Yesterday's War

Although the age of dinosaurs spawned many exotic breeds of reptile, there is little indication in the fossil record that capitalists and Conservatives were among them. Doubtless this explains why the dinosaurs were so dilatory in getting themselves wiped out: after a hundred and thirty million years of unrivalled planetary dominance, a foreign migrant filled the atmosphere with dust and catastrophically disrupted global food chains. The primates have taken a considerably shorter time to evolve not only the technological means to manage the same job for themselves but, even more importantly, the psychological resources to bask in the rose-coloured light of their own misdirecting intelligence. Although the National Johnson's silly little bout of finger-wagging at non-white polluters has put it virtually beyond doubt that no asteroid will be required to finish us, space agencies in some of the non-British parts of the globe are expending vast amounts of time, expertise and resources to counter an extinction event that was completed more than sixty million years ago.