“What is more”, the Red Queen told Alice, “I will ask the same question again and again until I hear what I want to hear. What I know you really, really want. Gruel!”
“You say the pieces do not want to leave without any supper, without their shoes, and without their coats.”
“Yes”, said Alice, happy to be heard at last.
“Very well then, they may leave with gruel“, said the Red Queen.
Alice sighed. Gruel was not food, and what of their coats and shoes?
When the Red King had asked the pieces if they wanted to leave the game, some said “yes”, and some said “no”. This had upset the King and he skulked off to play alone. The Red Queen was made of sterner stuff. If the pieces want to leave, then leave we must. “Gruel for everyone, and then we leave”, she said.
“Are you ready to leave with gruel?”, the Red Queen had asked Alice.
“Not without our coats, not without our shoes and not without a proper supper”, replied Alice. “We want sweet tea and toast with jam. A winter coat with belt and hood, and shoes with warm socks”
“If you do not take the gruel, then the game will stop and you will have nothing”, said the Red Queen. “What is more”, the Red Queen told Alice, “I will ask the same question again and again until I hear what I want to hear. What I know you really, really want. Gruel!”
undemocracy noun [un.de·moc·ra·cy]. A country that asserts democratic values, but subverts democracy in practice. Usage: The United States of America is the world’s greatest undemocracy.
There are many countries far less democratic than the United States. According to the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), North Korea is the world’s least democratic country, and it keeps company with a host of other authoritarian states including China, Iran, Russia and Saudi Arabia. The EIU list and the recently published report by Freedom House on the civil liberties track record of countries is unsurprisingly similar. No one seriously considered the world’s political bottom dwellers to be democracies — no matter what style of fig-leaf electoral process they may adopt.
The appellation undemocracy is reserved for those states that claim to be democracies, behave in many ways like democracies, and simultaneously subvert the values of democracy in practice.
American Presidents, without irony, have described their country as The World’s Greatest Democracy (TWGD). Bill Clinton, Gerald Ford, and Barack Obama all described the US in those words. Other leaders believe it (or choose to agree with it). Israel’s Prime Minister, Bibi Netanyahu, used those words to describe the US in a speech to Congress in 1996, and President Reuven Rivlin of Israel, used them in a congratulatory statement to President Donald Trump on his electoral victory in 2016. And that is ironic!
‘In a recent article calling for the impeachment of Donald Trump, Thomas Friedman used turns of phrase which, while not identical in form to TWGD, strongly suggested that he genuinely believed the US was TWGD.
[The US] is a nation that at its best has always stood up for the universal values of freedom and human rights, has always paid extra to stabilize the global system from which we were the biggest beneficiary and has always nurtured and protected alliances with like-minded nations
The complication is that the US “talks a good democracy” but it does not practice one. This is evident in the two “winning” electoral strategies that are regularly adopted: the gerrymander and voter suppression.
Any approach to winning an election that subverts the fair count of eligible voters is inherently undemocratic. Politically clever. Astute. Undemocratic. The hypocrisy of claiming to be The World’s Greatest Democracy when winning relies on subversion is audacious (and obnoxious).
A frightening, roller-coaster glimpse of an alternative reality … and then I fell asleep.
Days of Our Lies, winner of the Electoral College’s Choice Awards and runner up in People’s Choice Awards 2016
When Aaron Sorkin’s political, comedy, horror drama first appeared (simultaneously on all networks and all channels) in 2016, older viewers were expecting a reprise of his successful political drama, The West Wing. The Pilot’s weekly episodes cleverly matched real events with the absurd to produce a breathtaking roller-coaster ride through the Republican and Democratic Presidential primaries. Season one of Days of Our Lies closed with the nail-biting conclusion of the 2016 election and earned it an Electoral College’s Choice Award and runner up in People’s Choice Award. “Many people” believe the People’s Choice winner should also have been the Electoral College’s winner, but that debate is for another time.
Sorkin demonstrated the breadth of his creative genius by brazenly and seamlessly juxtaposing actors with puppetry with stop motion animation. He doesn’t ask you to take him seriously — he knows you will. It’s the Sorkin Effect.
I don’t want to get away from the review, but we have to give a nod to the use of Waldorf from the Muppets as the irascible but ultimately ridiculous, aging, socialist, Senator “Bernie Sanders“. Emma Thompson is extraordinarily good as “Hillary Rodham Clinton“. Some were disappointed by the obvious reboot of her earlier role as Susan Stanton, the wife of Democratic Presidential hopeful, Jack Stanton, in Primary Colors. The reality, however, was that Thompson took her two-dimensional Susan Stanton and gave the character flesh, blood and soul. The cardboard cut-out was transformed into a credible, thoughtful, effective Presidential candidate. Having Donald Trump play himself gives further insight into Sorkin’s dazzling imagination. Playing with that post-modern, facebook, WikiLeaks interface between reality and fiction, and instead of relying on another puppet, Sorkin finds a boor capable of playing a simultaneously narcissistic, ignorant, racist, misogynist, without pretense or guile (except for the lying, of course). Rounding out the ensemble cast, Sorkin persuaded the toy manufacturer Mattel to allow Donald Trump’s real daughter, Ivanka, to be played by a stop motion version of Barbie, while her husband, Jared is played by stop motion Ken. Don junior of course was played by splicing “never seen before footage” from Malcolm in the Middle showing Frankie Muniz rocking in a corner.
In Season One, no one expects Trump to triumph, and there in lies the absurdist appeal of Sorkin’s work, and the almost addictive love-hate relationship between the show and the viewer. Stand-up comics having been playing with audience abuse as a stylistic form for decades. Days of Our Lies is the first time it has ever been used for a television show. By the end of the season Trump has won and Hillary is waiting to be locked up.
Season Two — the first year in office — remained a fulfilling drama for many viewers, but the more discerning drifted away. They could see what was coming. Sorkin was no longer writing for the show and it had been cut adrift from reality. The Republican majority Senate and House toadied their way through blunder after blunder of the White House. The already exhausted writing team were re-using old footage to flesh out new episodes.
It was formulaic. Cut to Trump saying or doing something absurd, or criminal or criminally absurd. Cut to Waldorf saying how wrong it all is. Cut to stop motion Ken and Barbie looking beautiful and soothing the furrowed brow of Republicans — while doing something absurd, or criminal or criminally absurd. Cut to Frankie Muniz drooling in a corner. Cut to MSNBC or CNN asking “is this a smoking gun?” The Democrats beat their chests. The Republicans chant.
I am told by friends that the show was completely watchable and coherent if only you dropped a little acid first. Alas, I never did. But it was too late, I was hooked.
Season Three. I physically cannot do it any more. Donald Trump, the same boor from Season One is so patently “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office” that the show has lost its dramatic tension.
Days of Our Lies was like a shooting star. It blazed across the sky and winked out. The small remains of it landed in a pig-sty somewhere in Iowa.
Lemmus brexitus. A small, foolish rodent with an over inflated sense of its importance to others, and a limited sense of the precarious nature of its own existence. It is found in greatest abundance in England and Wales with a more limited range in Northern Ireland and Scotland.
Lemmus lemmus (the Norwegian Lemming)
In 1958 Walt Disney gave the world a “documentary” film called White Wilderness. Knowing that facts should never get in the way of a good story the producers arranged for lemmings to be thrown off a cliff creating the enduring truth that lemmings commit suicide.
Genetically and morphologically unrelated to the common lemming, L.brexitus has nonetheless taken on the darker, mythic nature of its namesake. Like Walt Disney, they will not let facts interfere with a good story: a story of Empire, pink blotches on a map, and the greatness of Britain.
The heroic tale rests on an asinine conceit, that generational change — effectively constitutional change — should be made on the basis of a simple majority from a referendum. A majority of voters did vote to leave the EU. It was not a huge majority, and it was not a majority of people in a majority of countries within the United Kingdom. But it was, nonetheless, a majority.
The reason that generational change usually requires a greater level of approval than a simple majority is that it ensures a smoother transition, greater cohesion, and better coordination. Australia, Canada, and the United States all have much higher hurdles for making generational change to their fundamental governance.
Not so the United Kingdom.
When I pointed this out to a colleague, he observed (complete with the pitying look reserved for imbeciles), that we had entered the EU on that basis, why should we not leave it on the same basis? He was, of course, completely wrong. When a referendum was held in 1975 to determine the United Kingdom’s continued membership of the European Communities, more than two thirds of voters (67.2%) voted to remain. A majority of voters in every country in the United Kingdom voted to remain. There was nothing precarious about the decision. It was decisively the will of the people to be European.
There is no ground swell of support for leaving or remaining — and in the absence of such support, keeping the status quo is rational thing to do. Instead we are watching the grey dishwater of indecision gurgle down the drain, carrying the leftovers from the smorgasbord that Europe offered. The last vestiges of a GREAT Britain and a UNITED Kingdom will be caught in the grease trap.
