It may simply be about decency after all.
You know, as when you see an elderly neighbour struggling along with her shopping and offer to carry it for her, and you do, and you walk slowly along, side by side, having a wee blether.
Or, when hardship and sorrow come, you lend a hand and support. Or, when joy happens, you delight with your neighbours, because the roses they planted have finally blossomed, or their sons and daughters are graduating, or the dog they’ve faithfully trained finally sits like yon beautiful Lassie in the film and stays when the carer says: “Stay!”
And, then, on the other hand, we look at this pernicious mob in charge of the country, where all sense of basic common decency has been binned. The parties and the vomit and the wine on the walls. The odious scheme to sell refugees to Rwanda.
And not just the drinking while others grieved, but the endless obfuscation and lies, which have left politics with an unholy stench. How on earth can anyone trust anything they say or do anymore?
And that matters because life is built on trust. I need to trust the chair will hold me up when I sit on it. That the water I drink from the tap is not poisoned. That, when I promise my wife to put the bin out, it happens. If only as symbols of much bigger things: that words have real meaning and consequences. Otherwise, we lose all relational value between words and deeds, truth and lies.
To climb the greasy ladder, you need to be some kind of snake
I think most of us were surprised by Donald Trump’s accession to real power in the USA.
I too remember those early, heady days when all these famous journalists from The New York Times and The Washington Post and CNN went to the press conferences and asked reasonable questions, expecting sensible answers. Between Donald John and the remarkable Sean Spicer, they’d be as well asking me for my views on quantum theory.
Though there are areas in which I could give, as best as I can, informed opinions. About Gàidhlig and poetry and fiction, for example. Which is basically to say that we all have some areas of competencies, and the least we can expect from our highly-paid Cabinet is some basic competency in their chosen field of “public service”.
And, that competency should include the basic human decencies on which everything hangs: truth and honesty.
I realise that to climb the greasy ladder, you need to be some kind of snake, slithering your way up. Though I do a disservice to the poor snake, who’s only behaving according to its nature.
No doubt Johnson and Rees-Mogg and all the rest of them, used to having nanny or mummy or daddy or some sgalag (flunkey) wiping up their mess, are also behaving according to their learned nature. That of privilege and entitlement and exceptionalism, where others have to choose between eating and heating, while they wallow in excess. And the gutless, silent backbenchers enabling the abuse of power, because they too gain from it.
It’s one thing to soil the playroom and expect nanny to clean up, another to soil the whole country
It’s a matter of great concern when such behaviour has obvious public consequences. While those in power partied and broke the rules they made, millions (including Her Majesty the Queen) suffered and obeyed the laws. While they squander billions of public money on dodgy contracts for their friends, millions of low-paid workers continue to rely on food banks to keep going.
It’s one thing to soil the playroom and expect nanny to clean up, another to soil the whole country.
Lies don’t last
The harrowing thing is that it appears to be a daily and consistent practice of inefficiency, incompetence, and sleaze. Trawling through a porn site while in the House of Commons seem pitifully normal, rather than an aberration.
There’s a fine old Gaelic proverb – cha sheas poca falamh. An empty sack cannot stand upright. For there’s nothing in it to keep it up. That’s what a lie is – a great emptiness at the heart of a thing. A no-thing.
An empty sack will crumple on the floor. By their fruits ye shall know them, as it’s so splendidly put in the King James Version.
The good news is that lies don’t last. Their hollowness makes them unsustainable: they have nothing to support them but their desolation.
Johnson will no doubt be heaved out sooner or later, then elevated to the great retirement home of the House of Lords
What lasts are the great virtues: decency, honesty, kindness, courage, fairness and truth. It’s what we best remember: that teacher who encouraged us in school; the bus driver who waited for us at the stop; the goals that Ross County scored!
But this mob will go, too. Johnson will no doubt be heaved out sooner or later, then elevated to the great retirement home of the House of Lords.
The decent behaviour of ordinary people will remain and outlast him, and his perfidious parcel of rogues.
Angus Peter Campbell is an award-winning writer and actor from Uist
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