What’s not to enjoy about driving along the arrow-straight roads of rural Victoria. There may not be much to look at but there’s so much to read. Indeed, some of the signage is rather helpful, even instructional – ‘Drinking. Driving. They’re better a part!’ (D’you think they got the letter spacing wrong there?) Other signs are a little more puzzling – ‘Water Over Road!’ or ‘Animal Help Line’. On the other hand some are handily topical, if somewhat time-limited: ‘Don’t Drive and Pokemon!’ But my favourite is a paradigm of concision, indeed Trumpian in its double-barrelled impact: ‘Witness Littering?’ it exclaimed, followed by a long mobile number that I singularly failed to hold in my memory as I tossed another coke can out of the car window. (Not really, I only said that for dramatic effect).
On the other hand, it may indeed have been Trumpian. Perhaps it really said: ‘Witless Twittering?’ Who knows. Should we care? Reality has gone make-believe. Life, as Woody Allen once said, doesn’t just imitate art, it now imitates bad television. And bad daytime television at that. The novelist Lionel Shriver recently confessed that the new Resident President could never appear in one of her novels, as he would read as too far-fetched, a farce. She agreed with the writer Malcolm Gladwell that we are locked in an era of the lowest common denominator, a time of broken language, senseless repetition, (I said senseless repetition!), and stuttering incomplete phrases that makes previous incumbents such as Dubya Bush seem, by comparison, almost Shakespearian.
Gladwell offers another angle by suggesting that not only should one retain a sense of humour amidst the slow car crash meant to resemble emerging US policy, but trust the future. Play the long game, he suggests. Surely the Chinese will do so. Indeed, he compares the feverish pace and frenzied excitement around the White House today with the McCarthy anti-Communist Witch Hunts of the 1950s. Sure, there will be crazy short-term followers, zealots and addicts but – like McCarthyism – the whole artifice will be rumbled, exposed and then roundly ridiculed. Trump’s rhetorical strategy (if it can be termed such), argues double Pulitzer prize-winner Marilynne Robinson, has a limited lifespan. Best to let its inherent contradictions, its off-the-cuff, on-the-hoof ‘thinking’, spiral out of control and be revealed for what it really is.
Meanwhile, we can just stare agog at the witless twittering, or perhaps that’s twitless wittering:
Donald J.Trump @realDonaldTrump
Chinese total losers! Who’d name their country after a dinner service?
Donald J.Trump @realDonaldTrump
Just tried watching Sound of Music. Weak! Julie Andrews doesn’t do it for me. Sack that hair stylist, fashion adviser!
Donald J.Trump @realDonaldTrump
Of course that goatherd is lonely! Quit that horrid yodelling! Total loser! Get a life!” *
(Note: I am grateful for various quotes and ideas borrowed here with appreciation from Marilynne Robinson, Lionel Shriver, Robert McCrum, Craig Brown*, and I’d like to give a call out to the student representatives, and to M&C colleague Alex Wake, whose statements at Academic Board were an important contribution in the first of two timely debates about academic freedom. She argues for openness, civility and a shared awareness of the welfare of others especially our students and fellow staff. Well said Alex! Firm leadership!)
'On the edge of my seat...' 