The Wole Soyinka case : Respect begets respect
Cornelius Hamelberg
The world is round
This is Peoples' Planet
Not the planet of the apes
No Big, white, fat hairy piece of shit here
This is Stockholm, Stockholmo
Alfred Nobel’s Sweden and
it’s Thor’s day, 30th November, 2025 :
“Letter perfect stars of
Gold in school
You got a right to shout
You been living the Golden Rule” ( Letter Perfect)
Lest we forget , earlier this year, observers lament, breaking all diplomatic protocols, Trump deported South Africa’s Ambassador to the US . Trump takes all and any criticism of the US, so personally - he supposedly sees himself as the personification of the United States that he wants to make great again. Fortunately, we may not point at anything like Shelley’s Ozymandias - no facial feature of babyface Trump that fits the Ozymandias description. Perhaps, Trump will take some small comfort in that .
The Wole Soyinka case : Respect begets respect .
Rule of thumb: Respect begets respect.
Sadly, Jim Sidanius, erstwhile Professor of political psychology, is no longer with us to get down on this and other adjacent matters concerning what from time to time is discernible as Trump’s erratic, sometimes eccentric behaviour
Diplomatic protocol means giving respect where respect is due and that’s why the Trump who respects strong men just said to China’s President Xi : "President Xi is a great leader of a great country, and I think we're going to have a fantastic relationship for a long period of time"
To our consternation, in his first term on the world stage, back then, less experienced and perhaps already somewhat surprised, frightened and giddy with the new-found (almost wrote “newfangled”) power at his command - indeed - as the American poet e.e. cummings once observed in his love poetry, “not even the rain has such small hands” - and that was not a matter of precognition - cummings wasn’t specifically talking about Trump’s hands, but perhaps - another perhaps - Ginsberg was already hallucinating Trump’s America when he wrote
“Poet is Priest
Money has reckoned the soul of America
Congress broken thru the precipice of Eternity
the president built a War machine which will vomit and rear Russia out of Kansas
The American Century betrayed by a mad Senate which no longer sleeps with its wife”
Anyway, talking about the size and sizes of hands and other body parts e.e was certainly not then anticipating or talking about Trump who we were unpleasantly surprised to hear referring to North Korea’s Kim Jong Un with some disdain as “little rocket man” - as if he didn’t know that if Kim ever felt like it and had the wherewithal he could , God forbid, surely obliterate New Your City, Trump Towers with it and what a great pity that would be, considering just one reckless push -button and what's done cannot be un-done, not even by Kim Jong Un who like China, is also a young master of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War
Is it that the US Consulate in Lagos was hellbent in trying to humiliate Nigeria's pride and Africa’s and the World’s Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka ? What's so disheartening is that the consulate authorities know and knew they were dealing with a world famous dramatist and therefore went the further mile to set the stage -they summoned him - by letter to be physically present with his passport for the visa revocation to be stamped - he was supposed to travel all the way from his sacred abode in Abeokuta , a distance of 100 km 62 miles, a 90 minutes drive - and we are to suppose that he had to set out at dawn …
I’m happy that Bard Soyinka didn’t go the extra mile too, to make a big drama out of it - he could have done what Bobby Fischer once did - Fischer had received a letter from the UN, a letter banning him from playing a chess chess match against Boris Spassky in Yugoslavia; Bobby Fischer took the UN letter out of his pocket read the ban out to the assembled reporters of the world press, dramatically proclaimed “This is what I think of the UN ban” after which he then spat on the letter and tore it up ….
The question remains, who wants to travel to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago, anyway? A few years ago - no respect - Trump thought that he was insulting everybody when he said that Africans and Haitians come from “Shithole countries “ and that “When they see our skyscrapers, they don't want to go back to their huts”
Middle Nation has been weighing in heavily on Trump
From Iran, even academic commentators such as Seyed Mohammad Marandi are relatively calm but bellicose when weighing in on Trump (The Great Satan) and by extension Trump’s best buddy, according to Iranian demonology, “ little satan”)
No doubt if Nuremberg Trials Number 2 were to be held in Tehran , then ADL - God’s Justice being the second most important in Shia Usool , Great & little Satan would pay a very heavy price indeed
Surprisingly, we haven’t heard any harsh words from e.g. China or Russia's Lavrov, both of course, masters of diplomatic protocol
Are we to understand that the visas of Trump’s critics will be revoked?
On his own home turf, among Trump’s critics are
The Defiant Lawyers Network -no love lost between them and Trump
Jeffrey Sacks who has labelled Trump “ The worst president in our history “
Cornelius Hamelberg
Correction :
This is Stockholm
in Spanish, Estocolmo
In Nigeria we have Abeokuta,
Abeokuta is the birthplace of Wole Soyinka,
fabulous and fabled : “The City Under The Stone “
Inside Donald Trump's NEW $400 Million Presidential Jet
Scott Ritter has also been sounding off on Donald Trump, and even before Nobel Peace Prize aspirant Donald J’s latest sabre-rattling, declaring that he’s going to start testing nuclear weapons , and before the questions arising, “Where? Caracas? Tehran? Moscow? When? On whom?, Scott Ritter was already asking what sounds like a very legitimate question of great concern :
“ Is Trump unhinged ? “