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Live on our screens, all politics is parallax
It came in a torrent last week on our streaming platforms, our screens, and social media: A PM ousted, a former PM assassinated, a presidential palace overrun by the people
SUMMIT COUNTY COLORADO — Last week, all these political events were parallax:
“The apparent displacement,” Miriam Webster states, “or the difference in apparent direction of an object as seen from two different points not on a straight line with the object.”
Boris Johnson, the UK prime minister, resigned under enormous pressure as dozens of his senior team, including the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Health Minister, resigned their posts. They could not take it any more.
They and a clear majority of their Conservative Party caucus could not abide by the lies and the prevarications, the twisting of words and denial of responsibility, hypocrisy on issues and personal conduct, the selfishness of the man at the pinnacle who could never reform himself, and therefore could never regain the confidence of the electorate.
Two impossible-to-lose by-election seats were lost last month, and the chairman of the party resigned too. The PM was not taking responsibility, but the chairman did. Johnson narrowly survived a vote of confidence in his party room just five weeks ago – but not by a sufficient margin to keep his job, exactly as we saw with Theresa May and Margaret Thatcher in their time in power.
In Washington, the political class had a parallax view.
A president lied and continues to lie about the 2020 election; is at the centre of an historic insurrection against the Capitol in an effort to overturn the election. And yet the Republican Party does not turn on Donald Trump.
The Republican leaders in the House swear allegiance to him as they prepare to take control of their chamber next year. Most Senate Republicans support Trump’s policies, from guns to abortion. The Republicans see the hearings of the January 6 Select Committee on the insurrection, and hear the testimony that Trump wanted to join the mob that attacked the Capitol, that Trump was indifferent to whether the mob would hang Vice President Mike Pence, that Trump acts like a child and bully at mealtime in the White House dining room.
But when Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell and former Attorney General Bill Barr are asked, after all the terrifying tumult of January 2021, after they speak the truth of what Trump did and that they opposed it, if he is the nominee in 2024, will they vote for him? Yes, they say, they will.
Parallax: A PM is forced out by his party. A disgraced former president, who would never accept being deposed by his party, is lionised by his party as he prepares to run for office again
Former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was assassinated by a gunman in the city of Nara. Shock is an understatement. Japan effectively bans guns. There are only a handful of gun deaths each year. The killing of Abe rocked the country. But as American journalists reported on this, the jarring chasm between Japan and the United States is an open wound. As Judy Woodruff for the PBS NewsHour observed:
“With the assassination today of the former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in a country where there’s so few, I mean, almost vanishingly few instances of gun violence, and then the contrast to our country, where I looked it up again, over 300 mass shootings already this year in the United States, and then punctuated by the July 4 massacre of seven people and many more wounded in the Chicago suburb, we’re — it reminds us where we are as a country, doesn’t it?
Yes, a country with 400 million guns and a population of 330 million people. A country that could never consider a gun buyback program as occurred in Australia after the Port Arthur massacre. A country where 60% of Americans want to ban assault weapons. A country where none of this will occur – because the political system, on this issue and on abortion rights, does not permit the will of the people to be expressed, and the political system’s leaders are too weak to fix the system.
Parallax: Shock and renewed unity in Japan; shock and resignation in America to the knowledge that more massacres will occur, and soon.
In Sri Lanka, the good people of that country have had enough of the corruption from the top, of the collapse of the economy, of the desperate daily search for food and fuel, of the hopelessness that has crushed the country’s spirit, of the bankruptcy of the political class and its leaders. Over the weekend, the presidential palace was overrun, and the prime minister and president could not restore order. The president pledges to resign, but we will see. Ultimately, the crowds will retire from the palace, with democracy and anti-corruption the goals. But rebuilding Sri Lanka will be an almost-unbearable burden.
Where did we last see images like this on our screens? On January 6 last year, when a mob of people overran the Capitol. If the president had had his way that day, he would not have ended his term in office, but stayed permanently in office.
Parallax: In Colombo, a cry of rage to restore Sri Lanka. In Washington, a cry of rage to destroy America.
Stay tuned. More parallax is coming soon to a screen near you.
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