We need someone up front.

Welcome to two thousand and twenty. 2020. Twenny twenny. We’ve come a long way since God got Mary up the duff but I sense we’ve reached the apex (not sure when, probably the summer of 1976) and now we’re sliding down the other side like those fat Boy Scouts on Jimmy’s rollercoaster. Where once there was hope now there is uncertainty, fear and something that smells an awful lot like panic. Elon Musk may like to think he’s a forward (or do I mean upward?) looker, peeking out through his curtains to gaze at the stars and all they that promise for the future, but let’s bear in mind he’s also the man that labelled that cave rescuer a paedophile when he wouldn’t let him play with his toy submersible. To some Musk is a hero. To others, including me, he is a deluded gimp who’ll get this planet even less than nowhere.

I don’t know why Elon Musk popped into my head as I started to contemplate life on earth in the 2020’s. Perhaps he serves as a useful marker for where we’re heading. Where as once the human race had Galileo, Newton, Einstein and Da Vinci to lead our thinking and expand our vision forward now we have people like Sir Richard Branson and Musk, both of whom seem to think of the planet and everything beyond it as some kind of private playground for their own twattish playboy ambitions. They’re worse than third rate nutty professors and they live in a dream world entirely of their own making. If they’re an option for pinning hopes then I’d rather pin my hopes to my right testicle. With a mallet.

By 2030 I’ll either be 53 or dead, and I’m not sure which is more worrying. Some people are optimists and other people are like me. I’m genuinely worried that we don’t have as much time as we think; events are starting to happen very quickly. Climate experts talk about the climate in 2050, but that’s another 30 years from now. I wasn’t worried about it when I was 13 but that has changed and so have I. And what are we doing about it? We’re making another series of X Factor, that’s what. Where are the people that can take us forward? Where’s our Churchill, as in a proper Churchill, not the shit version we have at the moment? I’d happily settle for a Clement Attlee right now, I’d even settle for a Napoleon, provided he kept his ego in check. But leaders don’t seem to want to lead anymore; they just want to look in the mirror and forget to rehearse what they’ll say.

So there’s the reality that you’ve been looking for. You want to know why we’re in trouble – it’s because there isn’t anyone out there who can get us out of it; it’s no coincidence that we’re obsessed with superheroes, they’re our comfort blanket for when we start sucking our thumbs at Armageddon. But they won’t come, the superheroes, and there aren’t any real life ones. Nigel Farage won’t help, or Gareth Southgate, or Diane Abbott, or Piers Morgan. The Yanks and Russians couldn’t care less and everywhere else seems to be falling apart. I mean, it may well have got to the stage where there isn’t a single credible politician left anywhere on the planet. Perhaps the best thing that could happen is for something really fucking serious. It won’t be nice and I wouldn’t enjoy it but perhaps now is the time to shake us all up. They say the youngsters are mobilising but that’s not true because most of them are gurning at their phones and talking utter crap. Let’s have World War III then, it’ll freshen things up a bit. On the other hand we could just leave it another 10 years and see what happens. I’d imagine Elon Musk would make quite a dashing Flush Gordon. No, that wasn’t a typo.

G B Hewitt. 03.01.2020

Note to self – this year will be a better year, provided I put in some effort.