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

Hey, hey, we’re the munchies

 

© Duckworth Books

 

Another Halloween-inspired post…

 

Zombie movies used to be my favourite sub-genre of horror cinema.  Okay, at first, it’s difficult to see the charms of a school of movies about reanimated corpses shambling around and trying to munch on the living.  But what I liked about zombies was that they could be a brilliant metaphor for any group that was large in number but, according to the powers-that-be, mindless: consumers, blue-collar workers, the homeless, etc.  This gave filmmakers endless opportunities for social comment and allowed zombie movies to have brains figuratively as well as literally.

 

Thus, George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) is a parable about a United States rattled by racial tensions and the Vietnam War.  His 1979 sequel Dawn of the Dead takes potshots at a consumerist America where shopping malls had become part of both the landscape and the social fabric.  Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2002) reflects a Britain where anger was an increasingly common social phenomenon, terms like ‘road rage’ and ‘air rage’ having entered the popular vernacular.  Its sequel, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s 28 Weeks Later (2007) is an allegory about the post-war occupation of Iraq.  And Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead (2004) takes the piss out of a twenty-something slacker generation who can’t tell if someone’s a zombie or just stoned, drunk or hungover.

 

But I said I used to be fond of zombie movies, because in the last few years I feel there’s been too damned many of them, offering the same old apocalyptic visions and same old shambling tropes.  Zombies have become ubiquitous, not just in the cinema but in TV series, books, graphic novels and computer games.  With popular TV shows like The Walking Dead (2010-present), derived from a graphic novel, and The Last of Us (2023), derived from a computer game, filling our screens with zombie carnage week after week after week, surely it’s impossible now to do anything fresh with the concept?

 

Despite my zombie-fatigue, however, I recently read Max Brooks’ bestselling 2006 novel World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War.  This is probably the number-two urtext in the zombie pantheon.  (Obviously, the number-one urtext is George A. Romero’s original trilogy of Living Dead movies, Night, Dawn and 1986’s Day of the Dead, which created the template: the flesh-eating, the infection being spread by bites, the need to shoot them in the head, the humans reacting to the crisis soon becoming more monstrous than the zombies themselves.)  Brooks updated the sub-genre for the 21st century and imagined a zombie plague happening on a global scale, with different countries responding in different ways.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Rhododendrites

 

World War Z is a mock non-fictional tome modelled on Studs Terkel’s The Good War: An Oral History of World War Two (1984).  It’s purportedly a compilation of interviews by a United Nations expert who, sometime after a worldwide zombie crisis ended, worked on a UN Postwar Commission Report.  He collected oral testimonies from survivors but, ultimately, the commission’s chairperson decided not to include the testimonies in the report, reasoning: “It was all too intimate…  Too many opinions, too many feelings.  That’s not what this report is about.  We need clear facts and figures, unclouded by the human factor.”  So instead, the UN expert publishes the survivors’ stories in book-form.

 

One’s first impression of World War Z is that Brooks – who in real life is the son of venerable funnyman and comic filmmaker Mel Brooks – has not only set his sights high but done his homework.  The book believably presents the voices not just of ordinary people, but of politicians, scientists, doctors, soldiers, mercenaries, pilots, etc.  It nicely captures their particular sets of jargon, slang and cadences as they describe their  experiences of the conflict with the undead.  The political protocols, science, technology, medicine, weaponry and equipment referred to sound convincingly well-researched.  Brooks is also authoritative when his UN official interviews people from more specialist walks of life, such as deep-sea divers (these zombies can move underwater) and astronauts (there’s a section about the crew of the International Space Station who, after things kick off, find themselves in orbit for longer than planned and do all they can to help humanity below).

 

The jargon occasionally gets a bit dense.  For instance, a diver grumps: “Kids today… f*ckin’ A.  I sound like my pops, but it’s true, the kids today, the new ADS divers in the Mark 3s and 4s, they have this ZeVDek – Zero Visibility Detection Kit – with colour-imaging sonar and low-light optics…  We couldn’t see, we couldn’t hear – we couldn’t even feel if a G was trying to grab us from behind.”  But then, people in any profession use plenty of jargon when they talk with passion about their work.  And you have to be passionate about your work when it involves relentless waves of zombies coming at you.

 

From pixabay.com / © Syaibatul Hamadi

 

A few entries stray into stereotypes and caricature, though.  An account by one Kondo Tatsumi, a teenaged computer geek so addicted to hacking into systems and obtaining information that he stays at his bedroom computer long after his parents have vanished, and the zombies have started eating his neighbours, without any awareness of the peril he’s in, ladles on the stereotype of the Japanese otaku too thickly.  To rub it in, Kondo is described as being at the time ‘a skinny acne-faced teenager with dull red eyes and bleached blond highlights streaking his unkempt hair.’

 

Another Japanese-set instalment is rather cheesy too.  It concerns an elderly blind man called ‘Sensei’ Tomonaga Ijiro.  Though old and blind, his sense of hearing and smell are acute and he’s also skilled at using a samurai sword – well, it’s really a sharp-bladed shovel that he used during his pre-World-War-Z days working as a gardener.  He manages to survive for years in the forested mountains of Hokkaido, slaying any zombie that ventures near him.  Here, Brooks is clearly riffing on the legendary blind swordman Zatoichi, a fixture of Japanese cinema and fiction.  But the story’s unlikeliness is out-of-place in a tome that generally aims for documentary realism.  Even if Sensei Tomonaga’s non-visual senses and swordsmanship enable him to fight off zombies for several years, I don’t see how an old blind bloke could stay alive in Hokkaido, in the open, for so long.  I’ve lived in Hokkaido and know how brutal its winters are.

 

Worst of all is the testimony of David Allen Forbes, a stereotypical Richard Curtis / Hugh Grant-style silly-ass Englishman whom Brooks’ dad could have featured in one of his films – Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993), say, or Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995).  An expert on castles, he begins by explaining how modern-day humans used the medieval structures as refuge against the zombie hordes.  Then he gets onto his own experiences of World War Z, which he spent holed up in Windsor Castle, just outside London.  There’s some utter guff where Forbes gets teary recalling Queen Elizabeth II.  She refused to join the rest of the Royal Family when they were evacuated to Ireland – yes, it shows how desperate things were that the Royal Family, for their safety, had to be sent to Ireland.  Instead, she stayed with the garrison in Windsor to ‘be an example to the rest of us, the strongest, and bravest, and absolute best of us.’  Of castles and Her Majesty, Forbes concludes: “One defended our bodies, the other, our souls.”  That bit turned my stomach more than the most graphic gore I’ve seen in a zombie movie.

 

Still, the good parts of World War Z more than outweigh the duff ones.  Most effective for me is a section where an American woman, Jesika Hendricks, recalls her experiences as a girl early in the crisis.  Following government advice to move north – by then it’d been noticed that zombies freeze up in cold weather – her urban, white-collar family load up a van and head for Canada.  They join some fellow refugees who’ve set up camp beside a lake.  Initially, everything is cheery, with communal bonhomie, singing around the campfire, and the nearby forest and lake-waters providing fuel and food.  Then, as the trees get cut down, and the fish get dynamited to non-existence, and the days grow shorter and colder, the mood sours.  “The camp became a mess, nobody picking up their trash anymore.  A couple of times I stepped in human shit.  Nobody was even bothering to bury it.”  By mid-winter, things have become truly nasty.  It’s a grim and believable account of what frightened and unprepared people can end up doing in an emergency.  And the zombies aren’t even around.  They figure in the punchline, though: “It took a lot of time, but eventually the sun did come out, the weather began to warm, and the snow finally began to melt.. spring was finally here, and so were the living dead.”

 

Meanwhile, Brooks devises a neat explanation for the zombies’ origins and how they spread everywhere.  The zombie-creating virus first appeared in China – possibly somehow spawned in the areas flooded by the Three Gorges dam project – and went on to infect the country’s supply of organs that’d been forcibly-harvested in its prisons.  Some of these organs were exported around the world and they released the virus into the bodies of their recipients.  Incidentally, in real life, China announced in 2014 that it would no longer use prisoners as forced organ-donors.

 

© Skydance Productions / Paramount Pictures

 

This premise didn’t make it into the big-budget, but disappointing movie version that Hollywood made of World War Z in 2013.  No doubt the studio, Paramount Pictures, was mindful of the growing importance of Chinese audiences for international movie profits and didn’t want to include anything that might annoy the Chinese government.

 

Finally, I noticed how the book makes references, mostly indirectly, to personages like Nelson Mandela, Fidel Castro and the aforementioned Queen Elizabeth II.  This gives it an oddly historical feel now.  Its story evidently began in the mid-noughties and concluded sometime in the 2010s.  And while Brooks pours scorn on inept and corrupt politicians, and other assholes in positions of power and influence (like a crooked pharma tycoon who lulls the West into a false sense of security with an ‘anti-rabies’ vaccination), he obviously believes the era still has enough people with the leadership skills, knowhow and courage to win the day for humanity.

 

But the mind boggles at the thought of such a scenario occurring in 2023.  For years now, we’ve been subjected to the callousness, venality and stupidity of leaders like Putin, Bolsonaro, Modi, Netanyahu, Johnson and, of course, Trump.  Also, we’ve seen how so many of them botched the handling of the Covid-19 epidemic.  If a zombie apocalypse started under the watch of the far-right-wing populist authoritarians who currently run too many countries in the world, they’d probably use it as an excuse to invade neighbouring countries, burn the Amazon, bash the Muslims, avoid corruption charges, hold raucous parties, inject themselves with bleach or, indeed, abandon the ‘blue states’ to the zombies.

 

And on the fake-news front, millions of ‘zombie sceptics’ would agree with Alex Jones, who’d dismiss news footage of zombie carnage as the work of ‘crisis actors’.  Millions of supposed ‘freethinkers’ would applaud the tweets of Right Said Fred and Neil Oliver, who’d dismiss the thing as a hoax engineered by a shadowy global cabal wanting to foist a ‘world government’ on us all.  Actually, I could imagine Oliver defying zombie-emergency lockdown by announcing on GB News: “If your freedom means I might get bitten by a zombie then so be it.  If my freedom means you might get bitten by a zombie, then so be it.”

 

Max Brooks’ 2006 World War Z chronicles a horror-show, but in hindsight, there’s ultimately something positive and uplifting about it.  A 2023 World War Z would be a horror-show full-stop.

 

From invaluable.com / © Motik One