In the past I have often joked about my age, ‘humorously’ exaggerating it. I suspect that was more a kind of double-bluff, in some ways feeling a little uncomfortable with growing older – turning 60, then 65, then 70 – but trying to make out I wasn’t. Or that, at least might be an armchair trick cyclist’s analysis.
I am, in fact, 73 – and shall turn 74 on November 21 later in the year – and I can confirm that getting older is not all downside. You do, oddly, feel a little happier with yourself, you seem to worry a little less, at least you worry less about trivialities.
Those downsides are there, though: your body slowly gives way, it aches more, your hearing goes, for a guy peeing takes longer (every night the very last thing I do is have a pee, even if I don’t feel I need one, and I rarely wake in the night and never to have a pee). Woman could list their own downsides – the menopause, bones becoming brittle and so on.
But both men and women will confirm that one facet of getting older is that it becomes ever rarer that you come across a novelty, are told something you had never heard before, find yourself in a situation which is new to you (in which the advantage is that you are not quite at a loss as to how to handle it as once you might have been). Oh, and my son assures me that I am a lot ‘calmer’ since I retired five years ago.
In short, I do believe that the phrase
plus ça change, c’est plus la même chose (the more things change, the more they stay the same). But I am, obviously, speaking from the perspective of a man looking back over the past 73 years (or rather over the last 50 years.
I doubt I very much took an interest in ‘life’ and her manifestations when I was still attached to my mother’s breast or later at college where this dilettante was far, far, far more concerned with growing his hair long, chasing still all-too-elusive nookie and scoring dope (which in those days was cannabis not heroin).
Thus as I was born in 1949, I had no ‘direct’ experience of the rise of fascism in Germany, Italy and Spain in the early decades of the 20th century, the consequences of the Russian revolution, the General Strike in Britain and the Great Depression in the US. If there were again to be a rise of fascism – a real one, not a development putting assorted readers of the West’s liberal press into a tizzy – it would be one of the few things I had not before experienced.
Getting older, as it is I get rather bored when I hear trotted out on the radio (I am more of a radio listener than a TV viewer) yet again phrases such as ‘today’s ever faster lifestyle’, ‘an unprecedented rise in house prices’, ‘the ever-greater pressures of modern life’, ‘the increasing pressures on today’s young people’ and so on.
I have heard those and similar phrases trotted out for the past 50 years, and I do wonder how ‘fast’ a lifestyle must be by now as it has been ‘ever faster’ for so long, at what point the ‘pressures of modern life’ will become so intolerable that en masse throw ourselves off Beachy Head (or wherever good Americans go to top themselves). My point is that at the end of the day ‘very little changes’.
However, I am now experiencing a novel situation which is not trivial and might become a worry.
It is taking place in both the US and the UK, where one Donald Trump and ‘Boris’ Johnson are behaving in a way which could – I’ll say ‘could’ because I dislike hyperbole and sensationalism – have quite a deep effect on the democracies of those two countries. Both men are, ironically perhaps almost inadvertently, doing quite a bit of damage to the ‘trust’ of ‘the people’ in their democratic institutions.
In the US – and this is certainly not news – Trump has claimed and still is claiming that the 2020 presidential election was rigged to ensure he would not be re-elected as US president. It was, he says, ‘stolen’ from him.
I shan’t and don’t want here go into the details of his claims and the details of why they are denied, because for what I am writing here the claims and denials are not relevant. What is relevant is that a substantial number of US voters – and I am talking of several million US voters – who believe him and convinced that what he says is true.
Over the past few months Trump has found himself in legal trouble of different kinds and most recently faces federal charges which carry a jail sentence if he is found guilty of them. But he is insisting – and those millions also believe him on this claim – that it is all simply an establishment plot to neutralise him and ensure he cannot regain the US presidency.
Yet Trump is actually irrelevant; and equally irrelevant is whether what he is claiming is true or not. If it were true it would be very, very serious but for any number of reasons, not least that a conspiracy of that scale would be impossible to organise, I think we can be certain it is not true.
What is relevant – and potentially very worrying – is those several million Americans who now believe that their system has become corrupted, quite possibly beyond repair. And if that is the case, they will conclude that all bets are off: if the other side is not playing by the rules, why should they?
If the other side can drive a coach and four through the conventions which govern their democracy, why shouldn’t they? In sum, they no longer trust their democracy, and thinking along those lines will have encouraged many to invade Congress on January 6, 2021.
This development is new in my life, in the 50-odd years I have been aware of ‘grown-ups’ and the shenanigans they can get up to. And as the global financial crisis of 2008 reminded us ’trust’ is not only a crucial part of our dealings with one another, but very, very fragile. Once it has been damaged and lost, it is very hard to re-establish.
Here in Britain our own Trump lite, Boris Johnson, is now involving himself in similar matters, though at the outset I must concede that he does not pose ‘a danger’. In fact, although both Trump and Johnson are buffoons, Trump is a dangerous buffoon, but Johnson is pretty much a joke.
Yet again he is in a sense also irrelevant: it is the effect and consequence of his buffoonery which are relevant, though democracy and its institutions are in no danger of breaking down here in cosy Old Blighty (so cosy, in fact, where a copper will run off and fetch you a glass of water if you ask nicely).
Things don’t look quite as rosy in the US. For one thing consider the numbers: those who might decide, if and when, to think ‘to hell with our democracy’ are in their millions. And many of them are not averse to resorting to violence and, legitimately, carry weapons.
I am not being alarmist and declaring ‘woe is us!’ I am merely pointing out that the US might – might – find itself in very uncharted waters in 2024 at the next presidential election.
If Trump is the GOP candidate and loses, how will those millions react if he again insists he had won but ‘they’, the establishment, have again stolen the election? And if he wins and is re-elected US president – and given his previous very high-handed behaviour exercising ‘his presidential powers’ – how will the his opponents react?
That last point is also worth considering: so far it has been Trump supporters and those ‘on the right’ who have declared themselves ready to give democracy and its institutions the finger (in Britain ‘two fingers’ shaped like a V).
But what if a sizeable number of Democrats, dismayed that Trump is back as president, decide that what is good for the goose is good for the gander and also embark on measures they would previously have believed to be beyond the pale?
That is merely a question, and I concede again to straying just a little too close to alarmism. But my central point stands: the US might find itself in a situation it has rarely found itself in. One of the last times one side was at odds with the other, they went to war for four years.
Thus mentioning ‘civil war’ is again, perhaps, straying too close to alarmism. But on many issues the various US states are now further apart than they have been for many years, and that is something novel in my 73 years.
