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ESTHER MENELL'S BLOG

Tag: Donald Trump

WHEN SILENCE IS GOLDEN

9th December 2024 /

How fortunate our royal family and the Church of England were in recent weeks to have been out-trumped by what was going on across the ocean.  Both the 253- page Makin Report with its horrific stories of abuse, and the untaxed wealth of our royal family, so vividly fleshed out In The King, the Prince and their Secret Millions, were buried under an avalanche of news which could herald the end of the world as we know it.

Photo: Foreign and Commonwealth Office via Wikimedia Commons

Should one laugh or cry at finding President Elect Trump, himself a convicted felon, appointing another convicted felon to high office, handing the nation’s health to a numbskull who looks as though he is carved out of redwood and the health of the world to a prize dimwit who does not believe in climate change.

Photo of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., by Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America, Creative Commons

Surely, an administration as lunatic as this will self-implode but what, if anything, will ever persuade our Royals to give up their wealth or, at the very least, pay taxes and use it for the public good. The Church, presently licking its wounds, may emerge more fit for purpose.

So incensed was I by the film about the royal family’s millions and how little outrage it appears to have evoked that I actually wrote  to the Guardian suggesting that the King and Prince William could start by taking over from the government the immediate reimbursement of the postmasters and mistresses and the casualties of the infected blood donor scandal. On reflection, could they not also transform the lives of the several million of their subjects still trapped in buildings with dangerous cladding . . . 

Photo: Simon Walker / No 10 Downing Street, via Wikimedia Commons

But it seems the wealthiest not only want to hang on to their wealth but also increase it, vide Elon Musk and the King’s silence.

Photo: U.S. Air Force / Trevor Cokley, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

POOR BORIS . . .

26th July 2019 /

It was perhaps unfortunate for Boris that when I read a long and sympathetic account of his childhood unhappiness (his mother had a long breakdown, probably caused by his father’s infidelities) I had just returned from the Jankel Adler exhibition at the Ben Uri Gallery, which specialises in the art of the dispossessed.

Here I learnt that Adler and his friend, Josef Herman – while refugees in this country – heard that their entire families had been murdered.   But this did not turn either one of them into the kind of greedy, lying, irresponsible buffoon that Boris has become.  On the contrary, after Adler had nursed his friend through a breakdown, they both produced remarkable work and were soon to have families of their own.

But they did not forget.   Josef kept this painting – given to him by Adler – in his living room, for the rest of his life.

Orphans 1941, Jankel Adler

That tragic episode in his mother’s life does not excuse Boris.  Nor does it appear to have jinxed the lives of his siblings who, presumably, comforted each other during her absence.

No more did being turned down by a prestigious art school excuse – or account for – another leader’s murderous rage.   What these two inadequate men ‘suffered’ is no more than a pin prick when set against the suffering one of them inflicted on millions, and the hurt and confusion the other has already left in his wake.

No one, surely, gets through childhood without some painful setback: ranging from having to flee one’s country of birth, to never being picked for the first eleven.  But it seems we are wired to survive, and time brings with it a mix of forgiveness and forgetfulness.

What makes the Trumps and Johnsons of this world different from the rest of us is their abandonment of the principles – the common humanity – which stop most people from putting their own desires above those of everyone else.  These two exemplars of the school bully, these two monsters of self-gratification have, somewhere along the line, and of their own volition, lost touch with ‘the court of conscience’.*

Let’s hope that Boris, with his backpack of classical allusions, has also read  Shakespeare, and remembers that the evil that men do lives after them.

 

* ‘There is a higher court than courts of justice, and that is the court of conscience.’  Mahatma Ghandi

 

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