In Nevil Shute’s On the Beach, post nuclear holocaust, an Australian submarine anchors off the west coast of the United States, and a naval officer, dressed in a space suit to protect against radiation, goes ashore. His task is to identify the source of a radio signal, picked up in Australia, coming from a military facility. Is it evidence of surviving intelligent life, or, as feared, has everybody perished?
In the station’s main transmitting room, it turns out that the radio transmission key is being activated by the combination of the wind, an oscillating window frame, and an overturned coke bottle.
Sometimes I think of this scenario when I hear the 47th President’s latest words of wisdom. People endlessly pour over the runes, trying to decipher the subtle nuances of apparently conflicting policy initiatives. But they are as random as a coke bottle rolling in the breeze.
I was very amused by a story the minister told in Dunblane Cathedral yesterday. There was a Church of Scotland minister working in his parish, a very tough Glasgow housing estate, run by two gangster brothers. They had everything stitched up: racketeering, drugs, prostitution, protection.
Then one of the brothers died. The surviving brother visited the minister, and made, apparently, a very kind offer. He would give the church £100,000. It would help with the roof repairs, and the broken down boiler. But there was a condition. The minister had to conduct the deceased brother’s funeral service, during which he would have to declare that the brother was a saint.
The minister thought about this, wrestled with his conscience, and finally agreed to do as he was bid. Come the day, the church was full; the people on the estate had been instructed to attend. The minister got up and began his eulogy. He pointed towards the coffin.
“The man lying before you was a miscreant, a hoodlum, a criminal, a vicious thug, and a murderer. But” – pointing towards the surviving brother – “compared with him, he was a saint.”
That made me think of the President again. Should we kowtow to him, should we have offered him an unprecedented second state visit, or should we speak truth to power? We agonise about that, but maybe it turns out that the President’s reaction to whatever we say or do will be as random as the coke bottle oscillating in the wind.
In the USA, the mid-term elections are due tomorrow. Will the President get a bloodied nose, and will the Grand Old Party lose control of the House, and the Senate? And in any case, will the President accept the result? I have a notion that the result might also turn out to be extremely random, a kind of Grand Integral of millions of voters being swayed by sound bites, posts on social media, and negative campaigning backed up by billionaire’s money. You might as well turn a coke bottle round a few times on its axis and see in which direction the neck points.
On Friday in Ardnamurchan, not the peninsula but the restaurant in Glasgow’s Hope Street, one of our party despaired of the state of the world, with its wars and rumours of wars, and said he could never remember the news being so bad. But what, I ventured, about the Cuban missile crisis? Yes, he replied, but there wasn’t a hot war as there is now. Actually there was. Vietnam.
We are being gloomed up for war. The Defence Secretary wants us to be battle-ready by 2030. Wasn’t 2030, at one time, a target deadline for the phasing out of petrol and diesel motors? I dare say that has become a “lapsed action”. That’s the trouble with war. It is very expensive, and it has a large carbon footprint. Proxy wars and hybrid wars are already with us. We need to stock up on emergency supplies, and buy a clockwork radio. The BBC are re-running Word War Two radio broadcasts advising us not to peel our potatoes thus wasting the best nutrition which lies in the jackets. And apparently we need to hoard, though I can’t think that a three day supply of baked beans is going to make much difference. How long did the siege of Leningrad go on for? Besieging is that most medieval of war strategies. I should know, because on Saturday I attended a performance of Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony, Leningrad, given by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra in the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall. It was magnificently played, but my goodness it was tough going, not simply because it is seventy minutes long, but because the subject, if indeed music can have a subject, is so bleak. It sounds like music composed in a lunatic asylum, which I suppose is precisely what it is. Its first movement contains a march theme, iterated and endlessly reiterated, often described as “deliberately banal”. It is accompanied by a martial side drum, and it occurred to me on Saturday that Shostakovich borrowed the idea from Ravel’s Bolero. Just a thought. Bartok, it is said, parodied the theme in the fourth movement of his Concerto for Orchestra. Bartok’s orchestra appears to mock the theme’s banality, deliberate or otherwise. If it’s true, I’m not sure Bartok should have done that. Poor Shostakovich was an anguished soul. But composers have a track record of being unkind to one another. Didn’t Stravinsky mock Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, and tell us all to take along our Kleenex?
Is preparation for war a self-fulfilling prophecy, or is it, as Winston said, the sole guarantor of peace? Do we appease an aggressor, or show ourselves ready to stand up to him? Maybe we need to do both; hope for the best, but plan for the worst. But hoping is not the same as planning, and if we put 3.5% of GDP into defence, we are being gloomed up that we will need to “make some tough decisions”. Whilst bemoaning the state of the world, my friend in Ardnamurchan said wistfully, “Why can’t we all just get along together?”
The answer is like that overturned coke bottle, blowing in the wind.
