Does Trump want civil war?

Donald Trump may be trying to foment a second Civil War in the United States in order to fully implement his dictatorial ambitions. 

He has little popularity outside of his MAGA base, and even some of that could be slipping. But he has the vast majority of the country’s appeal judges in his pocket. He has a conservative majority on the Supreme Court. He has ousted or forced to retire many career professionals in the Department of Justice, leaving sycophants able to weaponise it against his perceived foes for revenge or political gain. He has tame federal law enforcement in the FBI, Homeland Security, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the latter already proving to be every bit as nasty as Nazi Germany's Gestapo in the run-up to WW2. And he is the Commander-in-Chief of the American armed forces, which has demonstrated it will do exactly what he tells it to do. 

All that’s left in his way is the Constitution of the United States. Trump has already shown that he has little, if any, regard for that document. But it’s a barrier to cementing the stranglehold he has seized on the country he swore an oath to serve, instead using the position to serve himself, his family, and his cronies in political crime. Even eroded by his dubious actions not being pulled back, thanks to a Republican majority in Congress that has wilfully failed in its duties, the Constitution bars him from two important ambitions: being president for a third term, and being able to deploy the US armed forces against US citizens in their homeland.

It’s conceivable — and we can be sure Trump has thought about it — that if he can manage to stir a serious civil insurrection, or even the appearance of one, he could declare a national state of emergency and effectively suspend the Constitution and its associated Bill of Rights, thus freeing him to govern as if in a state of war. 

Upon declaring a national emergency in the United States, more than 130 special powers are immediately activated — such as the authority to shut down communications facilities or draw down equipment from national defence stockpiles — enabling a president to intervene in ways unavailable outside an emergency declaration. This president has already illegally deployed the National Guard in several states to patrol Democrat-led cities where he has claimed there are criminal emergencies outside the control of local law enforcement. If Trump has an apparent basis to invoke the Insurrection Act, which authorises the president to use military forces domestically in the event of an insurrection or rebellion, he can deploy troops to make arrests and conduct searches amongst the civilian population. The rule of habeas corpus can be suspended, allowing the detention without trial of anyone deemed to pose a threat to the country. 

I don’t hear anyone scoffing at the idea that he would do this. Without even invoking the Insurrection Act, he has ICE officers already doing that kind of work. People-snatching, hiding detainees in out-of-state incarceration centres, injuring and killing those who try to protect themselves or others, or who are documenting such abuses, are only a taste of what this president is aiming for. 

All he needs is a big enough excuse, and America then becomes Iran. 

The iPhone changed our view of the world

Bilbao 2014.

When the iPhone was invented, it rotated the visual world by ninety degrees for most users. 

When people take photographs with their phones, I can guarantee, from observation, that they will take nearly all those pictures with their device held vertically. Every shot becomes a portrait photograph. Photographically, we have become monocular, even though our species and most animals have a binocular pair of eyes. This gives us a landscape context and the ability to measure depth. Whether to see danger more quickly, hunt food prey more efficiently, or take pictures that accurately reflect how we see the world. 

Everyone is a photographer now. However, a generation is growing up in a vertical photographic world, missing most of the picture. In fact, two-thirds of it — whenever a TV news programme uses a ‘bystander’ clip of photo or video, they almost always have to frame it with a blurred shot on either side, to fill the television screen space. Instagram and TikTok encourage a default vertical format. Probably a part of the ‘me’ ethos those platforms promote. 

As I write this in a little square in a town in Portugal, catching the remains of the autumn evening heat, there’s an accordionist busking. His attention hook is a tiny dog sitting atop his instrument, a poor thing that must have its brain scrambled by nonstop music. Or maybe it has become deaf from it all. There could be a dozen phones pointed at them at any time. All vertical. All ignore the context around the accordionist. When they show the photos to their friends back home, they won’t see the other stories around the scene.  The architecture. The street. The audience. 

I’ve been a photographer for over fifty years. In the early days, I used smelly chemicals and expensive treated paper to make my final prints, cropping each one on the enlarger to depict what I wanted as the final picture. When the digital era arrived, cameras were still designed to take photos as we see them with two eyes. Over decades of peering through viewfinders, I have made pictures worldwide as a journalist who illustrates his own stories. So, how would the Grand Canyon have looked as a portrait shot? Or a food market in Laos, where a stall-holder lifts your selected live fish from a bucket of water, slashes the head off and wraps the very fresh item for your dinner? Or the dazzling white distances to the horizon of the Salar del Uyuni salt pan in the Bolivian Andes? Or the exceptionally lonely atmosphere of a winter drive through the centre of Iceland? 

One of my favourites among all those photographic recollections, I took after mass on a Sunday morning in the old town in Bilbao, Spain. It’s of people congregated outside various tapas bars. There’s no one point of focus in that shot, but looking at the multiple sets of two, three or more people, all animated in their own groups, at least nine different stories are presented. Most would have been unseen in a vertical iPhone photograph. 

I’m not wedded to landscape. I'll crop to a portrait for an actual headshot of someone. I use squares when appropriate, perhaps for a couple who don’t need a larger background context. And if a more usual 4:3 picture ratio isn’t appropriate. But in social media publishing, blog links to Facebook, for instance, require widescreen photos, or heads can get chopped.

We live in a landscape world, and while we can photographically focus closely on parts of it, we don't know what to leave out if we don’t have the whole picture. Shoot the world as a Cyclops, the mythical one-eyed Greek monster, and you’re stuck with what you get.

So, next time, turn that iPhone sideways, and leave yourself with all the options. 

Don't spoil your vote!

An actual campaign has been launched to encourage people to spoil their votes in the upcoming presidential election. There’s also a fair bit of similar commentary spouting on social media. A recent opinion poll suggests that about 6 per cent of people plan to deliberately spoil their votes. Which is about 4.5 times more than the actual level of spoiled votes in the 2018 election. Or, in real numbers, some 90,000 people taking the time to deliberately do something negative.

I really don’t get that. If there’s no candidate that you want to vote for on the ballot, just don’t bother going to the polls. Don’t waste your own time, and the time of the hard-working tellers at the count centres, who have to sort your bit of useless paper from the ones that do make a difference. 

You might say you’re exercising your democratic right to protest that there’s nobody on the ballot who reflects your views. But have you thought that you’re just being cranky? That you’re throwing your toys out of the playpen because you’re in a sulk?

OK, so you don’t have Maria Steen, or Gareth Sheridan on the ballot, or any of the others who didn’t make it through the nomination process. Or you might vote for Jim Gavin, whose name IS there, even though you know he backed out of the race after stumbling at the second debate fence. And you know that’s another wasted effort.

The vote that we all enjoy today is a democratic one. It was hard fought for. It’s valuable because everyone has it. That wasn’t always the case. A vote in Ireland was based on religion, with Catholics disenfranchised, until 1793. Then it was only on the basis of property ownership until 1918. With the formation of the Irish Free State in 1922, the franchise was opened to all men and women citizens of the state, and it’s now 53 years since the voting age here was lowered to 18.

Sometimes I think we don’t appreciate it. Turnout in the 2018 presidential election was less than 44 per cent, the lowest ever. Unlike, for example, Australia, voting here is not mandatory. What we have easy in our generation maybe we don’t value.

Use it or lose it, isn’t that what they say about life and skills? If we don’t use our vote, we could lose our democracy. If that sounds extreme, look at what’s happening across the Atlantic. In just half a year since the present incumbent of the USA’s highest office took up residence, what has been the flagship of modern democracy is being steered directly towards the rocks of autocracy. The really scary part is how easily the instruments of state — justice, law enforcement and defence — can be turned on a country’s own citizens. All made possible on a winner’s margin of less than 1 percent of the eligible turnout. More than a third of those eligible to vote in that election didn’t do so. And there’s a strong push from the current administration to make it more difficult for those groups who might oppose them to be able to vote next time around.

It couldn’t happen here. Could it? Well, have a think about it if you’re one of those considering the deliberate spoiling of your vote next week. What we take for granted in this safe, mostly comfortable, and in many other ways fortunate country of ours, may be much more fragile than you think.