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STRANGE once, Paul Simon said during his farewell concert at Hyde Park on Sunday. It was a veiled reference to Donald Trump, who had just visited Vladimir Putin after his particularly chaotic official visit to Britain.
The President's trip to the United Kingdom began by dissolving the Prime Minister and then disbanded and attacked the newspaper instead; to say that a trade agreement with the UK was unlikely and likely; and finally, declaring, before the Russian summit, that it was the EU that he now considered as "the enemy".
His extraordinary cascade of diplomatic incompetence ended up not to have accused President Putin of interfering with Russia in 2016 US presidential elections – an omission that was "nothing short of a traitor", according to the former director of the CIA.
Maybe the Russians have compromising photos of him. Maybe he's doing a secret secret business. More likely, he simply does not want to cast a shadow over the validity of his own electoral victory.
But back to Simon. His two acts of support also sought to counter the impact of their president. Bonnie Raitt played a song that started: "I can not believe the things I see." James Taylor said, "There is a different America than this guy … He's bigger than that, he has soul and will come back." He then sang a song about Martin Luther King [19659002] Paul Simon is 76. James Taylor is 70. Bonnie Raitt is 69. They are the musical heroes of an aging hippie generation who, on the back of the prosperity built by our fathers in the 1950s and 1960, felt that the world was open to spiritual regeneration.Our generation adhered, intuitively at least, to Whig's old interpretation of history, with his confident belief that things could only be achieved. As Trump is the proof of our mistake, we could hope that the venal narcissist, with his infantile crises and his selfishness naked, was only an aberration.But populism black is rising all over the world, as has shown Brexit in this country too. All of this is a revolt against the progressive self-certainty of the liberal elite, to whom President Trump is the barbarian antidote to the implacable political correctness of everyone.
All Simon's farewell seemed an elegy to an endangered world. He started with his song "America", a tribute of the 60s to the ardent optimism of young people's love. But his famous lines: "It took me four days to hitchhike since Saginaw, I went in search of America" were tainted with irony. Saginaw was one of the traditional democratic cities. He voted for President Trump in 2016 after the gradual loss of 26,000 jobs in the automotive industry.
Toward the end of the performance, Simon sang his "American Tune", which speaks about battered souls and broken dreams, and "Statue of Liberty sails to the sea". One of his refrains is: "I wonder what went wrong." The singer did his best to offer a fix as the notes disappeared: "Do not give up," he told the audience. We will do our best.
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