The Un-brightest Star.

You know the news isn’t all about doom and gloom. Every once in a while old Huw Edwards might end the news with a smile and a story about a kid who’s fought against the odds and raised and trained a wild hyena as a pet, or a story about how Piers Morgan has vanished off the face of the earth. It can’t all be about war and death and taxes and so on and so on. Take today for instance, there in the actual news, the truly momentous revelation that Donald Trump’s Hollywood star has been vandalised. What’s really great about it is it’s not the first time, and given what a colossus arse the man is this hardly comes as a surprise. On Wednesday night it was smashed up by a man with a sledgehammer, but on previous occasions the assaults have ranged from the inventive – building a miniature wall around it, the obvious – graffiti, and the plain brilliant – urinating on it. To my mind there are fewer simpler and more direct ways of showing your contempt for something (anything) than weeing on it/that/them. That said I would get less than zero satisfaction from actually weeing on Donald Trump but……….hold on, where am I going here, back to the point, sorry.
To have a star on the Hollywood whatever you don’t necessarily have to be a star it seems. You have to apply to the ‘The Hollywood Chamber of Commerce’ first and include a statement confirming you want a star and, get this, that you will definitely go to the opening ceremony (Cher did not, for instance) should you be granted one. If this already sounds heartbreakingly narcissistic then that’s because it is. Once you’ve done that you have to raise exactly £19,260 (buggered if I can work that out in $) in sponsorship. Why they have such a random number is your best guess as well as mine. Presumably someone then calls you and says you are eligible and, hey presto, you turn up to be photographed at your very own star placement inauguration ceremony down in Hol-e-wood.
America invented itself and if it could come up with its own example of what kind of person best reflects the outward soul of America then it couldn’t have done much better than Donald Trump. There are many kinds of America; the pointless hippy; the mid-west super-religious tyrant; the deeply worryingly racist southern hick; the poorly parented future college gun maniac; the East Coast Academic intellectual snide. The list could go on if I could be bothered. America really wants to lower it’s big balls into your eye sockets while you sleep. Ultimately Trump actually distils all the crass, awful, terrible ways in which the rest of the world views America, rather than how they see themselves. They are on the brink of possibly electing the worst president ever and if they don’t its only because they decided to vote for the second worst president ever. There’s more to say on this but the final line is that we’re all stars, of course we are, but we’re only real stars if we can send in a statement and raise (or just buy, surely) £19,260 or the equivalent in dollars, and then be bothered enough to turn up to our own ceremony, because who wouldn’t? I know for a fact that there are plenty of my heroes on the The Hollywood Walk of Fame but that doesn’t make me one of them. I am what I am and I’m also pleased to say that I’ll never, ever, be Donald Trump. And I wouldn’t wee on him either. Especially if he was on fire.
G B Hewitt. 27.10.2016.