Speechless (but not quite).

Before we move on with routine business here, it behoves me to throw down a quick line on yesterday’s US election results.

Groan all you like, but to be honest I’ve always felt frustrated by the determination of so many entertainment media outlets to remain “apolitical”, as if life-changing crises and fundamentally opposed worldviews can be put aside as we all get together and natter about the day-to-day trivia of, I don’t know, pop music, or Star Wars or something. Culture reflects the political landscape that surrounds its creation, and political realities reflects back upon the way in which we interpret culture – even on a blog that rides the currents of escapism and nostalgia as heavily as this one.

In fact, I’d even contest that this tendency to put on the blinkers and leave issues of everyday existence to the “political animals” has to some extent contributed to the formation of the black hole in which global public discourse currently finds itself, so, if you don’t consider this a valid forum for me to discuss such issues occasionally when the need arises, then… that’s too bad I’m afraid. I don’t consider my views on the wider world to be extreme or unreasonable, and I try not to become overly strident or repetitious in my expression of them, so hopefully you can still hang out here and enjoy the sights - but, neither do I feel that my beliefs should be kept out of sight, like mutant appendages at a dinner party.

I would have liked to have found some pithy way to tie things in with this blog’s usual subject matter… but I just don’t have the stomach for it right now to be honest. Like many people who continue to care for the well-being of their fellow human beings (and indeed, life on earth more generally) I have found the events of 2016 depressing beyond words, and a Trump election victory feels like the end of season finale.

None of us knows what happens next, so I’ll try to rein in my natural tendency toward doom-mongering, and keep the dozens of tangential diatribes I could launch into to myself. Let’s just say that, at best, I feel that representative democracy is on the skids on both sides of the Atlantic. The last time big-mouthed opportunists managed to make this amount of headway marshalling a dissatisfied proletariat with dangerous lies was in the 1920s and 30s, and you can end this sentence however you like, because I haven’t the heart for it.

Even if the resultant collapse of the geo-political status quo that has kept “our way of life” broadly intact over the past half century remains on the now-familiar level of infighting, chaos and indecision however, the predatory mixture of totalitarianism and free market capitalism currently gaining ground elsewhere in the world lies in wait. And as a worst case scenario meanwhile, I’m probably not the only one contemplating the manner in which an America-First President Trump, unshackled from NATO, is liable to respond to a 9/11 scale shocker on U.S. soil.

What was that I said about doom-mongering? Ok, let’s can it.

Whatever happens, it is as always the poor and voiceless and stateless who suffer first, and die first, whilst those of us who already have food on our plates bang the table like petulant children and demand we’re paid attention to. My most earnest wish right now is that selfish nation states would shut the fuck up and lend a hand to their neighbours, but it seems I’m paddling upstream on that one, so what the hell do I know.

For any readers in the U.S. grappling with more immediately pressing domestic concerns meanwhile, uncouth fighting words are probably the last thing you need right now, but I’ll nonetheless refer you to the words of the late Hunter S. Thompson, responding to the 2001 election of Bush Jr in one of his last published missives, because they are words I’d be keeping close to my heart were I over there with you. Just try not to throw them around too loudly in mixed company for a month or two – it probably won’t help.

Normal service to resume imminently. Thank you and good night.