FRIDAY 25 NOVEMBER 2022

It’s another Friday.  When you’re 71, Fridays happen on average every two days.

Random Harvest

France

• Emmanuel Macron was re-elected as president of France with 28 percent of the vote in the first round of the presidential election.  34% of the electorate either didn’t vote or spoiled their ballots.  The second round of voting saw the highest level of abstention for 50 years. (DM)
• Macron’s party lost over 100 seats in the subsequent legislative elections, forcing him to make an alliance with a party called the National Rally (formerly the National Front).
• Over the past several years, Macron has attacked pensions and the retirement age of French workers.  He had declared war on public sector workers. 

In Britain

• In Britain, Sunak came to power through what was “effectively a coup by finance capital.” (DM) 
• “There is probably no leader of a liberal democracy with a weaker democratic mandate…He has not been elected by popular vote, nor by his own party.  He became Prime Minister via an establishment coup.”

In the States

• Last night I watched a documentary about the rise of Hitler.  Tonight, my partner showed me a video of a man standing in a Seattle airport spouting Nazi slogans and doing Nazi salutes, spouting hatred and doing a brown-shirt performance.  People don’t go crazy in a random fashion.  They pick up the undercurrents in societies.  Here, they pick up the hatred, the resentment, the violence and now Trump and the Republicans have unleashed them, given them permission.  This was not a mentally ill young man, mimicking something he had seen on television.  This was a young man who hated, resented, felt entitled to dominance.  It made me sick, physically sick. 

On a Lighter Note

• I saw a photograph on Twitter today of a group of dogs sitting in theatre seats looking at the stage.  They were assistance dogs learning how to sit through a play.  There were actors on stage performing.  It was precious.
• I kept thinking of one dog getting agitated saying to another dog “I can’t bark?  I can’t bark?  Somebody’s going to get killed.  That guy’s going to kill the other one.  I have to bark.”  The other dog shrugs. “If you bark you’ll get in trouble.”