How dangerous is Trump?

I'm useless at reading the mood of the American public. Wherever the pulse of the US voter is, my finger is nowhere near it. But it turns out I’m not alone – no one saw Trump coming.

Who are these potential Republican voters who are keeping him at the top of the opinion polls? Why would Christians like him, or tea-party types? Rick Santorum has a 25-year marriage, 7 children by the same wife, and solid conservative positions on all the issues that have apparently been stirring up the Republican base since Reagan first mobilized the ‘moral majority’. The libertarian Rand Paul plans to curtail the power of the government, promising to reduce America’s military commitments abroad and its prison population at home, while cutting taxes and welfare. But in the polls they’re both nowhere, along with a dozen others.

The fact that I personally don’t like Trump is, of course, entirely beside the point. I didn’t like George W Bush either, but I can see why he got conservative voters excited with his cowboy boots and cheeky Texan grin and his recovered-alcoholic born-again credentials. Why don’t those same voters see Trump as a sleazy rootless urbanite who shouts Big Government every time he opens his big mouth promising to fix something?

Of course, what Trump would actually do, if by some weird mischance he found himself elected President, is anybody’s guess. Most candidates trade in vague aspirations and make promises they would never be able to fulfil. But they generally attach themselves to some value system – theological or economic – or at least stitch together some unlikely rags-to-riches story to affirm their belief in the American Dream. Trump doesn’t seem to do any of this.

It makes you suspect that for a lot of Republican voters the traditional ideological issues have just been flags of convenience all along. Trump’s rivals earnestly flourish their Bibles and their copies of the American Constitution and the public isn’t buying because Trump is giving them permission to let their ids off the leash. Meanwhile, the serious money men, who think of themselves as the Republican establishment and don't care a jot about constitutional or ethical issues, just want a president who can be relied on to cut taxes, reduce regulations and keep America and the world open for business. Trump can’t be relied on to do anything except promote Trump.

Of course poll numbers are not delegates. Trump knows how to draw a crowd, offering a potent mixture of jokes and outrage with the occasional opportunity to rough up a heckler – all these delights without being required to think. And when asked, in the casual way of opinion polls, which of this long list of candidates they’d most like see in the White House, a lot of people probably just opt for the name they recognize. Winning caucuses and primaries is a different matter. And even if Trump pulls it off and gets to be the nominee, current polling suggests that he's alienated too many voters to beat either Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders.

Hillary accuses him of being a recruiting tool for jihadis, but it’s hard to believe that Trump's bombast does more damage to relations with the Islamic world than bombing raids and drone strikes. Even so, he shouldn't be dismissed as a joke. To American Muslims he’s doing actual harm, having appointed himself cheerleader-in chief for hate crime. He’s also lowered the level of public discourse to the point where discriminatory policies are being given serious airtime.

And if his campaign implodes before the Republican convention, there’s a seemingly more plausible candidate poised to gather up his supporters. Ted Cruz as President – now that's a really scary thought. I can't imagine why anyone would vote for him. But what do I know?

Why are we still talking about this?

When I was a child ‘correct’ was for sums and spelling. In novels, people who upheld old-fashioned standards of social behaviour were sometimes called ‘correct’. At some point in the 70s some people on the Left started scrutinising each other’s language for deviations from a new kind of correctness.

In the 1950s Nancy Mitford had popularised the class distinction (first defined by the linguist Alan Ross) between U and non-U vocabulary. Now we had PC versus non-PC, a whole new way to make people feel bad about the way they spoke. The phrase was always going to be a hostage to fortune. There’s something joyless about enforcing correctness – it feels like a narrow achievement.

It wasn’t aimed at the grosser forms of verbal abuse – governments were passing laws against sexual harassment and incitement to racial hatred – and it didn’t touch circles not already inclined to watch their language. As the American sociologist and cultural commentator Todd Gitlin put it, the Left ‘marched on the English Department while the Right took Washington’.

I don’t know how these things went in America, but in Britain, by the 1980s, with Thatcher in power and Murdoch buying up the press, political correctness was regularly being mocked in the tabloids with tales of the ‘looney left’. Apparently the Inner London Education Authority had forbidden teachers to speak of blackboards. ‘Chalkboard’ was the preferred PC usage. Was this true? Who knows?

Political correctness was always a redundant concept. Its territory was already covered by three other categories: accuracy, politeness, and euphemism. All the satirical jokes came under the third heading – calling short people ‘vertically challenged’, for example. As for accuracy and politeness, they’re timeless values that need no apology, though they probably demand more conscious effort in inclusive, multicultural times.

Having been taken over by the Right as a stick to beat lefties with, PC was long ago rendered meaningless by misapplication and overuse. Any perceived infringement on individual liberty, from the arrest of a householder for shooting a burglar to the EU’s legendary ruling against curvy bananas, might be condemned in The Daily Mail or The Sun as ‘political correctness gone mad’ (as if those papers recognised any sane kind).

Forty years on, you’d think the concept would have burnt itself out. Who would have imagined that it could form the basis of a whole US presidential campaign? Overthrowing political correctness has become Trump’s only coherent promise to the nation. Vote for me, he seems to say, and you too will be free to spread slanderous generalisations about Mexicans, make up statistics about black crime, insult women for not being attractive enough, impersonate disabled people, and finally come out of the closet about hating Muslims.

Speaking in Donald Trump’s support last week, Republican Senator Steve King said that ‘political correctness has people walking on eggshells’. How squeamish they must be about causing offence, these Trump supporters, and how they must long to be liberated from the anxiety of hurting other people’s feelings. A vote for Trump means never having to say you’re sorry.

Undergraduate poem comes to light

In 1811, Percy Bysshe Shelley was expelled from Oxford for writing a pamphlet promoting atheism. This wasn’t his first offence. A few months earlier, a seditious poem of his had been published anonymously with the title On the Existing State of Things. For two centuries, all copies were thought to have been destroyed. Now one has been acquired by the Bodleian Library.

A newly discovered poem by Shelley is literary news. A few commentators have also been excited by the way its radicalism resonates in our own times. A reference to a victim of imperial expansion, who

… in the blushing face of day

His wife, his child, sees sternly torn away; 

Yet dares not to revenge, while war’s dread roar

Floats, in long echoing, on the blood-stain’ed shore 

spoke to some of Syrian refugees and, specifically, of 3-year-old Aylan Kurdi, washed up on a Turkish beach. Such images haunt us, and it doesn’t take much to bring them to mind. 

When it comes to human suffering, there’s no question that 18-year-old Shelley’s heart was in the right place. He was in favour of 'peace, love, and concord' and opposed to tyranny. None of this is surprising. More interesting are the ways in which the poem fails.

Written in heroic couplets, it harks back to the style that dominated English poetry in the 18th century. The more brilliant exponents of the form shaped it into a perfect vehicle for satirical argument. Alexander Pope’s couplets are crafted so that every word counts and the music of metre and rhyme seem effortless. In his Essay on Man he describes humankind as 

Created half to rise, and half to fall;

Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;

Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled;

The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!

What in Pope’s hands seem easy, other notable writers failed to achieve. Samuel Johnson, celebrated for his prose more than for his verse, began his poem, The Vanity of Human Wishes (based on Juvenal’s Tenth Satire) like this: 

Let Observation with extensive view

Survey Mankind from China to Peru.

Coleridge would later expose the emptiness of this couplet, by rewriting it: 'Let observation with extensive observation observe mankind extensively.'

With his friend Wordsworth, Coleridge was engaged in revolutionising poetry, writing about the lives of ordinary people in accessible language and using verse forms drawn from oral tradition. It’s puzzling, then, to see Shelley, a young radical of the next generation, reaching back to a form fashionable in the previous century to make his radical statement, and importing with it a lofty tone and a weakness for abstraction.

Nothing here suggests that its author would go on to produce a poem such as Ozymandias, which says more in 14 lines about the destruction of tyranny than On the Existing State of Things manages in 172. And it does nothing to stave off a time when Percy Bysshe might be referred to as 'husband of the visionary novelist, Mary Shelley'.

Strange motivations

I’m grateful to the novelist James Meek for introducing me to a new critical term. Reviewing Jonathan Franzen’s Purity (‘From Wooden to Plastic’, LRB, 24/09/15), Meek writes that the first appearance of Leila Helou “is couched in the leaden terms of the Unaccountably Disrupted Normal: ‘Ordinarily, Leila looked forward to travelling on assignment…. But from the moment she arrived in Amarillo, on a commuter jet from Denver, something felt different.’”

I’d been reading William Boyd’s latest novel Sweet Caress: the many lives of Amory Clay (Bloomsbury, 2015) and had just marked this passage: “It was proving to be the strangest day, with my emotions veering around from soft and silly to cynical and uncaring; and my sense of adult responsibility seemingly switched off – what was I doing on this bike with Oberkamp heading to Highway 22? It was as if I was in some hallucinatory state.” By chance, Meek had provided me with a name for what bothered me about Boyd’s sentence. Oberkamp, an Australian journalist with whom Amory, a British war photographer, has had a one-night affair, is pursuing his Vietnamese girlfriend through Vietcong territory. Amory may well wonder how he managed to talk her into going with him!

I’m inclined to think that the behaviour of fictional characters should be self-explanatory. If the writer has to spend time justifying unlikely turns in the plot, something’s gone wrong. If a first-person narrator, as here, admits that her actions don’t make any sense, I want to say: if you don’t believe them why should I?

That’s my theoretical position, anyway. As a reader I find I’m much more easy-going. In some ways Boyd is a careless writer. But his brilliance more than compensates for his carelessness. I’m aware of the occasional rough patch but I keep reading. In fact, over the years I seem to have read all but a couple of his fourteen novels.

In The Blue Afternoon (Sinclair-Stevenson, 1993) Kay Fischer has been approached by a mysterious older man called Dr Salvador Carriscant. “I met Carriscant,” Kay tells us, “at the railroad station in Pasadena early in the morning. He had asked me to come with him to Santa Fe and, for some reason, and much to my astonishment, I agreed at once…”

One benefit of Kay’s astonishing compliance is that, as readers, we get to see what happens in Santa Fe. Likewise when Amory gets on the back of Oberkamp’s motorbike we all go along for the ride.

As a justification perhaps this puts too much emphasis on Boyd’s carelessness and not enough on his brilliance. There’s psychological insight here, as well as narrative convenience. Boyd gives us characters capable of sudden, reckless, self-damaging behaviour, whose lives are unexpectedly derailed by unconscious impulses. Some of his most memorable narrators look back on their lives as strangers to themselves, viewing the unlikely plot twists with as much wonder as we do.

Boyd reminds us that it isn’t only in bad fiction that the normal is sometimes unaccountably disrupted.

Tested to destruction

‘I have a higher IQ than Stephen Hawking. I have a higher IQ than Einstein.’  So said one of the boys competing in Channel 4’s Child Genius, which is run in association with Mensa, ‘the high IQ society’.   

Full disclosure: I have a lower IQ than either Hawking or Einstein. I know, because I was tested by an educational psychologist when I was 12 along with my three younger siblings – my mother probably negotiated a cut rate for the four of us.

Even fuller disclosure: I have a lower IQ than most of my siblings. You might think this explains why I believe IQs are a lot of hokum, and you may be right, though I’m inclined to attribute it to less subjective factors. I can’t remember what I thought about all this when I was 12, but since then I’ve interacted with a lot of people, and the idea that they could all be placed on a single scale and assigned a number that would tell me anything useful about them has come to seem increasingly absurd. I don’t mean to suggest that there aren’t plenty of people a lot cleverer than me in lots of different ways. But I do think the different ways are as important as the cleverness, which can reveal itself suddenly in unexpected moments, or slowly over time.

IQ testing was once integral to British education policy. It came to light decades ago that Cyril Burt, the psychologist behind the tripartite system of secondary education established by the 1944 act, had falsified his research. In The Mismeasure of Man, published in 1981, the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould raised the lid on the whole murky history of IQ testing, exposing the statistical fallacies, cultural assumptions and circular arguments on which the construct depends.

And yet as recently as 1994, a couple of American academics, Herrnstein and Murray, were willing to argue in The Bell Curve that IQ is real, measurable and resistant to change over generations – and that, by the way, the average IQ of African Americans was 15 points below that of white folks and likely to remain so.

At least Child Genius has a healthy ethnic mix. It is also essentially a game show, with ‘sudden death’ rounds that defy the most basic principles of educational testing, and therefore not to be taken seriously. It might be one of the more cruel examples of reality TV, exploiting children for our entertainment and turning their remarkable abilities into circus acts. But better that the concept of IQ should find its natural home here, alongside Big Brother and I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here, than influencing public policy.   

Truth-telling and the right to publish

This piece has previously appeared in the Bangladesh Daily Star

The career of the British concert pianist James Rhodes has been anything but conventional. He was more or less self-taught until he was 13. He never attended music college. After leaving school, he gave up the piano for more than ten years. 

Driven to reconnect with music if only vicariously, he approached the agent of the renowned pianist Grigory Sokolov, not for an audition, but merely hoping to get a job representing musicians. At his first meeting with Panozzo, the agent, Rhodes admitted to having played piano a bit as a child. Panazzo asked him to play something and, astounded to hear an amateur perform so well, fixed him up with a teacher. A few years later, Rhodes was signing recording deals and winning prizes.

If that sounds like a fairy tale, it’s one with its full share of darkness. When Rhodes set out to write a memoir, he decided to give an uncensored account of the repeated sexual abuse he had suffered in childhood, the physical and mental suffering it had caused him, and the way music had saved his life. For almost a year its publication was prevented by a court ruling, after his ex-wife argued that the book would harm their 11-year old son. In May of this year, that ruling was overturned by the UK Supreme Court. Instrumental is now set to be published by Canongate.

Autobiography has a long history. Over the centuries, powerful men have often been moved to reflect on how they achieved greatness. A very different impulse towards confession is reflected in a tradition of conversion stories, such Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, which John Bunyan wrote while in prison in the 1660s. Classic autobiographies have also been inspired by more material forms of salvation. Frederick Douglass, the African American orator and abolitionist, published his autobiography in 1845 with the subtitle: An American Slave.

Since the late twentieth century there has been an explosion in personal writing, often with an emphasis on stories of survival. These writers claim our attention because of what they endured rather than by the status they have subsequently achieved. Though there’s no shortage of celebrity memoirs, the interesting development has been these records of otherwise invisible lives.

The genre sometimes known as “misery lit” is open to satire. It’s also open to exploitation. When James Frey was discovered in 2006 to have exaggerated both his sins and his suffering in A Million Little Pieces, Oprah Winfrey expressed her outrage on behalf of the readers he had betrayed. The strength of this reaction was a reminder that, while we may require memoirs to engage us as novels do, their appeal rests on some level of factual accuracy. That is an essential part of their contract with the reader.

In the case of James Rhodes, the principle the Supreme Court upheld was the right of an individual to tell his or own story “in all its searing detail” for whoever wants to hear it.  

And now the news where we are

On the TV channel we were watching yesterday evening here in Santa Barbara (Monday 4 May) the news was dominated by three stories. First came the “Jihad Watch Muhammad Art Exhibit and Cartoon Contest” in Garland, Texas, organised by the American Freedom Defense Initiative, which turned out to be no joke when two men were shot dead outside.

When I checked it out this morning, Jihad Watch’s website was full of vitriolic attacks on the “sharia-compliant” Daily Mail for publishing a photo of the event with the cartoons blacked out. In this way I learnt that there really are people who despise the Mail for its political correctness – also that this news story had reached Britain.

So that was the first item. Third was the naming of the royal baby. Americans seem to love William and Kate – even though they've named their children after the royal couple on the wrong side of the Revolutionary War – and now, apparently, so do we. Because what's not to like? British republicans are having a thin time just now, in spite of the nation's temporary love affair with Plaid Cymru’s magnificent Leanne Wood who once referred to the Queen as Mrs Windsor.

Understandably there wasn’t time for any of this context on the American news programme, though a commentator did point out that Prince William drove the baby home from hospital himself, in contrast with the rather too regal Hillary Clinton who hasn’t touched a steering wheel in years.

Sandwiched between these two items was election news. Not our election, obviously. Two more presidential hopefuls had thrown their hats into the ring. As of yesterday there were three days left before the UK election and 564 before the US one. I suppose there must be some formula for weighing temporal immediacy against geographical distance. So far, anyway, Americans are more interested in their election than in ours. And they’re probably right to be, even though our own offers more hope and seems less predictable even at this late stage.  

It’s a dismal thought, but in global terms the result of the UK election is relatively insignificant. We’ll be making choices about austerity versus public investment, the tone of our engagement with Europe, and the survival or destruction of the NHS – things that matter a lot to us. But whoever wins is unlikely to bomb Iran.

There’s been a lot of scare-mongering back home about the danger of a left-of-centre coalition that might tie Miliband to more radical policies than Labour’s own. But here in America, where the old two-party system is still intact and the only coalitions are internal ones, the Republicans seem hopelessly entangled with the kind of people who sound off on the website of Jihad Watch, and whose hostility to fellow citizens who happen not to agree with them makes the SNP's quarrel with Westminster look like a Downton Abbey cricket match.  

When their election comes, American voters will have to choose between two capitalist imperialist parties, one less rational than the other. Let’s hope they choose wisely. They’ve only got 563 days left to make up their minds.