What is one to make of
the candidates for the American presidency?
Trump reminds me of
Colm McCarthy’s reported remark on the Irish Financial Regulator’s television
performance at the time of the economic collapse, where he ‘stammered rote answers to questions he had not been
asked, and ignored the ones he had been asked’. Basically a flim-flam man, he’s not out of
place in the political arena.
Clinton, by contrast,
is not a natural politician. She is a
typical ideologue, convinced she knows what’s best for everyone and intent on
giving it to them, irrespective of whether they want it or not. But she lacks the necessary footwork for the
public side of things.
America has since its
founding prided itself on being ‘as a City upon a Hill, the eyes of all people
upon us’. In other words, certainly from
the point of view of many of the founding fathers, an example to the world of
what was possible in a society organised primarily on the basis of reason and
secularism.
Some city . . . some hill!
