Subversive Literature

In a refreshing change from the usual sex and sleaze, one of the Trumpster's legal feuds seems to have taken a bookish turn. While serving as director of the FBI, James Comey had the temerity to investigate the 2016 presidential election for dirty work by the minions of Tsar Vladimir; but although the investigation found that interference did take place, there was no evidence that servants of the Trumpster and his head-tribble had been found competent enough to take part. Since lack of evidence has always been the moral muscle and intellectual ichor of the Trumpster administrations, this conclusion was obviously malicious, vexatious and deeply offensive. The monarch and his mutants are therefore seeking to prosecute Comey for threatening regicide in a social media post and in a published novel, around both of which the royal prosecutors have concocted a conspiracy theory involving coded messages and a picture of some seashells. Rather than pleading that it was all a publicity stunt to increase the sales of his opus in accordance with the American Way, Comey is trying to get the case dismissed; which in itself is surely sufficiently incriminating.

Have They Learned Nothing?

A hundred and two former diplomats from France and Britain have signed a letter to the leaders of both countries urging, if you please, consequences for the Righteous State over the destruction of Gaza and the ongoing colonial assault. If one didn't know better, one would think that no hands had been wrung, no fingers wagged and no verbal reproaches uttered since the whole beastly business began. Clearly the signatories are on dangerous ground: we all know how slippery the slope can be from well-meaning student politics to full-blown antisemitism. It is a perilously short step from advocating consequences for the wrong kind of war criminal to arguing that the entire deplorable history of the Palestinian problem may have started a little earlier than October 2023; and from there a still shorter and more perilous step to proclaiming that the Righteous State should not have exclusive and unlimited rights of exploitation with regard to the memory of the Holocaust.

Informational Havering

Plucky little entrepreneurs have submitted plans for a Europe-beating infoslop emporium which will transform a couple of hundred football pitches' worth of green belt into a planet-cooking paragon of tech-bro sustainability. Although the Vice-Caudillo of the Farage Falange has clarified the movement's heatwave policy by instructing the great British public to get out and relish the burn, the Unterfahnenschwenkenführer of the local cadre was noticeably coy about the prospects for approval. Presumably the strutting Caudillo's non-declarable crypto-bung from the company's owners is still to be properly deposited.

British Fair Play is a Beautiful Thing

Readers of a certain vintage will recall a previous Labour government's increasingly desperate efforts, in the wake of the Iraq crusade, to preserve the shores of Albion from any influx of erstwhile darkie assistants. The current protectors of the realm have enhanced the Britishness yet further by continuing to refuse resettlement to Afghanis who aided the occupying forces, even after the Ministry for Wog-Bombing considerately made thousands of their identities available to the Taliban. Britain may be a nation of animal lovers, but that doesn't mean our charity extends to collaborators who helped us lose a war: they will just have to go back to their compounds and try to do better next time. Perhaps fairest and most beautiful of all is the fact that, should the next Anglo-Afghan war end otherwise than with the forces of liberation scurrying off in defeat, those natives who share in our glory will not require resettlement from the paradise they have helped to create.

Pax Americana

A major joint military exercise in South Korea has been abruptly and unilaterally terminated, apparently because the Trumpster is concerned about Kim Jong-un's itsy-bitsy feelings. Given their shared idea of what constitutes a democratic republic and the likely mutual affinity between their respective head-tribbles, such sympathy is natural enough; nevertheless, certain elements in South Korea have so far retained their alien Oriental notions of diplomatic protocol as to be miffed at the now customary lack of consultation, courtesy or other conventional allied behaviour. It is to be hoped that the present South Korean government's wish to take a more conciliatory approach to the North, alongside the concurrent American need for matériel to put another ally in its place, may enable the Trumpster and his head-tribble to add the Korean War to the umpty-three or oodly-nine conflicts they have already brought to an end.

Money to Burn

The company which provided the major fire hazard for Grenfell Tower spent thirty-two million of its insurance money compensating victims and survivors, and fifty-five million compensating shareholders for the inconvenience. Fortunately, all but one and a half of those millions were covered, so the actual losses to the company amounted to little more than a lunchtime's worth of boardroom bonuses. No criminal charges have yet been brought over the disaster, and given prevailing attitudes to health and safety, corporate regulation, and landlord control, it seems unlikely that anyone of any consequence has very much to worry about. Nevertheless, it is apparently newsworthy that a company which concealed the facts about a dangerous product in order to protect its profits also cared forty per cent more about its shareholders than it did about its victims.

Spend Don't Mend

New perils are about to befall the American Way, in the form of proposed bipartisan legislation that will impiously and blasphemously seek to countermand the eternal law of built-in obsolescence. Corporate citizens are squealing with righteous indignation at the threat that they may be required to provide their product consumption resources with the equipment and knowledge necessary to repair cars, phones or wheelchairs at, if you please, fair and reasonable terms and costs. Quite aside from the intellectual theft and loss of business motivation should people start using things for longer instead of consigning them to landfill, the risk to the environment might be so severe as to make corporate America play concerned about the environment. In such extreme territory, it is terrifying to think where the matter might end. Imagine the consequences if they the people took it into their heads to make a sagging quarter-millennial constitution fit for purpose, rather than accepting its de facto abolition in favour of the currently imminent imperium of the infoslop.

L'art pour l'art

According to Britain's leading liberal newspaper, Samuel Beckett has hitherto been viewed as a "poet of pure pessimism, interested in despair and stasis but unconcerned by real-life politics;" evidently his work for the French resistance against the Nazis and subsequent receipt of the Croix de Guerre are even more forgivable and forgettable than his Hibernian roots and his occasional lapses into literary Gallicism. Beckett's private diaries of a sojourn in Germany between the autumn of 1936 and the spring of 1937 are now about to be published, and it seems they demonstrate a healthy alertness to the patriotic pride and the legitimate and understandable concerns which were then trumpeting forth in the consolidating Nazi state. Given the obvious irrelevance of such matters at a time like this, the planned English-language edition will concentrate less on the politics and history than on the author's literary development, thereby tactfully ignoring Beckett's deplorable lack of interest in the period from September 1939 until June 1941, when all the most important bits of the Second World War actually took place.

Equipped with Marketable Skills

Several people have been wounded at Virginia State University, in a mass shooting apparently involving more than one perpetrator. It seems that nobody has been killed and that none of the injuries are life-threatening; so presumably it's safe to assume that the incident was yet another tribute to the Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, rather than yet another ICE cleansing of the melting pot. Patriots will no doubt rejoice that the American higher education curriculum still includes survival skills appropriate to a civil war.

It's All Been a Ghastly Mistake

There can be few unluckier men on Earth than the Netanyahoo. His cleansing of Gaza has brought him the inconvenience of mild rebukes from the western powers; his entrepreneurial acumen has brought charges of corruption from the envious; and judging by his latest performance in a morale-boosting interview for the IDF, he may have missed his true métier altogther. Righteously indignant at the British government's ever more lukewarm condoning of his final solution to the Palestinian problem, Bibi referred to "what is called the Islamic republic of Britain," and when the interviewer searchingly asked whether all of Europe wasn't just as bad, Bibi replied that "someone said the first Islamic republic with nuclear weapons will be the Islamic republic of Britain." He even cited Winston Churchill's son, whose book The Six-Day War offered an account of the Righteous State's plucky self-defence against the Arab Untermenschen. Of course the Netanyahoo is perfectly well aware that Britain is not an Islamic republic; although like everyone else he may have some difficulty with the nuances attending the nominally Christian, nominally monarchical, nominally parliamentarian, nominally democratic oligarchical coprocracy that constitutes the United Kingdom. Still, his bandying of the Churchill name (and his reference to the loutish scion rather than the superhuman sire), alongside his skill with unverified quotes and anonymous sources, surely demonstrates that his proper place all this time has been the free, fearless and cantankerous British press.