DO WE STILL LIKE TO BE IN AMERICA?

What a difference a day makes. Listening to the news is difficult. The various stories that are currently reported emphasise the difficulties faced by editors needing to prioritise the events reported on in order of their importance. Is the decision on level of importance arrived at by the editor alone or by a group of journalists in the newsroom based on their collective view as to what story should take precedence? The BBC have a basic formula of generally dealing with international news to begin with, unless there is a pressing national story which appears to be dominating the headlines. It then moves on to ‘local news’ which, when dealing with the greater London area, will often be part of a national news story.  Again, the degree of importance given to the story appears to be based on the editor’s judgement of what the public considers of most interest at the time of publication. ITV newscasts generally begin with local news followed by national and international news reporting.  A different approach but effectively along the same lines of separation of importance to the perceived viewer.

 

The main stories however are generally the same in whatever publication is on offer, presumably taking the general public’s attitude to what is of importance to them; although, the circulation of the various journals gives an indication as to what their particular readers feel is of importance. This is clearly indicated by the variety of headlines one finds in the Sun, The Express, The Mirror, The Mail, the Guardian, the Times, the Telegraph, the Financial Times etc. Each has their particular approach to lead story lines indicative of their readership. Know to whom you speak.

 

Given my own anxieties, I confess I lean towards the Guardian. I prefer its editorial views and I find some of its contributors are usually in agreement with me (tee hee) or at least express opinion with which I agree.  This attitude is clearly biased and full of ‘liberal lefty” prejudice, but it is what it is. I have sent the odd letter to the editor but have never had anything published. Indeed, I have sometimes been pissed off when I find my particular point being expressed in someone else’s letter or regular column the next day or a few days later. But such is life. People hold similar views and some occasionally have a platform. Some others are actually elected representatives, politicians who one hopes will promote the views we feel might go some way to improving the current problems and finding solutions to the difficulties.

 

This would be on both a national and international scale, after all it’s not like fight club. What happens abroad does not stay abroad. The ramifications go everywhere. Any perturbation on the globe clearly affects the entire planet. Spatiality matters. In discussing the brain, Professor Netta Cohen, now at University of Leeds, has proposed:

 

“One of the key things is that there are many interactive components, interacting in a non-trivial way, as physicists would say interacting with degrees of freedom.  There are microscopic degrees of freedom and macroscopic degrees of freedom that are interacting, each of those (components) are acting and interacting on a wide range of scales, this includes both temporal scales; you’ve got very very quick proteins acting on nanoseconds, all the way to the range of microseconds and sometimes milliseconds and you’ve got lifetime learning. A very broad range of time scales and a very broad range of spatial scales, things acting intracellularly, at the molecular level and the G-network level which are very localised and you’ve got things happening at whole brain level and that’s excluding your interaction with the environment which is whole organism level... A single protein can change the macroscopic state of the system; a single macroscopic perturbation can cause some gene expression which then causes some cascade which completely changes your system”

 

As a metaphor for what is going on across the globe on a very broad range of time scales and on a whole world level, it is more than somewhat appropriate. Can one see Mr Trump as that single protein or macroscopic perturbation causing cascades which are completely changing our system, or is it in fact a sequence of such proteins in the form of Putin, Trump, and other single minded right wing nationalists’ intent on bullying their way to supreme power? What on earth is the Greenland, Canada and Panama obsession about? Is it to emulate Putin and Ukraine, or Xi Jinping and Taiwan? What can Trump possibly have said to Danish Prime Minister Frederiksen?

 

This degree of freedom interaction is cause for considerable concern. He is being given a free ride in the United States by an astronomically ignorant and poorly educated electorate, a corrupt and without moral judgement so called Supreme Court and a Congress (in particular the Senate) of sycophants and lickspittles without a scintilla of integrity. Am I being harsh? I do not think so. His assumption that he can override the Constitution of the United States by executive order or decree is therefore not without foundation. ‘They’ have come round to his edicts before and there seems to be no reason for ‘them’ not to come round again.

 

As to the Washington Press Corps, they are alas absent without leave. There is nothing to challenge his ego. The only fly in his ointment is a little Episcopal Bishop in the Washington Diocese in the shape of Mariann Budde who spoke up from her pulpit. Her sermon to bless and commemorate the inauguration was in her church where he would not be able to voice objection or interrupt with the rage of his bully persona. He just had to sit there and take it. His usual response came out later on line with the usual epithet of nasty and other derogatory descriptive adjectives.

Her sermon has gone round the world and can be viewed:

I am not a believer in God. I do not call upon him as a saviour or proffer him as having a hand to lift me up and guide me through life. Marianne Budde however, is of a different view and she knows she has God on her side. This was not a sermon from a doubting Thomas. She was clear and articulate and spoke directly to power. ‘Smoke on your pipe and put that in’.