It’s a bit like when you play a game as a kid and you’re not a great loser and you lose the first time and your immediate response is to suggest a ‘best of three’. That’s what they should do in the American election. Just let Trump keep calling another round until he gets his way. After all it’s only an election for the leadership of the most powerful country in the world; it’s not anywhere nearly as important as a game of rock, paper, scissors, or anything like that. It nicely summarises just what a galactic arsehole Trump is and what a fly tip of a mess his country has become. Biden may be old and fragile but at least he doesn’t look and sound like a bloated, twisted playground bully. Oh let’s just be honest here and cut through all the polite stuff – Donald Trump is a cunt.
America has always been my dream ticket. The great holiday adventure. Top of my wish list. Or at least it was until recently. Now I’m not sure I’ll be able to cope. First of all, it’s hard to work out whether we’ll ever be able to go anywhere ever again. Secondly it’s quite hard to get into America on a good day anyway, but we can blame Osama Bin Laden for that. Thirdly, I’m now not sure I want to go to a country where the average village fete turns into a machine gun swap shop Klan rally. And finally, America has become a rotten apple. It might claim to be great, or to be in the process of being great again, but really that has no chance of happening, because the tide has already turned and there is only a long slump into decay ahead. Many once powerful countries went through this process: France, Spain, Portugal, and so on. Britain once held the world (or rather a quarter of it) in the palm of its hand and there must have been some idiots who really thought it would last forever, but nothing that big is ever sustainable. The Third Reich barely last a decade, let alone a thousand years. Staying on top forever would be like trying to sustain a particularly granite erection indefinitely.
America has benefitted to a huge degree from its geography (though I defer to the experts on that). It has the rivers and the fields, the oceans and the rocks. It has natural resources in abundance and is genuinely blessed with some fine minds and lovely folk, but all of this is offset by being ruinously riddled with some of the biggest cretins that have ever walked the earth. I mean, a few of them are literally beyond words. I’ve been watching them all week, in fits and starts, and occasionally I have choked with disbelief, wondering if any thought at all has been put into the sounds coming out of their mouths. It’s apparently quite easy to lead a fool and so Trump has cunningly used the ‘takes one to know one’ principle to his advantage and now they’re all repeating his thick stock phrases and made up bollocks all over the news – thoughtlessly spraying their shit around like a broken slurry hose. The other night I watched some plucky young fucker almost start to cry because Emily Maitlis refused (quite correctly) to believe what she was hearing; it’s all very well sticking to the Republican script but it’s not very useful if you don’t have the wits to get yourself out of the corner it will inevitably plonk you in. Good on yer, Maitlis.
Trump is the con artist of the century and yet his childish little games are all that many Americans want to see, and that’s because it’s the only way they can cope with the slow decline of their beloved country and all the deluded things they stand for. They just want to holler and whoop in approval and they seem to delight in turning the circus that politics already appears to be into something even cheaper. They want their politics to be a drive thru, a barn dance, a rodeo (though there is a certain cracked nobility to the battered rodeo rider – watch Junior Bonner – and so perhaps that is too dignified a comparison). Trump has turned American politics into a wet t-shirt competition, the sort you might find over here (I imagine) in the function room of a run down pub or the underground car park of a Budgens. If he could, Trump would probably love to flush Biden’s head down a toilet or make him sit on a whoopee cushion and then give him a wedgie live on CNN.
In conclusion, watching almost any politics is a pretty depressing hobby these days, but over in America they have managed to make bad politics something that used to happen in happier days. It isn’t all thanks to Donald Trump but it’s also more than just a coincidence. We still don’t know who will be president for the next four years (they’re not all fools, but they do seem to be very sluggish when it comes to counting) but I can tell you that by showering the whole scene with lawsuits and accusations, all completely unburdened by the necessary evidence, Trump has given us a sham of an election; the sort of election you might find in an African dictatorship, only much less dignified. He’s just a baby, really. A chubby, overindulged baby and a dreadful loser and he’s been that way all along. The problem is that if half the American population still can’t see what a cock Trump is then even if Biden wins there is only one way forwards, and that is downwards. I doubt we’ll ever see a great America again. I’d love to say the same of big Don.
G B Hewitt. 07.11.2020
On stupidity......and other causes for concern. 