Last night and this morning I watched and read various leaders across Europe, Asia and the Pacific giving their congratulatory and conciliatory speeches welcoming the new President of the US of A to office.
The one that struck me most was that beacon of European solidarity Angela Merkel, the current Chancellor of Germany. She began with what you would expect, but then, without hesitation and with only barely veiled contempt, urged President-elect Trump to truly mean what he said in his victory speech: bring people together, don’t hammer the wedges in any further than you already have. Merkel has her flaws and is hated by many, but you can’t tell me she doesn’t say exactly what she means and to hell with anyone who tries to silence her. In that respect, I think even she might just understand a man like Donald Trump, whether she likes him or not, which unfortunately doesn’t matter at all. If you missed it, she basically said this: Mr Trump, we can be friends, as long as you stop being such an asshole.
Now, it is a stunning example of the brutal irony of history that in 2016 a German Chancellor should stand at a pulpit and urge an American President to put aside notions of racial discrimination and embrace social harmony. It is a stark reminder that the world has changed a lot since a bigoted, hateful bastard blew his brains out in the shattered remnants of his Thousand Year Reich and the world entered a brave new era of Capitalism At All Costs.
When the dust settles and the new American President, who has never tasted the stale coffee in any governmental office anywhere on Earth, comes to grips with the fact that running a country is a goddamn difficult thing to do, I think for one thing the United States will be just fine, and for another, so will the rest of the world. And by fine, I mean roughly the same as it has been for the last four decades. Contrary to what some are telling me, that the United States has just taken a Giant Leap Backwards into the 1950’s, I actually believe the opposite is true. I believe we are standing poised atop the first rumblings of a massive tidal shift, across the world, socially, economically, militarily, and politically. Donald Trump was not elected President of the United States because he was deemed the best and brightest person for the job, but because the American people, in their wisdom, believe he is a) better than the alternative, and b) he represents something that people have been craving for a long time: change. We saw it in Europe with Brexit, we saw it last night in the United States. We saw it to a lesser extent here in Australia in July 2016 – parties that never would have stood a chance 3, 6 or 9 years ago won far more ‘seats’ (what we call political power here) than ever before. Not because they are better than the alternative, but because they are different. Not because they represented the core values that most who gave them preference do, but because the values the major parties spruiked are so lost in carefully constructed, vetted, political correctness that they have lost all meaning. Political speeches in my country are now the verbal equivalent of boiled cabbage. They have no flavour, no spice, no kick. And that’s a damning statement coming from me, folks, because I have written some of them. I don’t believe Far Right representatives got voted in in Australia because people here are racists. I just believe people were sick and tired of voting for the Same Old Shit time and time again and getting nowhere.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t expect massive changes immediately, in the United States, the Middle East, or anywhere else. But I do believe we are seeing the first blows landed from a growing and powerful movement across the world. We are seeing the increasing inability of what the Elites would call the Masses to just sit by and do nothing while the gap between the Uber Rich and the Super Poor grows, and grows, and grows. We are seeing, for the first time in the United States, the reality that the millions of people who have lost jobs while the CEOs of the companies that took those jobs and rolled them overseas take home salary packages of hundreds of millions of dollars are slowly but surely waking up to: that they outnumber them, and that Democracy, when its true power and essence is harboured, does indeed work. These people realised, rightly or wrongly, accurately or not, that under another President Clinton things would have stayed the same, and that just isn’t good enough anymore. They don’t want things to stay the same. They have to start getting better.
So yes my Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull gave the speech I expected him to give, and his congratulatory phone call to Donald Trump was probably obsequious drivel that would have had to be mopped from the floor beneath his chair when he was done, but I don’t blame the guy. Australia needs the United States far more than the United States needs us, and that won’t be changing any time soon. So Foreign Minister Bishop will suck it up and go along to get along.
The likely 45th President of the United States said last night that it was time to put aside the wounds of division and come together as one united people. What I would ask of my American friends is this: hold him to that. Don’t let him get away with saying one thing on the outside of the Oval Office looking in and doing another thing when he's sitting behind that desk. If he doesn’t deliver on that promise, in four years, punish him, make him rue the day he woke up and decided he wanted to lead your nation into the future. He says he wants to Make America Great Again. Make him mean it.
