Is there more to say about January 20th, 2025? A January 21st reflection from the South West Pacific
Monday, 27 January 2025
| Bruce Wearne
Image credit: The Inauguration of Washington as First President of the United States, April 30th 1789. Wikimedia Commons. Bequest of Adele S. Colgate, 1962.
Friends:
Do we stay quiet? Are we to assume that if we ignore the nonsense, it will go away?
In the clapping, the ecstatic smiles and hugs, the demonstrative childishness of ‘this is what victory feels like’ – and the media's attempt in all modes to maintain market share by its reporting – we're still confronted by what seems to be an outbreak of insanity that we are going to have to deal with; and deal with internationally, big time.
Immediately I wonder: how long before the delusion collapses?
With all the clapping and the nonsense telling the American people that a ‘fork in the road of civilisational progress’ has been reached, that the 2024 election result of the insurrectionist, convicted criminal, to Commander in Chief of the US military, is the beginning of the Golden Age (as was mooted in Ancient Greece under the Athenian Agora and by Saint Simon as a motif of early 19th century socialism), we are tempted to remain speechless! Do we dare to actually say anything about what seems to be an outbreak of delusional conduct? Can we begin to say to ourselves, in our prayers to GOD, what we are thinking of this nonsense? Indeed, can we even begin to address our own feelings about this? And then how long before it all implodes? And can we say anything without being dragged further and further into it?
And am I alone in thinking this? I don't think so.
Here in Australia, let us consider this message posted on X by our US ambassador and flinch:
A pleasure to accompany Australia's Foreign Minister on this historic day, as President Trump is sworn in as the 47th President of the United States.
This is what Google tells me has been posted. I try not to go onto platforms controlled by ‘presidential buddies’. Are we to stay silent as we are caught up in the insanity posted by former PM Kevin Rudd, our Australian Ambassador to Washington, on the presidential buddy’s propaganda machine?
What is Kevin talking about? A PLEASURE! A pleasure to be there? Truly? Perhaps ‘our Kev’ would reply that I'm taking the post ‘out of context’; to which I would reply that he has taken his office as Australia’s diplomat to Washington out of its mandated context by using the term ‘pleasure’ about his and the Foreign Minister’s attendance at such an event. The just and proper diplomatic response would have been to politely decline the invitation to attend, to anticipate the purported ‘offense’, and prepare a clear, quiet statement of explanation.
Australia should not have been present at that presidential inauguration as long as the Anschluss babblings foreshadowed in the previous week had not been openly and publicly retracted and their implications about the US’s violation of its own US view of the ‘international rules-based order’ (sic!) repudiated by the one who babbled them, the in-coming Commander-in-Chief of the US Military and his team. For him as ‘president elect’ to foreshadow the US taking over the Canal de Panamá, Greenland and making Canada the 51st US State, simply assumes that the US’s need for more ‘living room’ is to be a central principle from here on of international relations. No. Australia should have no part of this. If the US President-elect can send such a signal, our Australian Ambassador should have sent our signal that such a view of international relations is simply not on as far as we are concerned and stay away. To attend too easily sends a signal of our compliance. This is not the view of international relations that is presupposed by the ANZUS treaty.
Yes, that would be very difficult to have done and said without grandstanding! But does not the context of our commitment to international justice as the normative basis for international affairs demand such a ‘Thanks, but no thanks’ reply? A better use of their diplomatic time might have simply been to arrange to meet Michelle Obama away from the Capitol on that day, until her husband turned up after for his own reasons not being able to stay away from what was going on.
Sorry, Kevin – you made a lot of gains electorally years back in your 007 campaign by quoting Bonhoeffer’s ‘When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die’. But where in your actions on this occasion was the taking of the narrow, difficult path, instead of broadly going along with the crowd on the broad path? Here was no ‘spoke in the wheel’ of this nonsense. Instead, Kevin, you send out your tweet that puts us all on the ‘pleasurable’ path that must lead to destruction. To go along sent the wrong kind of diplomatic silence, and our problem is deepened by such tweeted ‘pleasure’. That is because the Anschluss babbling is now also our problem, not just the problem of Panama, Canada, Greenland and Denmark.
You appealed to Bonhoeffer when you wanted to gain points by claiming that Christianity was no subsidiary of the Liberal Party. Indeed, you got credit for that at the time, and lots of votes from so-called evangelicals as our major parties competed for the conservative Christian votes of Hillsong, the Anglicans and the Roman Catholics. That was then! And this is now.
Well then, instead of going along in meek and mild fashion, you should have put a genuine spoke in the wheel of this twittered insanity by simply staying away and keeping off the platform of the Presidential buddy.
Australia’s national interest here and now must mean open non-compliance even with any thought-bubbled Anschluss, and such a subsidiary post of ‘pleasure’ on the platform of the Presidential buddy simply signals our corporate inability to say openly and truthfully that we are not going to tolerate such loose lips that sink just international relations – not even as a joke, not even from the US president and his obsequious team.
Our alliance with our own region out here in the South West Pacific is fragile enough, in this international order that is creaking and groaning, without giving a millimetre to such foreshadowing of US ‘living room’ extensions. For us here as an ANZUS partner the babbling will have to be openly, decisively and unequivocally redrawn for us to have confidence that our defense treaty will be kept. Pacta sunt servanda. Promises must be kept.
Why unequivocally withdrawn? Because the babblings have real-world impact. Words mean something. They are not just twittered thought bubbles to be taken down when they are discovered to be inconvenient to the next stage of the babbling narrative. Merely taking down a twittered thought bubble is not an open, decisive and unequivocal revocation of one’s previous egregious statement.
Our country’s diplomatic signalling that now says attendance was so pleasurable might also be read to concede that ‘history in the making’ is simply willing accommodation to whatever the Babbler-in-Chief might put into his intemperate words at any particular time in his rule by tweet. We need Australian international diplomacy that gets out of the web of twittered thought-bubble based foreign policy.
No. This cannot be condoned nor should it be left to private, diplomatic weasel words that pretend to take offence behind closed doors. Not good enough.
I concede that we are in a right pickle here. But thanks to my colleague David Koyzis (see his recent book) I've been alerted to the article of September 2016 by George Weigel, when he was Editor of ‘First Things’. Weigel who made a telling post that put Australia front and centre of what was unfolding within the US polity at that point. The US and First Things was then, of course, anticipating the ‘impossible’ election of a man ‘who is utterly unfit – by character, by wit, or by life experience – to lead America for the next four years’. It’s as true now as it was then; even moreso. Kevin needs to read that article because his oh so polite tweak of pleasure confirms Weigel's astute reminder of what we sang back then in 1965 with the Seekers, in words that seem most apt about the ethos of rule-by-texting.
We’ll build a world of our own
That no one else can share
All our sorrows we’ll leave far behind us there.
And I know you will find
There’ll be peace of mind
When we live in a world of our own.
Maybe Australia's celebrity folk quartette of that time weren't thinking politically at the top of their quartette's harmony (hmmm ... although one at least would in time become a Liberal candidate). But, nevertheless, even with our own private space, we don’t live in or build a world of our own; what we say publicly is shared. And Kevin, your tweet gives us no peace of mind simply because the delusionary thought bubbles of the powerful need to be pierced.
If presumptive talk is going to be allowed to prevail without being repudiated by our clear and unequivocal public signalling – i.e. standing resolutely with Panama, Mexico, Canada and Greenland and against the foolishness of highly combustible talk – then we signal a compliant willingness to indulge the notion that we are whatever the US electorate's insurrectionist-as-President decides we are going to be.
And so we become colonised by his intemperate babblings, waiting for the next one to be issued.
The longer this insane talk goes on, and the longer the international ‘friends’ of the US fail to demand it be retracted fully and unreservedly then all that is happening is the issuance of an implicit order to maintain what can only be an obsequious accommodation to a ‘grotesque’ babbling as an ongoing descent into international diplomatic insanity continues.
Let the US confirm its commitment to what it so self-righteously preens itself by as the ‘rules based international order’ in terms of the way diplomacy among friends is done.
Bruce Wearne is a former sociology lecturer at La Trobe University. He reached 3 score and ten a few years ago and is still trying to stay busy as a student in the school of Jesus Christ. He now lives in Ballarat with Val his wife and with his two sons and daughter-in-law close by.