Unconvinced.

Remember, remember the 5th of November, gunpowder, treason, and plot.

On November 5, 2024 the people of the United States of America went to the polls. Representative democracy offers, perhaps, the illusion of choice more than actual empowerment, but in this particular election there seemed to be a very clear right and wrong answer to the question of who should be permitted to take the reins of the most powerful country on earth. To the world’s dismay, the people of the United States of America chose carelessness and cruelty, vulgarity and viciousness, arrogance and aggression. These were to be the defining values and the hallmark principles of the American administration for the next four years.

So far, they have not disappointed. On the campaign trail they had given fairly clear fascist signals, along with the requisite but lacklustre denials of being officially associated with the blueprint for fascist rule that was the infamous Project 2025, and once in power the administration began to govern precisely as one would have expected. The world’s richest man was allowed to take a chainsaw to government aid spending, funding for universities was frozen, universities were sued, resources for national parks were gutted. Under the catch-all phrase “anti-wokeness” – a weasel word if ever there was one – a campaign of whitewashing and historical revisionism was launched that extended not only to schools and universities but to museums as well, including the Smithsonian. Politicians, rather than historians were to be the arbiters of knowledge. And, of course, the budget for Immigration Customs and Enforcement, which has become a de facto Secret State Police, has swelled to gargantuan proportions.

Cruelty, as several commentators have observed over the last year, was the point. This should surprise no one. The individual who holds the highest political office in that country was known, long before his foray into the political fray, as someone who took delight in humiliating and demeaning others. This is also, perhaps, why the relentless campaign by some of Trump’s opponents to mock his voice and his mannerisms has proven so ineffective. The sphere of mockery and belittlement is one in which he excels, and the overall effect is one in which human life and human dignity are more generally eroded. One could hardly imagine, today, what it would take for a repeat of the scene in which Joseph Welch faced off against Joseph McCarthy. “Have you, at long last sir, no sense of decency?”

Decency, indeed, is what is missing. Assassinations and executions are turned, without any intervening time for grief, into political litmus tests. The devaluing of individual life is repeated, on the global stage, with brutal invasions of sovereignty. The old game of pretending that there was some kind of international law, or rules of warfare, has long since been abandoned. Greed and cruelty rule the roost, although the antiquated language of moral pretense does make an appearance every now and again; when it is convenient. The crimes of Maduro or Khameini, for example, may be mentioned in passing, as an afterthought justification for invasions whose motives almost certainly lie elsewhere.

The latest bombing of which I am aware, as this post is being written, is that of Iran, in relation to which the film Wag the Dog sprang almost instantly to mind. “A political term for the act of creating a diversion from a damaging issue through military force.” Connecting the bombing of Iran with the Epstein files does not really seem to be an outrageous leap. Now, there does have to be some sort of plausibility for a story to sell, and Ali Khameini does make a compelling figure as the face of evil. There are Iranians in the diaspora who are celebrating his death, which is understandable, but also seems somewhat premature. The death of a despot does not entail a necessary change in regime, nor does it automatically guarantee that things will improve for Iranian people. Particularly when the ongoing strikes against Iran include hospitals, schools, and residential areas.

I was in high school during the Iraq war, and among my classmates there were those who rather gleefully asserted that the Americans should just “turn Iraq into a parking lot.” I assumed that this was because they were dullards whose sense of decency had been eroded by too many hours of Call of Duty or some other nonsensical product of the military-entertainment complex. They were also not speaking entirely in earnest, and, if pressed, would certainly not admit that they were okay with the slaughtering of civilians, of women and children. The problem however, is that nobody is being pressed. We need to have our feet held to the coals of moral fire, and in the world where entertainment and news are blended together, that simply is not being done and has not been done for a very long time.

We needed to have a serious, society led conversation about journalistic integrity; especially in the wake of the betrayals effected by journalists during the Iraq war. Instead we were treated to the carnival barking about fake news by right-wing pundits who had no interest in the truth, but simply wanted to secure a position for their own propaganda in the media landscape. The opportunity for that more fundamental conversation slipped away, as the political sideshow became more and more shrill and peppered with the frequent use of overblown and sensationalist rhetoric. Instead of elevating the discourse, it was dragged into the mud. I have lost count now of how many articles I have seen in the past few years with a headline in which “X figure SLAMS Y figure.” Politics is treated with all the gravitas of World Wrestling Entertainment or late 90s reality television. And, yes, we are living in that timeline where a reality television star known principally for firing people is the President of the United States of America, and one of the founders of World Wrestling Entertainment is now in charge of that country’s education system.

What this says about the state of the world is quite alarming. Do we have the necessary attention span to even begin to deal with some of the unfolding crises? There are people who legitimately need help and aid; people who are being starved, bombed, and brutalized, but our attention is drawn to the battles of the behemoths. This, of course, is not new, and the fault does not entirely lie with the current American administration. I still remember being troubled by Bush’s language of the “war on terror,” and Obama’s promise to “degrade and destroy ISIS.” Obviously terrorist attacks are bad. Obviously the Islamic State was and remains an incredibly cruel organization. But it has never seemed sensible to me that more truth and beauty can be brought into the world by increasing the amount of death and destruction. Or, to put it differently, winning the war does not guarantee winning the peace. There is vital work of building trust, empowering people, and working towards justice that simply cannot be achieved with weapons. A descent into cruelty will not make the world a better place.

I am not saying that I am opposed to all forms of dialectical movement or paradox. I think often of the scene in which Unamuno was confronted by fascists clamouring with the slogan “Long Live Death” and “Death to the Intellectuals.” Unamuno’s response was “You will win, because you possess enough brute force, but you will never convince.”

This is where I am at. Unconvinced in the world of brute force, the world of cruelty and indecency. Unconvinced by the carnival show of power, the weak storylines of brutal bodies slamming into one another on the basis of a paper thin justification. Unconvinced that a world in which people do not mourn is a real world at all.