The Declaration of Independence lists crimes against the American people which drove them to reject British rule. Replace ‘the King’ with ‘Trump’ and this list still makes sense. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these […]
He didn’t want to be President. Not if President means making sticky decisions, and being blamed for things (most of the world calls this ‘adult responsibility’), and being woken at four to read the papers. What he wanted was to be Mr President. Good morning, Mr President! He wanted to star in the biggest ticker-tape […]
The Senate and the House. They are just going to do so much damage. I can hardly breathe, hardly swallow, it’s like iron in the chest. Now we see how dangerous our fears are, how fatal this cleaving to the lying pseudo-certainty that fist-raising white men seem to offer – in the face of unprecedented […]
Big guy who shouldered in front of me to the vegetable stall on the markets kept picking up and fondling everything, laying things lingeringly down. In between handling the produce he was adjusting his own paper bag, at the crotch, for greater personal comfort. I avoided all the produce his omnivorous fingers had touched but […]
Bought The Saturday Paper, the one not owned by a misanthrope sadist. Carried it into my favourite weekend cafe and sat down. They were playing the Rolling Stones: bloke music. The first sentence that caught my eye was: “Trying to explain why fiction matters, novelist Ian McEwan put it simply. ‘Cruelty,’ he said, ‘is a […]
A federal election approaches Germany, they’ve a Conservative government to vote back in. It’s an unequal fight: the sitting Chancellor, Angela Merkel, is called “Mummy” by the press and one of her would-be opponents is the Pirate Party (they’re good, but they’re goofy). This town is festooned with candidates’ placards. Barely a one unadorned with […]
Yesterday a German friend asked me, could you ever imagine to live in Germany permanently. I guess my laugh was unflattering. Why not, he said. I’m sorry, but… the way you guys run your country – it’s like a bunch of very well-behaved eldest children looking after the place while their mummy and daddy are […]
It seems to me the central stupidity of the revolutionary mindset is, it says: You can’t use the same kind of thinking to build the future as you used to build the past. So we need to destroy McDonalds, overthrow the government, raze the Catholic church, etc. But what is this doing? It’s using the […]