The past two weeks have brought the US presidency to a lower level morally and politically than I can remember, including Nixon’s Watergate, Lyndon Johnson’s exhibitionism, and Bill Clinton’s aberrant sex in the White House. Politically, he forced a shutdown of his government on the first anniversary of his presidency, by insisting on deporting hundreds of thousands, showing a mean-spiritedness that shames the most powerful Christian state in our sorry world. Surely a postponement of his resolve to empty the country of “illegals” will do no harm. The expulsion should not in any case have

included those brought in as children, who now lead productive and independent lives. But Trump seems to glory in the shutdown, blames Democrats for it, his robot Press Secretary Sarah Sanders, intoning, in turgid half-truths, “We will not negotiate the status of unlawful immigrants while Democrats hold our lawful citizens hostage over their reckless demands. This is the behaviour of obstructionist losers, not legislators. When Democrats start paying our armed forces and first responders we will reopen negotiations on immigration reform.” Trump’s behaviour is especially mean when you recall that his grandfather sneaked out of Germany to avoid military service, and that his father, and later he, have claimed Swedish origin during the wars with Germany. How many of his victims, do you think, have told similar lies? The shutdown will not prevent Trump from waging war if he wants to, even though his army may not be paid! To emphasise his immigration racism, he summarily dismissed Haiti and all of Latin America, and called Africa “s..thole” countries, displaying such profound ignorance that surprised even his most passionate detractors, and angered those who know the role played by American greed and power to bully and degrade those countries into a state of need and subservience that allows his slander.
Haiti is misunderstood. It assisted American colonies in their war of independence, but was betrayed by them on seeking the same three freedoms as they demanded. In 1825, slave-holding America colluded with France, which imposed on Haiti, under siege, a punitive charge of 150 million gold francs for freed slaves, to be paid in five years, to assure Haitian independence; this was well in excess of Haiti’s revenue, strangling the nation economically. Later in the19th century, Haiti borrowed continually from France and the USA, and US businessmen took an interest in Haitian agriculture. Burdened by the debt to France and the USA, which provided an excuse for US occupation during and after WW1 (1914-1934) during which money was removed from Haiti to the US (Citibank). FD Roosevelt, then Navy Secretary, rewrote the Haitian constitution, cancelling the restriction of land to Haitians, making it available to foreigners, creating a spate of take-over of the best lands by US interests at give-away prices. Thus Americans continued the raid on Haiti that France had started. This is only part of the story (see The Indelible Red Stain for more). Trump needs to know that his adopted country was one of the assholes that created the Haitian mess.
As you read this Trump is preparing to recite his “America first” gospel to the annual World Economic Forum currently taking place in Davos, Switzerland. This most exclusive congress of the richest and most powerful will consider this year “Creating a Shared Future in a Fractured World.” So far Davos has been a congress of globalisation winners, a bludgeoning force that subdued the world, tramped across borders and left whole populations ravaged by their intensity, such that today’s eight richest people own as much as the least 4 billion!!
This obscene fracture was not sudden. It has been known for years, but ignored by the very people who now belatedly deign to consider the plight of the less favoured and less connected, not by lack of ability, but of opportunity, seized by the world’s largest companies.
Last year, China laid claim to be the top economic dog. But it is no more beneficent than the great Western predators: the USA and its lap-dogs, Canada and Western Europe. This year, it will be India’s turn; but the signs are not good, for Indians, since it is clear that PM Modi wants alignment with Japan, USA and Australia in an Indo-Pacific coalition. India is already in too deep with the USA. Trump is capricious and untrustworthy, and wants the protection of an economic and partly physical wall around America, and will not hesitate to dismiss Indians, using nasty names.

If she were here today, Ma would shake her head with its signature summation that meant all was no longer well in this troubled world, and lift her eyes to the place beyond the low, darkening clouds where the good Lord resides insulated and secure, away from the turmoil in this palace of despondence we call Earth. That shake of the head and the lifting up of her eyes summed it all up: “What is this world coming to? As sure as rain, there is a storm coming!”
Ma would not understand why the copper cent piece, for example, is now as extinct as the dinosaurs; that now to dig in a backyard while gardening is to

discover among the rubble of rusted bottle caps (she called these “crown corks”), discarded discoloured blue covers of Bic ball-point pens, and what are now green and encrusted fossils of what was once a coveted, and highly-prized, much-circulated one-cent coin. The cent piece for her was both the final and irreducible unit of all transactions, as well as the starting point for all things financial – the atom from which the universe of all currency exchanges was constructed. For such transactions she always kept a small handful of these building blocks tied in a formidable and inextricable knot at one end of her orhini, the highly-detailed, embroidered headwear she wore as part of our great ancestral tradition. It was from this sinister knot, which only her dexterous fingers could untie the dense and circuitous overlapping and underlying layers of silk, the index and thumbs on both hands undoing its intricacies (at times with help of her two remaining front corner incisors), her concentration interiorised the way a safebreaker holds an ear, along with the breath, to the lock in order to listen to the sibilance of the tumblers in the combination in the vault of a bank, where she extracted cent after cent, inspecting each head as if for frowning signs of disapproval at being spent; or perhaps she was searching for flaws from the predictability in the stamping done by Her Royal Majesty, the Queen of England’s royal mint, before she reluctantly put down five-cents worth of luxurious spending in my sweaty, quivering, and impatient palm.
Even as she remade the knot, ensuring its sturdiness with a final tug, again putting the front incisors to use along with a closed and gripping fist, her eyes were issuing the warning of her eternal vigilance over this vault-like orhini. This was so since there were a few occasions when a close relative or two, wanting to supplement the entrance fee with a cone-pack or two of fried and seasoned chick peas during a movie visit to the small, nearby town, made a failed, predatory assault on the largesse securely ensconced within this localised version of an unassailable Fort Knox.
Ma was always on hand and ready for such an onslaught, her mouth primed like the barrel of a gun for a sweeping staccato of rapid, verbal fire, her petite frame taut, legs apart and the centre of gravity rooted like a boxer ready to defend a heavyweight title, against any attempt to extract through piracy more than a fair share of her weekly, atomised allowance of spending money.
Later, as I too began going to movies with my relatives, I started to imagine Ma defending her stash less like a boxer, and more like the armoured ankylosaurus, swinging with deadly and bone-crushing accuracy the balled knot of coins in her orhini the way this dinosaur bashed its clubbed tail into predators. But this was nothing more than the too active imagination of a young boy that had grown febrile, infected and influenced by too many foreign movies.
So, for Ma to unknot five cents so easily out of the stranglehold of her orhini, the coins blinded by the light of day even while breathing fresh air deeply like the suffocated, could mean either the world was coming to an end; or, that long-lost family members had turned up outside the hibiscus fence (Ma called the bridged space between our front yard and roadway, “the gap”), for what was the thrill of a day-long, unexpected visit. In those days, the frequency of family visiting was as sporadic as water in the public mains dribbling with gassy bursts out of the government’s standpipe; likewise, this was a time for celebration.
This was also an early schooling lesson for me, it being the time before pre-school, with Ma teaching me to count as she exaggeratedly put each coin into my tiny, excited palms, the moment a prehistoric, pre-dinosaur antecedent to what would later become an internationally famous hit-song: “One cent… two cent… three cents... Child! Stop moving as if you have ball-bearings in your waist!”
So it was the cousins thronged off to buy five-cents worth of candy, then to spend hours and hours from the currency of our childhood energised by the heavy-fuel of sugar, chasing each other in a time, which today, like the one-cent piece, is now spent, and can no more be recovered.

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