| Back to Black Joanne Black
What do back-seatof-the-car chatter and politicians’ domestic woes have in common?
An odd feature of having kids in the back seat of the car is that they talk to each other as though the driver is not present. My family’s most memorable example of this behaviour was when my husband was driving our older daughter and her friend, both then aged about six, to a swimming pool. As he drove, the girls mused aloud on the best way to kill him, apparently thinking this would be the first step towards my daughter going to live with her friend.
It was interesting that the master plan was not the other way around – possibly because, even at six, the friend realised that if I were the surviving adult in our house, the cooking would be so bad that she would prefer to stay at her place. They settled on poisoning as their preferred method of execution, though my husband felt sufficiently secure that he never took the precaution of hiring a food taster.
Last weekend, I was driving my younger daughter and her friend home after a sleepover. The girls, 16, were not planning to do away with me, but were having the conversation that dominates all others among many American teenagers – namely, what college to go to.
The friend, who is bright and likely to have her pick of colleges, was outlining her life plan. She would do her undergraduate degree, go to medical school, become a surgeon, work for 10-15 years to pay off her student loan and then, aged 45, visit India, “because I’ve always wanted to go there”.
She accepts delayed gratification much better than I did at her age, but it was her unquestioning, matter-of-fact expectation of a huge student loan requiring other life experiences to be deferred that interested me. Of course, I do not know anyone who was still following at 17 the plan they had at 16, let alone still following it at 45. However, the pressure of college applications and looming loans is very real here and dominates many kids’ final years of high school.
Their sense of purpose is admirable, though the pressure seems unhealthy. But as the mother of the girl who was going to knock off her father, who am I to judge kids’ conversations?
Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it’s off to court we go – or at least it was this week for US President Donald Trump’s attorney, Michael Cohen, trailed by a cohort including porn star Stormy Daniels, for whom Cohen negotiated the world’s least-effective non-disclosure agreement. In fact, if there had never been a non-disclosure agreement, the chances are that Daniels’ name would be unknown to those of us whose preferred version of pornography is artfully styled photos of profiteroles and chocolate gateau.
The Trump circus reinvents itself every week and is entertaining for the audience until someone gets hurt. We can only hope, therefore, that the timing of the strikes on Syrian targets by the US, the UK and France, in retaliation for the use of chemical weapons, had nothing to do with Trump’s troubles at home. The strikes occurred just before the first TV interview with fired FBI boss James Comey was aired and a few days after an FBI raid on Cohen’s offices.
The use of chemical weapons is always abhorrent. A civilised world would ban them. But the possibility that Trump, UK Prime Minister Theresa May and French President Emmanuel Macron each had domestic reasons for wanting to look like staunch defenders of moral certitude raises troubling doubts about the strikes’ rationale.
Syria has good reason to be worried.
The Trump circus reinvents itself weekly and is entertaining until someone gets hurt.