Uneasy Lies the Head

Philippine President Roderigo Duterte.

I think it is time to show some empathy for our leaders. They are human, after all.

Just imagine having to make the kind of decisions they must make in this pandemic. Choose lockdown, and you may wreck your economy, and lose your country’s position in the world. People may starve. You may cause a revolution. Choose to keep things open, and you may kill thousands, millions, of people. Nobody will be happy either way. And there is never enough information; there are no precedents.

Weeks ago, President Duterte of the Philippines, the notoriously tough guy, was already looking gaunt and tired. He was pleading with his own people for patience and understanding. A lockdown in the Philippines means people will quickly have no food. He has no money to give them, or to get masks, gowns, pills, or respirators. Even if a cure or a vaccine is found, he will have to wait in line until the rich countries have all the doses they need. There are no good options.

I think Donald Trump is cracking under the pressure. He has seemed superhuman in the past, able to stand his ground against all comers. But the stress has been showing recently. Hydrochloraquine has not been panning out; he had no doubt been hoping it would. Now he too has no good options. He was getting very aggressive towards the media at his daily pressers. They richly deserved it, but you got the feeling he was acting out some of his own stress. A few days ago, he lost concentration and said something offhand about injecting disinfectants. He was tired; who wouldn’t be tired? Now the press is trying to crucify him for it. All as he needs to make these terrifying decisions. And now they are blaming him for seeming to lack empathy. He seems to have lost his composure: he cut that press conference short, and now is saying he will hold them no longer. He excused his remark on disinfectants by claiming he was just being sarcastic towards the media. Not plausible; the villainy of the media has simply become an idee fixe for him.

I sense he has finally been pushed beyond the limits of human endurance. He needs sympathy, an outpouring of support, a rest, and the rest of us need to pray for him. If only for our own sake. The American media, of course, deserve condemnation. I hope he can hold himself together.

I find it hard to pity Justin Trudeau; he seems so insincere. And it is easier for him; as Canadian PM, all he needs to do is the usual: look at what the US is doing, and make the same announcement a few days later. But long before this started, he seemed to me a frightened little boy. “Frightened” may no longer be a strong enough word. I think he has detached himself, and is only reading things put in front of him.

Doug Ford, in his first press conference after the lockdown, seemed close to tears. Unlike Trump, he shows visible empathy. Like Trump, he also shows frustration: lashing out a few days ago at anti-lockdown protesters as “yahoos.” You can see he feels helpless.

But the leader I pity most is Kim Jong Un.

I have no insight into what is going on in North Korea. Multiple press reports say he is dead, or near death. But we know we cannot trust the media. The South Korean Government says they believe he is alive and well. But we know we cannot trust government intelligence.

My intuition is that Kim is still alive, but in grave condition, and not expected to recover. “Brain dead,” one of the rumours, may be right. My guess is that COVID-19 is probably there, as it is in every other country in the world, and the system has not been able to manage it. In early April, his guard detail were photographed wearing masks. If Kim caught it, he is fat, a smoker, with a heart condition.

The true situation has not been publicly announced, and the NK authorities are taking pains to go about their business as usual, because nobody else is yet in command; they need to settle that first. They do not want to send any signals that might give their people an idea that an uprising might succeed.

At this moment, then, Kim may be facing death. He is, in the end, a human being. He has committed unspeakable crimes, for a self-indulgent life. Now he must meet the reckoning. And it must be terrible.

The horror he is going through, and will go through, seems to me too awful to contemplate. The fact that he deserves it does not change that.

Queen Elizabeth I, it is said, died in terror, saying she would give her entire kingdom for just one more moment of life. And Elizabeth, although a far worse monarch than history remembers, was nevertheless not in Kim’ league.

He, more than anyone, is to be pitied.

Bad Times

The Seventies were a grim time. They were a decade of hangover from the Sixties. I gather the Fifties were awful too: soulless scientism and suburban sprawl. And a collapse of sexual morality. Everyone would surely say the same of the Dirty Thirties: mass unemployment and the rise of Fascism.

The twenty-teens seem to me to have emerged as similarly bad. 

The Fifties: artistically kind of sucky.

I wonder if we are in some regular twenty-year cycle?

The nineties may have been another depressed decade—the Clinton/Blair/Chretien years. I do not have a good fix on it; I mostly sat out the nineties in Asia. But that may be itself an indication: I needed to get out. It was too depressing in the West.

By “bad,” I mean depressed in the spiritual, not the economic, sense. These decades have been times in which North American and European society seemed to have lost their sense of purpose and direction. These were times adrift. Economic depression tends to come with this, but it is the sideshow, not the main event; and, I suspect, not cause but effect. Jimmy Carter sensed it, in the latter seventies, when he spoke of a social “malaise.” Kissinger expressed it when he spoke of himself as a modern Metternich, in the service of a declining empire.

The smiling face of the Seventies.

I suppose, being now in such a time, the useful thing to ponder is what in the past has pulled us out of such torpor. The mention of Jimmy Carter reminds us that, in the 80’s, it seems to have been new leadership. It was the strangely almost-simultaneous appearance of several strong leader figures, each in their way promising a new direction and a new beginning: Reagan, Thatcher, Pope John Paul II, Gorbachev, Deng Xiao Ping.

In the Sixties, it was more an artistic and cultural revival: the “counterculture” promised a new beginning, an Age of Aquarius. Rock/pop music, pop art, the Whole Earth Catalog, zines, and so on and on.

Suitable for colouring while on acid.

In the Forties, it was the unity and sense of purpose imposed by the need to take on the monstrous Nazis and their allies. Secondarily, this too led to the appearance of some inspiring leaders: Churchill, De Gaulle, Tito. Note that the major Fascist leaders emerged in the 20s and 30s. They were part of the malaise; they were not inspiring in the proper sense.

After the triangulation and fudgy “Third Way” if the nineties, the oughts restored clarity for a time with the need to respond to 9/11 and the rise of Islamist terror. The seeping of hi-tech into everyday life probably also generated some excitement about the future. That period of relative unity and optimism has now clearly dissipated.

What will pull things back into focus this time? Strong leaders with vision? Thatcher and Reagan, after all, were already visible in the wings in 1979; Churchill was long well-known in the 1930s.

Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, whatever else they represent, do not seem to offer any coherent and inspiring new vision. They are comic figures, only declaring the nonsensical nature of what is. I do not compare them with Hitler or Mussolini, as others do, but they still seem part of the malaise, not of the new morning.

Sanders and his like on the left? Perhaps I am unjustly prejudiced; I thought Reagan too was dangerously wrong with his “voodoo economics” before he rose to power. But apart from their pre-K understanding of economics, I do not think there is anything there, because there is no spiritual element or appeal. With successful revivals, there always is. For it is the spirit that must be moved.

I think Mad Max Bernier here in Canada is one figure who might have this inspirational dimension; but that is not yet clear. The “Mad” label is to his credit in this regard. The appeal would not be conventionally religious: rather to a cultural ideal. I think Tulsi Gabbard has potential in the current Democratic crop. Nobody notices, but her commitment to non-violence is obviously informed by her Hinduism. But such figures are for now on the fringes.

So what about religion as the source of our revival? What about the arts? It was the arts in the 60s. John Paul II may have been the one necessary ingredient to the Eighties revival, and just as possibly, John XXIII and his Vatican II was the critical factor that kicked off the 1960s.

Pope St. John XXIII

The Catholic Church, sadly, is currently in chaos. This is most troubling, because it is the single strongest religious voice in the world, let alone in the West. But Pope Francis gives no clear leadership.

Is there a figure in the Protestant tradition, or beyond? A Jonathan Edwards, a John Wesley, a Martin Luther King Jr.? Perhaps: I have one eye on William Lane Craig. To hear him tell it, something is percolating in Departments of Theology and Philosophy.

William Lane Craig

The arts, too, seem moribund. But there is probably something bubbling under the surface, struggling to break free. The arts are currently, as periodically happens, under the iron grip of “The Academy,” the art critics and academics, which do not understand the arts, and enforce conformity and mediocrity. But when this goes on long enough, there tends to be an eruption. An eruption seems overdue. I expected it in the 20-oughts. I expected it in the eighties.

The stuff in the galleries is obviously garbage. No sense of the beautiful, no sense of symbolism or vision or emotional connection, painfully clichéd and predictable. Decor. Generally making some obvious and tedious political statement.

Yet the stuff in the galleries is not representative of contemporary art. It is just the art that bureaucrats like; for bureaucrats control galleries. I follow a Facebook group of struggling visual artists. These folks in the artistic underground are inspiringly good. With the growth of social media, they are bound to break through soon.

So too with writing. I went last weekend to the Toronto Festival of Authors. It was not what it was when I left Toronto in the early nineties. Then, I could hope to see and hear someone I had actually read and enjoyed: Brian Moore, Ken Kesey, Timothy Findlay. There are no longer such figures. One reads new writing any more, it seems, out of a sense of obligation.

I attended the launch of The Best Canadian Poetry of 2019.  Decades ago, I was myself featured in the equivalent volume. It was about as much fun as a trip to the dentist. Several selected poets read their selected works. Each was less a poem than a gimmick: “conceptual art.” And even as gimmicks, painfully predictable. The first poem sounded like a dairy entry by an ordinary person on a perfectly ordinary day. Dull as daily life inevitably is; and that turned out to be the point. The final line was something like “just breathing in and out.” This is anti-art. This is just what art is meant to rescue us from.

The next poem was done as a flow chart. Vaguely interesting the first time I saw it done--back at Expo 67.

The next poem was a reflection on how incongruous it is to be thinking of Virgil in modern Toronto. The only point seemed to be to promote the poet as someone so sophisticated as to have read Virgil.

The poetry was so unpoetical that at one point, when this poet was reading an introduction to his poem, I thought it was the poem.

And the last poem was something intentionally incoherent in which every fifth word or so was replaced by the word “unknown”; sometimes in the plural. This, the poet explained beforehand, was a protest against torture and waterboarding. The target was apparently Donald Rumsfield, and his famous phrase about “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns.”

Leaving aside the fact that the poet completely missed Rumsfield’s point, which could have been an interesting one to consider, the poem was as obviously stale as a newspaper hot off the presses seventeen years ago.

But then, in despair for the state of poetry, I picked up a copy of the West Coast lit mag Geist, available free at the entrance. And it was solid. Subscribe and read.

It is not that the arts are dead; it is that they are suppressed. Something is liable soon to burst free.

And our sight may again be 2020.