A FAMOUS GROUSE

WE have a new drinking game, here at the Mahogany Ridge. It’s called the Blood-Dimmed Tide and, as the name implies, it’s a killer. 

The rules are simple. Every time you open a newspaper and come across an editorial or opinion piece that quotes from or refers to WB Yeats’s The Second Coming you toss back a stiff shot of Old Crazed Moorhen and a lager or two to get rid of the taste.

The Sunday papers, as you can imagine, will be full of it; the centre won’t be holding, darkness will be dropping on the world, things will be falling apart, the ceremony of innocence will be drowning, the best will be lacking all conviction, and so on. Come lunchtime, there won’t be a regular among us who isn’t legless.

This is not to suggest, of course, that the poem is inappropriate given the sort of week we’ve just had. Certainly the bit about anarchy being loosed upon the world does strike us as entirely fitting what with the uncertainty and dread following the US election results.

It came as something of a relief, when we managed divert our attention from the perma-tanned president-elect with the tiny hands, to learn that very little had changed in our neck of the woods, and things were still very much the same as they ever were.

The former public protector Thuli Madonsela was still under attack by the Presidency, Julius Malema was still a racist, and the Democratic Alliance was still persisting with motions of no confidence in President Jacob Zuma. 

This week they failed again, their eleventy-twentieth attempt, as the man himself may have put it. Why does the DA persist? Because our president was still a train smash.

And it was Zuma who came to mind, horribly enough, when we read novelist Garrison Keillor on Donald Trump’s victory. “Raw ego and proud illiteracy have won out,” he wrote in the Washington Post, “and a severely learning-disabled man with a real character problem will be president. We are so exhausted from thinking about this election, millions of people will take up leaf-raking and garage cleaning with intense pleasure. We liberal elitists are wrecks.”

America, it was said, is poised to discover what it’s like to also have a populist, crotch-grabbing yahoo for a president.

Which is fine. It’s what they wanted, and it’s what they got. That’s democracy, right? It’s lousy and unfair but, as Churchill once put it, it’s still better than anything else.

Some commentators have suggested — not too convincingly — that, with the bile and bluster of the campaign behind him, Trump may settle back into some sort of reasonable “middle” ground; that he won’t be building that wall to keep out the Mexicans, that he won’t be going after the lesbian and gay communities, that he won’t be suing the women who accused him of sexual assault.

And pigs will take wing and fly.

Already there are considerable fears that a Trump administration is going to be disastrous for global warming. The man firmly believes human-caused climate change is a hoax and has vowed to dismantle the US Environmental Protection Agency “in almost every form”.

In this, Trump has already given Barack Obama a (tiny) middle finger — and has appointed Myron Ebell, of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a corporate lobby group, to lead his EPA transition team. Labelled an “oil industry mouthpiece” by Vanity Fair in 2007, Ebell is of the opinion that whatever warming is caused by greenhouse gas pollution is modest and could even be beneficial. 

Those angry white men who voted for Trump wanted change — and it seems they’re going to be getting it. In spades.

And from bad to sad, with the news of Leonard Cohen’s death.

If you’d been paying attention, you’d know that the poet and singer has been warning us about this for some time now. 

In The Darkness, a song off his 2012 album, Old Ideas, he rumbled on in a gravelly voice, “I’ve got no future, I know my days are few; I thought the past would last me, but the darkness got that too.”

In July this year, Cohen wrote a farewell note to Marianne Ihlen, his former lover and muse, as she lay dying. It read, in part, “Well, Marianne, it’s come to this time when we are really so old and our bodies are falling apart and I think I will follow you very soon. Know that I am so close behind you that if you stretch out your hand, I think you can reach mine.”

We are moved. When the Blood-Dimmed Tide starts, the first one’s for Leonard. 

This article first appeared in the Weekend Argus.