The Xolobeni Contemplations #1.
The Suffocating ‘Locomotive Breath’ of Trumpism
After the shuffling madness of the Trump Impeachment saga, it would appear that all it has achieved is to shovel more coal to hasten a runaway train headlong to its death. Even without anthropogenic climate change causing extreme weather events and humanitarian emergencies, the relentless extraction of non-renewable natural resources has been causing pollution, ecological degradation, biodiversity loss and desertification at a global scale for decades. Is there any hope of getting a handle back on the beast? The Amadiba community of the Pondoland Wild Coast has shown that we can. They stopped an Australian mining company in its tracks.
For all the sacrifice and hardships that social workers have to endure there are moments of great encouragement.
One such Moment of Grace was back in 2007, one year after I had got myself immersed in the Amadiba struggle to stop the mining of their ancestral lands by an Australian mining company. I had the good fortune to meet one of the rock idols from my teenage years, Jethro Tull frontman and flautist Ian Anderson. From within the Amadiba’s global network of environmental activists one of our German friends managed to hook us up with the band during their tour of South Africa. I got some freebies for the live concert at Carnival City and took some my old school friends. In the early seventies we had negotiated our adolescent rite of passage to adulthood learning the lyrics and chords of Jethro Tull’s hits in the band we formed.
Jethro Tull encored with their best-known rock hit “Locomotive Breath”.
Anderson called on his fans to make sure — figuratively speaking — that they jumped on the train and applied collective sanity to dispel the “shuffling madness of the Locomotive Breath” — a direct reference to the threats posed by mining on the Pondoland Wild Coast.
“Ol’ Charlie stole the handle, and the train won’t stop going, no way to slow it down,” he sang.
The next day at a media event, with Claire Johnston of Mango Groove and Singugu Zukulu a proudly Pondo resident of the Amadiba Community who had help start the campaign, a campaign was launched that was a great boost to our efforts.
Afterwards I got to have a conversation with Ian and his son James.
Meeting Ian Anderson had caused the jukebox in my mind to fetch from my boyhood subconscious all the Jethro Tull classics and successively place them on the turntable. Having the chance to talk with a person who had a seminal influence in my adolescent moral/spiritual awakening was significant enough. But the main purpose of the conversations was not about Living in the Past (another of his famous hit songs), but whether there was any hope for the future: for the Wild Coast, and by analogy, for the human species living on planet Earth.
We talked about “Aqualung” — a deeply compassionate description of a self-loathing vagrant. I told him that it had helped inspire me to become a social worker, (“Snot running down his nose, greasy fingers smearing shabby clothes… Aqualung my friend, don’t you start away uneasy. You poor old sod; you see, it’s only me”). Another Tull hit — a lament against the domestication of God by institutionalised religion entitled Wind Up — planted the seed that eventually germinated in my decision to study theology after seven years of social work. (“So I asked this God a question, and by way per reply, he said ‘I’m not the kind that you have to wind up on Sundays”).
Were his lyrics for “Locomotive Breath” more than just an allegorical tale of a man’s life falling apart? Did he perhaps also see them as an allegory of the peril faced by the planet generally given runaway climate change?
Ian modestly agreed: the global climate change scenario was already nascent over 30 years ago, when he wrote the prophetic lyrics. With one hand holding fast to levers of industrial technology, and the other hand extracting ever larger volumes of fossil fuels, it explains how our technological reach has exceeded our spiritual grasp. Charlie has stolen the handle, rendering the servant locomotive into a tyrannical master, taking the “all-time loser headlong to his death” as it continued its relentless CO2 emitting path to destruction.
I also explained that I had travelled widely in Africa doing humanitarian work before becoming immersed in the Amadiba struggle, and saw the Wild Coast saga as just another local manifestation of a global predicament. Extreme weather events were not making it any easier.
He nodded. “I was already writing about climate change in the song ‘Skating Away On The Thin Ice Of The New Day’ back in 1974. But none of my generation can claim innocence in regard to our individual and collective greed of the last 30 years or so.”
I explained to Ian that, in becoming more deeply embroiled as a social worker with the struggles of the five rural communities on the mineral-rich shores of the Pondoland Wild Coast, I realised that the dynamics and conundrums they face are emblematic of global issues of concern. Can we continue indefinitely to take non-renewable resources below ground without harming the reproductive capability of ecosystems services above ground? Can we prosper from the global trade in mineral commodities without ripping to shreds the cultural fabric of indigenous local communities forced to give up their land and traditional livelihoods to make way for thirty-ton trucks, bulldozers and the scraping pistons of mineral-separating machinery?
Ian was humble about the extent of his influence. “All I can do is write songs and perform them with whatever talent I have, to support social workers like you, and others to do the real work of helping the Aqualungs of society,” he told me.
I took this as encouragement to ignore the steam breaking on my brow to redouble effort to ‘find the handle’ and stop the headlong rush of the Xolobeni Mineral Sands venture from having a disastrous environmental and social impact. I picked up Gideon’s Bible and opened on page 11 to find the verse “the stupid man built his house upon the sand” (Matthew 7:12).
Now, 13 years later, the future of the Amadiba to decide their local destinies locally seems much more assured. They have won their case in the High Court to assert their constitutional right to say no to mining. The scheme does not enjoy their Free, Prior and Informed consent. Minister Gwede Mantashe is not happy. He does not like to see his prerogative to decide on whom to award mining rights usurped. He says he will appeal the decision but we are still waiting for his papers. The Australian mining company is likewise furious, and have chosen to scapegoat me and two friends with defamation SLAPP suits. Mark Caruso, the CEO has just upped the quantum against me to R10 million for 28 instances of alleged defamation. More about that another time. Suffice to say I have dusted off my guitar and am tuning it up.
Moving from the local to the global, it now occurs to me that Locomotive Breath now needs to be played and sung by enlightened legislators in Washington, led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The lyrics do have an eyrie echo given the “Charlie” who remains entrenched in the White House, Donald J Trump. Seems to me that the Trump train “won’t stop going, no way to slow it down”.
Perplexing.
Further research into the predicament now facing the planetary community as a result of the failed impeachment effort, has turned up two further threads that have left me even more perplexed. Firstly the evidence that Trumps inaction on climate change, and his justifications mimic patterns in criminal behaviour that criminologists call “techniques of neutralisation”.
1. Denial of responsibility — it is not the offender’s fault.
2. Denial of injury of harm — the crime does not cause significant harm or may have positive results.
3. Denial of victim — there is no clear victim.
4. Condemnation of the condemner — the offender criticizes the criminal justice system to avoid criticism of the offender.
5. Appeal to higher loyalties — deviant behaviour was in aid of a greater good or to benefit someone else.
The article cited was written before his high crimes and misdemeanours over Ukraine came to light, but it seems to me that his conduct in that matter and his subsequent justifications also tick all the boxes of “techniques of neutralisation”. Most worrying it that, led by Mitch McConnel the Republican party (but for the brave Senator Mitt Romney) have not only been duped by his techniques, but have aided and abetted them.
While putting the finishing touches to this story CNN reported that four federal prosecutors involved in the case which convicted longtime Donald Trump confidant Roger Stone of seven charges including lying to congress and witness tampering had now quit in protest after “top Justice Department officials undercut them and disavowed the government’s recommended sentence against Stone”.
The prosecutors had recommended a sentence of nine years. Trump was furious and went on the offensive on Twitter expressing his displeasure. Attorney General William Barr evidently got the message and reduced the recommended sentence, causing an outcry. Although Trump denied interfering his twitter feed and public statements were enough to demonstrate “Techniques of neutralisation” at play.
Secondly, since the publication of “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump” in 2017, edited by psychaitrists Bandy Lee and Craig Malkin, growing movement of Mental Health professionals in the USA have joined up to question his fitness to hold office. They are now arguing that that Trump’s acquittal was invalid because he was “not mentally competent to stand trial” in the first place. They have now written to the Senate to make their case.
Evidence is now mounting to indicate that people who rise to positions of power actually undergo a form of apparently irreversible brain damage, because of the sustained effect of too much dopamine swirling through their synapses. It eventually changes their neural pathways and alters their personality. As reported in The Atlantic Monthly in August 2017, they lose mental capacities — most notably the capacity for empathy — that were essential for their rise to power. The man we see on TV today bears little resemblance to the young Donald Trump of thirty or so years ago. From videos I have seen of his younger self, he actually seemed quite charming and likeable, not the unhinged, vindictive tyrant of today.
It really is a perilous situation for the Earth community at large, well expressed by Tiara Walters in her recent satirical piece, High Crimes and #Mitchdemeanors: Open letter from Mother Earth to Mitch McConnell. We have a man who is the president of the most powerful country in the world, who remains in office despite that fact that experts have diagnosed him to be 1. criminally inclined and 2. probably mentally incompetent and unfit to stand trial let alone unfit to hold office.
Because he wields such power I found it hard not to feel deeply perplexed by the seeming hopelessness of the situation. “Arrogance combined with ignorance is lethal”, cautions spiritual writer Richard Rohr. Where the dominant power caucus deliberately shuts itself off from the truth, and has in place a billion dollar disinformation campaign to re-elect President Trump as reported by The Atlantic, have we gone beyond lethal and are now into the terrain of the diabolical?
I asked my God a question, and by way per reply, the jukebox in my mind fetched another hit by another minstrel who has hugely inspired me in my work and placed it on the turntable, Leonard Cohen’s “Anthem”.
“Ring the bells that still can ring.
Forget your perfect offering.
There is crack, a crack in everything.
That’s how the light gets in”.
The crack of hope came from Republican Senator Mitt Romney who broke the fear-filled Republican groupthink by voting to remove Trump from office knowing it would be “enormously consequential” for his political career. Indeed, and in the fullness of time for Donald Trump too.
One man or woman with a conscience is always a majority.
