Should we have seen this coming?  Orwell did, as far back as 1948.  He thought there would be three spheres, three great “superstates” – Oceania (the absorption of the British Empire by the United States), Eurasia (the absorption of Europe by Russia), and Eastasia (China and the countries to the south of it, Japan, and parts of Manchuria, Mongolia, and Tibet).

Each New Year, the political pundits on the BBC have a radio programme where they make predictions about the coming year.  What will 2026 bring?  The irony is that this year, they recorded the programme the night before the US bombed Caracas.  This was not foreseen.  As Mr Macmillan said, “Events, dear boy…”  So it would be a wise man, or a foolish one, who predicts how events are to unfold.  But let us suppose Orwell was right.  We would have to conclude that President Trump would, at least for the time being, stay out of other people’s Spheres of Influence.  So we might expect the war in Ukraine to grind on, and Russia to continue pushing west into Europe.  We would expect Mr Xi to carry out a Caracas-style copy-cat manoeuvre on Taipei.  And we would expect that the British PM, when asked to criticise President Trump, might shrug and say, “I’m not going to shed tears over Mr Maduro”, because after all, if you don’t have a Sphere of Influence, then you are in one.                                                      

Somebody wrote into The Herald the other day in praise of Prestwick Airport.  I have a soft spot for Prestwick because it was the destination for my father when he undertook a rather hazardous journey by Dakota, from Canada via Greenland and Iceland during the war.  He visited my granny, ten miles up the road in Saltcoats, for the first time in years, before being posted on to England.  Prestwick Airport gets a bit of stick.  It’s a political football, because its financial viability has been called into question, and the road and rail links to Glasgow are not that great.  (Same could be said of Glasgow Airport.)  On the other hand, it’s essentially fog free, and, according to the Herald correspondent, has the longest runway in the UK.

Wait a minute!  That’s not right.  I fired off a rejoinder.

Dear Sir,

Prestwick is indeed a terrific airport, but at 2,987 metres (9,801 feet), its runway is not, as your correspondent states, the longest in the UK (“Flying High”, The Herald, December 18th.)  The runway at Machrihanish, two miles west of Campbelltown, is 3,049 metres (10,003 feet) long.  I believe it was extended during the Cold War to accommodate Avro Vulcan bombers.  I see from my logbook that on December 6th, 2002, I landed a Cherokee Warrior there, and I remember touching down at the start of the enormous stretch of tarmac, and coming to a halt before I had reached the black and white “piano keys” signalling the start of the runway.  Happy days.

Yours sincerely…

The rejoinder got a rejoinder.  Machrihanish may have the longest runway in the British Isles, but, being at least three hours away from Glasgow by road, it’s a white elephant.

Wait a minute!  Not the British Isles.  The UK.  Shannon is longer.  Thus do the army of nerdish Herald correspondents fight like bald men over a comb, or look for a fight the way other people look for their dinner.  Well, I thought, if we built a bridge between the Mull of Kintyre and Antrim, Belfast would be just round the corner.  We could open up the Celtic world!  But I didn’t write back. 

It’s a fretful time of year, or it can be if you have a predisposition to bah-humbuggery.  I remember in the world of emergency medicine that Christmas was the most miserable day in the year.  People would present throughout the day to the emergency department with all manner of human wretchedness in mind, body, and spirit.  As the evening wore on, the incidents of interpersonal violence would increase in number and severity.  Amid all the blood and thunder, I remember one particularly patient individual finally reaching the head of the queue, only to request access to abortifacients.  It seemed a bizarre request on the day of a nativity.       

The newspapers are only too well aware of readers’ fretfulness.  This is why they are full of giant crosswords and multifarious brain-teasers designed to keep one occupied, or preoccupied.  I did the Sunday Times giant prize crossword last night, all but one clue, a 23 x 23 box monster.  I’m not sure if I’ll hunt up the last solution.  Didn’t Persian carpet makers deliberately leave one flaw in the weft, because only God is perfect?  Besides, the prize is a 530 piece wooden jigsaw from the Puzzly Company, depicting Claude Monet’s Woman with a Parasol.  I’ve never done a jigsaw in my life.  Perhaps this is my opportunity.  (530 pieces.  I can’t help noticing that 530 is just one more than 23 x 23.  There’s a jigsaw piece for every square of the crossword, and one to spare.  Only a fretful nerd would spot such a thing.)

The hiatus twixt Xmas and Hogmanay reminds me of a long haul journey by air.  It’s like suffering from jet lag without even getting off the ground.  But you feel as if you are stopping off in Singapore en route to Auckland, dozing off in the Sheraton Towers, 39 Scott Road, and waking at some unimaginable hour to stare stupidly at the TV screen, where a fish in an aquarium ogles you right back.  There’s some ghastly minimalist background music.  So it is now, this Limbo.  Have another mince pie, do another crossword, har har. 

I’ve kept New Year’s Resolutions to a minimum, otherwise they’d be liable to be the same as last year.  Having a lengthy bucket list is the same as being completely demotivated.  I really must read Proust.  I really must learn Wagner’s Ring, or Maxwell’s equations.  Repeating the same resolutions year on year is the definition of insanity.  You resolve, and then go off at a tangent.  Life, according to John Lennon, is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.  I really must visit Munich.  If you don’t know where you’re going, according to George Harrison, any road’ll take you there. 

So: one resolution.  Finish Tome No. 5.  It’s currently 70,000 words long, but the words aren’t necessarily in the right order.  Should I get AI to do it for me?  No thank you.  I have a notion that on a previous publishing exercise my copy editor was a robot, and it lacked a sense of humour.  That’s how I knew it was a bot.  Now there’s a white elephant.  Artificial Intelligence is the latest infatuation of our politicians.  It’s the deus ex machina that’s going to solve all the problems in the NHS, and in social services.  The lonesome will be consoled by AI.  Bots are really good at empathy.  Count me out.

But talking of fretfulness, I see that today the Chinese are exercising around Taiwan, rehearsing a blockade.  I wonder if the South China Sea is going to be the flashpoint of 2026.  It’s being so cheery keeps me going.

Every good wish, when it comes, for a happy and prosperous New Year

JCC.

When I first heard the term “Trump Derangement Syndrome” (TDS), I thought it was a joke, of the sort you might hear – indeed I did hear – on Dead Ringers (Friday, 6.30 pm, BBC Radio 4).  Turns out it’s dead serious.  When the film director Bob Reiner and his wife were murdered last week, President Trump went on Truth Social, not to express shock, nor outrage, nor grief, not to sympathise with friends and family, nor commiserate, nor soothe the nation, but to attribute the deaths, through some bizarre concatenation of circumstances, to a mental illness.  Apparently Reiner had been suffering from TDS.  It is characterised as a monodelusional psychosis.  People who are in every other walk of life apparently sane, become so angry with the President, that they are literally driven mad. 

It’s not a new phenomenon.  It’s not even peculiar to any particular side of the political aisle.  There was a George W. Bush Derangement Syndrome, and a Barack Obama Derangement Syndrome.  I’m even led to believe – though I’m inclined to think that it surely must be fake news – that it appears in the latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM 5, Text Revision 2022).  And there have been attempts to legitimise it through law. This year, politicians in both Minnesota and Ohio have tried to introduce a bill recognising TDS in medical and legal contexts, and requiring the National Institute of Health to study it and report annually to Congress.  Political interference in medical diagnosis and treatment is not a new phenomenon either.  Gender Dysphoria has disappeared from the US radar, and the current Health Secretary doesn’t think much of vaccination. 

Societally, we tend to be a bit casual about dubbing our fellows, who might stand out from the crowd, as mad.  The English language bursts with idiomatic expressions for craziness.  See that guy?  He’s one sandwich short of a picnic, not the full shilling, out to lunch, bonkers, raving, barking, bananas, daft as a brush, mad as a snake, “a nut job”…  We take offence on behalf of people who are black, Roma, LGBTQI, or a member of many other disadvantaged or minority groups who are frequently disparaged, but for some reason people who have lost touch with reality seem to be fair game.  On the whole, I don’t think we should casually refer to somebody as being one raven short of an unkindness or, more colloquially, “aff ’is heid” unless we really wish to assign him a DSM 5 diagnosis, and even then we, at least among the medical community, should be silenced by the constraints of confidentiality.  From time to time, doctors have been known to render and make public a diagnosis formulated remotely, and it usually lands them in trouble.  It was just something they saw on the telly.  Bad idea.  I certainly don’t think doctors should say, for example, that President Trump has a Narcissistic Personality Disorder, unless the diagnosis is made on the basis of a psychiatric history and mental state examination, and even then, it would be nobody else’s business. 

By the same token, I don’t think people, Presidents or otherwise, should be issuing putative diagnoses post mortem.  Why speak ill of the dead?  Maybe the President didn’t care for Bob Reiner’s movie A Few Good Men, with Tom Cruise, Demi Moore, and Jack Nicholson, a fine legal drama in which a young Tom Cruise exposes in court the corrupt dealings of a crusty and thoroughly unpleasant military commander (Jack Nicholson).  Reiner was politically active, and anti-Trump.  It seems to me that “Trump Derangement Syndrome” is a form of gaslighting.  You deliberately attempt to unnerve a critic, or opponent, by suggesting to them that they might be going crazy.  That’s not a new phenomenon either.  Totalitarian regimes have a long history of incarcerating political dissidents in lunatic asylums.  Their views are obviously so unbalanced, and they are so unhinged, that they clearly need to be locked up in a padded cell for their own protection.  You can see why people have tried to deflect Trump Derangement Syndrome back on those who variously ascribe the diagnosis.  It is they who are unwell or, in other words, the lunatics have taken over the asylum.  This, it seems to me, is the key to the music of Dmitry Shostakovich, a sane man who found himself to all intents and purposes incarcerated in a madhouse.  That is why the music is so sardonic, and often so harsh.    

Seasoned political dissidents know only too well that expressions of anger can be counterproductive.  This is why they turn to humour, especially political satire.  Going back to Dead Ringers, I laughed out loud on Friday at the recurring joke of President Trump (brilliantly impersonated) casting aspersions upon various well-loved persons, from Shakespeare’s Romeo, to Leo DiCaprio’s Jack in Titanic, to Bambi’s mother, all dying a pathetic death.  “Horrible person, evil person…”  It occurred to me on hearing the sketch, that the BBC, faced with an impending lawsuit now inflated to somewhere between $5,000,000,000 and $10,000,000,000, is “doubling down”.  Re Splicegate, the row about Panorama’s editing of a Trump speech, allegedly to make it appear that after his presidential defeat in 2020, he was inciting his supporters to violence, it suddenly occurred to me, and I became convinced, that the BBC are not going to settle out of court.  They are not going to back down.  It’s a bit like the bombardment of the French Fleet by the Royal Navy at Mers-el-Kébir, near Oran, on July 3^rd 1940.  That was the moment during World War II when the world came to realise that Britain had no intention of suing for peace. 

And I can see why.  This is an existential crisis.  Plenty of people on the right, on both sides of the Pond, wouldn’t mind if the BBC ceased to exist.  We all moan about the BBC, but when the threat comes from outside, it is time to circle the wagons.  Personally, I would miss Michael Barclay’s Private Passions, Matthew Bannister’s Last Word, Michael Rosen’s Word of Mouth, Laurie Taylor’s Thinking Allowed, Tim Harford’s More or Less, and a live concert on Radio 3 most evenings.  Oh, and The Briefing Room, with David Aaronovitch.  On Thursday we stepped into the briefing room, together to find out about the US National Security Strategy (NSS).  I pricked my ears up because I’d only just written about it.  The panel of experts highlighted the recent dramatic divergence of US foreign policy, particularly with respect to relations with Europe, and with Russia.  Europe and Ukraine painfully thrashed out a financial package overnight on Thursday – Friday, while Russia and the US have been meeting in Miami at the weekend.  There doesn’t seem to be much of a meeting of minds between the US and Europe.  Europe is, we are told, facing “civilisational erasure”. 

I was critical of the National Security Strategy in this blog last week.  Unlike Dead Ringers, I wasn’t trying to be funny, and I hope my language was not intemperate.  Admittedly I called the NSS “tosh”.  Maybe I’m suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome.                                                   

In these strange and troubled times, when the head of NATO is glooming us up for the imminent prospect of war, I thought I would read the National Security Strategy (NSS) of the United States of America, November 2025.  So I printed it off and read it, twice.  It’s 30-odd pages of A4, maybe about 10,000 words.  I’ll try and summarise it. (I’m using English rather than American spelling, eg defence for defense, and also, dare I say, Calibri font, sans serif, which is easier for the visually impaired.  Marco Rubio in the State Department has rejected it in favour of Times New Roman).    

We begin with a message from the President.  “My fellow Americans…”  This year, the administration has brought the world back from the edge of disaster, taken back control of US borders, strengthened the military (and expunged it of “woke lunacy”), got NATO to increase defence spending from 2% to 5%, unleashed energy production, imposed import tariffs, obliterated Iran’s nuclear programme, taken on the drug cartels, and settled eight raging conflicts worldwide.  The theme underlying all this activity is “America First”.  The President signs this preamble with his signature signature, so to speak (so familiar to us from a plethora of executive orders), which looks to me like a long barbed wire fence interspersed with goon boxes.      

The Strategy follows.  It is in four parts.

1.  Introduction – What is American strategy?

The aim is to ensure that America remains the world’s strongest, richest, most powerful, and most successful country for decades to come.  Previous administrations have gone astray by overburdening the country with overseas commitments not integral to its own interest, becoming embroiled in the activities of international institutions, while attempting to run a massive welfare-regulatory-administrative state.  No more – thanks to “President Trump’s Necessary, Welcome Correction”. 

•  What Should the United States Want?       

At home, survival and safety, protection from hostile attack (in the broadest sense), control of borders, resilient infrastructure, the most powerful military in the world, a modern nuclear deterrent and associated missile defences, the world’s most advanced economy, the world’s most robust industrial base and energy sector, the most advanced science and technology, unrivalled “soft power”, and a restoration and reinvigoration of American spiritual and cultural health, rooted in strong traditional families that raise healthy children. 

Abroad, a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine (a stable Western Hemisphere, supporting critical supply chains and free of hostile incursion), reversal of damage to the US economy from hostile actors in the Indo-Pacific (reliable supply chains and access to critical materials), support for the preservation of freedom and security in Europe, prevention of an adversarial power from dominating the Middle East, with the US leading the world in AI, biotech, and quantum computing.  

•  What are America’s Available Means to Get What We Want?

A nimble political system, the world’s leading economy, financial system, technology, military, and network of alliances, enviable geography, cultural influence, courage, willpower and patriotism. 

In addition, President Trump is re-instilling a culture of competence, rooting out “DEI” (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) practices, unleashing energy production, reindustrialising, cutting taxes, deregulating, and investing in science and technology. 

•  The Strategy

“President Trump has cemented his legacy as The President of Peace…  A world on fire, where wars come to our shores, is bad for American interests.”  The US will cultivate peace through strength, while respecting other sovereign nation-states.  The US will protect its own sovereignty, and not allow any power to become so dominant that it threatens US interests.  America will be pro-worker, and expect allies to treat the US fairly.  America will be a meritocracy with no “favoured group” status, but global talent will not be allowed to undercut American workers.  The era of mass migration is over.  Core rights, freedom of speech, religion and conscience, must never be infringed. 

“The days of the united States propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over.”  NATO countries must spend 5% of GDP on defence.  This is “burden-sharing and burden-shifting”. 

The President will seek peace deals, even in countries peripheral to immediate core interests, if it increases global interests, and opens new markets. 

The US will work to strengthen the economy, through balanced trade relations, access to critical supply chains and materials, reindustrialisation, and a revival of the military-industrial complex.  American energy dominance will be restored.  America will preserve and grow its financial sector dominance. 

The paper concludes with a discussion of five global regions.

1.  The Western Hemisphere

America will enlist and expand partnerships.  There will be serious pushback to non-hemispheric competitors. 

•  Asia

America will rebalance the economic relationship with China, combating, with the help of allies, unfair and predatory business practices, and while focusing on deterrence of war in the Indo-Pacific.  The US will invest in military and dual-use technology, including undersea, space, and nuclear.  “Deterring a conflict over Taiwan, ideally by preserving military overmatch, is a priority.”  The US will not allow a competitor to control the South China Sea. 

•  Europe

Europe’s problems include insufficient military spending, economic stagnation, “civilisational erasure”, the activities of the EU and other transnational bodies that undermine political liberty and sovereignty, out of control migration, censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birth rates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence.  “The continent will be unrecognisable in 20 years or less.”  Certain European countries may not remain reliable allies.  Europe needs to regain its civilisational self-confidence.  The US needs to engage diplomatically to manage European relations with Russia, and to mitigate the risk of conflict between Russia and the European states.  The US wishes to expedite a cessation of the war in Ukraine. 

•  The Middle East

President Trump’s June 2025 Operation Midnight Hammer significantly degraded Iran’s nuclear programme.  Progress towards a permanent Israeli-Palestinian peace has been made.  The US can work with Middle East partners to advance economic interests, and to open up new markets.  The Strait of Hormuz must remain open, and the Red Sea navigable. 

•  Africa

The US will transition from a foreign aid paradigm to an investment and growth paradigm. 

That’s it.  What do you make of it?  I can’t say anything surprised me. It was an iteration, and reiteration, somewhat repetitive, of things we’ve been hearing over the past year, and during the previous Trump administration.  If I had to summarise it in half a dozen words, these would be “America First – make America great again.”  The meaning throughout is reasonably clear, though the language is rather too abstract for my taste.  On page 12, for example, on the topic of the US working with allies, this sentence appears:

“The model will be targeted partnerships that use economic tools to align incentives, share burdens with like-minded allies, and insist on reforms that anchor long-term stability.”

That sentence could have been generated by AI.  Perhaps it was. 

The tone overall is supremely self-assured, and self-confident.  It certainly lacks humility.  The references to the activities of the President are somewhat sycophantic.  Much is asserted, with little underlying argument or back-up.  Then again it is a policy document, outlining a strategy as it now is, rather than how it evolved.  It is quite possible to read it and conclude that it is coherent, plain, straightforward, pragmatic, and reasonable.  It is a rah-rah call to patriotism.  Why shouldn’t people be encouraged to excel, to be the best they can be? 

All well and good.  I should therefore try to explain why I incline to think that the National Security Strategy is tosh, and a load of old codswallop.  Bigly.    

“The world works best when nations prioritise their interests.”  That is perhaps the key sentence in the entire document.  The idea is that if we are all primarily out for ourselves, there will be an international balance of power as if guided by an invisible hand.  But would we support such an idea if it were applied to the individual?  Would we regard as honourable a person who only looked out for “Number One”?  All of the world’s established religions, moral philosophies and codes of ethics argue against selfishness, and regard indifference to the wellbeing of others as being directly opposed to the way in which “the world works best”.  When G. K. Chesterton was asked what was at heart wrong with the world, he replied, “Me”.  He had humility. 

The trouble with prioritising national interest is that it creates a highly competitive, “dog eat dog” world in which powerful nations strive to be “A number one, king of the heap”, happy to sit at the top of what is likely to be a pile of excrement.  That leads on to another key sentence of the NSS:

“We reject the disastrous ‘climate change’ and ‘Net Zero’ ideologies that have so greatly harmed Europe, threaten the United States, and subsidise out adversaries.”

This, despite the fact that the scientific world is virtually unanimous in believing that manmade climate change is real, and an existential threat.  The trouble for the current US administration is that recognition of this fact would, and should, rather curtail the ambition to exploit the US’ enormous resources of fossil fuels.  Refusal to face this fact is of itself an ideology.  Climate change cannot be real, because it contradicts this latest iteration of the American Dream.  Once you recognise the imminent threat of climate change, you are obliged not only to curtail mining activities but also to cooperate with other nations, allies and adversaries, in order, for example, to keep the increase in average global temperatures since the pre-industrial age to under 1.5 degrees Celsius.  No nation can do this alone.  Some people argue that there is little point in worrying about climate change when countries like the US, China, and India ignore it.  That is a non-strategy, a strategy of despair. 

The current US administration is happy to cooperate with allies, but only insofar as this serves, or is perceived to serve, the US national interest.  Another key sentence:

“(Previously our elites)… lashed American policy to a network of international institutions, some of which are driven by outright anti-Americanism and many by a transnationalism that explicitly seeks to dissolve individual state sovereignty.”

The document does not have a good word for international institutions.  The United Nations does not get a mention, nor the World Bank, and certainly not the Conference of the Parties (COP).  The EU gets a poor press, as does NATO.  The attack on Europe is a contumely, blistering in its contempt.  But there is no criticism of Russia.

All in all, the NSS is all about the accumulation, for the US, of power, and wealth.  The US may not be an empire, but it is certainly an hegemony.  “We should be headed from our present $30 trillion economy in 2025 to $40 trillion in the 2030s.”  The rich get richer.  Money, in fact, is the predominant preoccupation of the NSS.  Everything is seen in terms of a business deal.  There is no reference to any ethical framework or moral code, beyond a couple of references to something nebulous called American “decency”, which, whatever it is, is taken for granted.

Poor Americans!  What a ghastly dystopia awaits them.  Perhaps it has already arrived.  The US reminds me of “Pottersville”.  In the celebrated Christmas movie It’s a Wonderful Life, James Stewart spends a lifetime putting self-interest to one side in favour of helping people who one way or another are in trouble. A series of personal misfortunes leads him to the brink of suicide.  He is not a praying man, but in despair, all that is left for him is prayer.  He believes his life has been futile, but his guardian angel shows him what the world would have been like if he had never existed.  In particular, the small town in which he grew up and lived is turned into a repository of tat, of tasteless kitsch, as a result of the profiteering of one Henry Potter (no relation to J. K. Rowling’s creation).  Pottersville is hell on earth.  America is fast becoming Pottersville.  There is a long tradition in Hollywood of the quiet, unassuming man, or woman, who takes on an adversary not because of a business opportunity, an eye for the main chance, but because something is happening to society which is fundamentally wrong.  Garry Cooper, James Stewart, Tom Hanks.  Who, and where, is such a figure now?

In fact, the idea that there might conceivably be something rotten in the state of the US is entirely ignored in the NSS.  No mention of interpersonal violence against the backdrop of the 2^nd Amendment; no mention of a profound societal rift between Republican and Democrat, with no apparent attempt to “reach across the aisle”; no mention of poverty, and the increasing gap between rich and poor.  All of America’s woes are perceived as external threats, adversarial manoeuvres coming from beyond its borders.  And in terms of foreign policy, other than a belief in the survival of the fittest, there is no consideration of what must surely be the most important, the most critical question of our time: how can we best get along together, without destroying ourselves, and the planet?   

Yet there is hope.  Winston told us that America could always be relied upon to do the right thing, after it has exhausted every other possibility.  I think of President Trump as Shelley’s Ozymandias.  In form, Shelley’s poem is really a sonnet.  I print it in full here because it seems extraordinarily apposite:

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said, “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert.  Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:

And on the pedestal these words appear:

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Nothing beside remains.  Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

All these years ago In  2^nd MB, in the dreaded dissection room, a cold echoing chamber suffused with the aroma of formalin which never leaves you, Dr Chinnan would blunt dissect with remarkable rapidity through the layers of fascia and muscle, to expose a nerve.  “Here is the nerve. It has a name.  Never mind the name!”  And Richard Feynman as a boy used to go on nature walks with his father, who was not academic, but who had an insatiable curiosity about the world.  He would say the same thing as Dr Chinnan.  This plant has a long Latin name, and people think they know about it because they know the name.  But just because you can name it doesn’t mean that you know anything about it.  And Bertrand Russell wrote a seminal tract on, among other things, nomenclature, On Denoting.  Just because you can name things in a fashion that is syntactically correct doesn’t mean that you are making any sense.  The present Queen of France is dead. 

Yet naming, labelling, seems to have become very important to us.  Are you a woman because, despite your 46XY chromosomal endowment, you know deep down that you are?  Does the activity of Israel in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank constitute genocide?  And, this week especially, do one in four children carry the diagnosis of either autism, or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder?  Wes Streeting the Health Secretary in England was minded to suggest that these days such conditions are being overdiagnosed.  On the contrary, said many consultants in child and adolescent psychiatry, they are being underdiagnosed.  The health secretary backed off, to an extent.  He is more than happy to take on the BMA, but less inclined to get offside with the medical profession as a whole.  On Any Questions last week Shami Chakrabarty commended him for eating a large slice of humble pie; something of a morganatic, or backhanded compliment.  I’m not sure he did.  He ordered a review.  He is clearly concerned that once a young person has been labelled with a psychiatric diagnosis, he or she is liable not only to be signed off, but written off, removed from the workforce, and put on benefits effectively for life.     

But is this urge to append a label to everything helpful?  Woman, genocide, neurodiversity… You can debate definitions endlessly, but these debates are purely semantic, and often rather recherché, like how many angels can dance on a pinhead, or how many daughters had Lady Macbeth?  Better put these issues to one side, and go deeper into exploring the fine grain of human problems.  Should a 46XY individual have the right to enter a sport’s dressing room designed for 46XX individuals?  Has the response of the Israeli government to the attacks of October 7th 2023 been proportionate?  Would a young person who cannot sit still and concentrate benefit from some extra help? 

The number of neurodiverse diagnoses has skyrocketed since Covid.  People wait an age, even half a lifetime, for the diagnosis, and another age for any form of intervention.  Have the number of cases really increased, and if so, why?  Are they merely being better recognised, or are people truly being overdiagnosed?  My hunch – and it is only a hunch – is that all of the above are true.  Much has been said about the deleterious effects of Covid, and the associated lockdowns, on mental health.  But, as has been pointed out, the increase in child and adolescent mental health problems started before Covid.  I’m more persuaded by the recognition of the malignant influence of electronic devices.  I remember attending an RSNO concert last year when a mobile phone went off during a performance.  Maestro Sondergard begged the audience not to bring their contraptions into the concert hall.  “They are making us all ill.”  That I think is, literally, true. 

In many ways society is much kinder now than it was when I were a lad.  I recall some of our teachers were very free with the use of the tawse.  One teacher administered a spelling test once a week, the ground rules being that two mistakes earned you two strokes of the belt.  I doubt if he had ever heard the word “dyslexia”; I don’t suppose that at the time, anybody had.  Another conducted forty minutes of Religious Education once a week, in which the class was required to memorise two verses from the Psalms.  At the end of the period he would select a pupil at random to give a recitation by heart.  Failure to be word perfect evoked the same dire punishment, and he was a ferocious belter.  At the time, I don’t suppose ADHD appeared in DSM 1.  Still, I’m glad I attended school then and not now.  I couldn’t bear the integration of the digital world, social media, and information technology into education.  I’m quite sure it would have driven me, literally, mad.

Are the psychiatrists overdiagnosing?  Actually I think the entire profession is overdiagnosing.  Everybody is on the spectrum of something.  No one is normal, and there’s none so queer as folk.  You go to the doctor with your own agenda, only to discover that the doctor has an agenda of his own, and it is a desire to place you somewhere on the spectrum of something.  I wrote the other day in this blog about a lawyer who said to a room full of doctors, “You think when you consult us that you are inviting us into your world.  On the contrary, it is we who are inviting you into ours.”  Nowadays a GP might say the same to a patient.  Before you know it, you are being screened, and vetted, and put on the spectrum of pre-hypertension, pre-diabetes, pre-hypercholesterolaemia, pre-you name it.  I don’t suppose practitioners working in mental health are any different. 

I was never taught to practise in this way.  Medicine used to be clear cut.  Patients either evinced a clinical sign, or they didn’t.  They either had a diagnosis, or they didn’t.  Of course you might argue that the concept of “diagnosis” was, is, entirely a human construct.  In reality there must be a spectrum of normal to abnormal, from health to a sickness which is mild, moderate, or severe.  And there must be, temporally, a point at which normal becomes abnormal.  You might argue that pinning a diagnosis on somebody is the same as pinning a label on them; it’s a semantic exercise.  The truth is that the diagnosis, the label, is not the end of the story.  Here, practitioners in somatic medicine can actually learn a trick from their psychiatric colleagues.  In the template of the classical psychiatric consultation of history and mental state examination, the diagnosis is immediately followed by an entity known as “formulation”, a reasoned application of the diagnosis to the unique circumstances of the individual patient.  This is what we need to do; apply the data extracted from the “case” to the unique individual before us.  Every diagnosis, and every ensuing treatment or management plan, is custom-made.  But individuals are in danger of being anonymised and swallowed up within populations.

So Dr Chinnan and Prof Feynman were right.  What’s in a name?  It’s only a heading.  What matters is the underlying formulation.  We might all learn from the psychiatrists, not just other doctors, but politicians, “influencers”, polemicists, culture warriors…  Ask the question, what’s actually going on here?  Think pathophysiologically.                                                                 

It’s official.  The Oxford Dictionary Word of the Year.  Actually they are two words.  Rage bait.  Surely it should be one word.  Doesn’t ragebait look more digital?  Ragebait has been described as the evil twin of click bait.  As you surf the net, or a million and one social media platforms, something catches your eye that is going to put up your blood pressure.  The curious thing is that, knowing that something is about to make you very angry, nonetheless you click on the link.  Of course, ragebait works.  You do click on the link.  That is the reason why ragebait is word of the year.  All the clicks have been counted, and cannot be ignored. 

Although it’s a phenomenon of the digital word, there is really nothing new about ragebait.  For as long as newspapers have existed, sub-editors have conjured provocative headlines to draw your attention to something that is bound to cause outrage, to make you splutter into your cornflakes.  What that outrage might be depends upon the political leanings of the newspaper, and its readership.  Single mum on benefits has twelfth baby.  Buckingham Palace pays less council tax than 20 Old Kent Road.  The headlines resonate around, but do not cross between two disconnected echo chambers. 

There are other manifestations of rage.  Now that we have moved into the season of Advent, we may shortly expect to see trolley rage in the supermarket.  To anybody who has lived for the last couple of years in the Gaza Strip, trolley rage must seem absolutely inexplicable.  Then there is road rage.  Every motor vehicle is fitted with a horn, a means of drawing attention to one’s presence, and to a potential hazard.  But car horns are usually sounded, often protractedly, in order to express outrage at another driver’s perceived infringement, real or imagined.  Sometimes the driver under attack responds with an equally prolonged blast of his own horn (the driver is usually male), and suddenly we are in the midst of a contretemps, as unseemly as the spectacle of two men brawling in the street.  The other day I saw a guy being tail-gated by a horn-blasting Audi around the skirts of Stirling Castle.  He was so irritated that he slammed his brakes on, causing the Audi to crash into his rear bumper.  Two men emerged from their respective cars, but I didn’t hang around to observe the outcome. 

I’m not sure where to find my car horn on my Skoda Enyaq.  Somewhere on the steering column.  I really must find out.  But I’ve never had cause to use it.  Temperamentally, I like to think I incline more towards placidity than rage.  But I don’t fool myself.  I too get tail-gated, through our village’s 20 mph zone, and sometimes feel inclined to stop dead, get out and take a baseball bat to the Audi’s windscreen.  It could all turn on a dime.  There but for the grace of God…

And for sure, I’m susceptible to ragebait.  My least favourite radio programme is When it hits the fan (BBC Radio 4, Wednesdays, 4.02 pm.)  I say “least favourite”.  So why do I bother listening?  It’s a programme about PR, Public Relations, a world which I frankly detest.  Yet I listen in, regularly, with sickly fascination.  Ragebait, you see.  It’s only for fifteen minutes, I tell myself.  (The podcast is longer.)  On one level it’s good listening.  Two PR gurus, David Yelland and Simon Lewis, have worked in the field at the top level.  They are clearly masters of their brief, and they are very good at having a blether.  November 26^th’s programme was entitled Power, PR and the “Epstein Class”.  Now that President Trump has allowed access to the late Jeffrey Epstein’s emails, there has been a media feeding frenzy over their content.  Apparently they are a window on the world of the great and the good.  This is how the top drawer communicate with one another, in succinct sound bites.  The more top drawer you are, the less you need to say.  This has nothing at all to do with Epstein’s sexual exploitation and criminality.  Yelland and Lewis were at pains to acknowledge how grotesque all of that was, and then to lay it to one side.  No.  The emails were a demonstration of how power works.  Epstein made himself a multimillionaire by building up a network, and trafficking information.  We thought we knew where power resides, over here, for example, in Westminster, or the British Establishment.  We thought we knew who runs the world.  But no.  These emails, this exclusive chat room if you will – here reside the people who run the world.

This world is very mobile.  Many of the emails start, quite simply, with the question, “Where are you now?”  Somebody on the New York Times has described these exchanges as “nomadic bat signals”. Then there is the exchange of information.  Or at least a taster, much like click bait.  I know why so-and-so met DJT (the president elect) at such-and-such golf course.  Apparently this piece of information gives the bearer something known in the PR world as “edge”.  Anyway, thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, apparently the age of the email is over.  All the movers and shakers have ditched it, gone under cover, and moved over to obscure platforms where their succinct messages can be encrypted.      

It occurred to me that “edge” could easily have been word of the year.  Perhaps it would be sexier in German.  Vorsprung.  You know.  Vorsprung durch Technik.  But how hellish it must be to have one’s life dominated by the constant pursuit of “edge”.  You can never be out of touch, off line, whatever the obscure platform you are using, for fear of losing edge.  That is precisely why adolescents are addicted to their devices.  In their own social world, they are in constant fear of losing edge.  It’s a PR disaster to be out of the loop.  The Australian Government, which recognises that the influence of social media upon young people has been malignant, is trying to ban ten specific platforms for use by people under the age of 16.  Of course teenagers are much more tech-savvy than their elders, and will find a way round it, if they want to.

But that’s the trouble with living your life through a smartphone or a computer screen.  The pursuit of edge is fundamentally puerile.  It’s quite a thought that the people who – at least according to Yelland and Lewis – run the world, have been infantilised. 

One of the most depressing images in our political life is the sight of an MP sitting on the green benches, or an MSP in the chamber at Holyrood for that matter, staring, preoccupied, at their smartphone.  I wish our politicians would dump social media, the preoccupation with image, dump their SPAVS, log off, and speak truth to us directly, in syntactically correct sentences with principal and subordinate clauses, and not in emoji-strewn nomadic bat signals.  The medium is not the message.  A pox on your PR.