Figures in a cloister
Cluny, Burgundy.
Quote of the Day
” The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.”
- F. Scott Fitzgerald
Good description of what liberals have been doing in 2025.
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Morten Lauridsen | O Magnum Mysterium | VOCES8
Long Read of the Day
Mark Carney’s speech at Davos
Coming in the afternoon after Trump’s rambling, shambolic speech, Carney’s was an electrifying demonstration of what beautifully crafted rhetoric can do.
You can watch it here, but I recommend reading it in full here.
Today I will talk about a rupture in the world order, the end of a pleasant fiction and beginning of a harsh reality, where the geopolitics of the great powers is not subject to any constraints.
But I will say, on the other hand, that other countries, especially middle powers like Canada, are not powerless. They have the capacity to build a new order that encompasses our values, such as respect for human rights, sustainable development, solidarity, sovereignty and territorial integrity of states.
The power of the less powerful starts with honesty.
It seems that every day we’re reminded that we live in an era of great power rivalry, that the rules-based order is fading, that the strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must.
And this aphorism of Thucydides is presented as inevitable, as the natural logic of international relations reasserting itself.
And faced with this logic, there is a strong tendency for countries to go along to get along, to accommodate, to avoid trouble, to hope that compliance will buy safety.
Well, it won’t.
So, what are our options?
In 1978, the Czech dissident Václav Havel, later president, wrote an essay called The Power of the Powerless, and in it, he asked a simple question: how did the communist system sustain itself?
And his answer began with a greengrocer…
Do read it.
And, if you’re interested in the Havel essay, you can find it here.
My commonplace booklet
The Morning After the Tantrum Before
The wittiest response to Trump’s rambling and incoherent Davos speech came from comedian Andy Borowitz, who specialises in a witty spoof headline every morning. Yesterday’s said it all:
Denmark Offers Trump Ownership of Room in Assisted Living Facility in Greenland
Tom Nichols of The Atlantic wrote that,
”No one can be watching this Davos speech and reach any conclusion but that the President of the United States is mentally disturbed and that something is deeply wrong with him. This is both embarrassing and deeply dangerous.”
It is. But it sparks another thought — about Joe Biden. For at least six months before the 2024 election we know that the people around him in the White House knew that his mental frailty was such that they should protect him from external scrutiny as much as possible. And in that they were mostly successful.
Now, Trump’s minders and enablers know that they have exactly the same problem with their boss. Because of his personality, though, they cannot keep him out of the public eye: his chronic narcissism makes that impossible. And the Davos shambles demonstrates the consequences of that. There will be more of this as the year progresses and the mid-term elections loom. This could mean that the MAGA strategy will now be to sabotage those elections, probably by using ICE to foment so much chaos that they have to be postponed on the grounds of a national emergency.
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