Why great Scottish poet Sorley MacLean would recognise the 'dead loathsomeness' of Trump, Putin and Netanyahu
Donald Trump’s self-pitying petulance about possible minor insults to him and his ‘friends’ is typical of tyrants throughout history
It was almost 90 years ago, in the late 1930s, that the great Scottish poet Sorley MacLean began to write the poems eventually gathered in his 1943 collection Dain do Eimhir (Songs for Eimhir); and none resonates more, in our own troubled time, than the poem titled The Cry of Europe.
In MacLean’s day, of course, the cry he was hearing was the call of the civil war in Spain, where an elected Republican government was struggling to resist the rising tide of European fascism; he wondered whether the beauty and love of the young woman in his life – “girl of the yellow, heavy-yellow, gold-yellow hair” – could ever outweigh his sense of shame at not going to confront this evil in person.
And as Donald Trump kings it at Mar A Lago, chatting on the phone to his “friend” Vladimir Putin, and holding out the pudgy hand of welcome to his “friend” Benjamin Netanyahu, it’s difficult not to hear one line from that magnificent poem resounding around this moment. “Would your song and splendid beauty,” the poet asks, “take from me the dead loathsomeness of these ways, the brute and the brigand at the head of Europe…”
MacLean meant Hitler and Franco, or perhaps Hitler and Mussolini. He would, though, instantly have recognised the trio of Trump, Putin and Netanyahu for the thugs they are, indifferent to both law and decency, and addicted to brute force as a demonstration of their power and effectiveness.
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Trump takes Putin’s line
In particular, Trump’s heady “bromance” with Putin – obvious since the early days of his first presidency – reached new heights this week, when Trump first prepared for a crucial meeting with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky by chatting to Putin for more than two hours, and then publicly asserted that Putin “wants Ukraine to succeed”, even while Kyiv and other cities were mourning their dead, and desperately trying to restore power and water supplies, after a devastating night of drone and missile attacks.
Worse, Trump then proceeded – when Putin called to complain that Ukraine had mounted a drone attack on his country house – instantly to accept Putin’s highly questionable account, and to damn Ukraine for its cruelty and irresponsibility.
This pattern of self-pitying petulance in the face of possible minor insults to Trump himself and his “friends” – contrasting with utter indifference to thousands of deaths caused by their policies elsewhere – is typical of tyrants throughout history; and it simply confirms Trump’s growing indifference, and even hostility, to the US Constitution’s values of democracy, freedom and the rule of law that his country at least claimed to represent during the long “Pax Americana” after 1945.
Instead, like a damaged child, Trump now prefers to hang around with the biggest thugs in class, the ones who break rules with impunity, and laugh as they smash down structures and institutions. The damage this global fraternity of brutes and brigands has already done – from the shattered landscape and people of Gaza, to the crushing of every hopeful attempt, over the last 80 years, to create a rule-governed order in which humankind could live together more decently – is tragic almost beyond calculation.
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More power for the powerful
For always and everywhere, the consequence of this regression towards a pre-modern ideology of brutish dominance and minimal rights is the same – more power to those already well-armed and wealthy, and ever more danger, humiliation, agony and insecurity for everyone else, particularly the most vulnerable.
And it’s because of that consequence that we must, whatever the difficulties, continue to resist the Trump administration’s ugly creed, and those who promote it. We have lived through an age of cynicism and greed in which rules and morality, including many of the ideals of freedom and democracy, were often framed as at best a luxury, and at worst a hypocritical pretence.
Now, though, we can perhaps begin to see that, however much we fail in fully implementing those declared enlightenment principles – however flawed our justice system and our democracy, however blatant our Western history of colonial enslavement and exploitation, however devastating our current failures to protect the people of Gaza and support Ukraine’s fight for survival – nonetheless, without the steady attempt to live out the meaning of those creeds, and to create institutions which reflect them, our world can simply and rapidly become a war-torn hell.
Facing up to the truth about the crises we face is not easy, of course, particularly after four decades of an economic experiment that has resulted in so many feeling bruised and left behind. Hence the ferocity of the deliberately fomented culture wars – delusional, distracting and ultimately disabling – that we now have to endure, across Western politics.
No more worthy task for us all
For those not tempted by fake solutions, though, there is no way forward but a return to the slow, painstaking task of building a decent, just and genuinely democratic society, from the smallest community up to our greatest international institutions.
That this work will never be completed is obvious; it could hardly be clearer, now, that malign forces will constantly try to undermine and corrupt collective institutions that resist their unaccountable power, from the smallest community battle against a giant energy corporation to the Trump administration’s increasingly hysterical attacks on the European Union.
If you seek a life that has space for beauty and meaning, though – rather than ugly and destructive self-aggrandisement – then there is no other task more worthy of your short time on Earth.
So as the year turns, let’s be grateful for the past generations of enlightened men and women who mapped out the way, and left us with many of the intellectual and institutional tools we need for a just and sustainable future; and then, in whatever way each of us can, let’s get down to work.
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