Jon Sopel - Notes from Trump's America

Jon Sopel has been the BBC's North American Editor for the last three years. Interesting times.

This book caught my eye. I always enjoy his broadcasts, pieces to camera and insights and usually end up informed.

Here he reflects on his hosts under interestingly predictable chapter headings such as guns and god. But there are some far more unexpected themes. I enjoyed anger and anxiety.

It is populist writing and easy to read. Having expected to browse and dip in I promoted it to the front of the queue and finished it quickly. I didn't have to look up any words.

To some extent it is an almanac of recent writings and thoughts. You will recognise all the people and events if you watch or listen to any BBC News output.

What I found interesting was the reflection on the differences between US culture and British or European. Why is the idea of a national health service seen so negatively over there? Why is the gun lobby so dominant? To what extent does the Democrat/Republican divide mirror our Tory/Labour one? Other, surprising, areas of difference include the volume of alcohol at parties, patriotism (which apparently works in an entirely different way to ours) and the quality of TV (US win on drama; we win on everything else). We note, in passing, that the print media is largely Democrat in the States but Conservative in the UK. Fox News isn't quite as bad as we think it is from the tweeted highlights. I recall my confusion that Democrats wear the blue accessories.

Jon Sopel also self-analyses the difficulty of being a fair reporter of situations where your gut feeling is tugging you to one side. During the Trump presidency the BBC has been tagged with the 'fake news' label. Carrying on doing your job in a balanced way in such circumstances is clearly very tough. Sad.

Short news items are helpful but we can fail to understand the big picture. This is the big picture. So the final chapter on truth reflects on where on earth we go now. And, to be truthful, none of us educated, articulate, liberal, chattering folk has the first idea any more. But I will take this book on the journey.

USA and Guns

It's been a strange, and terribly sad, week overhearing the voices of the religious right in the American south voicing their opinions on Orlando over the social media. Bible Belt - '...where there are more prisons than Starbucks.' (Kevin Spacey's David Gale in The Life of David Gale)

These people hate the very idea of Islam. It almost seems as if some of them welcome fundamentalist terrorism happening so they can up the vehemence in their rhetoric.

These people hate 'gays'. You will not find the expression 'LGBT' in their tweets. They often gather outside LGBT events holding random verses from Leviticus.

So when an ethnic middle-eastern, USA-born, bi-polar afflicted, proclaimed gay-hater who turns out to be gay goes mad with an assault rifle in the name of Islamic fundamentalism in a club full of members of the LGBT community - well they find it hard to get their anger pitched exactly right.

Know this friends. The shares in the company who made the weapon used by the murderer apparently went up by 50% over the weekend.

Number of people killed by guns in the UK per 100,000 last recorded full year - 0.04
Number of people killed by guns in the USA per 100,000 last recorded full year - 3.6

Ninety times more likely.

One Twitter user went through every condolence tweet from every senator and congressman and added the amount of money they had received from the gun lobby in the previous year. Eye-opening. It was a lot.

All this information is gleaned from newspapers and I have no first-hand knowledge. Apologies if any of it proves to be incorrect. It surely can't all be.

Spin

Radio 4. 8.00 a.m. news headlines:

Lloyds TSB HBOS has seen its profits drop by three quarters

Mustard Seed Shavings 8.02 a.m. news headlines:

Amazingly, Lloyds TSB HBOS reports a massive profit

They've had my money for 36 years now (although for some of that time it was more that I had theirs). We've never really been what you'd call friends.

Just so you know.

News Round Up

I've been doing my usual trick of a quiet Saturday and reading almost the whole week's newspapers in bed. I'll try and avoid sounding like, 'Apart from that Mrs Kennedy how was Dallas?' So let's say that 'it snowed' seems to have been news. But did you notice...

The inventor of Playmobil toys, Hans Beck, died. Perhaps he couldn't pull himself together.

And did you see the unluckiest person of the week who turned into the luckiest? Novice sky-diver Daniel Pharr was strapped to his instructor quite properly and the parachute was open when the instructor suffered a fatal heart-attack. Using his memory of TV programmes and basic military training Pharr managed to pull the right toggles to land safely.

It has been a busy week for round-robin e-mails. Most, as usual, not that funny but I did enjoy the one that linked to the aircraft landing with only one wing (Google THE_BEST_AIR_RACE_PILOT_EVER.wmv). It looked a bit of a spoof but I employed my favourite research technique which was to send it to a more sceptical friend with an assurance that I didn't think it was a spoof. He pretty soon linked me to a site that pricked its bubble. So one-winged planes can't land safely. Pity.

I've reached Wednesday so far.

Simple Language

We may not have quite deteriorated to the point where a window cleaner is required by law to be known as a transparent wall maintenance engineer but we have had some fun with our snow language haven't we?

To summarise, we have a had a major snow event as part of an extreme weather situation and in the theatre of disruption there are many localised incidents.

A man on the news just complained that there was a jack-knifed lorry on the M1 and it was ridiculous because all the traffic was now stationary. Call me stupid but I reckon that was because there was a jack-knifed lorry on the motorway.

The stockpile of salt, which hasn't been touched in the south-west for 18 years, may run out. There's always a danger of that when you use something.

15,000 people have called the emergency services because of snowballs. Crazy country. Bonkers .

Gaza

I write a monthly piece for Energize in the News, a regular attempt to introduce young people to items in the news and the issues raised. This month I've been doing a column about Israel and Gaza. I can't post it all here for copyright reasons but I thought you might be interested in the history of Gaza in the Bible:

Canaan was the son of Ham and grandson of Noah according to tradition.i The land of his descendants, the Canaanites, reached as far as Gaza.ii Joshua took this land, occupied by many different peoples and tribes, and slaughtered all the occupantsiii. Whilst the past is another country and they did things differently then, it is hard to be proud of this aspect of our Christian history.

After the conquest of the land, the region of Gaza was apportioned to the Tribe of Judahiv, a tribe which eventually became the southern half of the Kingdom of Israel (the north continued to be known as Israel). Judah lasted longer than Israel which fell to Assyria in 721BC and the remnant of its people inter-married and became known as Samaritans. It was in Roman occupied Judah (Judea) that Jesus lived.

At the time of Samson, Gaza seems to have been a Philistine town and still so under Samuelv but by Solomon's reign it was part of his huge Kingdomvi. However moving on, by the reign of Hezekiah it was necessary to recapture Gaza from the Philistinesvii, this having been prophesied by Amosviii. At the time of the prophet Jeremiah, Gaza was attacked by Egyptix, its downfall having been prophesied by Zephaniahx and Zechariahxi, although they may not have been anticipating exactly the same sequence of events.

The road Philip was travelling on when he met the Ethiopian official, who he converted and baptised, was from Jerusalem to Gazaxii.

iGenesis 9:18
iiGenesis 10:19
iiiJoshua 2:40-42
ivJoshua 15:47
v1 Samuel 6:17
vi1 Kings 4:24
vii 2 Kings 18:8
viiiAmos 1:6
ixJeremiah 47:1
xZephaniah 2:4
xiZechariah 9:5
xiiActs 8:26

If you want to read the whole column you'll have to take out a subscription. Interesting that Islam, Judaism and Christianity all have Abraham as their patriarch and prophet.

Spin

The World at One, often the arch-critic of government spin, announces, 'Statistics show that the growth in the economy has slowed.' Surely that should be, 'Statistics show that the economy continues to grow.' Or am I missing something?

Standard Sizes

Interesting conversation over the lunch table in which some of us noted that St Paul's Cathedral was often used as a standard of comparative sizing. So news readers will say if something is bigger/taller than St Paul's Cathedral. Wales works similarly - the only use for Wales frankly, and so does a bag of sugar and a human hand. Any others?

Big Job

Listening to Today on Radio 4 this morning, through the gloom, as I attempted to unload the dishwasher and make coffee avoiding the whole coffee-beans-in-the soap-tray-detergent-in the-espresso-maker scenario I half-heard a report from Mike Wooldridge, World Affair's Correspondent.

How big a job is that? I mentioned it to the three-quarters awake Mrs T, who so loves being jogged to life by an intelligent question on a Saturday, and she offered that perhaps he has an overview of the world. Overview man.

What a super-hero that would be. A guy who dropped into a situation and described exactly where you had got to and what needed to be done. Let me through. I'm overview man. Hooray. Anyone want to apply?

Silly Questions

Why did our sailors and marines not restrict their answers, under Iranian interrogation, to name, rank and serial number?

Because we're not at war with Iran and those rules are to do with war.

Why is it inappropriate for members of the armed forces to sell their stories?

Because then it might become more enticing for such a person to be captured for the long-term, gain of financial advancement in some future, minor conflict.

Why hasn't anyone said these things clearly yet?

Down the M50

There's been a lot of trouble about the precise amount of information the police can keep on someone if they are wrongly arrested.

Yes but there's a whale in the River Thames

I mean suppose your DNA sample was mixed up or compromised and you were later implicated in a crime you never committed?

Did you know there was a whale in the River Thames though?

And what about sex offenders and teaching? This bloke repents of having an affair with a fifteen year old girl (who he later married), committed no further sexual offences yet has now been chased out of town.

Someone says they saw a whale at Southend too.

22 people were killed by the latest suicide bomber in Iraq.

It'll never get through the locks at Lechlade.

They might have killed Osama bin Laden's second in command in Afghanistan.

Perhaps it could be turned round and harried back to the open sea?

We may have got beyond the point of no return in global climate change.

It's really pretty the way it moves through the water. So graceful.

Too many of our schools are under-performing.

They should watch this thing on Sky News about a whale in the River Thames.

The Liberal Democrats need a new leader.

It's so sad that the whale may die.