A prerequisite to power

What a difference a face job makes. I marvel at 79-year-old Nancy Pelosi, the top American woman in politics, as much for her plastic surgery as for her achievement. One wouldn’t have happened without the other. Ambitious American women have to look preembalmed when they hit big numbers, knowing that if they look anything like Bernie Sanders – actually two years younger than Pelosi – they will officially cease to exist.

I mean that in the sense of Japanese etiquette, where they don’t greet you walking out of the loo, say, nor do other guests acknowledge you if you pass each other along your hotel corridor. You are not seen because you are not officially on display. You take on a pleasant ghostliness instead, much as older women here do when they walk to the dairy with their cardigans inside out.

Not trying to look pleasing is a way of saying you don’t care, and you won’t get powerful that way. Eternal youth is a prerequisite.

Jane Fonda admits, at 81, that she’s had work done. That’s generous of her. It makes her a modern miracle, like Demi Moore and Cher. After all the medical stretching and tucking performed on them they could stand for president. But somehow the neck never matches the face or the backs of the hands. Never mind. You can always wear latex gloves and pretend you’re about to wash your diamonds.

It’s different with Donald Trump because he’s both male and a different species, an orange branch of homo sapiens with white panda eyes. This branch of the family tree talks in gibberish and made-up truths, which has made him a hit with voters fed up with trying to understand the nuances of policy and diplomacy, who just want to be amused.

Long ago American paediatrician Benjamin Spock visited this country with his first wife, later to be traded in for a younger version. I couldn’t take my eyes off her thick makeup, slapped on like cake icing and dipping now and then into the crevices of her face, while I interviewed him. How mean Spock must have been. He could easily have paid for her to be reconditioned.

Imagine Pelosi without her face job. Impossible. She represents the American Dream, proof that money can buy you anything, especially illusion. But nothing can buy you approval when a woman uses the favourite American swear word, motherf…er.

My goodness, a woman in the House of Representatives should always be a lady, especially if she’s from a cultural minority with a name nobody can pronounce. Rashia Tlaib, the first Palestinian American woman member of Congress, was sworn in holding the Koran, which must have been offensive enough to conservative Americans, and went on to say she was keen to impeach the naughty word she used to describe Trump.

To her critics I would say she proved herself a true American right there, with the vernacular off pat. She apologised later, which is more than the president did when he talked about grabbing women by the pussy, on which basis I think she should have swaggered like he does, and stuck to her guns.

There’s a high level of debate in the US just now, so that when another new congresswoman, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, defended Tlaib and called Trump racist his cronies crowed that she had displayed ‘‘sheer ignorance’’. Trump, as an orange humanoid, would know better, I guess.

I hope the many new women in government in the US don’t expect to remain idealists for long. High-flown principles hit the gutter ages ago.