NOW that Trump has packed his trunk and said goodbye to the White House as he heads off to Mar a Lago to top up his improbable tan, there is much to ponder about his presidency.
His last hurrah in inciting a mob to insurrection weirdly echoed the “carnage” he’d spoken of in his inaugural speech. But let’s not forget some of his other actions –possibly the worst was playing down the gravity of the coronavirus which led to hundreds of thousands of American deaths.
Building a wall to keep immigrants from coming to the US from Mexico wasn’t enough. He introduced a policy of separating young children from the desperate migrant parents he put in custody, putting them in cages without bothering to get proper documentation. According to the Washington Post, 545 children are still separated with no-one knowing who or where their parents are.
There was his hideous mocking of disabled journalist Serge Kovaleski at a rally before his election, his suggestion that ingesting bleach should be tried to beat Covid, his infamous boast of grabbing women by the p***y, his creepy quip that he would date Ivanka if she wasn’t his daughter, his dodgy phone calls to the Ukrainian leader suggesting financial aid would follow if he investigated Biden junior’s dealings, his attempt to force a Republican official in Georgia to “find” extra votes to enable him to overturn the election result and most of all, his assault on truth.
He invented the “fake news” mantra that conveniently denied the truth of anything he didn’t agree with. His spokeswoman later spoke of “alternative facts”, while his less nuanced followers simply attacked news crews and wrecked their cameras on numerous occasions.
He might be gone but his “big lie” about how he really won the election will live on and continue to exacerbate the split in US society that he so ruthlessly exploited.
Were there any good points? Yes, he didn’t get involved in any wars and he put it up to China, who are still denying the truth about the onset of the coronavirus.
But President Joe Biden and his administration have a mountain to climb. How will they unite the country and turn back the American public from the terrible delusion that led them to support a man so ill-suited to public office? All 74 million of them.
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LIKE a lot of people who went to a secondary school, I didn’t have the chance to learn Irish. It was considered too difficult for us 11-plus failures, so I concentrated my efforts on French and Spanish.
Irish is tougher as it doesn’t read as it’s written, the spelling is a challenge and it’s highly inflected. But it has a real meaning here in its native land.
Nearly every place-name in Northern Ireland has its origin in Irish, and it tells you something about the location. Belfast means nothing in its English form but Béal Feirste, mouth of the Farset does.
The Shankill has a meaning when you learn it’s from the Irish 'sean chill', meaning old church. I have a handy Irish speaker at home to consult about any place-name we pass – or used to, back in the days of travelling around the country.
So I was cheered by the news that Belfast City Council is to make it easier for residents to apply for an Irish-language street sign. It’s a pity that the DUP, UUP and PUP still view Irish as such a threat to their identity, that they couldn’t back the policy.
If the plan had been to remove the English version, I would have agreed with them. But is it so frightening to have the Irish version beneath the English one?
I’d be happy to have Ulster Scots signage wherever that was appropriate. Isn’t it richer to know what a place-name means? The poet John Montague wrote: “The whole landscape is a manuscript/ We had lost the skill to read,/ a part of our past disinherited”.
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NOW that there’s not much to do except watch TV, I was cheered to hear there’s a new series of Sex and the City on the way, though alas, without Samantha, who was the best of the four unlikely friends.
Is the new title, And Just Like That, really a tribute to the late Tommy Cooper’s catch-phrase?
The main character, Carrie Bradshaw, was able to afford Manolo Blahniks and a Manhattan apartment on her one column a week. And so it made me think… Am I getting paid enough?
