Tag: Donald Trump

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Paul Thomas Anderson wins this battle

 

© Warner Bros. Pictures / Ghoulardi Film Company

 

The critics have, almost universally, lavished praise on One Battle after Another (2025), the new movie written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson.  (Though he didn’t try to adapt it directly, Anderson’s script took some inspiration from Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland.)  The praise is richly deserved.  I went to see it in my local cinema a few days ago and, afterwards, I hadn’t felt so exhilarated by a film since watching Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) on a big screen a decade earlier.

 

Heading the movie’s cast is Leonard DiCaprio, who plays Pat, a bomb-maker involved in a revolutionary American group called the French 75.  The ’75 stick it to The Man by freeing recent Latin-American immigrants from detention centres and blowing up banks and the offices of right-wing politicians.  Surprisingly, the plodding, unshowy Pat has a relationship, then sires a child, with fellow-revolutionary Perfidia Beverley Hills.  Essayed by Teyana Taylor in a short but devastating performance, Perfidia is the opposite of DiCaprio’s character.  She’s a force of nature: loud, fearless and given to flamboyant gestures, like humiliating the sleazy commander of a detention centre by forcing him to jerk off in front of her.  It’s entirely in keeping with her character when she’s shown firing a machine gun whilst massively pregnant.

 

To put an end to the French 75, the authorities appoint the ruthless and immoral Captain Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn), coincidentally the detention-centre commander who was made to have that embarrassing, public wank.  Lockjaw captures Perfidia and compels her to rat on her colleagues, and thereafter it becomes open season on the ’75, with most of them being arrested or – more often – summarily executed.  Pat and his now-infant daughter manage to escape with new identities (‘Bob and Willa Ferguson’) and end up living a low-key, mostly off-grid existence in a Californian town called Baktan Cross.  Pat / Bob decays into a booze and dope-raddled paranoid, terrified the past will catch up with them.  Wilma (Chase Infiniti) grows up with no idea of her real origins and becomes a teenager bemused by, and frequently having to nursemaid, her eccentric old dad.

 

15 years later, Captain Lockjaw is invited to join an Illuminati-like organization called the Christmas Adventurers Club, whose members belong to the white American elite and are wealthy, powerful… and extremely racist.  Lockjaw’s relationship with Pefidia in the days of the French 75 was more than one of pursuer and quarry.  He came to fetishise her, his obsession triggered by that first, masturbatory encounter, and they were briefly intimate prior to her capture – which highlights what a wild, try-anything-once character Perfidia was.  Now Lockjaw fears that he might be Wilma’s father, not Pat / Bob, and having a mixed-race daughter would obviously torpedo his chances of joining the Christmas Adventurers.  So he launches a military crackdown on Baktan Cross, ostensibly to round up illegal immigrants, but really so he can find Pat / Bob and the inconvenient Wilma and erase them.

 

© Warner Bros. Pictures / Ghoulardi Film Company

 

That’s the set-up established during One Battle After Another’s first quarter and it’s all you need to know.  What follows is a cinematic rollercoaster ride as Pat / Bob and Wilma, in separate locations when Lockjaw and his uniformed, heavily-armed goons crash into Baktan Cross, flee, hide, fight back and try to find each other and escape.  Along the way, they  encounter Sensei Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio del Toro), Willa’s local karate teacher who’s much more than he seems; a bounty hunter with a conscience (Eric Schweig); an assassin sent by the Christmas Adventurers to clean up Lockjaw’s mess (John Hoogenakker); some skateboarding radicals; a nasty far-right militia who dispose of people for money; and a secret enclave of nuns with guns. 

 

As you’ll gather from the synopsis, One Battle After Another is a politically charged movie.  It regularly focuses on how how the USA reacts to immigrants,  often impoverished, frightened and vulnerable people, both mistreating them and unscrupulously using them as pawns in power games and culture wars.  This is timely considering what Trump and his minions are doing at the moment.  It has to be said, though, that Lockjaw and the police and troops under his command go about their business with much more precision, organization and efficiency than the masked, clumping thugs in Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency have managed so far.  Predictably, you don’t have to look far on the Internet before you find negative reviews of the movie posted by far-right frothers, incensed by what they see as its Marxist / communist / socialist / radical-leftist leanings.

 

But as well as being political, One Battle After Another is very funny.  DeCaprio’s Pat / Bob may have been a revolutionary once, but for most of the movie he’s an amusingly grumpy and befuddled middle-aged dad, showing zero patience, say, for his daughter’s insistence that he respects her schoolfriends’ preferred pronouns.  Particularly funny are the scenes where, on the run from Lockjaw, he tries to phone what’s left of the French 75 to beg them for help.  He’s far from impressed when they demand he reels off an array of code-phrases to prove he’s who he says he is – codes he’s mostly forgotten during the past 15 years.  DeCaprio’s subsequent meltdowns are hilarious, though these scenes will strike a chord with anyone who, in the days before voice-recognition, tried to phone their bank but failed to cite the right security numbers.

 

The film makes interesting parallels between the French 75 and the Christmas Adventurers Club.  Though they’re positioned at different ends of society, at the bottom and at the top, both are shrouded in secrecy and pompous security protocols and both believe they are doing great works and bending history to their wills.  Seen from outside, though, they seem like two groups of overgrown kids who’ve set up gangs with stroppy rules about who gets to be ‘in’ and who doesn’t.

 

One Battle After Another features, perhaps, Leonardo DeCaprio’s best-ever performance.  His Pat / Bob character is an extension of Rick Dalton, the frustrated over-the-hill movie star he played in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019).  But while Dalton had his loyal buddy and stunt double Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) to keep him from going off the rails, Pat / Bob has no one when the shit hits the fan.  His daughter Willa is elsewhere and he has to overcome his many insecurities and get his act together alone.  At the same time, DeCaprio convinces us that Pat / Bob, despite his chaotic nature, is a loving father.  It’s his desire to save her that keeps him going, no matter what fate throws at him.  And in this film, it throws a lot.

 

© Warner Bros. Pictures / Ghoulardi Film Company

 

He’s excellently partnered by Chase Infiniti as Willa.  Though in reality the actress is 25 years old, she convincingly plays a teenager – one who has her head well-screwed-on at the start of proceedings, but who still has to deal with a very steep learning curve.

 

Meanwhile, Sean Penn is splendidly villainous as Lockjaw.  He’s memorable both because of his grotesque physicality – with his contorted face, weird musculature and lurching gait, he looks like Popeye the Sailor Man rendered in human flesh – and because of his deeply screwed-up personality, which is simultaneously psychotic and pathetic and driven by a juvenile sense of entitlement.

 

Great though DeCaprio, Infiniti and Penn are, Benicio del Toro comes close to quietly stealing the show.  When he first appears, you see him as a character who’s popped up in DeCaprio’s movie.  But later, having learnt more about him – his character runs an extensive and meticulously-organised sanctuary and support-network for undocumented immigrants in the town – you begin to feel DeCaprio has strayed into his movie.

 

There’s also a lovely score courtesy of Radiohead’s Johnny Greenwood and, late on, a car chase that could become as legendary as the one in the Steve McQueen classic Bullit (1968).  And Paul Thomas Anderson handles things at all times with aplomb.

 

One Battle After Another should win a slew of Oscars at next year’s Academy Awards.  By then, though, Donald Trump may have banned all opposition parties in the USA and put the country under martial law, enforced by real-life Steven Lockjaws in ICE, the National Guard and various far-right militias.  So it might not.

 

If that proves to be the case, I can only say, “Viva la revolution!”

 

© Warner Bros. Pictures / Ghoulardi Film Company

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A month of ironies

 

© Maverick / Warner Bros.

 

September 2025 reminds me of the song Ironic by Alanis Morissette.  The song’s lyrics contain many examples of things that are ironic, for example, “An old man turned ninety-eight / He won the lottery and died the next day,” or “a free ride when you’ve already paid”, or “ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife.”  Although, as the comedian Ed Byrne has pointed out, some of the situations mentioned in the song aren’t actually ironic.  “A traffic jam when you’re already late,” for example.  As Byrne observed, that’s really only ironic if you’re a city planner.

 

Anyway, should Alanis Morissette ever write a sequel to Ironic, the month that has just passed should provide her with more than enough material.  To me, it’s the most ironic month I’ve ever experienced.  Here are a few reasons why I think so.

 

[Incidentally, this blog-entry contains references to American right-wing activist Charlie Kirk.  Please note that it’s possible to hold two opinions about Kirk at the same time, though many people out there are unable – or unwilling – to accept this.

 

Firstly, you can be horrified by Kirk’s murder, excoriate the fact that it happened while he was on a university campus exercising his right to free speech, and feel sorry for his young family.  Secondly and simultaneously, you can detest many of the things that came out of his mouth.  Things about black people.  (“Happening all the time in urban America, prowling blacks go around for fun to… target white people, that’s a fact.  It’s happening more and more.”)  About women.  (“Reject feminism.  Submit to your husband, Taylor.  You’re not in charge…  And most importantly, I can’t wait to go to a Taylor Kelce concert…  You’ve got to change your name.  If not, you don’t really mean it.”)  About Islam.  (“Islam is the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America.”)  About trans-people.  (“We need to have a Nuremberg-style trial for every gender-affirming clinic doctor.  We need it immediately.”).  And so on.  Also, you can be dismayed by the fact he made himself very wealthy by saying such things.]

 

September 10th

Charlie Kirk once said this of American gun ownership and the attendant, heavy toll of American gun-related deaths (16,576 in 2124, excluding suicides).  “You will never live in a society when you have an armed citizenry and you won’t have a single gun death. That is nonsense. It’s drivel…  I think it’s worth it.  I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.”

 

Today, while speaking at Utah Valley University, Kirk was shot dead by an American citizen, using a gun, which it was his God-given right to own under the Second Amendment.  How tragically ironic and tragically American.

 

September 11th

UK prime minister Keir Starmer sacked Peter Mandelson from his job as British ambassador to the USA.  This was on account of Mandelson being an old friend of the late millionaire paedophile and human-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.  Mandelson had even waxed lyrically about Epstein in writing: “Once upon a time, an intelligent, sharp-witted man they call ‘mysterious’ parachuted into my life…  wherever he is in the world, he remains my best pal!”

 

Five days later, another old friend of Jeffrey Epstein, who’d also, allegedly, waxed lyrically about him in writing (“We have certain things in common, Jeffrey.  Yes, we do, come to think of it.  Enigmas never age, have you noticed that…?”), arrived in Britain.  This was Donald Trump.  Starmer rolled out the red carpet and treated him to a state visit.

 

© Private Eye

 

September 13th

Led by double-barrelled far-right rabble-rouser Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, failed thespian nepo-baby Laurence Fox and others, and addressed on a big screen by Sieg Heil-ing billionaire Elon Musk, a crowd of more than 100,000 people marched through London to protest against immigrants.  They were particularly against foreigners who were criminals and a danger to women being allowed into Britain.  According to reports, some protestors wore MAGA – Make America Great Again – hats in honour of Donald Trump: a foreigner who’s a convicted criminal, and a proven danger to women, who was being allowed into Britain for a state visit the following week.

 

September 16th

Donald Trump landed in Britain and his hosts immediately went into full pomp-and-ceremony grovelling mode.  The orange American president got a royal salute, a lunch with the Royal Family, a tour of the Royal Collection, a ‘beating retreat’ military ceremony, a ride in a gilded coach, a state banquet at Windsor Castle, and a visit to Chequers, the prime minister’s country residence, for a look at the Winston Churchill archives and a press conference.

 

Speaking at the state banquet, Trump declared, “…this is truly one of the highest honours of my life. Such respect for you and such respect for your country…  The lionhearted people of this kingdom defeated Napoleon, unleashed the Industrial Revolution, destroyed slavery and defended civilization in the darkest days of fascism and communism.  The British gave the world the Magna Carta, the modern parliament and Francis Bacon’s scientific method.  They gave us the works of Locke, Hobbes, Smith and Burke, Newton and Blackstone.  The legal, intellectual, cultural and political traditions of this kingdom have been among the highest achievements of mankind.”

 

A week later, Trump gave a speech to the United Nations and had this to say about London, capital of Britain, and Western Europe, of which Britain is a part: “And I have to say, I look at London where you have a terrible mayor, a terrible, terrible mayor, and it’s been so changed, so changed.  Now they want to go to Sharia law, but you’re in a different country, you can’t do that.  Both the immigration and their suicidal energy ideas will be the death of Western Europe if something is not done immediately…  I’m really good at this stuff. Your countries are going to hell.”

 

Maybe the grovelling hadn’t worked.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Executive Office of the President of the US

 

September 17th

American late-night TV host Jimmy Kimmel was suspended indefinitely by the American Broadcasting Company (ABC), following comments he made about the assassination of Charlie Kirk.  These drew the ire of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).  The FCC’s chair is Brendan Carr, a staunch Trump loyalist.  Trump applauded Carr as ‘a great American patriot’ for his actions.

 

Funnily enough, in 2022, Carr had declared: “Political satire is one of the oldest and most important forms of free speech.  It challenges those in power while using humour to draw more into the discussion.  That’s why people in influential positions have always targeted it for censorship.”  And Kirk himself once said of freedom of speech: “You should be allowed to say outrageous things.”  But perhaps what they meant was political satire and outrageous things should only be expressed by people they agreed with.

 

September 22nd

After an uproar from practically everybody, and their granny, and their dog, the forces that’d removed Jimmy Kimmel from the airwaves backtracked.  It was announced that he was being reinstated on ABC.  A new episode of his show was broadcast the following evening.  It achieved his highest ever ratings – 6.26 million viewers – and was viewed 26 million times on YouTube.  Kimmel quipped about Trump’s likely reaction: “He might have to release the Epstein files to distract us from this now.”

 

In other words…  The American right, which earlier in the month had worked so hard to make a martyr out of Charlie Kirk, blaming his death on the ‘radical left’ and threatening retribution against anyone who suggested he might be anything less than a saint, had inadvertently made a martyr out of Jimmy Kimmel instead.

 

September 23rd

Trump delivered an hour-long speech to the United Nations.  Besides condemning the institution for a malfunctioning teleprompter and an escalator that stopped working – him and his missus Melania had to climb the stationary escalator, which for someone of his considerable acreage must have been hard work – and besides ranting about ‘radicalised environmentalists’ (“No more cows.  We don’t want cows anymore.  I guess they want to kill all the cows.”), he boasted that he’d ended seven wars: “…Cambodia and Thailand, Kosovo and Serbia, the Congo and Rwanda…  Pakistan and India, Israel and Iran, Egypt and Ethiopia, and Armenia and Azerbaijan.”

 

In fact, two of these wars didn’t exist, two have continued in terms of ceasefire violations and ongoing bloodshed, one was a war Trump helped to start and then participated in, one was a war where one of the countries denies that Trump had anything to do with settling it, and one ended with a peace-deal that hasn’t yet been ratified.

 

That last war, the one Trump actually came closest to ending, was the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict.  Previously, at the September 18th press conference with Keir Starmer, Trump claimed to have stopped a war between Albania and Azerbaijan.  And at a dinner in Vermont on September 20th, Trump announced that he’d ended a war between Armenia and Cambodia.  So maybe that’s why Armenia and Azerbaijan agreed on a peace-deal.   One was so busy fighting Albania, and the other so busy fighting Cambodia, that they no longer had time to fight each other.

 

Come to think of it, none of this was ironic.  It was just moronic.

 

September 26th

The Ryder Cup, golf’s biennial contest between Europe and the USA, teed off at Bethpage State Park in New York State.  Trump attended its opening day, making him the first sitting American president to do so.  It’s fair to say that his attitude towards golf – win at all costs, even if it means getting caddies to plant new balls for you when the old ones land in inconvenient places – and his attitude towards competition generally – win at all costs, no matter what a bullying, graceless, ignorant chump it makes you look – infected the crowd.  Taking their cue from their Dear Leader, they behaved like bullying, graceless, ignorant chumps for the next couple of days.  They chanted “F*ck you Rory!” at Northern Irish golfer Rory McIlroy.  They threw beer at McIlroy’s wife.  They hurled insults at McIlroy’s fellow Irish golfer Shane Lowry about his weight.  No wonder at one point McIlroy told them all to “Shut the f*ck up.”

 

Anyhow, Europe won the Ryder Cup by 15 to 13.  That wasn’t ironic either.  That was karma.

 

From wikipedia.org / © The White House

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It has happened here

 

© Renard Press

 

Nowadays, Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here (1935) feels like a story of alternative history, exploring what would have happened in the USA if the historical timeline had taken a twist in the mid-1930s it didn’t actually take.  But when Lewis wrote it, the real timeline and his imaginary one were in the future.  He was peeking ahead to the presidential election of 1936, one year after his novel’s publication, and wondering, “What if…?”  In its original context, then, It Can’t Happen Here was a work of science fiction, though the future imagined was so barely ahead of the present that it probably didn’t seem like that.

 

It gives me no pleasure to report that reading the book in the middle of 2025, with the USA sliding remorselessly towards authoritarianism under the presidency of Donald Trump, It Can’t Happen Here doesn’t feel dated.  No, it’s surely more relevant than ever.

 

The novel explores what could have happened if the 1936 election hadn’t been won by Franklin D. Roosevelt – who in fact won it resoundingly, garnering over 60 percent of the popular vote and securing over 98 percent of the electoral college.  In Lewis’s version of events, the presidency is won by a populist maverick called Berzelius ‘Buzz’ Windrip.  It’s commonly assumed Lewis based Windrip on the controversial Louisiana governor and US Senate member Huey Long.  In an ironic twist of fate, Long was assassinated one month before It Can’t Happen Here was published.  The son-in-law of a political rival shot him, though it’s been claimed Long actually died of a wound from a ricocheting bullet fired by one of his trigger-happy bodyguards, who immediately responded to the attacker by pumping him ‘full of lead’.

 

Early on in It Can’t Happen Here, we get to read Buzz Windrip’s campaign manifesto, The Fifteen Points of Victory for the Forgotten Men.  This is a grab-bag of crowd-pleasing promises – the government giving every family 5000 dollars a year (point 11) while wealth being capped at 3,000,000 dollars per person (point 5) – and nakedly racist, reactionary and jingoistic rhetoric.  You have to swear allegiance to the New Testament and the flag if you want a job in the professions (point 4), threats are made against the Jews (point 9) and blacks and women are disenfranchised (points 10 and 12 respectively).  Oh, and there’s a sneaky final point, number 15, wherein Congress and the Supreme Court have to cede all authority to the Presidency.

 

The manifesto is popular enough to put Windrip in the White House and, thereafter, the USA experiences a rapid fascist takeover similar to the one Hitler engineered in Germany in 1933-34.  Windrip soon has his own militia / secret police making sure everyone toes the line, media, educational and economic institutions are bullied into acquiescence, and opponents, dissenters and anyone else the regime takes a dislike to are herded into concentration camps – that’s what the novel calls them, several years before the Nazis made the term ‘concentration camp’ synonymous with evil on an industrial scale.

 

The country’s lurch into dystopia is seen through the eyes of Doremus Jessop, a 60-year-old, liberal-minded editor of a smalltown newspaper in Vermont.  Jessop finds out the hard way that the new regime doesn’t take kindly to criticism – he pens a scathing editorial, which leads to an altercation with some officials, which results in his son-in-law being executed.  Afterwards, he’s forced to do an about-turn with his paper’s editorials and news coverage and make it a propaganda mouthpiece for Windrip and his government, as every other official news outlet in America had become.

 

Later, a disgusted and horrified Doremus hooks up with a resistance movement, the New Underground, run by a dissident senator called Walt Trowbridge who’s escaped to and based himself in Canada, and he begins surreptitiously writing and distributing an anti-Windrip newsletter called The Vermont Vigilance.  Later still, Doremus and his associates are rumbled and they wind up in a concentration camp.  But the story isn’t quite over yet for the dogged old editor…

 

© Penguin Books

 

As I said earlier, when you read It Can’t Happen Here today, there’s an elephant in the room – a corrupt, authoritarian, orange-skinned elephant, one with a bad combover, a ludicrously long red tie, a big mouth, a small pair of hands, a tiny but cunning brain, a criminal record, and a penchant for cheating at golf.  Yes, it’s shocking how much Lewis’s novel anticipates what Trump is up to in America at the moment.

 

As with Trump and his Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, which is now better funded than most countries’ armies and is no doubt attracting into its ranks all sorts of far-right nutjobs, Windrip sets up a militia called the Minute Men (MMs) and recruits into it thugs and low-life who relish having the power to intimidate, bully, beat up and murder their neighbors.  Doremus’s life gets progressively harder as Shad Ledue – his former handyman, who’s a lazy, ignorant brute and who lusts after his youngest daughter – joins the local Minute Men and, gradually, shins his way up the pole until he becomes District Commissioner.  And Trump’s enthusiasm for creating ‘immigration detention facilities’, like the notorious ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ in Florida, mirrors Windrip’s enthusiasm for creating concentration camps, like the one Doremus latterly finds himself an inmate of.

 

It Can’t Happen Here makes much of the regime’s assault on academia.  Early on, Doremus receives a worried letter from an acquaintance at his old alma mater, Isiah College, warning about how its Board of Trustees is bending to Windrip’s malevolent will.  “What,” he asks, “can we do with such fast exploding fascism?”  Trump has famously tried to do the same with America’s universities – some, like Columbia University, groveling to him pathetically; others, like Harvard, putting up slightly more of a fight.

 

Windrip sees to it that the ‘most liberal four members of the Supreme Court resigned and were replaced by surprisingly unknown lawyers who called President Windrip by his first name.”  Trump, of course, has made sure that the present-day Supreme Court is packed with yes-men and yes-women.

 

And in an effort to bolster its authority, Windrip’s regime launches an operation to end ‘all crime in America forever’.  Criminals are “tried under court-martial procedure; one in ten was shot immediately, four in ten were given prison sentences, three in ten released as innocent… and two in ten taken in the MMs as inspectors.”  That sounds suspiciously like Trump’s recent takeover of Washington D.C., supposedly in the name of ridding the capital city’s streets of crime, though more likely to divert attention from the possibility that Trump’s name appears in the US Justice Department’s files investigating Jeffrey Epstein.

 

Generally, Lewis’s descriptions of how Windrip manages to captivate the American public, or a section of it sufficiently large to get him into power, are depressingly similar to how Trump weaves a spell over his ‘MAGA faithful’ – portraying himself as an outsider and anti-establishment figure, despite the fact he’s the son of a real-estate millionaire and has had everything handed to him on a plate.  Of Windrip, Lewis says: “…he was the Common Man twenty-times-magnified by his oratory, so that while the other Commoners could understand his every purpose, which was exactly the same as their own, they saw him towering above them, and they raised their hands to him in worship.”

 

Meanwhile, Lewis highlights how the regime puts in positions of authority people who are worthless but unswervingly loyal to Windrip.  That loyalty, of course, rewards them with wealth, power and prestige.  Trump too has populated his government with sycophantic mediocrities, self-serving grifters and dangerous incompetents like Pete Hegseth, Kristi Noem, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, Tulsi Gabbard, Pam Bondi and Marco Rubio.  Their single virtue, in Trump’s eyes, is their ceaseless willingness to bow, scrape and debase themselves before him.

 

There’s even a parallel with Elon Musk who, as the world’s richest man and CEO of the social-media platform X, has a massive ability to inform and misinform people and shape their opinions.  The It Can’t Happen Here version of Musk is Bishop Paul Peter Prang, a priest who makes a hugely popular and influential weekly address on the radio.  Like Musk’s voice on social media, Prang’s voice ‘circled the world at 186,000 miles a second’ and practically ‘leapt to the farthest stars.’  (Prang’s character was inspired by a real-life demagogue, the ‘Radio Priest’ Charles Coughlin.)  And like Musk with Trump, Prang enthusiastically backs Windrip for president – but gets short shrift from the man he’s championed once he’s across the threshold of the White House.  Though while Trump merely dropped and humiliated Musk, Windrip sticks Prang in jail and then in an ‘insane asylum’: “No one willing to carry news about him ever saw Bishop Prang again.”

 

All that said, It Can’t Happen Here is not a perfect book.  It has certain features that earn it the dreaded sobriquet ‘of its time’.  The focus is almost entirely on a handful of comfortably well-off white Americans and, though there are brief references to the horrors Windrip visits upon the black community, the book shows no interest in exploring these.  Also, Lewis makes mocking references to sexuality of Lee Sarason, Windrip’s Machiavellian campaign manager, who wears ‘violet silk pajamas’ and obviously has a fondness for strapping young men.  But no mention is made of the regime’s official policy towards homosexuals, which presumably would have been as murderous as Nazi Germany’s.  And male chauvinists will appreciate how Doremus gets to have his cake and eat it throughout the book, in that he’s simultaneously married to one woman, dull, frumpy Emma, and engaged in an affair with another, the bewitching firebrand Lorinda.  He’s never taken to task for this.

 

And the book’s tone can be awkward at times.  Lewis writes it in a folksy, sardonic, Mark Twain-like style that sometimes works, especially when its poking fun at the general hypocrisies, absurdities and idiocies of Windrip’s regime.  It works less well when it’s detailing the brutal realities of that regime – the tortures and humiliations, for instance, that Doremus has to endure while he’s in a concentration camp.  For subject-matter as bleak as this, I suspect the only way to record it is with the precise and dispassionate prose of, say, George Orwell’s 1984 (1949).

 

Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here may not quite make it into the top tier of great dystopian novels, then.  However, in 2025, you’re unlikely to read one that feels more terrifyingly prescient.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Touring Club Italiano

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The Boss versus the dross

 

From wikipedia.org / © Ralph_PH

 

I have another reason to loathe Donald Trump, the 45th and also, alas, 47th president of the United States of America.  He’s made me like Bruce Springsteen.

 

On May 14th, at Manchester’s Co-op Live Arena, on the opening night of his Land of Hope and Dreams tour, Springsteen – the famously sideburned, famously plaid-shirt-wearing singer-songwriter-guitarist from New Jersey – kicked off proceedings by making a speech.  He declared: “…my home, the America I love, the America I’ve written about, that has been a beacon of hope and liberty for 250 years, is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent and treasonous administration.  Tonight, we ask all who believe in democracy and the best of our American experiment to rise with us, raise your voices against authoritarianism and let freedom ring!”  Later on, he described the head of that ‘corrupt, incompetent and treasonous administration’, i.e., Trump, as an ‘unfit president’ and proclaimed, “The America l’ve sung to you about for 50 years is real and regardless of its faults is a great country with a great people.  So we’ll survive this moment.”

 

Needless to say, it wasn’t long before Trump’s overworked posting-thumb was busy knocking out a retort on his Truth Social platform.  He called Springsteen ‘as dumb as a rock’ and added: “This dried out ‘prune’ of a rocker (his skin is all atrophied!) ought to KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT until he gets back into the Country, that’s just ‘standard fare’. Then we’ll all see how it goes for him!”

 

Also joining in was Trump’s number-one music-industry sycophant Kid Rock, now a not-so-kiddish 54 years old.  It’s telling that the only song I’ve heard by him was the 2008 hit All Summer Long – a Kid Rock number whose best bits weren’t actually written by Kid Rock.  They come from Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Sweet Home Alabama (1974) and Warren Zevon’s Werewolves of London (1978).  “Just another person with TDS (Trump derangement syndrome) at the highest levels,” Kid Rock said of Springsteen.  “To be in Europe talking junk about our president who gets up and works his ass off for this country, every day, and his administration is doing such great things…  Thank God for him.  But to do that in Europe… what a punk move.”  Kid Rock, please note.  To me and many folk my age, calling Bruce Springsteen a ‘punk’ is amusing.  But it’s not the insult you think it is.

 

Since Kid Rock believes Trump’s administration is ‘doing such great things’ for the USA, he’s surely a big fan of Trump’s vicious anti-immigrant policies.  Incidentally, the restaurant he’s licensed in Nashville, the not-at-all-stupidly-titled Kid Rock’s Big Ass Honky Tonk Rock N’ Roll Steakhouse, lately and mysteriously sent kitchen-staff home during a weekend when Trump’s brutal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency were conducting operations in the city.  I’m sure the reason for this wasn’t anything dodgy.  Not because, say, the restaurant was employing people who were immigrants lacking permanent legal status and might get dragged off and incarcerated.

 

I first encountered the musical oeuvre of Bruce Springsteen, or ‘Loose Windscreen’ as I liked to call him, while I was a fifth-year pupil at Peebles High School in the early 1980s.  Fifth and sixth-years pupils, the senior members of the student body known as the ‘Upper School’, were entitled to their own common room, where there was an elderly record-player and speakers you could play music on during the morning, lunchtime and afternoon breaks.  This was normally monopolised by the Upper School’s sizeable heavy-metal contingent and it blasted out a lot of AC/DC, Deep Purple, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Led Zeppelin, Motorhead, Rainbow, the Scorpions, Thin Lizzy and Whitesnake.

 

© Columbia Records

 

However, once in a while, somebody would manage to get past the phalanx of heavy-metal fans surrounding the record player and slap something a little different on it.  One such record was Springsteen’s 1975 breakthrough album, Born to Run.  Hearing it, I thought it was all right and, at the time, the title track seemed a stormer.  (Nowadays,  having heard it a zillion times, I’m less keen on it.)  So, Mr Windscreen’s, sorry, Mr Springsteen’s music seemed perfectly fine to me.  But it wasn’t anything I’d go out of my way to listen to.

 

Incidentally, a few years earlier, my favourite band had been the Boomtown Rats, the new wave outfit fronted by Bob Geldof.  Last week, I listened to Rat Trap, the Boomtown Rats song that topped the UK charts in 1978, for the first time in decades.  And I was surprised by how, well, Springsteen-esque it sounds now.

 

By the mid-1980s I was a student at Aberdeen University.  I quickly discovered that a number of my fellow-students were seriously into Bruce Springsteen.  They were so into him they apparently knew everything about every second of music he’d ever committed to vinyl – that, say, if you played the third of the nine tracks on the Belgian version of the 1973 LP Greetings from Ashbury Park N.J. backwards, you’d hear him break wind in the studio.  Yes, stuff like that.

 

These Bruce-fans – whom some unkindly referred to as ‘Bruce-bores’ – were, without exception, male.  Actually, a good proportion of them seemed to be engineering students and had names like ‘Morris’.  Also, they never called their hero ‘Bruce’, but used the annoying moniker ‘The Boss’.  This struck me as paradoxical since they were always going on about what a man of the people he was.  Surely, then, a blue-collar, working-class guy like him would be against the bosses?

 

© Columbia Records

 

This was a bad time if, like me, you were surrounded by Bruce-bores, sorry, Bruce-fans, and you didn’t believe as they did that Springsteen was the greatest thing to have happened to music since Mrs Beethoven gave birth to little Ludwig van.  For, in 1984, he released Born in the USA, an album that sold over 30 million copies worldwide and spawned no fewer than seven singles.  As with most of Springsteen’s output, it struck me as perfectly decent, but not remarkable, journeyman rock music.  But it subsequently became annoying because people around me never seemed to stop playing it.

 

The Born in the USA singles received heavy rotation in the place where I worked part-time during my second year as a student, Ritzy’s Nightclub.  At Ritzy’s I was a member of the floor-staff – meaning I spent most of my time collecting empty glasses and loaded ashtrays from the punters’ tables, cleaning them, and returning the glasses to the bar-shelves and the ashtrays to the tables.

 

I’ve said before on this blog that of the many jobs I’ve had in my life, I hated the Ritzy’s one most.  I had to work until 2.00 AM every Friday and Saturday night while my mates were out partying.  The glasses I collected were often phenomenally grotty with cigarette ends and even puke floating around in them.  Many of the punters were workers in Aberdeen’s then-flourishing oil industry, who made tons of money and believed their hefty earnings allowed them to behave like knob-heads at all times, especially towards serfs like myself.  And the music spewing out of the nightclub’s speakers was gruesome – all the vacuous New Romantic stuff like Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet and Wham that dominated the UK charts during 1984-85.  In that company, Springsteen’s songs didn’t seem so bad.  But having to hear them repeatedly in that environment quickly made me sick of them too.

 

The first Born in the USA single out of the blocks was Dancing in the Dark, which I came to associate with a mid-week gig I had at Ritzy’s.  This was a regular evening the nightclub held for the over-30s, which was known in local parlance as ‘Grab-a-Granny Night’.  It featured a live band who performed cover versions of songs currently in the charts and Dancing in the Dark seemed a particular favourite of the band’s frontman, a bloke called Stan.  The sound of Stan warbling his way through the song, and the sight of him simultaneously attempting some Boss-like dancing onstage whilst apparently in possession of two left feet, are burned into my memory.

 

In the summer of 1985, I developed a fully-fledged aversion to Bruce Windscreen, sorry, Springsteen.  The summer was going badly for me for various financial, personal and health reasons, and my mood wasn’t helped by the fact that every single day that July and August saw rain piss down relentlessly on Aberdeen, turning the grey granite the city was built with oppressively black.  At one point I found myself sharing a flat with a good friend, one Andrew J. MacRury, who was also having a bad summer.  And yes, Andy was an avid Bruce-bore, sorry, Bruce-fan.  I worked night-shifts and, a dozen times each day, while I was in bed trying to snatch some sleep, I’d be rudely awoken by my friend playing the title track of Born in the USA in the next room, at full blast, in a desperate attempt to cheer himself up.  Repeatedly, every day, I was practically blasted out of bed by the sideburned one hollering: “Booooorn… in the US-Aaaa!  I wuz booooorn… in the US-Aaaa!”

 

Thereafter, if anyone show signs of talking enthusiastically about Bruce Springsteen, let alone play some music by him, I’d run for the hills.  In March 1992, when to great fanfare he released two albums on the same day (Human Touch and Lucky Town), I think I went into hiding.

 

© Columbia Records

 

Now any Bruce-bores, sorry, Bruce-fans reading this will no doubt be shocked by my attitude towards their hero and accuse me of being deficient in musical taste.  To that I would reply I wasn’t the only person on the planet unswayed by the charms of Mr Springsteen.  The legendary radio DJ John Peel, for example, once said of Springsteen’s appeal: “It utterly mystifies me.  I can’t see it at all.  I mean, when he first started out… it sounded to me like sub-Dylan stuff.  And it just doesn’t ring true.”  Indeed, the John Peel Wiki notes that Peel “almost never played any of Springsteen’s material on his show and scarcely missed an opportunity to compare him unfavourably with other artists such as Half Man Half Biscuit.”

 

Certain musicians have been less than enthralled by him too.  The Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards, while describing Springsteen as ‘a nice guy, a sweet guy’, has been scathing about his musical ability.  He wrote in his 2010 biography Life, “If there was anything better around, he’d still be working the bars of New Jersey.”  Meanwhile, Irish folk-rock troubadour Van Morrison once grumped about what he saw as Springsteen’s lack of originality.  As far as Van Morrison was concerned, he’d nicked all his ideas from, er, Van Morrison.  “For years people have been saying to me, ‘Have heard this guy Springsteen?  You should really check him out!’  I just ignored it.  Then four or five months ago I was in Amsterdam, and a friend of mine put on a video.  Springsteen came on the video, and that was the first time I ever saw him, and he’s definitely ripped me off.”

 

However, in times of great adversity, you have to take sides – even the sides of folk whom, until now, you’ve regarded as your enemies.  For instance, the cops had to join forces with the prisoners in John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) when faced with an onslaught by the murderous gang Street Thunder.  And James Bond (Roger Moore) had to team up with Jaws (Richard Kiel) in Lewis Gilbert’s Moonraker (1979) to overcome the genocidal plans of Hugo Drax (Michael Lonsdale).  I feel the same way about Bruce Springsteen.  I’ve found much of his music stodgy, and at times his fans have driven me up the walls, but I’ll back him all the way in his struggle against Trump, who’s busy turning Springsteen’s homeland into an authoritarian state run by white supremacists, loopy evangelical Christians, billionaire tech-bros and environment-wrecking oil barons.

 

Indeed, if Springsteen can do anything to get Trump out of office – arrange, say, for a million Bruce-bores, sorry, Bruce-fans to storm the White House – I’ll happily grow sideburns, and wear a plaid shirt for the rest of my life, and listen to Born in the USA a dozen times a day.  Hail to the Boss!

 

Also, while I don’t have much regard for Springsteen’s music, I still think it’s light-years better than that Big Ass Honky Tonk Rock N’ Roll shite peddled by Kid Rock.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Carl Lender

Posted on

Liar wolves, not dire wolves

 

From unsplash.com / © Reyk Odinson

 

Donald Trump has recently rampaged through the world’s global trade system with the delicacy of Godzilla taking a stomp around downtown Tokyo.  That would be Godzilla after he’d been on a week-long cocaine binge.  So, in the current climate of gloom, dread and despondency, perhaps it’s unsurprising that the world’s news outlets have latched desperately and uncritically onto a story that looks like good, even uplifting, news.  Those news outlets have made much of the claim by an American biotechnology and genetic engineering company called Colossal Biosciences that it’s created the first dire wolves to have graced Planet Earth in about ten millennia.

 

The dire wolf, according to Wikipedia, is “an extinct species of canine which was native to the Americas during the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene epochs (125,000-10,000 years ago).”  It was generally bigger than most modern wolves.  Research suggests “the average dire wolf to be similar in size to the largest modern grey wolf.”  Dire wolves also pop up in George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones books (1991-2011), but more about that in a minute.

 

The headlines have come fast and furious: DIRE WOLF REPORTEDLY BROUGHT BACK FROM EXTINCTION; NO LONGER EXTINCT: DIRE WOLVES HOWL AGAIN AFTER 12,000 YEARS; LONG EXTINCT, DIRE WOLVES ARE BACK, AND NOT JUST IN GAME OF THRONES; SCIENTISTS PERFORM WORLD’S FIRST DE-EXTINCTION TO REVIVE THE DIRE WOLF THAT VANISHED 12,000 YEARS AGO.  Time Magazine stuck a picture of one of three dire wolves supposedly created by Colossal Biosciences on a recent cover, below the word ‘extinct’ with a line scored through it and the inspiring message: “This is Remus.  He’s a dire wolf.  The first to exist in over 10,000 years.  Endangered species could be changed forever.”

 

So hey, this is great news, yeah?  Extinction is bad, so ‘de-extinction’ must be good, right?  And since much extinction in the last couple of millennia had been caused by humanity, isn’t it gratifying to see good old human know-how being put to work reversing the process and bringing one – hopefully the first of many – extinct species back?

 

Except, of course, that it’s a load of bollocks.  The New Scientist has responded to the company’s claims with an article whose lead-in puts it succinctly: “Colossal Biosciences claims three pups born recently are dire wolves, but they are actually grey wolves with genetic edits intended to make them resemble the lost species.”  Although some genuine dire-wolf DNA was used in the project, the genome was merely analysed to determine what a dire wolf’s key traits would be.  The DNA itself was way too aged and decayed to be spliced into anything, Jurassic Park-style.  The Colossal Biosciences team then made edits to modern-day grey-wolf DNA to replicate those dire-wolf traits.  Finally, three modified wolf-pups were produced using domestic-dog surrogate mothers and caesarean sections.  So what you’ve got aren’t dire wolves.  You’ve got three grey-wolf pups that’ve been tinkered with genetically to give them characteristics the team think dire wolves might have had.

 

The analogy here isn’t the Steven Spielberg movie Jurassic Park (1993).  No, it’s Irwin Allen’s terrible 1960 adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912) starring Claude Rains, Michael Rennie, David Hedison and Jill St John.  In that film, the dinosaur special effects were achieved by taking modern reptiles like iguanas, monitor lizards and crocodiles and glueing horns, frills and fins onto them to make look ‘dinosaur-ish’.   Which is what’s been done with these young grey wolves in a fancy, high-tech way.

 

The Irish-American palaeontologist and writer Caitlin R. Kiernan summed it up bluntly in her online journal the other day: “…there’s this bullshit about a company named Colossal Biosciences claiming to have resurrected dire wolves.  They haven’t.  Not even close.  It’s a hoax that would make P.T. Barnum proud.”

 

From wikipedia.org / © American Museum of Natural History

 

Also, it’s not merely nonsense, but dangerous nonsense.  It makes extinction sound like something that’s solvable through scientific jiggery-pokery, an error that can be fixed without the arduous, inconvenient lengths that human beings need to go to to prevent extinctions happening, which is to stop killing life-forms through hunting, habitat-destruction, economic consumption and general greed, cruelty and ignorance.

 

In the last few days alone, I’ve seen stories on the Guardian’s environment page about a report on New Zealand’s environment, which warns that “76% of freshwater fish, 68% of freshwater birds, 78% of terrestrial birds, 93% of frogs, and 94% of reptiles” are “threatened with extinction or at risk of becoming threatened”; and a warning by 32 charity organisations that proposals under the British government’s new planning bill “could push species towards extinction and lead to irreversible loss”; and the grim likelihood that Donald Trump’s decimation of USAID will wreck conservation projects leading to increased poaching and habitat encroachment and serious threats to such animals as lemurs, white rhinos, gorillas, orangutans and elephants.

 

The uncritical coverage given to the dire-wolf story is harmful because it encourages the idea that animal extinction is not so serious now because science can resurrect those animals later.  Which would be bad enough if the idea was based on proper science.  But it’s not – it’s based on the spin coming out of Colossal Biosciences.

 

As I said, direwolves (spelt not as two but as one word) turn up in the Game of Thrones books: “Direwolves once roamed the north in large packs…   According to Theon Greyjoy, direwolves have not been sighted south of the Wall for two hundred years.  Rangers of the Night’s Watch hear direwolves beyond the Wall.”  I’m quoting a Game of Thrones wiki here, as I’ve never read the books.  I haven’t watched the 2011-2019 TV show based on them either, having always intended to read the books first.

 

I find it a bit disappointing that Games of Thrones author George R.R. Martin seems to have swallowed the Colossal Biosciences hype hook, line and sinker.  In a recent blogpost, he said in February he’d been to visit the secret installation where the three supposed direwolves are being kept.  Obviously in a state of giddy excitement, he declared: “I have to say the rebirth of the direwolf has stirred me as no scientific news has since Neil Armstrong walked on the moon…  And Colossal is just beginning.   Still to come, the woolly mammoth, the Tasmanian tiger, and… yes… the dodo…  I can’t wait.” The post also has an undeniably cute picture of him holding one of the genetically-edited beasties.

 

To be fair to Martin, I suppose it must be flattering to have a biotech company pay you the compliment of (allegedly) creating some animals that nowadays most people only know as fantasy-creatures in your novels.  So flattering that it’s befuddled his critical faculties.  Of course, it’s likely that Colossal Biosciences chose to work on dire wolves because the creatures are currently famous due to the Game of Thrones phenomenon – making it an excellent PR stunt that’s earned them lots of headlines.

 

And I suppose, as someone who writes fantasy fiction under the penname Rab Foster, I’d be flattered too if a biotech company offered to create some fabulous animals or monsters that’d appeared in my stories.  Not that there’s much chance of that happening – last year, as Rab Foster, I earned about 75 pounds, which I suspect is a wee bit less than George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones royalties for 2024.  If any biotech outfit was up for it, though, I’d like them to have a go at creating the sinister miniature-harpy things in my 2022 short story Crows of the Mynchmoor, which were basically crows’ bodies with shrunken copies of a witch’s head grafted onto then.  I’d like a flock of those to keep in my garden.  I bet they’d really creep out folk passing by on the street.

 

© 20th Century Fox

Posted on

Eco chamber

 

From wikipedia.org / © Rob Bogaerts

 

A follow-on from my previous post…

 

Elon Musk’s stiff-armed salutes at Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration on January 24th – at least, unlike Dr Strangelove, he didn’t address Trump as “Mein Führer!” – inspired me to read again Umberto Eco’s 1995 essay Ur-Fascism or Eternal Fascism: 14 Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt.

 

This begins with Eco reminiscing: “In 1942, at the age of ten, I received the First Provincial Award of Ludi Juveniles (a voluntary, compulsory competition for young Italian Fascists—that is, for every young Italian).  I elaborated with rhetorical skill on the subject ‘Should we die for the glory of Mussolini and the immortal destiny of Italy?’  My answer was positive.  I was a smart boy.”  It goes on to describe Eco’s hometown being taken over in 1945 first by the partisans and then by American soldiers (all of whom were African-Americans) and then muses on the nature of Italian fascism, as helmed by Mussolini, and of fascism generally.  It ends with Eco identifying 14 key traits that he believes appear in fascist movements and quoting Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1938: “I venture the challenging statement that if American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, fascism will grow in strength in our land.”

 

Well, Roosevelt’s words seem sadly ironic now.  Under Trump, American democracy appears to be moving backwards as a dying force, and the only citizens whose lot he’s seeking day and night to better are rich, white, straight, male ones.  But what about those 14 traits of fascism?  How many of them are detectible in Trump’s America at the moment?

 

Spoilers…  A lot.

 

The American far-right’s modus operandi of ‘moving fast and breaking things’ was a concept originally attributed to Mark Zuckerberg, one of the new Trump-grovellers-in-chief, and is something Trump’s been doing ever since his inauguration three weeks ago: ‘Tariffs!’ / ‘Drill, baby, drill!’ / ‘Invade Greenland!’ / ‘Invade Panama!’ / ‘Make Canada the 51st state!’ / ‘Leave the WHO!’ / ‘Leave the Paris agreement!’ / ‘More tariffs!’ / ‘Abolish DEI!’ / ‘Abolish USAID!’ / ‘Abolish trans-people!’ / ‘Abolish Gaza and turn it into the new Riviera!’ / etc.  This obviously corresponds to Eco’s fascist trait number three: “the cult of action for action for action’s sake… Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection.”

 

Also Trump down to a ‘T’ is trait number four: ‘disagreement is treason’.  So too is number five: ‘fear of difference’.  I can’t see life in America over the next four years being much fun if you’re different from one of those aforementioned rich, white, straight males.  And absolutely so too is number six: “appeal to a frustrated middle class… a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.”

 

Number seven is: ‘obsession with a plot’.  Yup, Trump has never shut up about the ‘deep state’, whatever that is, being out to get him and he’s happily courted all those delusional QAnon believers and other conspiracy fantasists.  Number eight is the belief that one’s ‘enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak’?  Well, listen to Trump’s speeches and you’ll hear him ranting simultaneously about how shit the US has become in the face of international competition and how it’s still somehow the greatest country on earth.

 

© Lumen Press

 

Number nine, the notion that ‘pacifism is trafficking with the enemy… life is permanent warfare’?  Well, see what I wrote in my previous post, about how “when things aren’t going wrong, Trump will still dial up the panic, make it look like there’s a crisis, and blame immigrants, liberals, working mothers, people of colour, etc.  That’s because he can’t afford to let his base relax and simply get on with their lives.  To ensure their ongoing support, he has to keep them in a constant state of anxiety and in constant readiness to lash out about it.”

 

Numbers ten, eleven, twelve and thirteen, which are respectively, ‘contempt for the weak,’ ‘everyone is educated to become a hero’ (heroism is especially easy when your population has ready access to AR-15s), ‘machismo’ (note Trump’s conviction in a civil court in 2023 for sexual abuse) and ‘selective populism’?  Tick, tick, tick and tick.

 

I don’t think Trump’s smart enough to have entertained thoughts about number fourteen, ‘newspeak’, wherein, for example, “Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning”.  In George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), this was the project that Winston Smith’s colleague Syme was working on at the Ministry of Truth, whittling down the size of dictionaries so that people has less vocabulary to articulate such abstract concepts as free will and self-expression.  Mind you, the many social-media platforms now doing Trump’s bidding are infested with so much short, simplistic, soundbite messaging – ranting, basically – that’s there’s little room for critical reasoning in them.

 

I haven’t mentioned numbers one and two yet, which are the ‘cult of tradition’ and ‘rejection of modernism’, wherein fascists deny the “advancement of learning. Truth has been already spelled out once and for all, and we can only keep interpreting its obscure message” and the “Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.”  But obviously, that’s written large across Trump and his operation, from his rejection of what the overwhelming majority of climate scientists are warning us about, to his efforts to put the anti-vaxxer grifter Robert F. Kennedy in charge of America’s public health, to his lackey Musk getting rid of fact-checking on X and lackey Zuckerberg doing the same on Facebook, Instagram and Threads, to the idea that you can turn any untruth into a truth by repeating it often and loudly and brazenly enough: Haitian immigrants are eating pets, vaccines cause autism, DEI policies caused a mid-air collision, USAID supplied condoms to Hamas and so on, and so forth.

 

And that brings me to another piece of writing I’ve encountered recently.  It’s a passage from the book The Demon-Haunted World (1995) by the late, great American astrophysicist and writer Carl Sagan, which I’ve seen quoted on several people’s social-media pages.  Sagan’s mid-1990s fears about a near-future America were, shall we say, troublingly prescient.

 

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…

 

“The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second soundbites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”

 

Awesome technological powers in the hands of a very few…  Public representatives unable to grasp the issues…  Critical faculties in decline…  Dumbing down…  Soundbites…  Pseudoscience…  Superstition…  Yes, Carl, you nailed it.  I’m glad, though, that you (and Umberto Eco) aren’t around to witness the ultimate, apocalyptic celebration of ignorance that’s erupted with the advent of Trump Mark II.

 

© Random House

Posted on

You won’t ever be happy

 

From pixabay.com / © clecaux

 

It’s been two weeks since Donald Trump’s inauguration as 47th president of the United States.  For the 49.8 percent of Americans who voted in November 2024’s presidential election and voted for him, his previous four-year stint as 45th president obviously wasn’t enough.

 

Already those two weeks feel like two decades.  I live in Singapore, a long way away from Trump’s USA, and yet his orange visage assails me non-stop, smirking and scowling out of photos in the news websites and social media accounts I peruse.  I feel sorry for the poor folk who can’t stand the sight of him but have to live within the same country-borders as him.

 

It’s been relentless.  One moment he’s pardoning the 1600-odd dingbats who attacked the US Capitol on January 6th, 2021, including 600 who were charged with attacking or impeding law-enforcement officers, and including the lunatic shaman-guy in the buffalo horns who reacted to his pardon by posting on Twitter, “Now I am gonna by some motha f**kin guns!”  The next moment he’s pulling the USA out of the Paris climate agreement (again) and halting Joe Biden’s Green New Deal – much to the delight, I’m sure, of the Chinese government, whom he blames for pushing the ‘hoax’ of man-made climate change.  They’ll now seize the opportunity to establish their country as the world’s renewable-energy superpower.

 

And the next moment again he’s halting all American foreign aid, giving Elon Musk’s ‘Department of Governmental Efficiency’ (DOGE) free rein to destroy the US Agency for International Development (USAID), or as Musk calls it, ‘a viper’s nest of radical left-Marxists who hate America’.  Again, I’m sure the Chinese government is cheering.  As the US’s disease-prevention, food security, water security, education, etc., programmes in the Global South and elsewhere grind to a halt, they’ll swoop in and replace them, thus greatly extending China’s global soft power and influence.

 

What else?  Trump’s pulled the US out of the World Health Organisation (WHO) – obviously, when there’s a deadly global pandemic, he doesn’t want medical experts interfering in how he runs his country and warning him that his proposed ‘inject yourself with bleach’ cure isn’t a good idea.  He’s banned all Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programmes in the belief that important jobs must be left to straight, fully-abled white men, who are inherently smarter than everyone else.  Why, even before the bodies of those killed in January 29th’s mid-air collision at Washington DC were cold, Trump raged that DEI policies were responsible for the tragedy.

 

He’s renamed the Gulf of Mexico ‘the Gulf of America’.  (What next?  One wag speculated on social media that he might rename the Oxford comma ‘the Comma of America’.)  He’s tried to bully Denmark into handing over Greenland to him, as part of his expand-the-American-Empire project (no doubt inspired by his buddy Putin’s expand-the-Russian-Empire project).  And he’s also tried to bully Mexico and Canada, by threatening to slap tariffs on their goods.  I’m not a big fan of Pierre Trudeau, but his riposte to Trump’s blustering bollocks showed he has more class and statesmanship in the tip of his little finger than Trump has in his whole, gross body.

 

From pixabay.com / © StockSnap

 

However, I’m sure that for tens of millions of Trump’s supporters, this is music to their ears.  They must feel like they’re in heaven.  Thanks to the antics of their orange hero, they’re now owning the libtards.  They’re bathing in libtard tears.  They’re loving the smell of napalmed libtards in the morning.  They’re achieving their number-one objective, which is to cause maximum distress to those libtard snowflakes who want to deny them their constitutional right to stockpile huge quantities of military assault rifles, and their right to go ‘rolling coal’ in their modified diesel-engine trucks, and their right to grab women by the pussy without suffering consequences, and their right to live in neighbourhoods with zero numbers of people of colour, and so on.  They’re all on Twitter, or ‘X’ as Musk insists on calling it, yeehawing their joy in their echo-chambers of MAGA-ites, incels, neo-Nazis and Russian bots at how President Trump is blasting those libtard wusses with both barrels.

 

Well, to the vast majority of Trump’s supporters – i.e., those not rich enough to qualify as being in the top 10 percent who own half the nation’s wealth – I have some bad news.  You won’t ever be happy.

 

Firstly, your lives aren’t going to improve materially.  The involvement in Trump’s project of Elon Musk, who’s the world’s richest human being and whose right arm had a Dr Strangelove-style tendency to slip into troubling, sloping salutes at the inauguration, should be a warning of that.  So too should the prominent places given at that inauguration to Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg.  Big tax-cuts are coming for Trump’s wealthy and super-wealthy friends.  A large part of the bill for those will be shifted onto the working and middle-classes, for example, through the extra they’ll have to pay for goods when Trump starts imposing his beloved tariffs.

 

Some of these tax-cuts will also be financed through the axing of government services, which Musk is doing in his new, DOGE-eat-dog world right now.  There’s always much whinging about how much is removed from your pay-packet and sent off to fund distant government departments.  But when departments overseeing such things as social security, medical care, education, tax refunds, disease control, environmental protection, disaster relief and so on receive the chop, and the effects of their loss are felt, I suspect people’s tunes will change.

 

Incidentally, it’s ironic that far-right-wing commentators, influencers and social-media grifters have for years belched out claims that the world’s governments are secretly controlled by liberal-minded billionaires like Bill Gates or George Soros.  They’ve also indulged in antisemitic dog-whistling by suggesting that billionaire banking family the Rothschilds are pulling the levers.  (See, for instance, a 2023 complaint by the Board of Deputies of British Jews to GB News about their presenter and conspiracy fantasist Neil Oliver referencing the antisemitic, Rothschild-accusing document Silent Weapons for Silent Wars during one of his diatribes about impending ‘one-world government’.)  Yet here we have a billionaire who, unelected and in plain sight, is heavily financing, influencing and manipulating an elected government for his own benefit.  And there’s not a peep out of them.

 

From unsplash.com / © Larissa Avononmadegbe

 

Musk has even got access to classified US treasury files, which are full of confidential data about citizens’ social security and Medicare payment systems.  You’d think this violation of people’s private information would give right-wing conspiracy nuts the heebie-geebies.  But no, they’ve been strangely quiet.  Maybe Musk’s salute at the inauguration did it.  He showed these guys that they didn’t have to worry – he’s the type of billionaire they’d want to have controlling their government.

 

But returning to Trump, I don’t see how his antics are going to improve life for the average citizen who voted for him.  If he carries out his witless threats to impose tariffs, he’ll drive up prices.  Meanwhile, his belief that, conveniently, climate change is just a sham will no doubt see the American economy take a severe battering in the years ahead as the country itself takes a battering from increasingly inclement weather.  Imagine what home-insurance bills will be like after a good chunk of Florida tips into the Atlantic Ocean.

 

Not that I think his supporters will be loudly belly-aching about their lives continuing to be shit, or being even shitter than they were previously.  A lot of them will be conditioned by sunk-cost fallacy and keep quiet – having invested so much time and energy in backing Trump and his MAGA movement, they’ll be reluctant to admit they were wrong.  Also, Trump now has X, Facebook, Instagram, Threads and, most recently, Tik Tok singing his praises.  He also has newspapers like Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post and Patrick Soon-Shiong’s Los Angeles Times kowtowing and kissing his ring.  The bulk of the American media will spend the next four years assuring the public they’ve never had it so good, when in all probability they’ve never had it so bad.

 

And that’s not all, Trump supporters.  Even in the unlikely case of your circumstances getting better, you still won’t ever be happy.  Trump and his lackeys won’t allow you to be happy.  To illustrate what I mean, you only have to look at Britain and the nearest institution Britain has to Trumpism – that toxic far-right-wing newspaper the Daily Mail.  Paul Dacre, its former editor and now the editor-in-chief of its publisher DMG Media, once remarked that the perfect Daily Mail story was one that (1) confirmed its readers’ worst fears and (2) gave them someone to blame for it.  You can expect something similar in the US over the next few years.  (Maybe forever, if Trump can change the constitution so that it resembles that of Putin’s Russia, and politicians who might oppose him in future elections start falling to their deaths out of windows.)

 

Everything that goes wrong will be the fault of immigrants eating people’s pets, or environmentalists not pumping enough water to put out wildfires, or Democrats controlling the weather, or Jewish space-lasers, or deadly aircraft-destroying DEI programmes.  Even when things aren’t going wrong, Trump will still dial up the panic, make it look like crises are happening, and blame immigrants, liberals, working mothers, people of colour, etc.  That’s because he can’t afford to let his base relax and simply get on with their lives.  To ensure their ongoing support, he has to keep them in a constant state of anxiety and in constant readiness to lash out about it.  They’re to be riled up, permanently.

 

So, Trump people, I’m sorry, but you won’t ever be happy.  As someone once put it: “Hell is getting what you think it is you want.”

 

From pixabay.com / © heblo

Posted on

Haw Par Villa: a special place in hell

 

 

Donald Trump has been inaugurated as 47th President of the United States of America. With social-media platforms like X, Facebook, Instagram, Threads and now TikTok acting as his cheerleaders and fascists like the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Three Percenters and those deranged January 6th rioters he’s just pardoned acting as his law enforcers, he looks set to transform the USA into a combination of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Ben Ali’s Tunisia and Benito Mussolini’s Italy.  That’s while his administration abandons science and embraces paranoid conspiracy fantasies, superstition and stupidity, pumps umpteen more billions of tons of carbon into our already-poisoned biosphere, and conspires to destroy what democracies remain in the modern world.  Therefore, it can be said we are now living in hell. 

 

With these hellish things happening, I thought it would be appropriate to devote a blogpost to the most vivid representation of hell I have ever seen: that at Haw Par Villa, Singapore’s most remarkable museum.

 

Haw Par Villa was originally built by Burmese-Chinese brothers Aw Boon Haw and Aw Boon Par, who developed and marketed the famous analgesic remedy Tiger Balm.  They relocated from Burma to Singapore in 1926 and purchased the site – today on the West Coast Highway, just along from the Haw Par Villa MRT Station – in 1935.  The villa was designed in an Art Deco style and completed in 1937, but its original incarnation didn’t last long, being bombed and occupied by the Japanese during World War II and demolished after the war ended.  Its gardens survived, though.  Up to his death in 1954, Aw Boon Haw installed statues and dioramas there that he hoped would help instil ‘traditional Chinese values’ in those who viewed them.  Subsequently, the gardens became a public park popular among Singaporean families.

 

By the 1980s, the place was losing its lustre and efforts to repackage it meant it underwent several name changes – from ‘Tiger Balm Gardens’ to ‘Haw Par Villa Dragon World’, back to ‘Tiger Balm Gardens’ and finally to ‘Haw Par Villa’ as it is today.  No doubt the Singaporean Tourist Board understood it was special, thanks to those installations Aw Boon Haw had made to promote his vision.  Yet it surely seemed too traditional, and too eccentric, to compete with the city-state’s more modern visitor attractions.  A study in 2014 reported ‘low tourist interest’ in it and made the melancholy observation that it was ‘rather rundown and not very well maintained’.  However, Journeys Pte Ltd acquired it in 2015 and closed it for a period at the start of the 2020s to make renovations.  Since reopening, the latest version of Har Par Villa has won acclaim.  In 2023, for instance, it was a finalist in the Singaporean Tourism Awards for Outstanding Attraction.  Let’s hope its future is now secure.

 

 

A while back, accompanied by my partner and a couple of friends, I visited Har Par Villa.  Approaching its entrance, we went past the place’s name in blood-red English letters and Chinese characters raised against a tableau of artificial rocks.  Then we went through a traditional Chinese paifang with a prominently-displayed picture of a tiger – appropriately for the home of Tiger Balm – and then found ourselves passing a gamut of strange statues.  These included big, spooky white rabbits with red mouths and eyes, mad-looking sheep with black horns and black-rimmed eyes, and a freaky humanoid pig in britches, cap and shirt, the shirt peeled back to reveal a fat belly and sagging man-boobs.  A couple with human bodies and tiger heads, wearing dungarees and a pink dress, held forward tins, boxes and packets of Tiger Balm.  And a pot-bellied Buddha with a wide cackling mouth resembled one of the Blue Meanies in the animated Beatles movie Yellow Submarine (1968).  It was all wonderfully, charmingly weird.

 

 

Our intention today was to visit just one part of Haw Par Villa, its most famous part – the attraction announced by a banner at the entrance, which said: ‘Hell’s Museum: Visions of Death and the Afterlife’.  From all accounts, there’s much more to see there, but that would have to wait until another visit.

 

After buying tickets at the ticket desk / gift shop – whose door had a sign saying ‘No food, no drinks, no pets (pets go to heaven)’ – we ventured into the first section of Hell’s Museum.  We discovered a corner where we could stand by a backdrop of red-hot lava, orange flames and grey smoke and have photos taken so that it looked like we were in hell; and a room where a short documentary film about religious concepts of death and hell played on a loop. Thereafter, we entered a modern and reasonably sober museum.  Haw Par Villa is famous for some over-the-top, properly hellish depictions of hell, but those would come later.

 

The museum contained displays and charts giving information on such things as different cultures’ and religions’ beliefs in the afterlife, the history of ‘handling death’ in Singapore, ‘Singapore’s industry of cremation’ and, courtesy of a large map, the locations of all the cemeteries in the city-state – Chinese, Buddhist, Muslim, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, Baha’i, Parsi, Burmese, Japanese and ‘War’.  Among many other things, there were verses on the subject of death and hell from various sacred texts, such as the Buddhist Dhammapada.  (Chapter 9, Verses 126-128: “Some are born in the womb; the wicked are born in hell…”)

 

 

I particularly liked a replica of a Mexican Day of the Dead altar with all the traditional paraphernalia: photographs of the deceased, butterflies, flowers, bunting, candles, water, food, alcohol, cigars, salt, incense, mirrors, crosses and little skulls made of glass, ceramics, plaster and sugar.  There was also one of ‘a traditional Chinese void deck funeral’.  Void decks are the ground floors of the Singaporean Housing Development Board (HDB) apartment blocks that rise all over the city-state.  These floors are normally untenanted and have communal spaces and, according to the museum, create ‘opportunities for residents to interact and bond over activities…’ and let them ‘…stage social functions, weddings, and of course funerals.’  Coincidentally, I’d lately read a short story entitled The Moral Support of Presence by the Singaporean writer Karen Kwek, about a woman having to organise and sit through a void-deck funeral for her mother whilst coping with grief.

 

 

Immediately past the modern museum was another area of Haw Par Villa eccentricity.  The dioramas here included a mass of rock whose multiple folds and clefts were adorned with severed heads, their faces ghostly pale, tongues protruding, mouths and eyes leaking blood.  An even more bizarre display was a rocky landscape where rats and rabbits were depicted at war with each other.  I don’t know what story or legend inspired this, but to my Western eyes it resembled the title creatures of James Herbert’s The Rats (1974) taking on the rabbits in Richard Adams’ Watership Down (1972) – after those rabbits were infected with rabies. One rabbit chomping bloodily on a rat’s neck was an especially nasty detail.  Meanwhile, I felt sorry for a pair of rats wearing medic armbands who were trying to carry away an injured comrade on a stretcher.

 

 

Finally we came to a structure housing Haw Par Villa’s most celebrated attraction – a series of dioramas representing the Ten Courts of Hell of Chinese mythology and Buddhism.  Guarding its entrance were the demons Ox Head (a minotaur holding a trident) and Horse Face (an equine-headed being clutching a spiked club).  These guardians, an information panel explained, were “…part of the netherworld’s bureaucracy.  They form a network of attendants and jailers responsible for escorting souls through the ten courts…”

 

 

Inside, things started fairly innocuously with Court 1, where ‘King Qinguang conducts a preliminary trial for the deceased.’  The diorama here showed a recently-deceased soul cowering in front of King Qinguang while demon guards with superlong tongues and bird’s claws, or heads shaped like malformed gourds, looked on.  Having been assessed according to the deeds they did alive, with the help of such judging tools as ‘the Book of Good and Evil’, ‘the Scale of Good and Evil’ and ‘the Mirror of Souls’, the souls are divided up: “Virtuous souls… may cross the Golden or Silver Bridges to either attain the Tao, become immortals or deities, or be reborn as humans blessed with good lives…”, whereas “…sinners will have to go through further judgement and punishment in the rest of the 10 courts.”  Needless to say, it’s the ordeals of that latter group that gives this attraction its ghoulish zest.

 

 

Thereafter, we learnt what types of miscreants are dealt with in Courts 2-9 and what punishments are meted out to them.  In Court 2, for instance, people who’ve caused hurt, cheated or robbed get ‘thrown into a volcanic pit’, those who’ve indulged in corruption, stealing or robbery (again) get ‘thrown into blocks of ice’, and those sullied by prostitution get ‘thrown into a pool of blood’.  By Court 9, robbers, murderers, rapists and those responsible for ‘any other unlawful conduct’ have their ‘head and arms chopped off’ while anyone guilty of ‘neglecting the old and the young’ gets ‘crushed under boulders’.

 

And the dioramas showed the courts’ demonic bureaucrats carrying out those punishments in bloody, gory detail.  We saw hearts being extracted (as punishment for ungratefulness, being disrespectful towards one’s elders or ‘escaping from prison’); writhing bodies disappearing under giant grindstones (that’s what you get if you’re disobedient to your siblings or don’t show enough ‘filial piety’); folk being graphically impaled on the branches of ‘a tree of knives’ (your comeuppance for cheating, kidnapping or using bad language); and tongues being removed (the price you pay if you spread rumours or cause discord among your family members).

 

 

Fabulously, the chopping, severing, gouging, crushing, impaling, disembowelling, dismembering and decapitating going on in Haw Par Villa’s 10 Courts of Hell have encouraged generations of parents to bring their children here in order to instil moral values in them – or, putting it more bluntly, to terrify them into being good.  They’ve forced their offspring to look on these horrors while warning them, “See what happens if you’re naughty!”  Indeed, one of my Singaporean colleagues told me she was brought here when she was eight years old and suffered nightmares for the next fortnight.

 

I found myself wondering, meanwhile, what chastisements the 47th President of the USA would face when he passed away and entered the netherworld.  From what I knew of his misdeeds, I calculated he’d be thrown into a volcanic pit, into blocks of ice, into a tree of knives and into a wok of boiling oil; have his heart and tongue cut out and his head and arms chopped off; and be grilled alive on a red-hot copper pillar, sawn in half and pounded by a stone mallet.  Oh, and dismembered.

 

 

Lastly, in Court 10, we saw King Zhuanlun making a final judgement on the souls who’ve been through hell’s punishments, deciding “what forms they will take upon their rebirth.  This will depend on their karma – the good and bad deeds committed in life.”  In this diorama, there were two sinners on their hands and knees before the king, and already the animals they’d become in their next lives were taking form on their backs.  One was metamorphosising into a black goat, the other into a white rabbit.  Before being reincarnated as those creatures, they had one more port of call – ‘Meng Po’s Pavillion’, where their  memories of previous lives, and presumably of hell, are erased.

 

With all this glorious, phantasmagorical barminess on display, it doesn’t surprise me that the Sri Lankan author Shehan Karunatilaka, who worked in Singapore at various times between 2014 and 2020 and whose Booker Prize-winning novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (2022) is about ghosts, demons and the afterlife in late-1980s Colombo, cites Har Par Villa as one of Seven Moons’ major inspirations.

 

As I’ve said, there was a great deal more at Haw Par Villa we didn’t have time to see that day.  I can’t wait for our next visit to this splendidly baroque place.

 

Posted on

The controls are set for the heart of the sun

 

© Val Guest Productions / Pax Films / British Lion Films

 

In my previous blog-post, I cited the ending of the apocalyptic 1961 sci-fi film The Day the Earth Caught Fire, where we’re inside a newspaper office and see that two versions of the next day’s front page have been prepared.  One page’s headline announces WORLD SAVED.  The other announces WORLD DOOMED.  Which headline, I wondered, would be appropriate after the US presidential election on November 5th?

 

Well, the results are in.  And it’s…

 

© Val Guest Productions / Pax Films / British Lion Films

 

I think I’ll stay away from the news for the next week or so, as it’s going to be full of the sights and sounds of the very worst people on the planet popping open the champagne and jeering and crowing about Trump’s win – from despots and corrupt authoritarians like Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu, Kim Jong Un, Victor Orban and Aleksandr Lukashenko to billionaires who believe (probably rightly, given the evidence now) that democracy is something that can be bought and sold in the quest for profits, like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Charles Koch, Rupert Murdoch, Paul Marshall and all the other media tycoons, hedge-fund moguls, oligarchs, oil barons and would-be tech overlords.

 

Despite a majority of British people hating Trump’s guts, Britain’s press and social media will be particularly infested with sycophants drooling and slobbering over the orange turd’s victory.  These range from online grifters who make their money whipping gullible people into frenzies of paranoia and hatred, such as Andrew Tate, Russell Brand, Neil Oliver, Tommy Robinson and failed nepo-baby thespian Laurence Fox; to the preening hacks who pen vitriol for the country’s right and far-right-wing publications, like Brendan O’Neill, Alison Pearson, Douglas Murray, Piers Morgan and Isabel Oakeshott; and to its most discredited, unsavoury and opportunistic politicians, such as Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Nigel Farage, Lee Anderson and Jacob Rees-Mogg.  So, I’ll avoid that lot too for a while.  I don’t want to be put off my food.

 

Many hideous people are no doubt licking their lips at the prospect of the dystopian years ahead, thinking about what they can do as part of the Trump bandwagon and how they can line their pockets from it.  I’m sure that includes all those I’ve mentioned above.

 

Finally, I now find myself thinking of the ending of another 1960s sci-fi film, that of Franklin J. Schaffner’s Planet of the Apes (1968).

 

© APJAC Productions / 20th Century Fox

 

Not only does this conclude with Charlton Heston discovering the Statue of Liberty buried up to her chest in sand – indicating that the USA, plus the rest of human civilisation, are now extinct and lie hidden under millions of tons of sediment – but it shows Heston having a meltdown in front of this haunting and pitiful spectacle.  “You maniacs!” he rages.  “You blew it up!  Damn you!  Goddamn you all to hell!”

 

He could have been referring to those millions of Americans who thought it was a good idea to vote Donald Trump back into office the other day.

 

© APJAC Productions / 20th Century Fox

Posted on

Set the controls for the heart of the sun

 

© Val Guest Productions / Pax Films / British Lion Films

 

One my favourite British science-fiction movies is The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961), starring Edward Judd, Janet Munro and Leo McKern, directed by Val Guest and scripted by Guest and Wolf Mankowitz.  (The underrated Guest made three other movies, 1955’s The Quatermass Experiment, 1957’s Quatermass II and 1960’s Hell is a City, that I also like a lot.)

 

The Day the Earth Caught Fire is an apocalyptic tale wherein the USA and the Soviet Union carry out simultaneous nuclear-bomb tests at the earth’s poles and, subsequently, the planet experiences weird meteorological events.  Rivers dry up in some places and rain falls in unexpected torrents in others.  The general trend, though, is that temperatures rise.  The film’s heroes – a pair of London-based journalists – discover that those nuclear tests have disrupted the earth’s nutation, its axis of rotation.  Our planet is now spiralling closer and closer to the sun and in a few months’ time will plunge into it.

 

Yes, the film’s science is wonky.  A full-force hurricane has a heat-release every 20 minutes that’s similar to one 10-megaton nuclear bomb going off, so a few such nuclear explosions are nowhere near enough to knock the earth out of its orbit.  Also, what’s amusing about the film from a 2024 viewpoint is that its journalist heroes work for the Daily Express – a newspaper now so moon-howlingly rubbish it makes the Daily Mail look comparatively sane and reasonable.  Today, while the Thames evaporated, the Express would be denouncing the earth-knocked-out-of-orbit / crashing-into-the-sun scenario as a woke hoax and politically-correct fearmongering.

 

However, as a dystopian sci-fi movie showing a gradually-unfolding catastrophe through the eyes of some ordinary people who are powerless to do anything about it, The Day the Earth Caught Fire is both affecting and chilling.

 

The film ends ambiguously.  The world’s governments make a last-ditch attempt to reverse the damage, exploding more nuclear bombs in the desperate hope they’ll nudge the earth back into its proper orbit.  Meanwhile, in the Daily Express’s offices in now-utterly-sweltering London, we see that two versions of the next day’s front page have been prepared.  One bears the headline WORLD SAVED, the other the headline WORLD DOOMED.  And we leave the film’s characters there, not knowing their fate.

 

I’ve been thinking about the ending of The Day the Earth Caught Fire a lot today.  November 5th, 2024, is when Americans go to the polls to elect a new president.  That will either be Kamala Harris or Donald Trump.  The latter was once memorably and accurately described by the New Yorker writer Mark Singer as someone whose existence is ‘unmolested by the rumbling of a soul’.  A few years ago, less eloquently, I called him ‘that rancid man-slug of evil.’

 

Trump has been open about what he’ll do to the USA if he’s re-elected president.  He’ll transform the world’s most powerful country from a democracy into an authoritarian state, with him as despot-in-chief.  Even if the American public are stricken with buyers’ remorse after voting him in, he’ll change the election laws and fiddle the constitution so that they can’t ever get rid of him and his far-right Republican successors (who’ll no doubt be led by the repulsive J.D. Vance).  The Trump Reich will be here to stay.

 

Along the way, he’ll also embolden other fascists in other countries around the world, hand over Ukraine to his buddy, hero and idol Vladimir Putin and allow Putin’s malignant influence to extend right into Europe, make American women second-class citizens with zero control over their bodies, persecute LGBT people and probably erase trans ones, put the lunatic anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy in charge of American health policy and appoint Elon Musk as his Joseph Goebbels-style head of propaganda who’ll pump out misinformation and hate on Twitter (or ‘X’ as Musk calls his debased platform these days).  Science will be derided, suppressed and defunded.  Pig-ignorance will be lauded, promoted and revelled in.

 

Worst of all, Trump, a climate-change denialist, will add billions of tonnes of US carbon emissions to the earth’s atmosphere, probably thwarting any last chances of humanity doing anything to mitigate the effects of the climate catastrophe.  Yes, the earth really will be catching fire, if slightly more slowly than it did in Guest’s movie.

 

So, world saved or world doomed?  We’ll find out a little later this week.

 

© Val Guest Productions / Pax Films / British Lion Films