The presidency of Donald Trump contaminates every part that touches it, like dogshit on the top of a pointed stick. Watch out, politicians of the world, leisure manufacturers, and industrial properties, that you just don’t get any on you. It stinks.
On Monday evening, one among my pretty rescue cats, having battled the cat flap into submission, disappeared within the silly firework darkish. He’s not again but and I’m very unhappy. Like me, he was deserted to his destiny as a baby, however in a cardboard field outdoors the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ place slightly than within the Youngsters’s Society workplaces in Lichfield (a city from which I’ve been banned from performing by the mayor’s workplace since 1990). Dependent, like me, on the kindness of a series of strangers, the cat’s arrival and survival felt like a small balancing of the guide of life. However possibly, like many hundreds of thousands of us worldwide, he simply couldn’t face Wednesday morning.
Final week, Robert Jenrick, our new shadow justice secretary, was attempting accountable Keir Starmer for the early launch of intercourse offenders from the very prisons his personal authorities had carelessly overcrowded; one other mess left for another person to select up. The Tories spent 14 years treating the entire nation like an adolescent’s bed room. I solely went in to assemble up all of the outdated espresso cups, and ended up tripping over a collection of deserted infrastructure tasks and falling into an unlimited community of sewage-filled waterways.
However, one has to ask, if Jenrick’s so frightened about intercourse offenders being on the unfastened, why is he so happy that one is now within the White Home? “If I have been an American citizen, I might be voting for Donald Trump”, the child-hating sod informed GB Information’s calcified opinion-vampire Camilla Tominey, Britain’s forty ninth most influential rightwing determine, in September. It seems prefer it’s one rule for white working class British rapists and fairly one other for orange American billionaire intercourse offenders with their fingers on the nuclear codes. Two-tier Jenrick can do one! Accommodating Donald Trump will invalidate us all.
This week, Bob Dylan is on the Royal Albert Corridor. I couldn’t purchase a ticket, and wasn’t about to pay 5 occasions over the percentages to one of many Tories’ ticket criminals. However I’ll go all the way down to Kensington and grasp round outdoors hopefully, like a canine, in case one other middle-aged man with an opinion in regards to the relative deserves of the 5 extant takes of She’s Your Lover Now needs to promote a sudden spare to “the world’s biggest residing standup comic” (the Occasions).
I want to see Bob Dylan yet another time, at the very least, however surprise what it could really feel like to observe one of many architects of postwar progressive America performing in a world the place the tradition he helped create is so clearly in retreat, as a sexual abuser reclines in Washington inflating himself like a bulbous brown toad. One factor you may say about Dylan, who hardly ever affords the informal fan the chance to take pleasure in any of his again catalogue dwell with no important ontological battle, is that he was by no means a nostalgia act. Properly, he’s now. Trump has moved the dial and made him into one. The occasions they’re a-changing. However not in a great way.
Because the second world warfare, America’s strongest device has been the delicate world diplomacy of its irresistible, and broadly liberal, standard tradition – rock’n’ roll, cinema, and latterly the comic-book characters that at the moment are the tentpoles of the worldwide leisure business. However how do these American icons make sense in a Trumpian world, the place the star-spangled iconography that informs their costumes is now redolent of fascism and local weather denialism slightly than freedom and the longer term? No person would need their baby to be saved from a burning constructing by Swastika-Chest Man and his child sidekick Drill Child.
As a result of working-class Jewish autodidact visionaries, producing the pop artwork primers of tomorrow on a pittance, drew Captain America punching out Hitler within the early 40s, and since previously one-dimensional superheroes have been made thrillingly two-dimensional by acid-fried faculty dropout creatives within the 60s and 70s, Marvel Comics, although their roots are obscured, stay broadly liberal, even virtually countercultural. That’s how I reverse-engineer my infantilised pseudo-intellectual need to maintain studying them on the age of 56, anyway.
Certainly, in September 1963, Jack Kirby, the 12-cent William Blake of the Decrease East Aspect, drew the Unbelievable 4 preventing the Hate-Monger, a villain whose superpowers weren’t the power to manage soil or infuriate moles, however the capacity to whip up hate. “We should drive all of the foreigners again the place they got here from. We should present no mercy to these we hate,” he cries, in his purple hood, as his followers agree – “Lengthy dwell the Hate-Monger. He’ll clear up this nation for us!” – and the Invisible Lady observes, helpfully: “He appears to have the group in a trance. They … they’re agreeing along with his un-American sentiments.” Dangle on! Was that Unbelievable 4 Challenge 21, 61 years in the past, or Sky Information final week?
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Scarlett Johansson, Marvel’s Black Widow, pointlessly assembled a squadron of Avengers actors to denounce Trump, arguably emphasising America’s divides, however the actual Avengers would oppose Trump. In the event that they existed. In 1974, as Watergate’s curtain fell on Nixon, the comics author Steve Englehart, a former soldier who grew to become a conscientious objector, had Captain America abandon his costume and tackle the id of Nomad (“the person with no nation”) as a result of he couldn’t sq. the fictional character’s values along with his nation’s corrupt figurehead. My Captain America wouldn’t sling his vibranium protect for Donald Trump. The success of Trump invalidates the shared, if naive, notion of what America is. I’m going to search for my cat.
Stewart Lee’s 2025 tour Stewart Lee vs The Man-Wulf begins at London’s Leicester Sq. theatre this December, with a July Royal Pageant Corridor run simply introduced.
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