J.D. Vance – Blood and Porridge

June 14, 2026June 15, 2026

How low will you go?

When The Simpsons was the greatest thing on television a long – a very long – time ago, I remember a 1999 episode, They Saved Lisa’s Brain, that began with a contest being held in Springfield and broadcast live on TV called How Low Will You Go? According to the entry about it on the WikiSimpsons site, How Low Will You Go? was ‘sponsored by Grandma Plopwell’s Pudding’ and its winner ‘would be the person who did the stupidest thing on the stage.’ Contestants included Bart Simpson eating ‘everything that was thrown at him’, Homer Simpson wearing ‘a suit made of popcorn kernels’ and singing a song called Kernel Knowledge, and Moe Szyslak ‘dressed in a sailor suit with a giant lollipop.’

When I saw the episode more than a quarter-century ago, I remember reacting to this indictment of how people are humiliated and degraded by TV and its promises of instant celebrity by thinking: Wow, that is pretty low! Of course, I didn’t know it at the time, but I hadn’t seen anything yet. In the decades since, TV – often of the ‘reality’ variety – has induced folk to do far worse things and make far bigger dicks of themselves on camera, to the point where cavorting around in a suit made of popcorn kernels actually seems quite highbrow in comparison.

Anyway, I feel like How Low Will You Go? has now become a TV series that’s in the middle of its second season. Each season lasts for four years and takes place in the White House whenever Donald Trump is the US president. Season one lasted from 2016 to 2020. Season two began in 2024 and is due to end in 2028. That is, if the USA still exists by 2028. Come to think of it, if the world still exists by 2028.

In season one, Trump proved that yes, he could go pretty low. He shamelessly sucked up to Putin. He belittled a war veteran, John McCain, who’d served his country in Vietnam and spent more than five years as a prisoner of war there. (“I like people who weren’t captured!”) He skipped attending an event in honour of American soldiers killed in World War One at France’s Aisne-Marne American Cemetery on the 100^th anniversary of Armistice Day because he couldn’t handle the fact it was raining. He mocked a reporter suffering from congenital joint condition in front of a rally by doing an impersonation of him that an obnoxious kid would do of someone with cerebral palsy.

He suggested injecting bleach as a cure for Covid-19. He describing developing-world nations as ‘shithole countries’. He leched after his own daughter, talking about her ‘breasts, her backside, and what it might be like to have sex with her.’ He told 30,573 lies, according to the Washington Post. Oh, and when he lost the presidential election in 2020, he claimed, baselessly, it’d been ‘rigged’ and incited a mob of his dingbat supporters to attack the US Capitol, where they chanted about hanging Trump’s own vice-president and tried to prevent Joe Biden’s victory in the election being formalised.

The Trump version of How Will You Go?, season one, was a ratings hit. In fact, a sufficient number of Americans thought it was so wonderful that they voted Trump back into the White House in 2024 for a second season. And, so far, season two hasn’t disappointed. How far can the man go this time? Why, far, far lower!

He’s threatened to annex the USA’s next-door neighbour and important ally and trading partner Canada, so that now everyone in Canada hates his guts, won’t visit his country and spend money there, and won’t buy American products like American bourbon. He’s threatened to annex Greenland, which belongs to a country in a military alliance the USA is in, an alliance whose basic doctrine would require all the other member countries to go to war with the USA if he attempted to annex it. Makes sense, yes?

From wikipedia.org / © The White House

He’s shamelessly sucked up to Putin, again. He’s insulted reporters, often female ones – intelligent and independent-minded women are obviously a group he has serious issues with – calling them ‘piggie’ and ‘crooked or stupid’ and ‘corrupt’ with ‘hatred in her eyes’. He’s whinged like a spoilt brat about not receiving a Nobel Peace Prize. He’s fallen asleep in meetings and press conferences after he sneeringly dubbed his presidential predecessor ‘Sleepy Joe’ Biden. He’s relentlessly posted AI crap on his Truth Social platform, including footage of him in a plane dropping gigantic turds on ‘No Kings’ protestors, pictures of himself as Jesus, and images depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes.

He’s also allowed himself to be bounced into a war against Iran by Benjamin Netanyahu, with the result that the Strait of Hormuz, and the maritime route carrying 20 percent of the world’s oil supply, are now blocked. The other day, he claimed his administration and the Iranians were on the brink of agreeing on a peace deal… But as he’s already claimed this about 40 times since the conflict started in February, I’m not going to hold my breath. At least for Trump, it takes folk’s minds off his sizeable presence in the Epstein Files.

To spice things up even further, the producers of season two of How Low Will You Go? have brought in additional cast-members to give Trump a run for his money in going low. Thus, we’ve had Vice President J. D. Vance insulting single women who keep cats and being a malicious prick towards the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, a leader with more courage in his little finger than Vance and Trump have in their entire, make-up-enhanced bodies.

They’ve also introduced the ultra-ridiculous Pete Hegseth, who was Trump’s Secretary of Defence until Hegseth persuaded him to change the title to the more manly and harder-sounding ‘Secretary of War’, and who pees his pants in rage when press photographers take pictures of him from what he considers unflattering angles. At a recent gathering in France commemorating the 82^nd anniversary of the D-Day landings, Hegseth gave a speech condemning European nations for allowing their beaches to be “stormed by different, dangerous ideologies”, i.e., people he considers not sufficiently white enough and Christian enough to be let in. I really don’t know why Hegseth turned up at this event. After all, 82 years ago, his side lost.

Today, June 14^th, we get another episode in How Low Will You Go? It’s Trump’s 80^th birthday and he’s marking it by staging Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) bouts on the South Lawn of the White House. The Las Vegas-based UFC organises ‘mixed martial-arts’ combat – basically, violent ‘anything-goes’ scraps – inside cages. So, the seat of the American presidency is about to host cage fights. That really resonates with the dignity of the place and those who’ve lived there in the past, one-time holders of the USA’s highest office like Abraham Lincoln, Teddy and Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy. If Honest Abe, FDR, JFK and the rest are watching this from the clouds, they’ll be doing so between their fingers.

What’s been installed for those UFC bouts consists of an enclosed octagonal ring with a huge, claw-like superstructure built over it with clusters of lights and big TV screens attached. The ring is emblazoned with the names of sponsors like Bud Light, Toyo Tires and Pit Boss Grills. And, inevitably, the web address crypto.com features prominently too.

It makes me think of the 1986 movie Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome and the hemispherical gladiatorial arena where Max and Blaster had to fight it out with chainsaws and sledgehammers. Trump’s spectacle at the White House sounds just as dystopian – though at least in the Mad Max movie, the dictator presiding over things was played by Tina Turner. I’d have her as my dystopian overlord rather than the revolting, decaying Trump any day of the week.

From wikipedia.org / © Warner Bros / Kennedy Miller Productions

Oh well, I suppose there’s one silver lining to this. Trump’s crass preoccupation with having UFC fighters slug it out on his lawn has at least diverted his attention from the Football World Cup, which kicked off in Canada, Mexico and the USA a few days ago. He hasn’t tried to insert himself into that, so far. I was particularly worried he’d turn up at yesterday’s match between Scotland and Haiti in Boston, since he loves talking about his Scottish roots – his mother hailed from the Isle of Lewis – and since he hates Haitians. (During the run-up to the 2024 presidential election, both he and Vance yet again showed how low they’d go by lying about Haitian immigrants in Ohio eating people’s domestic pets.) If he’d shown his orange face at the match, I think I would have found myself wanting Haiti to win, just to sicken him.*

*Trump didn’t appear, I was able to support Scotland as normal and Scotland won, just about. Phew.

April 30, 2025May 1, 2025

Rab Foster herds some cats

© Swords & Sorcery Magazine

The Cats and the Crimson is the name of a fantasy story I’ve just had published in the April 2025 edition, Issue 159, of the online publication Swords and Sorcery Magazine. As always with my fantasy fiction, the story is attributed to the pseudonym Rab Foster.

One part of its title refers to its heroine, Cranna the Crimson, the formidable red-haired swordswoman who takes no shit from anyone, least of all from male chauvinists. She’s previously featured in my published stories Vision of the Reaper (which appeared in the collection Fall into Fantasy 2023) and The Drakvur Challenge (which last year appeared in the third issue of the magazine Crimson Quill Quarterly). The other part of the title refers to the cats that Cranna encounters when she enters a mysterious desert town in search of treasure – firstly, cats of the cute, domestic variety, but later, ones of a more sinister nature.

I don’t want to give away anything more about the story. Though I will say it contains a rebuke to sentiments expressed by American vice-president and Trump-lackey J.D. Vance, who notoriously complained about women who are “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices they’ve made” and who “want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” I’m sure Cranna would react to those words by socking the contemptible, eyeliner-wearing creep in the jaw.

For the next month, The Cats and the Crimson can be read here, while the April 2025 homepage of Swords and Sorcery Magazine, with three further stories and a book review, is accessible here.

November 5, 2024November 6, 2024

Set the controls for the heart of the sun

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 5^th, 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.