The Donald and Elon Show is an unholy mess
'Abba, selach 'ethon la nakhru mah h'mon pelalin!' Flood the zone with shit. Police investigators that pore professionally over horrific imagery online have counselling and mental health support. This week I've followed the news from Musk's America for the sake of another supposedly funny Observer column, and no one's checking to see if I'm coping. I'm going to go to CEX here in St Albans tomorrow to score a second-hand copy of Ruggero Deodato's Cannibal Holocaust, just for some light relief.
'Abba, selach 'ethon la nakhru mah h'mon pelalin!' Flood the zone with shit. I asked to file this week's supposedly funny column a day later than usual, hoping there might be some glimmer of hope by 4pm Wednesday. On Monday night I went out to do my standup show at Dorking Halls, and four hours later, when I got back to my hotel, the routine I'd just performed about America's new leader Elon Musk was already irrelevant, white supremacists worldwide delighted that he appeared to have given two full-on Nazi salutes to the faithful. I didn't have that on my Trump inauguration ceremony bingo card.
'Abba, selach 'ethon la nakhru mah h'mon pelalin!' Flood the zone with shit. To be fair to Musk, maybe the Nazi salute was just an unfortunate choice of gesture, made by a sleepless ketamine-gobbler. Who can honestly say they have never accidentally sieg-heiled a victory rally, twice, while also having a history of promoting far-right parties in Europe? I know I have. Although as Oscar Wilde, a classic diversity hire, might have said, 'To sieg-heil the Magas once, Mr Musk, may be regarded as a misfortune; to do it twice looks like carelessness.'
'Abba, selach 'ethon la nakhru mah h'mon pelalin!' Flood the zone with shit. If Trump's abandonment of environmental targets in the face of short-term economic goals didn't mean our doom, already sealed anyway, was now going to be a lot quicker and nastier, I'd be laughing at the epic idiocy of the whole thing. Trump did it. He actually did it. He actually said he was 'saved by God to make America great again'. And he did it on the day America celebrates Martin Luther King, a man whom the same God presumably didn't feel was worth saving when an assassin took a pot shot at him. Them's the breaks. God's unpredictable like that. He can't be expected to be everywhere at once. He's not … oh …
'Abba, selach 'ethon la nakhru mah h'mon pelalin!' Flood the zone with shit. However, I found comfort in a strange place. There was a meeting of the local chapter of Reform in the bar of my Dorking hotel, the White Horse, before I went out last night, which ended with a bucket being passed round, either for donations, or for reasonable people to vomit into. How do these donations get declared and processed I wonder, when 'the party' is a limited company, with three shareholders? And when one of whom, Richard Tice, is now splitting his time between his Skegness constituency and Dubai, which is actually twinned with Skegness, where he lives it large under Sharia law? Is any change in the bucket split three ways at the end of the night and paid out as shareholders' dividends? Or is it just put behind the bar, which had conspicuously run out of both Guinness and Doom Bar when I got back at 10.45?
'Abba, selach 'ethon la nakhru mah h'mon pelalin!' Flood the zone with shit. Meanwhile, over at the main event, Reform's chief shareholder Nigel Farage, having failed to get into the Elon Musk Historical Military Salute Show, was posing delightedly for photos with the martial artist Conor McGregor, supporting his fellow sex abuser Donald Trump, having recently paid €250,000 in damages to a woman who said he raped her. Perhaps Farage feels that McGregor, like the monetised misogynist and suspected sex trafficker Andrew Tate, is 'an important voice' for men. Pass me the Dorking White Horse Reform bucket please.
'Abba, selach 'ethon la nakhru mah h'mon pelalin!' Flood the zone with shit. But mulling later on Reform in the White Horse bar, I realised it's possible that Musk and Trump's fascist project will fail. In a May 2024 poll, only 31% of people still supported leaving the EU, and many of those will be dead by now anyway. Having seen the damage Brexit has done here, in France even Marine Le Pen's far-right Rassemblement Nationale has quietly dropped the idea of actually leaving the hated EU. Maybe Farage's legacy will have been to have inoculated Eurosceptics. Britain's suffering and Britain's sacrifice will, once again, have saved continental Europe. Wear your Ukip Keep The Pound badge with pride!
'Abba, selach 'ethon la nakhru mah h'mon pelalin!' Flood the zone with shit. Do Americans really hate their LGBTQ+ neighbours and family members so much they want to see them excluded from public life? Do they really hate environmentalists so much they want to burn their own world down out of spite? Will it feel good to watch the planet cease to function just because they know it will upset the singer from Green Day? Do Americans really hate their native peoples so much they want to see them humiliated on a grand, if petty, scale by having their mountains renamed, again, after dead white men? Unless the functional apparatus of democracy is totally dismantled, and the new government's tech-bro servants manage to warp the flow of news irreparably, it's likely that a second dose of Trump might, just as Brexit discredited Farage's ideas, cure America of its fondness for fascism. We can only hope.
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Right. I have to file this in 30 minutes. One last look at the news. What? The Ku Klux Klan are giving out recruitment flyers in Kentucky telling immigrants to 'leave now'? 'Eli, Eli, lama sabacthani?'
Stewart Lee tours Stewart Lee vs the Man-Wulf this year, with a Royal Festival Hall run in July
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