Manufacturing Hope
Ben Wildsmith
Somewhere between Donald Trump becoming Master of the Universe and Wales losing to Fiji I started to lose my sparkle a little.
Yes, the boiler is acting up, yes, they have erected a wind turbine directly behind my house this week, and no, I’m not strictly wild about forking out £30 for the works Christmas lunch, but nobody said it would be easy…
Does it have to be this hard, though? Is anything improving at all, for anyone? Hope is crucial to the human experience. If deterioration is our only prospect, we can’t cope. It doesn’t take long, either.
It was seven years between the financial crash of 2008 and everything going Trumpy and Brexity. The drip-by-drip torture of austerity sent us all round the twist in short order, grasping at any passing fancy that promised to make it stop.
America, what are you doing?
But we were supposed to be past all that. The Yanks voted for Biden, we voted for Starmer, we’re sensible again now. Time to calm down and act like grown-ups…America, what are you doing? NO!!!!!!!!
We told them they mustn’t, didn’t we?
‘Don’t do that, America, we’re tired and emotionally fragile.’
They don’t listen, leaning against jukeboxes, chewing gum in their leather jackets. They do exactly as they please.
And don’t get me started on China! Are we still supposed to believe they didn’t knock up Covid in a lab? That’s perfectly fine, is it? Even if it did originate from a PangolinsULike franchise around the corner from the lab, is that not at least negligence on a scale worth discussing?
No?
Whatever.
Senedd elections
And Nigel Farage is specifically targeting the Senedd elections as the launchpad for his newly professionalised Reform UK.
Reformed Reform UK is supposed to have branches and a democratic structure. Previously a wholly owned subsidiary of Nigeco Holdings, it will hitherto project the conveniently lucrative values of its founder through democratically appointed Farageistes.
Target number one is Wales, specifically the Valleys where I live. Let joy be unbounded!
Imagine the pub! It’s bad enough now with 20mph obsessives assuming the mantle of freedom fighters: Che Guevara in in a Nissan Qashqai. Once the world’s media descends on Aberdare to determine if the Trumpian wave is global, they’ll be insufferable.
Plus Palestine, plus Ukraine, plus the climate, plus, plus, plus…
It can feel as if we have let civilisation slip through our fingers. There seems to have been something unserious about people in our lifetimes. Even those in high office have lacked gravity, the sense of what might be at stake.
The WWII generation knew that, and it informed the world they created. Growing up with the institutions they made to educate, care for, and inform us, it seemed like the world had changed permanently.
Now, at the dog end of the Boomerverse that was to come, we see right well that their achievements should have been defended with the ferocity that birthed them, not taken for granted or flogged off for a few quid.
Omnipotent
Trump will face no opposition this time. With his party entirely loyal, and majorities in both houses, he’s omnipotent. Most likely, he’ll allow Benjamin Netanyahu and Vladimir Putin to act with commensurate impunity.
As humanity is trucked southwards across the Mexican border in its millions, and women in conservative states are subjugated to religion, we’ll need to decide where we are in all this; what we stand for here.
To maintain hope against this backdrop can feel naïve: as if clinging to a blanket. But we know all this perfidy will fail.
Nobody gets away with the sort of hubris we’re witnessing now. They’ll come a cropper, alright, and the less opposition they have, the quicker they will unravel.
It may be that the grotesque, caricature spectacle of Trump unchecked will reveal misapprehensions endemic to the culture that valued him so highly. His descent will be as loud and ugly as his rise.
What comes after will be a reaction to him, profoundly different. So there, at least, is something.
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Concluded with the hope that simply MUST spring eternal.
With both houses of Congress, and a Supreme Court stacked with right-wingers, what’s to actually stop him from having himself crowned King Donald I?
Presumably the US constitution?!
His SC appointees have proven more independently minded than many feared.
I too think that’s the case. And I understand that any proposed change to thew US constitution has to have secured the consent of 75% of the members of both houses of their legislature.
And somehow I can’t see that happening in this context!.
As John Ellis says; the constitution.
Introducing a new amendment, or altering an existing one in any way (including repeal) isn’t easy. It requires a ⅔ majority in both houses.
This can be bypassed by calling a national convention, something that hasn’t been done since the original Constitutional Convention in 1787. If anything, the bar is even higher using that route. It can’t be called without the support of ⅔ of states; any proposed change would need the support of ¾ of states.
Trump today calling for the gop to find a way to hammer it through.
As Keynes said, “in the long run we are all dead”, and in “philosophically” waiting for contradictions of Trump and the right across Europe to work themselves out, possibly in the shorter term too. Liberalism has been exposed as a hollow pretence, US politics (and British) is to chose the appointees of the wealthy, eat your gruel, don’t look up and especially don’t question. The hell of Gaza, climate change, austerity for ever, bare faced lies as absolute truth, a media with the sole mission of reinforcement? Saint Orwell didn’t know the half. Ah, but one day the clouds will… Read more »
We can’t do anything about events in the US of A but we must now start shouting loudly & incessantly in the run up to our Senedd elections that a vote for Farages limited company is a vote for an extreme version of the Tory party with hints of fascism thrown in. Let’s hope the people of Cymru see exactly what the mp representing Clacton in the white house really stands for as it’s certainly not the interests of Cymru but as he sees it, a blatant grab for a power base to enrich himself & his cronies.
The comment about civilisation in the article made me think of the question asked of Gandhi (and I’m paraphrasing here):
Interviewer: “What do you think of british civilisation?”
Gandhi: “It will be good when britain achieved it.”
The people are being dropped into posts now, latest into Homeland Security is the woman who shot her puppy because she didn’t like it. Miller is in there as well (some pillow cover wearing orgs would rate him too far….). Gotta wonder how long the US lasts as a decent country now. Putin laughing all the way to the bank…..
Oh, there is musk, in at the government to cut departments and trump wants to remove generals who don’t play his tune. Sound familiar? Still got that twitter account?
My favourite part is Musk is being partnered up with a man who wants to scrap the IRS in this new “efficiency” department. How, exactly, is the government supposed to collect taxes to pay for, well, anything, without a tax office? Will the new Trumpian America simply run on love for dear orange leader?
I wonder. Perhaps they want to replace it with something more efficient? I have had no dealings with the IRS but, if they are anything like HMRC, I don’t doubt that getting rid of it and starting again wouldn’t be a bad place to start. There are 67,500 people working for HMRC (up 16% since 2015). And yet all the local tax offices have been closed, all tax submissions have to be done electronically, it is impossible to get through to the HMRC by telephone and they are making an unforgivable number of mistakes even with simple things like tax-codes.… Read more »
Really?
Musk as an efficiency czar? The bloke is facing investigations and just been put in charge of shutting it down.
He has shown that he can get an electric car to market far quicker than the established motor industry, that Twitter can operate with 80% fewer staff, that a rocket can deliver cargo to the ISS at a fraction of the cost of NASA or Boeing. I would say he knows a thing or two about efficiency.