Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.
Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.
- Christopher Howse: 'A Pilgrim in Spain*
The Bloody Virus- It's becoming clear that close and prolonged contact is required for transmission, suggesting that the risk is highest in enclosed environments: households; long-term care facilities; and public transport. And that: Casual, single contacts are unimportant. So . . . The emphasis should be on avoiding situations where people are exposed to continual or multiple infections over a period of time. Which clears the way to abandon much of the ritualistic social distancing.
- We will enter Phase 1 on Monday. But not all of us. Only 51% of out provinces are being given this privilege. And the inhabitants of major cities will have to wait. Details here and an interactive map here.
- Should you be among the lucky ones, here's a reminder of what you're allowed to do.
- The rate of fine-levying in Spain continues to astound. Rebellion meets officiousness.
- María's Day 55.
- A positive take from somewhere in the Valencia region, one in which the majority of provinces will remain in Phase 0. And where it's only recently stopped raining, after an unprecedented 6 weeks of the stuff. I recommend the video cited.
- Those tribal politics.
- A humorous tale of an Andalucia transgender gypsy and her moment of TV glory.
- And a more heart-warming tale from that region: A visit to the house where Shakespeare was born has inspired a Spaniard to rescue the birthplace of a famed artist from oblivion, and transform it into a museum celebrating his early life. The house in Seville where Diego Velázquez was born in 1599 lay abandoned for 8 years after its fashion designer owner fell into debt during Spain’s economic crisis. It was put up for sale by a bank in 2018 and now, Enrique Bocanegra, the leading member of a local group that bought it, is hoping to bring the building back to its former glory. After overcoming numerous bureaucratic hurdles, the city council has said it will start renovating the building for conversion into a museum in the coming weeks. Which, sadly, could mean anything, of course
The UK
- This crisis is a flight into the unknown and we need the captain to stop the blustering and talk to us like grown-ups: Matthew Parris, The Times
- Has there actually been any real lockdown to relax from there? asks someone from Spain here. About 1.7 billion people live in countries where things are under control, at least provisionally, and this club appears to be growing. But: The U.S. is not currently on track to join it, even as states attempt to leave lockdown behind.
- See the review below by Justin Webb of a polemical new book which argues that Trump behaves like a toddler, but which leaves Webb asking if he really is unfit for office.
- This morning, I again got an email asking me to link to another site, from a woman who wanted to circle back with me and exhorted me not hesitate to reach out with any questions. I wondered if she was American or a Brit pretending to be. I'm guessing that in the USA, people really do speak like this.
- Reader El Flaco(The Flake) correctly doubted that the Eurasian blackcap and the US black cap chickadee were the same bird. Here's the technical details, with the blackcap on the left in the last 3 boxes. But they might be related . . .
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Aves
Order: Passeriformes
Family: Sylviidae/Paridae
Genus: Sylvia/Poecile
Species: Sylvia atricapilla/Poecile atricapillus
THE BOOK REVIEW
The Toddler in Chief: What Donald Trump Teaches Us About the Modern Presidency by Daniel Drezner.
When Donald Trump wonders aloud whether injecting disinfectant into people could help with Covid-19, we have a right to be worried. A right to ask whatever happened to the “aristocracy of talent and virtue” promised by Thomas Jefferson at the start of the great experiment of the United States of America. A right to ponder, in the words of one White House correspondent, whether the president is going to “go bats in front of them at any time”.
Ah, but wait. That president “going bats” was not Trump. That was John Osborne of The New Republic writing about Richard Nixon in 1972. I mention him because the real question about Trump is this: is he really sui generis, as they say in West Virginia, or is he just another Oval Office circus act soon to be replaced and (gradually, perhaps) forgotten?
As Daniel Drezner readily acknowledges at the beginning of The Toddler in Chief, “every president prior to Trump has been accused of some scandal or act of malfeasance”. There have been philanderers, bullies, bumblers, paranoids. Drezner’s neat summary: “A few great men, some good men, and a mélange of liars, cheats, drunks, depressives, and racists”.
Is Trump different? Drezner, a professor of international politics and Washington Post commentator, says he is. “Across a range of behavioral and cognitive traits — temper tantrums, a short attention span, impulse control, oppositional behavior, and knowledge deficits — Trump has much more in common with small children than with the 43 men who preceded him.”
I am not so sure. All presidents are human. But worse: all presidents are humans of a peculiar kind. They looked in the mirror and saw a president; if there’s a bigger sign of being unsuitable for the job, I don’t know what it might be. In modern times Nixon is the obvious example of us being here before. I recommend as a useful companion book to Toddler in Chief, Francis Wheen’s hugely entertaining 2009 work Strange Days Indeed: The Golden Age of Paranoia. Wheen’s portrait of the 1970s includes all the juiciest Nixon barminess.
This was a president so in love with Patton, the film about the Second World War commander known as “Old Blood and Guts”, that the Chinese government, when preparing for a summit, asked for a copy so they could better understand their adversary. When several cabinet members argued against an attack on Cambodia he responded by removing the White House tennis court because they played and he did not.
He would ring people in the middle of the night — sometimes all night — to complain about the media. “I’m the best thing they’ve got,” he would whine. He even wandered out of the White House one night and talked to horrified antiwar protesters. The reaction of one is worth quoting in full: “At first I felt awe. Then that changed to respect. Then as he kept talking it went to disappointment and disillusionment. Then I felt pity because he was so pathetic and then just plain fear to think he’s running the country.”
You see where I am going with this? I am not arguing against Drezner necessarily, but the Nixon experience should give Americans — anti-Trump Americans — a sense of perspective and of hope; it is possible to survive this.
How about Drezner’s more serious academic point, that the risks posed by this president are more extreme than with previous crazed incumbents because of the increase in presidential power in recent decades. Without getting too involved in this constitutional debate, surely Nixon was pretty powerful? He bugged. He burgled. He misused the FBI and the tax authorities. Abroad he prosecuted a war that included secret elements. Above all, he threw tantrums, was self-pitying and had a low attention span.
And that brings us to the toddler stuff. This is the least convincing part; basically a Twitter-road-tested collection of reports of Trump’s supposed imbecility lengthened into book form. Quotes from paediatric experts are interspersed with reports from the front line, as it were. It is certainly true that Trump is often compared to toddlers. He seems as self-centred and unsocialised as they are.
There is the “president’s oppositional behaviour”, which parents will remember is a classic toddler trait. If you want to get something done, an official suggests, “tell him it’s never been done before. Tell him the lawyers would never allow it. Tell him The Establishment would go crazy!” Then he does it.
Perhaps that’s what they said about the possibility of buying Greenland from Denmark. Remember this was a joke suggestion last year. Until Trump did not get the joke — toddler-like — and reacted to the Danes’ bemused refusal to get sucked into this nonsense by cancelling a summit. “Denmark is a very special country with incredible people, but based on Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen’s comments, that she would have no interest in discussing the purchase of Greenland, I will be postponing our meeting scheduled in two weeks for another time,” he said. That showed the Danes. At least in toddler land.
And as for his attention span, an official gave him a briefing on budget matters and was asked at the end of it “who he would be in the world, if he could be anyone — himself or, say, Tiger Woods?” The budget obviously bored him. He is excited, we are told, by meeting royal families and choosing the decor for Air Force One. His knowledge of the world comes from TV, with his aides, like parents the world over, trying to get him to read. And they do try. Although it is hard. His briefs need to have, one aide complains, “the syntactical complexity of ‘See Jane run’ ”.
Yet as so often with anti-Trump polemics, you find yourself half-sympathising with the Donald. A foreign diplomat is quoted by Drezner: “He just bombed us with questions: what’s your GDP? How much oil does [that country] produce?” Another was asked: “What do you think of climate change? Is Nato worth it? How big is an aircraft carrier?” If I were president these are precisely the questions I would ask. And if someone answered the aircraft carrier question with reference to football pitches or the size of Wales, I would have them burnt at the stake. But I digress.
This book was written before the catastrophe of coronavirus and the Trump response. Its judgments about the president are all the more eerie as a result. “The idea of Trump coping with a true crisis — a terrorist attack, a global pandemic, a great power clash with China — is truly frightening,” Drezner writes.
Well, indeed. Suddenly we have two out of the three. So Drezner’s reasonable conclusion is redoubled in power. If the American people decide to re-elect Trump, Drezner writes, then they, not he, are the real toddlers. They would be proving that they have become infantilised: “developmentally delayed”.
The thought occurs, though: might they want to keep him in office for fear of what he might do if he loses in his re-election bid in November? Drezner seems to think the toddler may go quietly if he is sent to bed early by the American electorate. Nixon went quietly in the end. Will Trump? You have to hope so, but reading this book you cannot be sure.
*A terrible book, by the way. Don't be tempted to buy it, unless you're a very religious Protestant
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