More praise
On behalf of my family, I’d like to congratulate everyone at The Nelson Mail for winning the Regional Newspaper of the Year Award. It’s a brilliant achievement and one that you should all feel very proud of. The timing was also spectacular given The Mail’s recent announcement that it is reviewing the way it funds local news and sustains the future of local journalism. Personally, I hope that the combination of the two remind people of the critically important role The Mail has played in this region for over 150 years. It’s a role The Mail continues to play today; holding the powerful to account, keeping people informed, exposing them to new ideas, giving locals a voice and helping to keep Nelsonians connected. In a time of increasing spin, fake news and propaganda, it’s a role that we need to be filled now more than ever. I hope the people, businesses and institutions of Nelson understand that and give you the support that you need to keep up the award-winning work.
The work soon numbed my mind. Sadly it didn’t numb the body. As I loaded the barrow, and as I wheeled it across what began as lawn but became the Somme, and as I unloaded it at the other end, my thighs protested, my arms protested and my lower back, well, it threatened a coup d’etat.
The return trudge though the mud with an empty barrow was my thinking time. Mostly I thought about how much my back was hurting. Back pain is the price our species pays for going bipedal. My dog can’t hold a knife or wheel a barrow, but his spine’s just fine.
And I also thought about Sisyphus. Sisyphus’s punishment is famous. Less famous are the crimes that he was punished for. Sisyphus was a bully and a tyrant. Vain, vengeful and selfish, he acted as if he were above the law. So the gods felt the need to teach him a lesson, to punish him in a way that they would still be talking about five thousand years later. Hence the rock.
How wonderful, one might think, if the gods were still around. There’d be no need for the FBI and special prosecutors. ‘‘Trump,’’ the gods would say, ‘‘for obvious crimes we condemn you to a life of misery and isolation.’’
Well, the good news is that’s just what’s happened. The ancients knew a thing or two. Their gods weren’t supernatural beings to be worshipped. They were metaphors for the way things were. And the way things were is the way things are. Nothing’s changed. And the way things are has condemned others. Nut-job, grandstander, very dishonest people, such phrases are the projected accusations of a man who feels the wordless weight of guilt.
His wife is no comfort. Chosen for her decorative qualities, she stays away as much as she can. And on the one occasion when she was required to give a speech in his praise she could think of nothing to say so stole a speech from another woman, stole it word for word.
And with an irony too delicious for even the gods to have thought of, that woman was Michelle Obama, the smart black wife of the smart black dude who humiliated Trump at a televised correspondents’ dinner, who made a whole room laugh at him. That ignominy still burns in Trump’s heart. His wife could not have aimed the dagger more precisely or twisted it deeper.
Isolated, out of his depth, exposed and mocked, consumed with hatred, awash with self-pity, and facing a slow but inexorable crushing in the jaws of justice, Trump is in hell more surely than Sisyphus ever was.
And actually Sisyphus, as Albert Camus pointed out, could be considered a happy man. He had something to do, and it was no more futile than most things. Every rock rolls back down the hill eventually.
The pleasure is in getting it up there, in standing back after five hours work, admiring the shed full of wood and saying, ‘‘I bloody did that.’’