Live a little

+What is the right response to our current times? A nutter is in the White House. A barely capable middle manager is ‘running’ the UK. A chap with imperial tendencies resides unwanted in the Élysée Palace. An inscrutable expansionist is president for life in Beijing. A diminutive Tsar reigns in Moscow (and putintively in Kiev too). The great left hope in the UK is splintered even before birth and is, I predict headed to oblivion. At times like these, perhaps an appropriate response is provided by Charles Baudelaire (1821—1867) who also lived in interesting times:
 
GET DRUNK
 
ONE SHOULD always be drunk. That’s the great thing; the only question. Not to feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on your shoulders and bowing you to the earth, you should be drunk without respite.
 
Drunk with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you please. But get drunk.
 
And if sometimes, should you happen to awake, on the stairs of a palace, on the green grass of a ditch, in the dreary solitude of your own room, and find that your drunkenness is ebbing or has vanished, ask the wind and the wave, ask the star, bird or clock, ask everything that flies, everything that moans, everything that speaks, ask them the time; and the wind and the wave, and the bird and the clock will all reply: “It is time to get drunk! If you are not to be the martyred slaves of Time, be perpetually drunk! With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you please!”
 
(Paris Spleen, New Directions Paperback edition 1970 p.74) 
 
So what’s it to be? Wine or virtue? Or both? (Always worth bearing in mind of course that Baudelaire didn’t live very long.)*
 
+Talking of martyrs, the exiled former Prime Minister of Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina Wazed has been condemned to death. She served as PM for a surprisingly long time given the usual mortal game of musical chairs of Bangladeshi politics, which resembles a long running family feud between two mafia dynasties. I met her in 2009 and gave her a report on climate change. Leading a country which is one of the world’s most vulnerable to climate change related sea level rise I thought such things would be uppermost. Clearly not. Preserving the dynasty probably made a more pressing call on her time. Still, it’s not every day you get to shake hands with somebody who has been sentenced to death.
 
FACTCHECK: Bangladesh’s population is 171 million on a land mass of 54,000 sq. miles. England’s population is 58 million on a land mass of 51,000 sq. miles. And we’re overcrowded? Think again! (India is wise to this—they’ve built a barrier which encircles Bangladesh. No free movement there.)
 
*Other options are available