Thanksgiving in the USA (1)
November 19th, 2016 by Roger Darlington
For some time, it has been on my bucket list that I should enjoy a Thanksgiving dinner in the USA. I’ve seen this event in so many American television shows and movies and it looks such a lot of fun, so I persuaded my good American friends Mike and Laura Grace to invite me over for the festive event. Little did I know at the time that my visit would come less than two weeks after Donald Trump would be elected the next president of the country and leader of the free world in the most surprising and astonishing electoral upset of modern times. This will be my ninth visit to the United States over a period of 46 years.
Thanksgiving is celebrated mainly in Canada and the United States but also in a small number of other countries including Granada, Liberia and St Lucia. In Canada, since 1957 it is held on the second Monday of October, while in the USA since 1942 it takes place on fourth Thursday of November (go figure!). In the United States, the festival is said to date back to 1621 when the Pilgrims gave thanks for a good harvest. Originally a religious event, Thanksgiving has long been a secular occasion which is at least as popular as Christmas.
There are all sorts of traditions associated with the event. Some cities hold Thanksgiving parades. Football (the American version) plays a major role. Since Ronald Reagan was President, the country’s leader pardons a turkey which is allowed to live rather than be eaten – unlike over 50 million other birds nationwide. Millions and millions of Americans travel back to the family home to celebrate the event with lots of traditional food. In short, the day is one for family, feasting and football.
I fly today – once I have finished my full English breakfast here at Heathrow …
Posted in American current affairs, My life & thoughts | Comments (3)
Will we ever see a moron in the White House?
November 18th, 2016 by Roger Darlington
After every recent presidential election, this quote does the rounds on the Net:
“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
H. L. Mencken (1920)
But is this quote real? It seems too smart to be true. But it is true – as explained here.
Not surprisingly, the Mencken quote has had fresh currency with the recent election of Donald Trump. Of course, Trump is many things – but is he a moron?
The Wikipedia page on Trump states:
“Trump attended Fordham University in the Bronx for two years, beginning in August 1964. He then transferred to the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, which offered one of the few real estate studies departments in United States academia at the time. While there, he worked at the family’s company, Elizabeth Trump & Son, named for his paternal grandmother. Trump graduated from Wharton in May 1968 with a Bachelor of Science degree in economics.”
Now the gardener Chance in the 1979 film “Being There” was a moron – but that was fiction. right? Maybe it would be safer to have a moron in the White House …
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I’ve been thinking about Naples …
November 18th, 2016 by Roger Darlington
My mother, Anna Maria Romano, was born and brought up in Naples, Italy, and did not leave the city until in late 1946 she married my father who was stationed there with the post-war Royal Air Force. Over this summer and autumn, I have been reading all 1700 pages of the four ‘Neapolitan novels’ written by Elena Ferrante.
As a result, I’ve been thinking about Naples which I have only visited twice – when I was four (1952) and when I was almost 14 (1962). In the latter case, I kept a diary (indeed I have kept a diary ever since) and I’ve just been reading it.
The diary is written in a small notebook which came with a pencil fitted along the spine, so it is written in pencil which makes it a little hard to read these days. I recorded that the notebook cost one shilling and three pence.
While my mother took the coach from Manchester (where we lived) to London with my younger sister and brother, for complicated reasons I travelled alone overnight by train to the capital. It was my first visit to London and I marvelled at Buckingham Palace, the Houses of Parliament and the Underground.
In Naples, we stayed with my grandmother who lived in a small flat on the third floor of a housing block near Piazza Tribunali. All four of us slept in the same bed: two at the top and two at the bottom.
The diary contains some fascinating assessments such as “There is no doubt that Italy is different [from Britain] but I like it” and “There are many more pretty girls in Naples than in Savona [which we visited first]”. On the one hand, I noted “Naples is generally scruffy, with narrow streets, litter and many beggars” but, on the other hand, I described the place as “a really exciting and beautiful city”.
Although I have not returned to Naples in the intervening 54 years, those images live in my memory and my mother’s life there and in the UK very loosely inspired one of my short stories, “A Life In A Box”, which you can read here.
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Zadie Smith’s “NW” novel and television adaptation
November 17th, 2016 by Roger Darlington
Zadie Smith is one of Britain’s finest novelists and her work is distinguished by the multicultural nature of the milieu of. and characters in, her work.
Her fourth novel was titled simply “NW” – a reference to the part of London featured in the book – and I read and enjoyed it almost three years ago. This week, BBC2 television broadcast an accomplished adaptation of the work which impressed me.
You can read my review of the novel here and find a review of the television adaptation here.
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)
Have we lost control of the Net?
November 16th, 2016 by Roger Darlington
It may be that we never really had control but, in the last few months, there have been some major danger signs that control is becoming less and less meaningful. That’s not a reason not to use the Net, but it is certainly a reason for Governments, companies and end users to be really careful and take all appropriate precautionary measures.
You can read a column that I have just written on this subject here.
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Who are Reince Priebus and Stephen Bannon?
November 15th, 2016 by Roger Darlington
Now that the world is having to come to terms with the election of Donald Trump as the President-elect of the United States, there is intense interest in whom he is going to appoint to advise him and serve in his cabinet.
We have the first two names: Reince Priebus, 44 year old Chairman of the Republican National Committee, will be Chief of Staff and Stephen Bannon, 62 year old Executive Chairman of the website Beitbart News, will become Chief Strategist and Senior Counsellor.
Priebus is a Washington insider and mainstream Republican figure (not that this will reassure Democrats and liberals), but Bannon is an extreme figure seen as a leader of the so-called “alt-right” movement whose appointment has created a range of reactions from deep worry to outright terror. It is unclear how well these two – whom Trump calls “equal partners” – will work together in office. But these are names we will hear a lot and people we need to understand.
You can find profiles of the two men and selected quotes from them here.
Posted in American current affairs | Comments (0)
Word of the day: syzygy
November 14th, 2016 by Roger Darlington
In astronomy, a syzygy (from the Ancient Greek suzugos meaning, “yoked together”) is a straight-line configuration of three celestial bodies in a gravitational system.
The word is often used in reference to the Sun, Earth, and either the Moon or a planet, where the latter is in conjunction or opposition.
Such a configuration explains why this evening we will experience a phenomenon known as a “super moon” when the moon will be the closest to Earth since 1948 (the year of my birth). More information here.
Posted in Cultural issues, Science & technology | Comments (0)
A review of the new sci-fi movie “Arrival”
November 12th, 2016 by Roger Darlington
If there is life on other planets, the laws of physics suggest that they’ll never make it here. But, if they do, the big problem will be communication. This is the issue at the heart of “Arrival” which has had great reviews but left me disappointed. You can read my review here.
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)
U.S. presidential election (37): why the Electoral College should be scrapped and why it won’t be
November 11th, 2016 by Roger Darlington
The counting is not quite over in the US presidential election but it looks as if Donald Trump won a comfortable majority in the Electoral College but Hillary Clinton won 200,000 or so more votes nationwide. How can this be? It’s because of how the Electoral College works.
The President is not elected directly by the voters but by an Electoral College representing each state on the basis of a combination of the number of members in the Senate (two for each state regardless of size) and the number of members in the House of Representatives (roughly proportional to population). The District of Columbia, which has no voting representation in Congress, has three Electoral College votes. In effect, therefore, the Presidential election is not one election but 51.
The total Electoral College vote is 538. This means that, to become President, a candidate has to win at least 270 electoral votes. The voting system awards the Electoral College votes from each state to delegates committed to vote for a certain candidate in a “winner take all” system, with the exception of Maine and Nebraska (which award their Electoral College votes according to Congressional Districts rather than for the state as a whole).
This system of election means that a candidate can win the largest number of votes nationwide but fail to win the largest number of votes in the Electoral College and therefore fail to become President. Indeed, in practice, this has happened four times in US history: 1876, 1888, 2000 and now 2016.
If this seems strange (at least to non-Americans), the explanation is that the ‘founding fathers’ who drafted the American Constitution did not wish to give too much power to the people and so devised a system that gives the ultimate power of electing the President to members of the Electoral College. The same Constitution, however, enables each state to determine how its members in the Electoral College are chosen and since the 1820s states have chosen their electors by a direct vote of the people. The United States is the only example in the world of an indirectly elected executive president.
In the event that the Electoral College is evenly divided between two candidates or no candidate secures a majority of the votes, the constitution provides that the choice of President is made by the House of Representatives and the choice of Vice-President is made by the Senate. In the first case, the representatives of each state have to agree collectively on the allocation of a single vote. In the second case, each senator has one vote.
Clearly the Electoral College is utterly inappropriate to the modern age and it has delivered the ‘wrong’ result in two of the last four elections. Opinion polls show substantial support for a direct presidential election. So the system should be changed, right? It won’t be though because a change will require an amendment to the US Constitution and, in the current divisive political situation of the USA, any substantive change to the Constitution is effectively impossible to achieve.
Of course, the Constitution could be changed – but this is really difficult. First, a proposed amendment has to secure a two-thirds vote of members present in both houses of Congress. Then three-quarters of the state legislatures have to ratify the proposed change (this stage may or may not be governed by a specific time limit). Even the Equal Rights Amendment failed to meet these thresholds after a 10 year process.
There have been 27 amendments to the US Constitution (although one was simply a repeal of another). The first 10 amendments – constituting the Bill of Rights – were taken together shortly after the drafting of the original Constitution. Of the other 17 (effectively 16), one was the abolition of slavery, but this took half a century and a bloody civil war. Other amendments brought about woman’s suffrage (1920) and votes for those aged 18 (1971), but these were simply measures introduced about the same time in other democratic states.
My proposition is that any constitutional change that is controversial – for instance, longer terms for Congressmen or strong controls on election expenditure or effective controls on gun ownership or abolition of the Electoral College– is effectively impossible to achieve. This makes the US Constitution the oldest and most inflexible in the world and in large part explains why the US political system is dysfunctional and will remain so.
Posted in American current affairs | Comments (7)
U.S. presidential election (36): stop the world, I wanna get off
November 9th, 2016 by Roger Darlington
I spent the whole of last night at the Marylebone Sports Bar and Grill in central London with a few hundred Americans resident in Britain – all Democrats wanting a victory by Hillary Clinton. I arrived about 10.15 pm and stayed until the place closed at 5.30 am, so it was 6.20 am before I reached my bed.
It was a noisy affair with so many excited people and dozens of screens showing live coverage of the election results on CNN. I tweeted 11 times in the course of the evening. All my tweets come up on my Facebook page and I received a number of comments from friends in both the UK and the USA who had also stayed up for the results.
It was a surprising and depressing result. The polls got it completely wrong and across the democratic world we are finding that political polling is much less accurate than it was.
Donald Trump’s victory is astonishing. For someone who has never held elected office, has such a chequered business career, did not publish his tax returns, insulted almost every demographic constituent in the election, was so extreme in his policies when they were clear, and was so vague about his policies in so many crucial areas, for this person to beat one of the most experienced politicians ever to run for the White House is simply breathtaking.
For those, like me, who vehemently opposed his candidature but wishes America and the world well, we have to hope that he will pull back from many of his more extreme positions in the face of the realities of power and that he will appoint experienced and wise colleagues who will be able and ready to counsel him. We have to hope this because his tenure will profoundly affect the whole world and we have nowhere else to go.
There’s been a spike in views of my short guide to the American political system and I’ve just updated it to take account of the election result.
Posted in American current affairs | Comments (8)