Throwing it all away... (531)

At the end of the hugely under-viewed 2021 film Don’t Look Up – the character played by Leonardo Di Caprio says this line

“The thing of it is… we really did have everything didn’t we”

But its importance is far more than a memorable ending. What the character is saying is that we threw it all away. You’ll find similar lines in other dystopian and post apocalyptic films and books. The main protagonist, played by Denzel Washington in The Book of Eli says “We threw away things people kill each other for now…”

And that is exactly what we’re doing.

It seems to epitomise what we have done for decades and are doing faster now than at any time in human history – even including the world wars that left human and infrastructure carnage across the globe. We are throwing away everything we have, everything we think we value and more importantly – everything we need.

The US under Trump continues to throw away the economic stability clawed back by Obama during his 8 year tenure, its international credibility along with its global influence and it is literally throwing away the lives of desperate children and the ordinary workers of America – with the cuts to US AID and Medicaid.

Here in the UK – after the dreadfully hard-won and only briefly enjoyed gains secured for ordinary people after the sacrifices of WWII – the ‘throwing away’ begun with Thatcher, has not stopped.

Everything that was in public hands has been privatised. As a predictable and oft predicted result – services have plummeted in availability and quality and prices have sky-rocketed. The wealth gap in this country has widened exponentially and in poorer areas longevity has fallen for the first time since these things were monitored by The Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

Wages have fallen in real time and – the same horror who gave us the illegal and catastrophic invasion of Iraq, with all its grotesque and ongoing consequences, introduced university tuition fees in a country where higher education had previously been free. So, having decimated an entire country on the other side of the world, Tony Blair can also take credit for economically crippling the lives of generations of young folk in his own bit of the globe.

And talking of Blair, the Bush/Blair fiasco in Iraq threw away the chance for stability in the Middle East. Its tempting, if you listen to the drone of Western legacy media, to imagine that, for example, ISIS sprang out of thin air rather than growing rapidly in the Petri dishes of the illegal invasion of Iraq and the disturbing events in Guantanamo Bay.

OF course now we have the genocide in Gaza, also facilitated by the UK/US.

We’ve been throwing away our planetary resources at an ever-increasing rate. Consumerism is out of control but the beast of late stage Capitalism needs to be fed. The more it feeds the more it hungers and the more we feed it. Chucking our resources down its dark deep endless maw until we’re cannibalising ourselves.

As humans, its often seemed to me that we are throwing away one of our most precious traits – empathy. Empathy, broadly speaking, is what makes us human. It developed with our ability to communicate, store information and accumulate knowledge and understanding. Empathy allows us to function as civilised beings. (Check out post 308 Get your face out of your phone.)

The unfettered invasion of technology and remote, robotic interactions in our lives seems to be driving empathy out. Now, regular readers of this blog may have an eye-roll. They may recall I am a Luddite. No smartphone – no social media. No TV since last century. No car, no microwave/dishwasher, no flying abroad for over 20 years. Etc. What does she know? Well, I still live in the world. A world where I am in an increasing minority (can minority increase?) A world where eye-contact seems rarer, children pointed in the direction of screens from babyhood struggle with language and concentration. I see it.

(Oh and the phenomenon of the childish tech-titan lunatic is beautifully dealt with also in Don’t Look Up.)

Is it this reduced empathy that allows us – in a world where we cannot not know how others suffer, to nevertheless ignore the traumas of our fellow human beings and carry on shopping, consuming, throwing away?

Our governments have increasingly thrown out the idea of regulation. That thing that protected ordinary people from the worst excesses of the Greed monster and the consumerism that is eating us. (check out blog post 383 Regulation is not a dirty word)

Recent examples of the devastating effects or the shunning by the rich and powerful of protective regulations are all around us but perhaps the best/worst example in recent living memory is the financial crash of 2008. In a nutshell – a catastrophic global financial failure brought about by rapacious avarice and the ability of the rich to pass the results of their failed risk taking down to those at the bottom of the economic food chain in secretive unregulated market practices.

Many parts of the world and many towns in the US where Wall St kicked off, for one example, the sub-prime nightmare, have not recovered to this day. Peoples futures were torn and thrown away as the Future’s markets grew fangs.

In fact, as the crash of 2008 is the main global economic trauma of my life-time, despite the ever available lessons of the 1929 Wall St crash and Great Depression, it feels as if even reality was thrown away.

Just consider that then Treasury Secretary Paulson in the Bush administration, gathered the heads of the richest US banks together and handed over a total $125bn as part of their self-induced-crisis bail-out while the victims – those who lost jobs and homes - got nothing. The final bill was $180bn and that is on top of the trillions those banks were borrowing from the Federal Reserve.

The top financial/social trauma this side of the pond recently was the 2016 self-harm of Brexit. Arguably as much to do with the desire of the wealthy for de-regulation as it was about rampant xenophobia. What throwing away our embedded and successful economic ties, educational, cultural, intelligence and research relationship to our closest block trading partner actually led to, was a massive hit to GDP and loss of global credibility. What we could show in return – even when we had the hideous splinter Jacob Rees-Mogg as Minister for Brexit Benefits - was a different coloured passport!

In 2016 we also seemed to throw out the notion that leaders should be even vaguely competent and at least apparently decent. That was when we got Trump I in America, Bolsonaro in Brazil and here in the UK, hopeless Theresa May who paved the way for the even more disastrous chancer Johnson.

Despite the film quoted in this piece and as we’ve just had the hottest year on record, its worth remembering, as per blog post 364, in reality Armageddon will not be televised.

But soon – very soon – there will not only be nothing left to throw away...

Things Fall Apart… (530)

...or do they?

Ask Macbeth.

Chinua Achebe’s seminal and brilliant 1958 work Things Fall Apart has the sound of inevitability, fate, destiny. And yet – the thread of this intricate African fable is more subtle. In fact, at every turn it is the choices of the central character Okonkwo, a successful man, famed in his younger days for his wrestling prowess but haunted by the spectre of the father he deemed a failure, that triggers many of the tragedies that befall him, his family and his village.

And that encapsulates the most important lesson we never learn.

Its a lesson that is known on one level. It is set deep in cultural understanding and psychological examinations of human nature; is evident in famous Shakespearian anti-heroes.

In one of the many notable soliloquies in the Scottish play, Macbeth begins his pre-regicide speech by acknowledging the here and now “here on this bank and shoal of time” as he contemplates the consequences of his actions. Still in Act 1, Macbeth hopes that “its surcease were its success”. He is hoping that in fact there will be no consequences from killing King Duncan even though he almost immediately acknowledges that “in these cases we still have judgement here”.

In Things Fall Apart there are also – as with Macbeth’s witches – ethereal and terrestrial forces that proclaim, predict and influence actions. Most obviously, Okonkwo is subject to and a clear victim – as is his village and culture – of the abomination of colonialism in its mundane brutality. It is the choices made by the men on both sides that create the endless tragedies.

And if we step swiftly sideways into the less prosaic, real contemporary world – this is a lesson we reject – however many times and however many examples of destruction are laid out in human history – often repeats of repeats of repeats.

Despite the horrors of wars currently raging or brewing around the globe and the appalling losses of innocent lives – it is still the case – that the greatest and most imminent threat facing humanity is the destruction of the environment.

This is something we are doing. We know we are doing it. We choose – if not to keep doing it at least to not do anything about the doing of it. Same thing.

And do we have any examples of the catastrophic effect of similar actions. Well – you could say too many to mention. But let us take Australia. Not somewhere I’ve ever been.

Today 70% of this continent country is arid. And its getting worse.

Aboriginal peoples lived ‘down under’ for 40,000 years without decimating the land which was verdant and fertile.

It was European settlers who – as well as abusing the Aboriginals and corrupting their ways of life – destroyed the natural world there with farming methods unsuitable to the region, plant and animal species that were not native and which debased the land. In particular cattle rearing, which has turned whole swathes of the land into irretrievable desert. Australian cattle farming – one of the most environmentally harmful on the planet – goes on apace today.

Here in Britain – something I have written about endlessly – is how the post war gains aimed at improving the lives of ordinary people after the human sacrifice and slaughter of WWII, were systematically unpicked from the early 80s when Margaret Thatcher (PM 1979 - 1990) began her cruel policies and a programme of privatisation which, when completed this century, put most of what had been in public ownership back into private hands where profit rules and we see the devastation of society all around us in crumbling and dysfunctional, old and worn infrastructure that fails so many. Sewage in the water and in prepping itself for private profit - the Post Office created one of the worst mass miscarriages of justice in British legal history.

A decade and a half of Tory rule this century added to the misery with an austerity programme that led to decreased longevity in some poor areas and an increase in child poverty. In-between Thatcher’s horrors and Cameron/Osborne’s austerity social cataclysm we had – of course – Tony Blair’s illegal invasion of Iraq. Another ‘choice’ albeit made directly against the clearly expressed will of the majority of the British public and the evidence. The repercussions of that miserable adventure are with us today.

Somehow given the choice between what is the right thing to do and obvious self destruct there is something about human nature – at least for some – and sadly often those in power, that leads them to make the obviously bad choice. Tony Blair’s give-away for when he knew he was making the wrong choice was to talk about ‘difficult decisions’ It became, in my view, shorthand for – crapping things up.

But we do it en masse too. Not just individually. The UK (though not, I’m proud to say, the people here in Scotland) voted for the self-destruct of Brexit. It is acknowledged as such by economists and all sentient beings and yet the main architect of this – media darling Nigel Farage – rises ever higher in popularity where he was put but the media that still platforms him.

America voted for Donald Trump not once but twice. And you’d have to have been living under a rock not to know how horribly that is playing out.

If humanity doesn’t start pulling away from obvious bad choices soon; if we as humans simply hope, like Macbeth, that the obvious consequences just wont happen when they obviously will and if we don’t curb the men with Macbeth’s “vaulting ambition” then things, everything, will fall apart.

But things don’t fall apart all by themselves.

Things Fall Apart because we break them.

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Do check out My BOOKS and as the summer hols are upon us - remember all the poems in Fun Poems For Children are performed by me on youtube I put these put for the grandkids during covid but they're now public.

Plus why not have a read of an early relevant post

 Armageddon Will Not Be Televised

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Finally - as folk keep asking - just a reminder - I've never been on any social media and still do not have a smartphone 😊 so no need to waste time searching.

Bye for the summer, see you in September.

Scottish Independence; Why is this my fight? (529)

 Che Guevara was not Cuban. This is my shorthand answer when English friends ask in a bemused fashion, a woman of Caribbean descent, born in the shire counties of England, without a drop of Scottish blood, is so passionate about Scottish Independence.

I could also add that, in fact, there may be Scottish ancestry somewhere. With a name like Crawford lurking on the peripheries of my family – the most likely explanation is a Scottish slave owner somewhere in the past. We’ll leave that one.

I could go on to say that, even more so as a mixed-race person born into a comfortable working-class household in the early 1960s, I was aware in an abstract way that I was not only different from almost everyone around me at school and everyone in my immediate neighbourhood but also not entirely ‘in’ with the black immigrants of my maternal family when we were in Birmingham. A sense of ‘other’ leads, I suspect, to lack of ties to contemporary groups. The up-side is that I never felt the pull of peer pressure as quite simply I felt I was never part of the group. Hence no peers to be pressured by.

And on I could go, waffling into the long grass.

The truth I suspect is closer to the first short explanation on which I will expand.

Sometimes you have fight in you. Sometimes you have an innate sense of injustice. Where it comes from, I cannot say other than I’ve always had it. I do not come from a political family but on leaving home to study in Newcastle I was pretty soon engulfed in a political battle that could not have been further from my roots if it had involved invaders from Mars; The 1984/5 Miners’ Strike. A battle ostensibly of white working-class men in an industry I had no experience of and little knowledge of. But I campaigned, I marched, I took the student buses to London and experienced first-hand the grim, untethered aggression of angry ‘encounters’ involving a police force that knew it had carte-blanche to horse charge and use batons whether against miners or students.

Thatcher’s collective punishment beating of the working class marked a dark and dangerous turning point which began to unravel the post-war gains for ordinary people. These significant gains were born of the horrors of the Second World War and an acknowledgment that you could not send ordinary people, en masse, to die on the battle fields, leave widows to bring up children and continue to treat vast swathes of the populous as 3^rd class.

But it felt like my battle. Why? I could not have explained at the time but it led in the end to me joining the Labour Party – which is ironic as then leader Neil Kinnock arguably did little to support the miners. Perhaps secretly hoping that Thatcher would clip the union’s wings and curb some of the power of the very movement that was the genesis of the party he led.

In reality there followed an avalanche of societal destruction which may not have been obvious as such at the time (it was obvious to some ref: Making it Public by Dexter Whitfield. Pluto Press 1983) but which – looking back – was a wholesale restructuring of social orders, bringing us to a present day where everything that was in private hands before that war – and much that was not – is back in the hands of the wealthy – with this one caveat. The state now subsidises these private entities and much of that money ends up off-shore in private hands – very often foreign hands despite the Right Wingers being the loudest to bleat about patriotism.

Later – though still young as a city councillor (at 23) I was one of a couple of lone voices to argue against what we called The Poll Tax and was carpeted by then Council leader Jeremy Beecham and his creepy side kick Tony Flynn. I made a nuisance of myself complaining about the abuse of councillor’s expenses. This was back in the day when – despite the fact that councils actually ran services directly rather than simply deciding which of their mates to award contracts to – there was no stipend so those who thought they were entitled used to ‘play the expenses system’ and Jeremy Beecham was able to behave like a feudal lord handing out favours to the obedient in the form of chair positions of prominent committees.

I won’t go on about that sad episode – suffice to say – I couldn’t stomach it and after being elected a second term, I resigned before its conclusion when I realised ‘dealing with’ bullying and abuse was pointless – achieving nothing. I let my membership run until the illegal invasion of Iraq then resigned that too and swore off party politics.

THEN I moved to Scotland.

What I discover was people with a strange accent speaking my language. I found folk who – on the whole did not look like me but with whom I felt a connection.

I discovered a political ideology that was what I’d firstly assumed and then hoped The Labour Party was about.

I discovered a social structure – albeit imperfect and horribly restricted by devilish devolution – that actually still cared about human beings in a humane way.

It was a revelation.

And – what is even more astonishing is that – while I did – many years later – get over my disgust at party politics and join the SNP – I have found that the touchstone of my drive, my desire for justice, my need for fairness, accountability and the dignity of people is served better in the grass roots Independence movement – The Yes groups that are dotted over Scotland, sparked by the 2014 referendum.

Why is this so odd? Well – in many ways the Yes groups seem to me to be more ‘culturally’ Scottish than the SNP. So – as someone who’s not a fan of haggis or bagpipes (though, who doesn’t like a guy in a kilt?) I at first did not understand this affinity.

In fact, I’ve been on street stalls where other English born people have wandered over for a chat and when we’ve laid out what we do they respond – ‘oh, I’m English, it’s nothing to do with me’. To which the collective response – in our group is – and in every group should be – if you live in Scotland, it’s your business.

Why?

Sometimes you have the fight in you. You have the burning need for justice. And what I re-discovered having discovered it once in the Miners’ Strike as a student – it doesn’t have to be your fight. It only needs to be a parallel.

I cannot fight the injustice of my ancestors. There is no land to reclaim, there is no route back to those roots. But the fight is in me and I see a similar fight here and I want in. I want in really badly.

I want to see freedom, dignity and independence and the right to self-governance for those who live in Scotland now as if it is my freedom and my wrong.

It helps for purposes of clarity that Westminster – whether under Labour or Conservative - has continued blindly and cruelly in the colonial mindset and shows no empathy for the ordinary people of this land. It helps that they have shown a callousness that is unequivocal whether it be to the tens of thousands of Middle Eastern civilians they condemned to body bags and unmarked graves in Iraq and subsequently Gaza. It helps rub out any distinction on this side now they have abandoned poor children, the homeless, the elderly, women and young people. Is there anyone the incumbents of Westminster have not abandoned in the pursuit of power?

It is sad that large swathes of the populous have swallowed the lies that economic woes and decline are the fault of the poor, the destitute and the migrant. Have they squandered the wealth of land and industry? No. Nothing could be further from the truth.

In a post-Brexit society where bigotry has been legitimised and the last and current Westminster administrations have failed to move public focus away from migrant-blaming in order to protect the failures of the historic ruling classes and their increasing, stand subsidised fortunes, it behoves the more enlightened Scottish government and the grass-roots independence movement to shift the dial.

We must openly acknowledge the historic contributions of generations of migrants have made to Scotland.

We must loudly celebrate the energy, hard work, and vitality of those who have chosen to make this their home.

In the interests of a strong, united, successful future independent Scotland we must be unequivocal about its welcome to those who come here to raise families, contribute to the nation of Scotland.

We must not only continue to reject the harmful, corrosive, poisonous scapegoating of the vulnerable – whether on a domestic level or those fleeing countries devastated by Westminster’s continuing colonial mindset but to make sure that – as the situation is now, clearly vacant – Scotland welcomes ‘the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free’. Because migrants have always nourished the worn soil of tired nations from the Irish road builders and potato pickers to Romanian nurses, Polish plumbers and African care workers and it is – as we all know – the avaricious few at the top of the pile who suck society dry.

That truth has been turned on its head and we need to openly and publicly and loudly set the record straight.

Not only is that the right thing to do it opens the door to welcoming in a whole army of friends and new allies to the Independence movement who are still ambiguous as to whether it has anything to do with them.

The battle is upon us.

Yes, lethargy and the disconnect of a populous that is weary and disengaged is against us.

A complicit predominantly right-wing media is against us.

The monied interests that rely on tax subsidies to shore up their profits are against us.

The narrative that our failing infrastructure and crumbling services are the fault of desperate people in boats and the feckless on benefits is as unwavering as it is untrue.

The cowardice of those who gain power and then do not wish to rock the boat they float in is against us.

But we must fight anyhow.

And, whatever their colour or creed, I’ll stand next to anyone who will stand next to me.

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Thanks for reading.

As always do check out my audio stuff on Bandcamp and My BOOKS 

Also - if you have kids - I've opened up the poetry for children (rather rough) vids that I put on youtube for my grandkids - so enjoy these too Fruit Salad Person

The last one is a bit bonkers but remember I put them up for my grandkids...

Trump Derangement Syndrome v Farage Fixation Syndrome… (528)

 What is the significant difference between the US’s racist orange menace with the broken brain who is breaking America and the UK’s racist frog-faced charlatan who broke Britain?

Trump became politically popular after endless media promotion then wrecked America. Farage wrecked Britain while endlessly promoted by the mainstream media and then made real political gains…

(in the context or recent local election results in England…)

I’ve written before about Labour’s Starmer being in counter-productive appeasement mode re Trump’s America. However, there is something disturbing going on in UK domestic politics re our own bargain basement used-care-salesman, chief gurning racist, discontent-manipulator and man using politics to enrich himself – Nigel Farage.

It's long been identified that the remaining rump of the Tory party – Cameron’s infamous ‘swivel-eyed-loons’ - are desperate to colonise F’s Reform UK voters. They are realising too late that even a leader as off her trolley as Kemi Badenoch cannot out out-loon Nige.

But Labour is also attempting ‘muscular and heard-hearted’ to appeal to the aggrieved, sprinkled with anti-migrant political pepper.

It’s never worked, it never will work and it will alienate the increasing number who see Starmer’s Labour as Tory-lite at best or those - like me – who remember Blair’s Iraq invasion and have a horrible sense re Gaza, that Labour's penchant for instigating or being involved in situations that put 10’s of thousands of brown civilians in body bags is just too uncomfortable.

In the US, MAGA label anyone who dislikes Trump’s autocratic chaos as having Trump Derangement Syndrome. One state in Texas is trying to have TDS officially added to a list of mental illnesses!

Now Trump is planning a Kim Jong Un-style military birthday parade for himself costing $billions – I ask again – when will enough be enough for Starmer?

The Tories have had it for a while. Now Starmer’s Labour seem to be suffering Farage Fixation Syndrome.

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And, as in indication that we never learn the lessons of history – even the very recent lessons – here is another old doodle from that strange fateful year 2016…

Brexit broke Britain ~

As always do check out My BOOKS. 

And – as I’m not on any social media and reading is very out of fashion – I am having a little celebration re my wee bloggy passing 300k 

EARTH DAY 2025

So, its Earth Day today.

Not that you'd notice for all the attention being paid to the catastrophic state of the planet.

But - as my contribution I'm going to push two of my written pieces at you.

I've listed them before but here goes - 

ZERO ONE ZERO TWO (US)

ZERO ONE ZERO TWO (UK)

and, if you don't like reading - 

Casey & the Surfmen

NB Bandcamp is a really good site for supporting artists like me so please consider paying the very modest fee to download. Thank you.

From Oliver Twist to Oliver Subsist… (527)

Labour’s recent budget is cruelly Dickensian in an age of billionaires. We may even see our first trillionaire very soon. And these two things, as has been underlined on this blog many times, are directly connected.

Few socio-economic observers with at least one foot in reality would disagree that the real way out of poverty and decline is for wages to rise, the wealthy to be efficiently taxed and for work to really pay. Real wages for really decent jobs mean more tax revenue after all. Our current system has the state subsidising wealthy companies through supplementing ever poor wage values.

Many fiscal observers on both sides of The Pond and in successful EU countries say as much so it’s not complicated, it’s not a secret.

What Starmer and his Chancellor Rachel Reeves are doing with their recent slashing of benefits to the most vulnerable, is blowing up the bridge that gets many of the most financially exposed, over the croc-infested raging waters of life. And they are doing it before putting the necessary new measures in place that might lead to an economy where ordinary people can actually thrive or at least live decently in our late-stage capitalist society of ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’.

Starmer & Reeves are implementing survival of the financially fittest. It’s a sod the poor, disregard the disabled, fail the elderly, abandon children living in poverty and disgusting housing conditions attitude.

Instead of society sheltering the needy, the super-rich ‘shelter’ their wealth offshore. Their £millions are, after 40 years of the wreckage of privatisation, often from the proceeds of the garage sale of our infrastructure. They are no different, therefore to the oligarchs of post-soviet Russia.

But if Labour are going full Oliver Twist, why not just re-introduce Work Houses?

Literal and figurative Dickensian attitudes and callousness are emanating from Labour. Starmer is Mr. Bumble dishing out cold gruel to ungrateful wretches who dared to hope for 'more' from the party of Kier Hardie. The first Kier being a Scottish Trade Unionist, true working-class hero and founder of The Labour Party. See The Herald  .

Again, there’s talk of future house building to ease the shortage. No hard assurances that this government will ensure it is affordable housing. No mention of the fact that many young folks are hobnailed not just by prices but the life-crippling student debts they owe. Student loans were introduced by the last Labour administration and thankfully still kept at bay here in Scotland. But for how long?

Many of the things the Scottish government has managed to protect; free prescriptions, free elderly care, publicly owned water infrastructure - are under threat as the level playing field between Westminster and Holyrood fails to materialise. Holyrood is left in the invidious position where anything that goes wrong is blamed on them but without independence, they do not have the free reign to act like other successful small independent nations.

It is no coincidence that Finland has been voted the happiest country for the 8th year in a row with experts citing, among other things, a “strong welfare system”. But others in the top ranks include, Denmark, Iceland, Sweden.

Small self-governing nations clearly work. While Scotland is treated like a colonial enclave that should shut up and put up despite differing from England in so many ways and on so many big political issues – some listed above but also, Scotland rejected Brexit, Scotland called for a ceasefire in Gaza when it might have made a difference to Palestinians and hostages.

And up here in Scotland we have the absolutely useless Labour puppet Anas Sarwar, like the hopeless undertaker Mr Sowerberry in Oliver's story. Though Scottish Labour call themselves that, they are anything but. They are an uninspiring side-show to Westminster with no sense of Scotland or its people.

The latest Labour let-down for ordinary folk is just one more reason why Scotland needs to be able to work for the people who live here, free of the chains of Westminster colonial think.

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Thanks for reading. And, as always, do check out my other writing -

My BOOKS

WHAT IS WRONG WITH US? (526)

We know what is wrong with Trump et al.

But what is wrong with us? What the hell is wrong with US?

As one of the ‘observers from a distant planet’ (it seems…) I was told during the EU referendum that – referring to those who voted for Brexit – though it didn’t have that handle then – I was being disingenuous. A little condescending. Unfair. Everyone has a right to their opinion.

To which I can only wonder – but do they though?

Why is the opinion of someone who spends their time brain addled with reality TV or febrile celebrity bollocks or other complete mind-numbing social media gobbledygook and who then puts that opinion into play at the ballot box, as valid as people who’ve been paying attention?

And now that its all gone to very completely absolutely predictable shite, can I please at least be pissed off about it?

May I – as I did in a recently published letter - now refer to them as not so much turkeys voting for Christmas but turkeys who voted for a permanent parking space at the abattoir and daily stuffing?

And it is that x1000 re Trump and America. Both having burst upon us like a giant plague of boils in 2016. And here's an old doodle from that dark year...

They/we’ve known what Trump is, ever since he descended the gold elevator with mannequin Melania. And if the glitzy descent wasn’t a metaphor/warning/visual premonition, I don’t know what was.

The appalling Zelenskyy ambush in The Oval Office was just the most recent horror show in a tired, long-running franchise that has us anxious and weary in equal measure.

Rape wasn’t enough. 32 felony convictions weren’t enough. Migrant infants put in cages, separated from their parents – some, to this day, not reunited – not enough. The constant grifting; from MAGA bibles made in China to cheap gold hi-tops, to the eve-of-inauguration meme crypto scam. Just what was it about this man that Americans thought was going to turn out well for them?

Ditto – here – Farage and Johnson. We knew who they were. Con-men. Mad egoists. Chancers and most of all racist.

And yes, in all cases, the legacy media has given them a massive leg up. Why, ratings? Because they thought it was entertaining? Who knows. What we do know is that all these men were allowed to get away with behaviour that would have been career-ending for almost any other politician. Even in these days where our expectations are so low.

I know racism dressed up as jingoism never loses its attraction for a lot of people. Add to that now – the very obvious draw of aggressive misogyny. But, are so very many millions of voters really willing to go for all that knowing that pretty much every other aspect of their lives will be ruined?

Yes.

Clearly.

Is it that we’ve just given up?

Overwhelmed by the things we’ve relied on all our lives that no longer work – here in the UK that includes, public transport, all infrastructure, affordability of anything, education – at all levels. Care for the vulnerable yada yada yada.

And what of the soft right and liberal Left?

Well, Biden along with previously Rishi Sunak (remember him?) and subsequently Sir Keir Starmer, were happy to facilitate Netanyahu’s Gaza slaughter devastation. Starmer – as leader of the Labour Party - refused to get rid of the 2-child benefit cap leaving many vulnerable youngsters in poverty and appalling living conditions, while simultaneously refusing to cap bankers’ bonuses (remember bankers – they brought the economy down in 2008 and most of us are still paying for that one way or another).

Biden lost the plot and started to think that his presidency and his family were more important than America. Then – having left the VP in an absolutely impossible position – trying to fight an election in a few weeks that her opponent never stopped fighting since he left the White House so very reluctantly last time – claimed if he’d still been doddering around - he’d have won.

Is the whole world suffering from delusions?

I glance around my immediate world at the vape-addled youngsters all talking in TV reality show soundbites while the hedgerows and motorways are an open dump. Paths are a minefield of dog shit and everywhere, unhealthy, miserable-looking people are staggering along clutching ‘energy’ drinks and throw-away food (at least that is what they tend to do with it – plus the packaging) and yes – faces are never more than 4 seconds away from being zoned into their smartphones and whatever is going on there. Shopping for tat. Gambling. Videos of shite. Etc

I think the clue may be in our clothes. If you glance around, just see how many folks you can spot wearing entirely black or at least something black.

Are we all pre-mourning as the world slips away?

And when was the last time you heard any mention of the thing that is actually gong to wipe out us humans – the climate crisis?

So – yes – any engaged person can see what is so very wrong with Trump, J. D. Vance, Putin, Orban, Milei etc, (apart from they all have terrible hair) but we put them there. All these idiots, walking disasters were elected.

So

WHAT IS WRONG WITH US?

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Thanks for reading. I’m no longer going weekly on this as having to tune in in a forensic way to what is happening in the world too regularly will drive anyone under the duvet.

Do check out my other writing – novels, children’s poetry and stories about the environment. Cheers.

My BOOKS (avail in all good online book stores)