A Burning Issue

The recent meeting between Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump might appear to have been a good thing – better for them to talk face-to-face than to threaten each other from behind nuclear bunkers – but I found it disheartening to see these two men take to the world stage, masquerading as sagacious political leaders when, in reality, the former is a dictator and the latter aspires to be one. We have more than enough political bullies already – Duterte, Erdogan, Sisi, Orbán and Putin to name but a few – either established or busily working the trend of “populism” to cement their powers. If I believed there was such a thing as a god, I would pray for it to strike them down with thunderbolts. Their supporters, however, do believe there is a god. He is male and he is on their side.

I just saw The Breadwinner, a film about the ways in which the Taliban regime in Kabul repressed women, without exception and without compassion, under the pretext of doing God’s will. The Taliban may no longer control Kabul, but their ambition remains intact. And, in case I might feel smug about such a thing being unlikely to happen in the West, that evening I watched an episode of The Handmaid’s Tale, which depicts another regime oppressing women. It is fiction, of course, based on Margaret Atwood’s novel of 1985, yet there are right-wing fundamentalist Christians in America that make me wary of complacency: and are they not fervent supporters of Trump?

What is to be done to lift one’s spirits out of such miserable thoughts? I sought diversion in a sports pub, watching rugby between England and South Africa, but the genial atmosphere soon dissipated when it became obvious that England would lose; another pint of ale was poor consolation. Then I went to a jazz gig – Laura Jurd & Dinosaur  at BOTW – and this time, it worked: they played exciting, progressive, engaging music that restored my optimism in the human instinct to create rather than destroy – and the instigator was a young woman on trumpet.

Nevertheless, dystopia was a recurring theme in my week. I had decided it was time to read Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. Published in 1954, it is one of those books so well known that I never felt an urgency to read it. I knew it to be set in a future where the job of firemen is not to extinguish fires but to burn books. I knew, also, that “where books are burned, in the end, people also will be burned” * so the story seemed predictable. When I actually read it, however, the most chilling pages were unexpected: they describe how hatred for books arose out of what we now describe as “populist” politics i.e. the triumph of ignorance over learning, the belief that there is intellectual elite that controls society to its own advantage and excludes the majority from economic benefits. Compulsory book-burning was established on the back of popular enthusiasm for it.

I was reading Bradbury outside, in a public space, enjoying the balmy weather and the gentle civilised buzz of the city. During the hour I sat there, three people interrupted me and, each time, I looked up half expecting to be admonished for blatant book-reading. But my Bradbury-induced paranoia was momentary: the first person merely wanted directions, the next information and the last my attention (I think he was mentally ill). Books may be losing ground to other media, such as Twitter, Facebook and Youtube – the tools beloved of populists – but they are still being written, printed and read, for now.

* Heinrich Heine, 1823.