I have emerged into a world where everything seems not to be as it should.
Forgive me if I am mistaken, but shouldn’t it go: global economies are badly damaged by Black Swan event; debt surges to unmanageable levels; governments and central banks fail to manage the re-building of their economies and decide to inflate their way out of trouble; living standards fall; nationalistic populism rises; division, hatred and polarisation are adopted as mainstream political tools; Christian nationalism helps to shape the new landscape; despotic, capricious, hateful, narcissists, become leaders of major world powers. Conflict(s) ensue, after which the far-right hegemony collapses?
So, how come then, House of Trump has gone from Caenina to Commodus [https://www.history.com/news/commodus-worst-roman-emperor-gladiator]; from 1932 to 1946, without the bit in between? These new-variant liberationists seem not to have adhered to the brand values. They are the first fascists ever to rise to the top of national politics without a plan, and who, in their haste to find the least resistant route to acquire the keys to the citadel, have taken a short-cut to self-annihilation.
It’s like an imported Chinese sex toy exploded in Rudy Giuliani’s whiskey marinated rectum, spraying toxic flesh over the adoring faces of his proselytes from the mezzanine balcony of the penthouse suite at Trump Tower, to bring an abrupt end to the welcome to MAGA-Nirvana party – until then, a constantly self-renewing bacchanal, financed by biddable lunatics who had been seduced by offers of privileged access to the criminally insane leaders of the cult. The final, decisive, batch of bewildered new arrivals, having filed-in to replace the abused and ravaged corpses of the sycophants and psychopaths that pre-dated them, not yet assimilated to the obligation to ceaselessly pleasure their hosts; agog in stupefied rapture at the scene before them – like the besotted morons who gawped as Musk’s broken rocket sprayed filth over their devoted faces; too terrified to duck down towards the trough from which their hosts gorge, for fear of being anally violated by someone they’d previously taken for a far-sighted, deep-state, conspiracy theorist; reluctantly accept the morsels of putrefied, alcohol-tinged, flesh flying into their gaping mouths. And only then do the scales fall from their eyes, as they are forced to acknowledge the likely provenance of the strange umami flavour of the apero-snacks that had been served with their introductory two-for-one Prosecco package on arrival.
And then, they see it all in 20-20 vision: the central trough, that is really a cesspit for every bodily emission from their drugged, drunk, and obese masters; the greased lap-dancer’s poles, to which the remainder of the cohort before theirs cling for fear of being abused beyond their twenty stone capacity to endure; the anterooms where partially trained cosmetic surgeons, working alongside fund raisers, PR execs, and fast-tracked law graduates from Trump University, re-engineer drones to act as witnesses in law suits, acquire drugs, and liaise with organised crime and news syndicates; the curtained-off private areas adjacent, where they see for the first time, acts that they’d previously only heard allusions to in Bible-School; until eventually, they realise that the only thing that resembles nirvana about the inferno of which they’re now a part, is the desire to swallow a handful of Fentanyl as soon as they can come up with the funds to acquire it.
Or perhaps, the better analogy is to say that they are like the colonisers who, between them, contrived to eat the last dodo; and who now find themselves unable to sail their ship home, because they’ve started eating the crew. Whatever.
The real question is, I suppose, are we having a fin de siècle at the age of just twenty-three, or are these events but a prelude to the real Black Swan event coming? It seems ludicrous to suppose that people worse than Trump and Johnson are waiting in the wings, but it wasn’t long ago that we laughed at the idea of those two acceding to power. Perhaps this is what it felt like in the early 1930s? Perhaps, for all the lockdowns and credit crunches, we haven’t yet had our version of the 1929 crash yet? – the real disaster which heralds in the period of history in which Trump and Johnson will come to be viewed as the ridiculous warm-up act to the maniac that followed? Less fin de siècle, more the tip of the fin?
Or better than all that, maybe, the human race has simply continued on its slow decline towards inevitable oblivion, but it presents to me alone as a quantum shift, because I have spent the last two years in captivity, in blissful ignirance of it all? All I know, is I feel scared. I suppose being without means, or language skills, in the middle of a war zone adds to that sense of anxiety, so, for the moment, I will concentrate instead on my plans to run away. The only trouble is, I don’t know where I’m running to.
Dickie White's Diary 