Like badly written haikus, there’s a steady flow of few-syllabled Brits leaving the UK right now. These abandoneers of the modern age are disgruntled with how things are here. Oddly, many profess a strong patriotism. Most have listened to, or read, those weirdly euphoric US podcasts, and requisitioned social media sites, saying the UK has been taken over by Islamists. (Fake news.) The toys tossed from their pram are sharp and brightly coloured, often the expensive kind. With lost irony, they favour moves to authoritarian regimes close to the desert, while muttering about school fees. (The truly rich go to Switzerland and Monaco, I am reliably informed.) One of them has written an article about it in the right-wing press. Good riddance, as a playful verbalism, springs to mind. My good friend’s joke about rich Brexiteers now wanting Brexit to end so they can go live in Greece would be funny if it wasn’t so true.
‘When you ain’t got nothin’, you got nothin’ to lose,’ I want to remind some of the new Dylan fans stepping out of A Complete Unknown. Not of a commercial bent myself, which is why I like the line, fortunately much of what I like is free anyway. The flow of the River Thames. The meditative state of a grey sky. Trees when they have no leaves. The odd nod from a shy neighbour. Empathy when the local newsagent feels vulnerable.
Last week I alluded to Stateside friends going quiet since the Inauguration. I tried some again on the Eastern and Western Seaboard. Most, not all, continue their radio silence. (One in Washington State, to be fair, has been placing his father in and out of a home.) It used to be the opposite—engaging replies, full of wit and warmth and banter. Now, there’s just this loud silence. If I didn’t know them any better, I’d say they are scared or depressed. Come to the UK, I should be telling them. The oligarchs don’t like us either.
One of the weirder Tory plans during the last government was Rwanda—to which illegal immigrants and asylum seekers were to be sent from the UK. Totally safe, we were told. A squeaky clean country. Well, it’s a richer one, that’s for sure. A total of £715 million was spent by the UK on the deportation scheme. In fact, the assault on the eastern city of Goma in Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is by M23, a militia controlled by Rwanda, though Rwanda deny seeking to occupy part of Congo. I wonder if any of the money paid by our previous government for the deportations went towards this.
Of course, it’s an even more wretched world for frontline aid workers since Trump froze all US funding. A 90-day pause, no less. A sea of broken American promises. Brave folk made vulnerable like the people they were contracted to save. Plus up to 3,000 Washington DC-based development sector workers now out of a job. Not the act of a global leader, as one person said to me last week. A reputation in tatters. Ironic given the flack ours has been getting from some of the more volatile members of the new administration in the US.
An artist I adore—a Brit first met in New York whose work it was that brought me to the writings of the great American novelist John Dos Passos—messaged me back last week from our south coast after I asked if he was winning: ‘Dearest Peter, sadly most of the good people in this world are losing badly. There is only a kind of ineffectual ghostly resistance movement left standing. Mostly of writers, artists, etc. My personal battles are of nothing by comparison.’
I previously mentioned attending a nuclear non-proliferation conference at the UN in Vienna. My host sent me a link last week to the Doomsday Clock which ticked one more second closer to midnight. (The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists continue to warn of the ever-increasing probability of global disaster.) Disruptive technologies such as biotechnology and AI are now added to the list—technologies far outpacing any kind of policy regulation, or an understanding of the consequences. On the nuclear front, the big front, the mother of all fronts, the only hope is of a new no-first-use (NFU) Trump-Xi-Putin deal. Blue moons do happen, I keep trying to tell myself, wishing I could avoid the fact there are also the nuclear weapons of the UK, France, North Korea, Pakistan, India, Israel, maybe Iran soon, to deal with too.
Seafaring Australian CC O’Hanlon continues his southern Mediterranean odyssey with American partner and wife Given. He has abandoned the House of Musk for Bluesky with recent posts including an apposite Tony Benn quote, a refined nod to Marianne Faithfull, an Alex Webb photograph from outside Beira in Mozambique, Kathy Acker at New City Theatre in Seattle, and a reposted Philip Pocock photograph of Canadian writer Joanna Pocock at a David Wojnarowicz exhibition at what I remember to have been the wonderfully ungovernable and temperamental Civilian Warfare Gallery in the East Village in New York.
Some people really do seek to destroy. CC O’Hanlon is for me the opposite. With him the world is always big again, its true scale presumably a huge weight on his shoulders. A famous David Fenton photograph he recently posted from a 1968 New York demo against Democratic presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey sports a woman with a ‘Franz Kafka for President’ placard. CC writes: ‘I’m with her.’ Well, folks, I’m with CC. From his time-honoured boat Wrack he writes: ‘Another day of fierce winds and the boat dervish-dancing between its tethers.’ Who needs haikus, I am left thinking, when we have CC?
