Did Donald Trump tip-off his commodity-trading pals five minutes before making an announcement that he knew full well would influence the global price of oil? If he did, he was guilty of illegal insider trading. If he did not, then it was simply lucky timing for those few practitioners who made the bets that earned them billions of dollars. If I were to place a bet on the outcome of an investigation into the matter (in the unlikely event there will be one), I would not be giving Trump the benefit of the doubt.
I was
listening to this news item as I carried out a mundane task in the kitchen. My
Other Half, who is a self-described “starter not finisher”, had prepared a
sauerkraut mix of beetroot and red cabbage and left it to ferment in a cupboard,
where I had come across it a few weeks later. Since she was away, it fell to me
to find some jars, clean, sterilise and fill them, then mop up the purplish-stained
aftermath.
It’s not
that I’m complaining (I’m used to being the finisher around here), it’s just
that I want to illustrate a point. My OH, having recently joined the CND (yes,
it’s still going) had gone off to join an annual peace camp outside RAF
Lakenheath, where American bombers are stationed. If I were to place a bet on the
outcome of CND’s seventy-year-long mission, it would not be on the abolition of
nuclear weaponry. But that is beside the point: what counts is that alternative
voices are heard and seen to be heard, for how else do we learn to question
what is too easily taken for granted?
Notwithstanding
the old saying that “behind every woman out there trying to save the world is a
man at home doing the laundry” *, it seems inevitable that the small, domestic
matters of everyday life preoccupy us, often to the exclusion of wider issues. It
wasn’t really necessary for Maslow ** to categorise our needs into a hierarchy,
but his having done so makes it easier to articulate the instinctually obvious:
that we need food, shelter and rude health before we can start to contemplate
the ‘higher’ things in life, like education, art, science, sport, diplomacy and
derivatives trading. It is, therefore, understandable that so many people lack
knowledge of or interest in the geopolitics that really shape their lives, when
those lives are so configured that the effort of simply fuelling their existence saps
their energies.
But, to her
credit, my OH is doing her bit to save the world on the micro as well as the
macro level. She has become involved in the rescue and renovation of a local community
centre that, along with a school, is part of housing scheme built just 25 years
ago. Sociologically speaking, the development made sense, insofar as it was
designed to cultivate neighbourliness. But its designers could not foresee the
impact of diminishing municipal budgets and the rise of social media. Starved
of funding, it has fallen into disuse, its functions partly ceded to Facebook
and the like, digital platforms that may supplement but do not replace physical
proximity as a driver of social interaction. Its revival would be a significant
correction to the tendency to live insular lives within densely populated neighbourhoods.
Without solid, local foundations, how can we hope to build a wider, stable
society? The hope is that micro adjustments will lead to macro improvements.
I was
talking this through with a friend over coffee one morning, when he drew my
attention to the recently discovered archaeological evidence that coffee was
being drunk in Britain 200 years before it had previously been documented. The
habit was not widespread and was probably confined to a small clique of
commodity futures traders, whose venture failed to gain ground and who died in
relative poverty.
*Acknowledged: the subject is controversially binary.
**Abraham Maslow proposed his psychological theory, The
Hierarchy of Needs in 1943
