Trump, May, Lysistrata, and a revitalised media
Laura and I came up to London today. We’re staying overnight — two nights, in fact — and found ourselves in the midst of the gathering of women (and men and children but thousands upon thousands of women) in Trafalgar Square early afternoon.
The crowds were close and good natured. Actually, scrub that: they were good natured within the crowd but less good natured towards the target of the their protest. There was a lot of anger painted on a lot of signs. Trump has aroused a huge sense of disgust among women.
It got me thinking of Lysistrata — because I’m pretentious that way. Lysistrata is a comedy by Aristophanes in which the heroine of the piece — Lysistrata — enlists the help of the women of Greece to end the Peloponnesian War by withholding sex from their men.
You might think there are some basic flaws in the idea of the play. You could imagine Aristophanes as a typical old-fashioned man who can’t believe that women could enjoy sex and that sex is about duty rather than pleasure. But the women in the play are initially reluctant to go along with Lysistrata precisely because they don’t want to miss sex.
In the end it is through a sense of sacrifice for the common good that the women agree to the plan.
Quite how such a protest would work in the Trump era I don’t know. It might be hard work to try to get Melania Trump to join in, for instance, although perhaps not as tricky as all that.
The growing attack on women by the Republican Party and the fact that a Trump presidency will be seen by many on the right as a free pass to start rolling back all the gains women have made in the last fifty years surely merits some drastic action by women. Regular marches may make us all feel good but it’s not going to stop the right wing juggernaut, especially if the laws proposed by a number of states to make peaceful protest illegal are passed.
Marching is a start and it reveals a strong voice and a common bond. It’s not just about Trump, of course. We have our own issues here in the UK with its own troubling drift further to the right and Theresa May channeling Trump in calls to make Britain Great again. Maybe we should just change the country’s name to Great Great Britain and leave it at that.
And talking of May and her pathetic attempts to create a ‘global’ Britain — Great Great Global Britain, anyone? — there was an excellent article by Roger Cohen in today’s International New York Times.
Cohen writes:
The June 23 referendum, May insisted, was “the moment we chose to build a truly global Britain.”
I know this is a political moment when black equals white, no means yes, two plus two equals five, and post-truth is the phrase du jour. Still, this was a Trump-size whopper from May. She had obviously been steeped in Orwell before her oration.
Further on, he says,
“Global Britain” is a specious branding effort designed to mask an expensive mistake, opposed by 48 percent of voters.
And he finishes with this:
Global Britain! Make America Great Again! Russia for Russians! As Orwell is said to have observed, “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
We have two — at least — avenues to combat lies and propaganda and the slide towards dictatorship.
A media that begins to take its responsibilities seriously and delivers incisive commentary rather than rehashed government press releases is one method of attack.
The second method is civil disobedience. That may mean marching when marching is illegal or it may mean refusing to look away when our friends and neighbours are targeted arbitrarily and named dangerous because their politics, race, religion, or sexuality is not what the ruling class deem to be really British. Great British.
The US has Trump; we have the Tories. Let’s use this to mark the end of the era of unregulated capitalism. Of capitalism, full stop, if we’re lucky.
