Well, I’m back on the ferry, heading to the UK, wondering if the North Sea undulations are making me feel unhinged or the prospect of being much nearer to our general election. Mexico gets a progressive, PhD-qualified climate crisis expert. Even Narendra Modi’s far-right populism gets dented. We currently have a disaster capitalist hydrocarbon extraction enthusiast wearing the wrong trousers. He will most likely be succeeded by a man whose sentences flee meaning the way vampires dodge tanning salons. Seriously, if our last decade in politics (and all preceding decades) have taught us nothing else, we know that when someone is incapable of using words to describe their ideas, then they either have no ideas, or only ideas too terrible to mention.
Viewed mostly from France, the whole spectacle has seemed relatively harmless – like watching an amateur re-enactment of Gormenghast by people with recent head injuries, who are also on ketamine. And, somehow, also on crack. A dismaying percentage of those involved are clearly high on pure, uncut racism with no plans for ever coming down. And that goes for their bots and trolls and Putin-backed Astroturfers. Voter suppression disguised as a valiant effort to stop “illegals” voting? Way to go! You can be racist all day long with that. And voter fraud is a problem we don’t have – so it’s solved already! Immigration a net financial benefit, source of workers and resilience in communities? Well, those are just facts and we’ve been ignoring them for years!
