Its been a while since my last post – really need to do this more often. The events in New York over the last few weeks surrounding a certain ‘high profile’ trial have finally spurred me to take up the pen (or keyboard) and put down a few thoughts.
First off I should say that I do not understand why anyone would want to be in the world that the former president creates around him. However, millions of people do and, therefore, this is something which cannot be ignored in the hope that it will go away.
The latest revelations regarding the “Apprentice” TV show that have seen the light of day after being ‘buried’ for twenty years only confirm what I think most people think – that behind all the bluster there is a particularly shallow individual who – seemingly – is unable to carry out the most simple of tasks, never mind be the President of the USA.
Although the guilty verdict – by a jury of his peers – in many ways showed that the “justice system” does indeed hold up, other signs around and about show that it is not only creaking somewhat, but perhaps actually showing its weaknesses to the world. Rules are rule, you say – and as long as people recognise those rules for what they are everything ‘should’ work fine. When I was doing Operational Analysis in my days as a worker some of the scenarios that we put through a thought process were examples of what was termed asymmetric warfare. This is a commonly used term to describe situations where the two sides in some conflict do not use the same “code of conduct’ – whether by strategies or tactics or because of imbalances of power or strength. These situations are very difficult to deal with because every instinct is to use your own “code of conduct” to determine your actions in a given situation.
In a similar way, this is what is happening in American politics at the moment where those that are holding to the ‘norms’ are finding it difficult to deal with someone who ignores those norms. The ‘norm’ is for a defendant to be unable to continually delay the commencement of a trial by spending huge numbers of dollars on ‘legal tricks’ that slow the whole process down. The ‘norm is that a defendant does not have powerful people willing to stand by him and assert innocence (regardless of the facts). The ‘norm’ is that the defendant does not have the ability, or the opportunity, to broadcast his grievances to an army of devoted followers. And so on….
Equally, those who ‘believe’ in the process would never contemplate the idea that it can only be fair if the findings of the court are in their favour. Nor would they ever doubt the integrity of the judge and jury in applying the law fairly.
When someone departs from all the norms they have – at least initially – a huge advantage because no one “in the system” has ever considered how to deal with that.
To be fair, there seem to be many ‘reasonable’ voices – who know what is happening even if they do not yet know how to deal with it – and the whole thing is made more complicated because many who are ‘outside the norm’ are holders of significant power and influence (not to mention dollars). That is a significant challenge.
Asymmetric warfare often is waged by terrorist groups and the like who have significant disadvantages in terms of ‘power’ and ‘influence’ having instead to resort to extremes and actions that are indeed outside the norm in order to make their point or achieve their objective. The political situation in America is quite different since the former president is in an extremely powerful position and has, importantly, many more with influence at his back – literally in many cases.
There are many aspects to this and I may come back to it – but this will do for a first stab at the issue.