Daily Times

London: this past week celebrated Queen Elizabeth II’s Jubilee of 60 years on the throne. By any assessment, the celebration was a brilliant success. Despite frightful English weather with blustery and chilly rain showers, millions turned out to cheer the queen. The worries of a flagging economy, unemployment, the Euro crisis and what that might mean for recovery and the war in Afghanistan were, for the moment, placed on hold.

Contrast the jubilant mood in the UK with that across the Atlantic. The presidential election again dominated the news coverage for last week. It was, to borrow from Charles Dickens, ‘the best (if not fleeting) of times’ for the Republican contender, Mitt Romney. And it was ‘the worst of times’ for President Barack Obama, bearing in mind the media hype to portray the future as seen through the most transitory of lenses that oscillates more frequently than the 24-hour news cycle.

Mr Romney raised far more money than Mr Obama did during the week that was. The recall election of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker was reported as a decisive victory for the Republicans and a harbinger of bad things to come for the Democrats in November and labour union influence that failed to collect Walker’s political scalp. President Obama’s statement that “the private sector is doing just fine”, quickly retracted, gave the former Massachusetts’s governor an exquisite opening to use the charge about him “being out of touch” with the American public levied by his Republican opponents during the primaries against the White House.

Politics sometimes being a zero sum game, made Mr Romney’s gains Mr Obama’s losses. The best that could be said for the president was that this horrendous week occurred in June and not closer to election, meaning there was ample time left to recover. That it is absurd to abstract permanent consequences from such a temporal moment is a further reflection of the state of American politics and society and obsessive focus on the immediate. But how to put this in perspective and cast good news stories against bad ones is not a trivial question.

In 1962, a hit BBC television show made its way across the Atlantic where it was widely watched until 1964 when it folded. That Was the Week That Was, aka TW3 was a powerful comedy and satire featuring among others, Sir David Frost. The show opened with the tune “That was the week that was; it’s over, let it go…” and lampooned politicians from British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan to President John F Kennedy. Other targets were Britain’s declining status as a world power, racism, particularly in the American south and South African apartheid, social hypocrisy, Britain’s class system and offered a satirical ‘consumer’s guide to religion’, all of which would be considered highly politically incorrect today.

What we need today is an updated version of TW3 to leaven the media playing fields and bring some humour to an otherwise depressing venue of bad news. Recall for a minute the days of yesteryear and 1962. In that October, the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the United States and its allies nose to nose with the Soviet Union. How close the world came to thermonuclear war can be debated. But, when compared to other traumatic events such as September 11 and the twin tower attacks by al Qaeda, the missile crisis put the existence of hundreds of millions of souls at risk.

Before TW3 would go off the air, President Jack Kennedy would be assassinated and the Gulf of Tonkin incident in August 1964 would lock the United States in a tragic crusade in South East Asia. Those were indeed trying times in which, by the way, economic dislocation was a genie that had long escaped from its containing bottle.

Against this gloom, events such as the Queen’s Jubilee are powerful if not permanent medication for what ills us. The festivities were not an inoculation with a lasting effect; however, even an occasional painkiller can be helpful.

The question is what broader analgesic may be present at a time when there is little to be optimistic about. From Algeria to Zaire with Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan in between, the news is not heartening. And from Athens to Madrid and the Frankfurt Stock Exchange to Wall Street, financial markets are in disarray.

A new TW3 may not be the answer. But the ability to take ourselves collectively less seriously may be. How Mr Obama or Mr Romney may be doing week by week is of little lasting value. Nor is the Queen’s Jubilee. However, the latter was a time and place to rally a nation, something that is too lacking elsewhere and is sorely needed. If Messrs Obama and Romney are serious about governing, this is a great opportunity for some creative thinking.

The writer is Chairperson of the Killowen Group that advises
leaders of government and business and Senior Advisor
at Washington DC’s Atlantic Council