Having endured a summer of UK Labour
Party supporters ranting at each other on FB with previously unseen levels of
vitriolic abuse about who should or should not be their leader, I shall be
enormously grateful when next week arrives and the equally emotive US
Presidential Election is more or less settled, too.
The two contests, the Labour one and the
US Presidential one, are more similar than one might imagine in that they are
both intense arguments between people as to which faction on what is broadly the
same side should be in charge. The only real difference being that in the
Labour party the two sides are on the political left and in the US the two
sides are on the political right.
My own political view is more central
than any in either of these contests and I have held or hold no voting right in
them. I remain an uninvolved observer and it is from this standpoint that I
make the following comments on the United States at election time, educated and
/ or inspired by the variety of threads and discussions I have e:overheard
between US citizens in recent weeks.
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From a British and French perspective,
it is obvious there is something seriously amiss with the healthcare system in
the US that anyone has to look at their pocket book to decide whether or not
they can get the medical treatment they need or that anyone could become
destitute through illness or accident and there is clearly a huge amount of
confusion and misinformation as to what the rules and therefore the costs
actually are.
That said, what is frankly astonishing
is the sheer selfishness of so many people who are unwilling to help share the
cost of providing treatment to those less fortunate than themselves. Medical
problems can befall anybody without their being at fault so, surely, it should
be a given that in any civilised country, especially one that purports to hold
to Christian values, such burden-sharing should be welcomed not vehemently railed
against.
There appears to be enormous distrust of
any system being introduced by any government that would level the healthcare
playing field. Particularly among Republicans this distrust manifests itself as
acute paranoia, tending people to batten down their own personal hatches and to
view anyone not closely blood-related as a dangerous enemy in their perceived
war against .... Well, it is unclear what the war is against but it is clearly
waged daily and with a fierceness I have never e:seen outside of the US.
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I read from someone proposing to
"make America great again", itself a peculiar slogan in that it
clearly indicates a view that America is currently less than impressive, a
claim that the US had been at some time "the envy of the world" and
it should fight to regain this position. I saw little point in advising this
person directly that I knew of nowhere that in my 54 year lifetime had envied a
country in which, amongst other things, so many people feel sufficiently
threatened on a daily basis that they require to carry guns or to keep them in
their homes to protect themselves and their families.
One only has to watch a selection of television
crime dramas from around the world to note the significant cultural difference
between European countries in which routinely armed police officers carry
weapons they rarely draw and the US where, it seems, firepower is represented
as indicative of authority more than the law itself and the firing of guns is
enthusiastically celebrated.
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What the hell is it with the United
States and transgender "bathrooms"?
Here in France it is common for public
loos to be unisex, equipped for those who wish to stand *and* for those who
wish to sit down, often without there being any divide other than the doors of
the cubicles in which those who wish to sit do so.
Urinal troughs or bowls are fixed to a
wall and the men who make use of them are facing that wall and their
"private" parts remain so by dint of being obscured by their bodies.
Men and women wishing to use the cubicles simply walk behind them and society
does not crumble.
Slightly less commonplace but far from
unusual is the public loo that has the urinal visible from outside. Again,
those who wish to use it are facing it and their "private" parts
remain so by dint of being obscured by their bodies. Passers-by do just that,
they pass by and society does not crumble.
Where nominally gender-specific separate
facilities are provided and one facility is oversubscribed so prospective users
of it avail themselves of any overcapacity that may exist in the adjacent
facility society still doesn't crumble.
I can only assume that American males,
for it seems to be they who are most outraged by gender indistinction, despite
their overt machismo are in fact sufficiently insecure in themselves that they
fear contagion will somehow ensue from the nearness of anyone displaying, or
having hidden, any difference from them.
It is as if those intent on appearing
the most cocksure are not sure of anything, least of all the orientation of
their own cock, and that it is their deeply felt fear that this might be
discovered that leads them to make such public insistence that their
masculinity is heterosexually aligned that they become perpetual caricatures of
this tradition.
I am not suggesting homophobia,
transphobia or any other similar phobias do not exist at all in France, just
that a very much higher percentage of the population here really couldn't give
a monkey's what someone else is because they don't believe what other people
are makes any difference to who they themselves are and they accept that
everyone needs to go to the toilet now and again and that it is nothing to do
with sex.
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I was also inspired to watch a BBC
documentary largely focused upon Steven Anderson, a proudly homophobic
"fire and brimstone" preacher and Pastor of the Faithful Word worship
club in the Tempe suburb of Phoenix Arizona. A more hateful and unchristian
individual would be hard to find and I don't advocate anyone wasting their
precious time by viewing his many posted rants and rages, not least because he
gauges his success by the number of hits he gets, irrespective of whether the
viewer or listener is astonished and offended by his raving or whether they
echo his spiteful sentiment.
Were Mr Anderson to pay more attention
to the real world than the virtual one he might notice his clubhouse is not
enormous and many seats remain empty during his performances, but he is unlikely
to acknowledge such an obvious clue as to the level of support he genuinely
enjoys and is unlikely to consider for a moment that the majority of his online
viewers are likely to have clicked on his uploads out of curiosity alone and do
not share his beliefs.
It is no surprise that Anderson holds
that only one version of the bible is worthy of belief, the one the English
King James commissioned the writing of back in 1604 and that took seven years
to evolve to his satisfaction such that it received his seal of approval for
publication in 1611, no surprise he discounts all of the versions that existed
and differed from it during the 1611 years prior to its issue and no surprise
he pays no heed to the fact that none of them were around when the key character
in whom club members are supposed to believe was alive.
Even if one were to accept Anderson's
view that King James' was the only Version worth the paper it is printed on,
one might note how selectively he preaches from it. A key example being, to anyone
who, like Anderson, hold's Paul's input as equal to the Jesus character's, that
one of Anderson's most famous and newsworthy sermons was one small legal step
back from inciting the murder of President Obama despite Romans 13 clearly stating
"the powers that be are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth the
power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to
themselves damnation." Which, to be honest, is pretty straightforward.
Obviously this passage was retained in
the KJV to give King James divine authority to govern on earth but, to any
literalist, it applies equally to any who hold positions of power anywhere and
thus would bestow a similar divine authority to govern locally upon any
President of the United States, too. You don't have to be theologian to spot
that all of Romans is instruction from Paul to early Christians living in Rome
on how to blend in, to not make waves and generally to be neatly oppressed and
good servants of the Roman Empire, much if not most of this instruction being
in clear contrast to that given by the Jesus bloke who was all about equality.
It should also be noted that Anderson
gratefully received a gift of an AR-15 assault rifle, presumably in recognition
of his services to homophobia, during a seminar of similar worship club "leaders".
Otherwise notable from the documentary
was the interpretation of free speech that enables individuals and groups in
the US to very publicly insult passers-by at random according to their
perceived religion or sexual orientation, often using electronic equipment to amplify
their voices to make themselves heard over the general hubbub of a busy thoroughfare.
All of these hate-preachers in the documentary considered themselves to be doing
their bit to "make America great again" while serving no practical
purpose.
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I am sure the majority of American
citizens who will cast their vote for a Democrat or a Republican to be their
next President are quite reasonable people who just want to be able to get on
with a job of work, look after themselves and their families and not have to
worry about whether or not they are tooled-up when they go out or whether they
can afford to get proper medical attention should they require it, just as they
want to enjoy having somewhere comfortable to live into old age, to have enough
healthy food to eat and for their children to receive a proper education, and I
doubt very much that anyone wants to feel threatened by the police who they employ
to protect them.
Sadly, most of what I have seen in the
run up to this election is a ridiculous amount of internal argument, a large
number of people reverting to immediate insult on a largely homophobic basis in
the event of disagreement and a remarkable degree of ignorance. If even a
quarter of the effort that is currently expended on insult were to be directed
toward constructive discussion and even half the money wasted on worship clubs
were diverted toward the common good I could imagine America could achieve a good
few positive steps toward achieving a feeling of shared greatness that would be
of genuine benefit to future generations.
As it is, the apparent entrenchment of
the two principal and increasingly polarised parties that are the Democrats and
the Republicans is not serving to improve the lot of the average citizen in the
slightest. I do feel genuinely disheartened that any citizenry should waste the
opportunity it has every day to collaborate with itself in pursuing shared
goals and instead let itself so easily be diverted into mudslinging and unproductive
separation into factions, each blaming another for its own failure to disengage
from the imagining of spurious enemies, fictional external forces at work to destroy
the fabric of their society that they have themselves allowed to become threadbare
by their distraction from its maintenance.
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If I had to pick a side in this upcoming
election I would support the Democrats because they are closer to the centre
ground than the Republicans. They are still a way to the right of me but
nowhere near as far as the Republicans. On average, too, I have read a great
deal more in the way of reasoned argument coming from the Democrat side and a
great deal more in the way of paranoid hatred and insult coming from the
Republicans. Neither presidential candidate has the magic power to suddenly make
everybody in the United States wealthy but only one would be well received
worldwide and thus be able to negotiate anything that might be of benefit.
There may well be millions of American
misogynists who can laugh off Trump's attitude to women but they should remember
that the President of the United States of America also has to work outside of
the country if they are to improve its international standing, to engage with
the wider world where there are many heads of state and holders of other key
negotiating positions who are women. Anyone who thinks they, or the majority of
males in positions of power, will be impressed and positively disposed toward a
man who has boasted of sexual assault is really not thinking clearly.
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I don't believe in gods, I am not that
kind of pastor, but I have read the book most wield as their authority to teach
and I know well enough what it says to understand what it was made the Jesus
guy popular. It was his talking down religious hierarchy and bigging up
individual conscience, the general idea being to respect everyone equally and
to support those less able to support themselves, thus benefitting society as a
whole as opposed to just adding to the wealth of the already rich. It's not
socialism, it is humanity. Socialism is what the UK Labour Leadership battle
was about and is a very long way to the left of the US Democrats.
