Trump is famously a non-reader. Last year the Washington Post quoted him as saying he has no time to read: “I never have. I’m always busy ..."
If he were a reader, he might be familiar with what the 16th century son of a glover from Stratford-upon-Avon had to say about the single-minded pursuit of power.
The combative Macbeth, a Scottish lord, is seduced by a ghoulish trio of confidents into believing that he is destined for great things ... that he will ascend to be King of Scotland. Spurred on by the prophecy, and colluding with ambitious members of his family, Macbeth plots the murder of the reigning King Duncan.
In order to conceal the criminal nature of his ascent to power, Macbeth weaves a tangle of subterfuge and lies, and is forced to ruthlessly dispose of all those who may reveal his actions. The physical and psychological cost is high, and Macbeth is increasingly wracked by paranoia, startling hallucinations and tormented midnight tweets.
In Act 1, as he plots the demise of another opponent, he anguishes over 'bloody instructions, which being taught, return to plague the inventor', and confesses to 'vaulting ambition, which o'leaps itself'.
The most compelling passages of Macbeth are his increasingly violent swings between megalomania and guilt ... as his psyche steadily unravels, and members of his family, equally tormented, meet their demise.
Opposition forces slowly assemble, until, isolated in his castle, surrounded only by those most blindly loyal, he is dispatched by the avenging MacMueller.
A compelling literary portrait of the price of ruthless pursuit of power, Macbeth is a salutary tale for anyone who wishes to lead a nation, and who would stoop at nothing to do so.
Several days in the Far North town of Kaitaia running a writing workshop for a bunch of local teenagers. The town has rampant unemployment, and was in the national news while I was there for an outbreak of gang warfare that has killed five gang members in the last year (Black Power, Mongrel Mob, Headhunters, Nomads). Problems range from gang executions to kids selling cannabis in school on behalf of their parents. 'Smash Dog', a spokesman for the local Mongrel Mob announced they were planning a formal 'fight night' next month, a social event, to bring the gangs together to stop the killing. Go figure.
I had been invited to Kaitaia by Nancy Wiperi, a community activist charged with empowering local kids through storytelling. Location of our workshop was a freezing wharenui (below) with the most elaborate and tortured figures carved masterfully into the wooden interior. Gargoyles of the tangata whenua.
The kids ranged in age from 13 to 17 and were drawn from Kaitaia College (kiwis, plus kids from Germany, the Isle of Man, South Africa, Spain) and a small local village school. Some of the Maori kids from the village school had never met a foreigner before, and among these was the great-grandson of esteemed Maori poet Hone Tuwhare.
Kids this age have a predilection for science fiction, perhaps as an escape from the nature of their environment, but rapidly segued into events of the real world when I invited them to imagine a poetic transformation of their own tender histories. We looked at how to inflect these stories with the template of the Hero's Journey - a story-telling pattern that goes back to the dawn of man, and which occurs in bold form in Maori myths.
I was inviting them to create stories that transcended the restricted nature of their lives, and they took to it with alacrity. The enthusiasm and native energy of teenagers is always a thrill to work with ... their imaginations still pristine and undamaged by the burdens of adult life and the sterile ways of the corporate workplace.
Perhaps on my next trip to the north, I'll invite the gang members to a creative writing workshop. While not as cathartic maybe as a 'fight night', it might provide a little respite for the local hospital services.
At a writing workshop I held some time ago at Paremoremo Maximum Security Prison, I was struck by two things - the profound sadness of these men ... and also the sense of puzzlement in the inmates, many of them Maori gang members; as if they were faintly baffled by their predicament. At one level the catastrophe of their lives was a failure of creativity - an inability to imagine a future for themselves that didn't include violence.
Interior of the wharenui - gargoyles of the tangata whenua
Today, on a park beach overlooking a sun-kissed Mairangi Bay in Auckland, I listened to my friend Warren Karno describe a hydrogen bomb blast over Malden Island in the central Pacific in 1957. Warren is one of a handful of people still alive today who have seen a thermonuclear explosion. A member of the Royal Air Force, he was told by his commanding officer to turn his back for 15 seconds to avoid being blinded by the flash, and then watched in awe as the air-burst, code-named 'Grapple', hovered 18 miles away at 5,000 feet like a freshly-minted second sun. Warren was ordered to return to Malden Island where he was exposed to radiation. Warren's book 'Grapple and the Guinea Pig' relates his experiences, and he told me of the genetic damage he suffered that he believes is now being passed on in birth defects and still births to his children and grand-children. A clip of one of the 'Grapple' tests ...
This week, we are closer to nuclear war than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, and the Soviet early warning system malfunction of September 1983, when sunlight reflection off high clouds was logged as an incoming US nuclear missile attack. On that occasion the cool head of Colonel Stanislav Petrov, under a paranoid Soviet leadership, correctly identified the 'attack' as a false alarm.
Kim Jun-un
This situation right now in North Korea is quite similar.
The paranoid leadership in Pyongyang view every US move as a threat, and the diversion of a US aircraft carrier group this week to the Korean peninsula has caused the North Koreans to threaten a pre-emptive nuclear strike. No leader in his right mind would conceive of such a thing, but the 33 year old North Korean leader Kim Jun-un, is as belligerent and unstable as his US counter-part Donald Trump. Should there be an error in the North Korean early warning radars, or an over-zealous military report an incoming attack, Kim Jun-un could launch a nuclear strike on one of the dozen US army bases along his southern border, or just as likely ... on the South Korean capital of Seoul, which is 50 km south of this border.
Seoul is the second largest metropolitan area in the world, with 26 million people.
WW II was sparked by a deranged demagogue's invasion of a neighbouring country, and resulted in 60 million deaths. In an unprecedented move this week, China's foreign minister, Wang Yi, fearful of this very scenario, warned that war on the Korean peninsula could break 'out at any moment'.
North Korean missile technology is probably not yet capable of delivering a nuclear warhead to Seoul, but a nuclear weapon would be delivered by one of its nuclear-capable Illyushin Il 28 bombers, which travelling at 900 km per hour would reach Seoul in minutes. Such a catastrophe would leave millions dead and injure millions more.
The North Korean leadership lives in a paranoid parallel universe, not dissimilar to the aging and frightened Soviet leadership at the height of the Cold War. The recklessness of the Korean leader was demonstrated in February when he organised the bizarre killing of his own half-brother with a nerve agent at a Malaysian airport.
This is the true and terrifying danger that Trump's macho posturing brings with it ... that his bumbling belligerence will cause the panicking North Koreans to shoot first.
Last week I hiked out to the wild west coast and spent the night in my one-man tent, perched above the Tasman Sea in an ancient sea cave. Throughout the night, a sou'wester howled around the site, and big swells from the ocean rolled in and dashed themselves on the rocks below.
I drove out to Piha Beach at dusk, hiked an hour and a half up the Hillary Trail and made camp at Paikea Bay just north of Sir Edmund Hillary's former home high up on the cliffs. Paikea was a turehu, or supernatural being of Maori folk-lore, who rode the hump-backed whale and in local myth would ferry people up and down this rugged coast. Paikea Bay is a wind-blasted and remote spot, devoid of settlement, although ancient Maori (and Paikea himself no doubt) used the cave for shelter, and below the entrance lie heaped up shell-fish middens, and the remnants of camp fires.
After pegging out my tent as securely as I could, I lit my propane burner, cooked myself a Kathmandu instant meal titled hilariously Venison and Vegetables. Choking it down, I wondering why campers ever fall for the enticing photos on these bags. A cup of hot chocolate on the other hand, tasted several times more delicious than it would at home.
Paikea Bay
I had taken a book, 'Solitude and Loneliness' by the BBC radio writer Alistair Jessiman, who argues for spending time alone in wild places, and read this by the light of a failing LED head-lamp. Jessiman tells us that urban life tames the mind; reduces it to habitual and constricted ways of thinking and only by regular contact with the wilderness can we reconnect with the intrinsic and natural wildness of our minds, the untamed nature of our souls.
I didn't sleep much, as the wind threatened to tear my tent loose from the mouth of the cave and send it out over the Tasman like a demented kite ... but at times, in the dead of night, with the ghost of Paikea cackling in the high reaches of the cave, I felt a primal joy that came from the utter loneliness of the place, and the raw power of the elements around me.
In the morning it was raining, so I carefully packed up my possessions, and hiked back across several headlands to Piha Beach, a feeling of rare exhilaration dogging my path. I knew the effects of this experience would only last a few days, but I had supped at the table of the infinite, and that I would not forget.
As I was writing of my visit to the Kaiser Wilhelm Church in Berlin, a young Tunisian called Anis Amri drove a black Scania semi-trailer into a Xmas shopping crowd around the church, killing twelve people and injuring 56. He couldn't have chosen a more poignant location to create this carnage, because the church is a monument to the tens of thousands of Berliners killed by Allied bombing in WWII. The building has been left in its distressed state as a reminder of the insanity of war, and beside it has been built one of the most beautiful structures I have ever seen.
The black stump of the church
A remarkable apparition has sprung up in the shadow of the ruin; a new church whose 50,000 stained glass windows, homage to Chartres Cathedral in France, blaze in a vast display of incandescent blue. Sitting in the church, I reflected on how an artistic masterpiece on this scale can create a monument to the dead that remains with you for months afterwards.
The next week I listened to a performance of a J.S. Bach cantata in the new church, with full choir, the centre-piece of a service conducted in German by a bearded clergyman with a sonorous voice and vigorous gestures. The choir were located on a mezzanine floor, so their voices flew overhead like a divine wind.
The fire-bombing of civilian areas of German cities would now be deemed a war crime (think Aleppo, but on a vast scale) - but was thought necessary in 1945 to 'break the spirit of the German people'. If anything, it firmed the resolve of the populace. Kurt Vonnegut's novel 'Slaughterhouse Five' is a black comedic account of his survival of the fire-bombing of the medieval city of Dresden, to the east of Berlin. As an American Prisoner of War, his task was to emerge from the basement of a slaughterhouse after the holocaust, and sweep up the charcoaled remains of some of the 20,000 German civilians incinerated in one night, largely women and children.
It's hard to know whether Anis Amri, the truck driver shot dead two days ago by Italian police after he fled to Milan, had any understanding of the act of desecration he was about to commit. The killing of a French cleric in his church by a jihadi this year suggests the target may have been deliberate. Amri was a petty criminal, involved in the drugs world before becoming radicalised in Italian gaols. He chose this most sacred of spots in Berlin to renew the cycle of death that probably won't end until the unemployed and disaffected young men of the Arabic diaspora in Europe are drawn out of rage-filled isolation into the cultural mainstream.
The tango club, the Haus der Sinne, was somewhere in north Berlin. Part of my mission over the city was to dance my way through as many tango clubs as I could, in a city second only to Buenos Aries in its obsession with this most passionate of dances.
The sheer ferment of tango culture in Berlin is astonishing. I found tango clubs tucked away beneath the rough brick arches of railway embankments; I stumbled across outdoor milongas swirling along the banks of the steely River Spree on a hot afternoon ... and bursting out of stylish cafes in the 19th century Kulturbrauerei in Pankow.
Now it was 10pm, I had walked for hours in search of the Haus of Sin, and found my way blocked by a long, sinister boulevard, devoid of pedestrians or lights. I had the odd feeling that I was entering a parallel universe. I hurried up the deserted road for twenty minutes, pleased to escape un-mugged into the warren of backstreets that led to the Haus. Next day, I discovered I had crossed the famous Mauepark, a former killing zone beneath the Berlin Wall ... now a monument to the divided city. The remnants of the Wall had been invisible in the darkness.
Mauepark - a former killing zone
At the door to the Haus der Sinne, a statuesque blond woman, with bright red lipstick, clad in black leather and holding a tassled cane waved me inside. I perched on a bar stool with an orange juice, watching the tangueros move about the floor in their fixed, intense coupledom. They were submerged in the gloom, like strange four-legged animals in a primordial sea. On a pillar was a picture of a bear-like creature, and next to it, a wan-looking girl with her legs splayed open. But there didn't seem to be a lot of sinning going on. Perhaps my translation was wrong? On checking the German, I found 'Sinne' means something else altogether.
Tango couples are hermetically sealed; locked into their twelve minutes of love with a fixity that excludes the world ... and I watched as they danced tanda after tanda. The pairs weren't breaking ... it seemed that the Haus der Sinne attracted couples, rather than the free spirits I was in search of. Very different from Cafe Franz at the Kulturbrauerei where I had animated chats with foreign tangueros and begun dancing immediately. This club was patronised by native Berliners. After an hour or so, unable to attract another dancer with the traditional cabaseo, I gave up and ambled off into the night. The blond woman at the door grinned and gave me a playful whip on the butt as I departed.
Quite why Berliners have taken so avidly to tango is a hard to explain ... a tortured history; their historic interest in intense, theatrical art-forms ('Cabaret'), and Berliners' very un-German obsession with sensuality. Christopher Isherwood's 'Goodbye to Berlin' and its depiction of licentious Berlin culture between the wars, is a classic portrait of a doomed civilization, and the spirit of the Weimar Republic still lives in Berlin. Tango allows raw and unbridled expression of passion between total strangers. And yet, paradoxically, it is also a complex and mesmerizing art form, in which the human spirit soars free within the architecture of the dance.
During a month in Berlin, I met a young couple who had fled the conflict in Syria, their home and jobs destroyed. Some of the one million refugees that Germany has let into the country, they spoke no English and little German, and had a young child - a lively addition to Berlin's multi-cultural mix. My Berlin friend, Barbara, was teaching them German, as many Berliners have volunteered to do, and in return they took us to eat in Sonnenallee; 'the street of the Arabs', a bustling thoroughfare with a fascinating history (it was once bisected by the Berlin wall), and where only Arabic can be heard in the shops.
Sonnnenallee, - Arabic brio
We ate on the sidewalk ... a delicious, heavily spiced Syrian meal, hummus, green chillis, olives ... which our host perilously retrieved from a food shop thronged with battling diners. Although Syrian refugees have been targeted by Far-Right groups in Germany, there was none of that on Sonnenallee, where the vivacity and brio of the street was a sign of Berliners' legendary tolerance of outsiders. Or perhaps it's just indifference - Berliners are notoriously oblivious to others.
Along Sonnenallee, the average pedestrian seemed about thirty; it's mainly the young who have been able to flee from war-torn Syria in significant numbers. Specialist shops vending coffee and spices echo with voices from farther afield ... Lebanon, Iraq, Palestine and Turkey, while shops sell fine silks and the tortured metal-work of ornamental hookahs.
Hookah shop
With the West turning against refugees in the wake of the US Presidential elections, Angela ('the Angel') Merkel continues to show moral leadership and compassion at the risk of her own political career. It was heartening to see such a vibrant enclave of Arabic culture at the heart of Germany's spiritual capital.
In a strange reversal of history, from Trump Tower, New York, a city once renowned as a haven for the oppressed and racially persecuted of Europe, comes the ugly voice of racial bigotry; while in the former home of Nazism, the doors have been flung open to desperate refugees and their children.
