Manufacturing Hope

Ben Wildsmith

Somewhere between Donald Trump becoming Master of the Universe and Wales losing to Fiji I started to lose my sparkle a little.

Yes, the boiler is acting up, yes, they have erected a wind turbine directly behind my house this week, and no, I’m not strictly wild about forking out £30 for the works Christmas lunch, but nobody said it would be easy…

Does it have to be this hard, though? Is anything improving at all, for anyone? Hope is crucial to the human experience. If deterioration is our only prospect, we can’t cope. It doesn’t take long, either.

It was seven years between the financial crash of 2008 and everything going Trumpy and Brexity. The drip-by-drip torture of austerity sent us all round the twist in short order, grasping at any passing fancy that promised to make it stop.

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America, what are you doing?

But we were supposed to be past all that. The Yanks voted for Biden, we voted for Starmer, we’re sensible again now. Time to calm down and act like grown-ups…America, what are you doing?  NO!!!!!!!!

We told them they mustn’t, didn’t we?

‘Don’t do that, America, we’re tired and emotionally fragile.’

They don’t listen, leaning against jukeboxes, chewing gum in their leather jackets. They do exactly as they please.

And don’t get me started on China! Are we still supposed to believe they didn’t knock up Covid in a lab? That’s perfectly fine, is it? Even if it did originate from a PangolinsULike franchise around the corner from the lab, is that not at least negligence on a scale worth discussing?

No?

Whatever.

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Senedd elections

And Nigel Farage is specifically targeting the Senedd elections as the launchpad for his newly professionalised Reform UK.

Reformed Reform UK is supposed to have branches and a democratic structure. Previously a wholly owned subsidiary of Nigeco Holdings, it will hitherto project the conveniently lucrative values of its founder through democratically appointed Farageistes.

Target number one is Wales, specifically the Valleys where I live. Let joy be unbounded!

Imagine the pub! It’s bad enough now with 20mph obsessives assuming the mantle of freedom fighters: Che Guevara in in a Nissan Qashqai. Once the world’s media descends on Aberdare to determine if the Trumpian wave is global, they’ll be insufferable.

Plus Palestine, plus Ukraine, plus the climate, plus, plus, plus…

It can feel as if we have let civilisation slip through our fingers. There seems to have been something unserious about people in our lifetimes. Even those in high office have lacked gravity, the sense of what might be at stake.

The WWII generation knew that, and it informed the world they created. Growing up with the institutions they made to educate, care for, and inform us, it seemed like the world had changed permanently.

Now, at the dog end of the Boomerverse that was to come, we see right well that their achievements should have been defended with the ferocity that birthed them, not taken for granted or flogged off for a few quid.

Omnipotent

Trump will face no opposition this time. With his party entirely loyal, and majorities in both houses, he’s omnipotent. Most likely, he’ll allow Benjamin Netanyahu and Vladimir Putin to act with commensurate impunity.

As humanity is trucked southwards across the Mexican border in its millions, and women in conservative states are subjugated to religion, we’ll need to decide where we are in all this; what we stand for here.

To maintain hope against this backdrop can feel naïve: as if clinging to a blanket. But we know all this perfidy will fail.

Nobody gets away with the sort of hubris we’re witnessing now. They’ll come a cropper, alright, and the less opposition they have, the quicker they will unravel.

It may be that the grotesque, caricature spectacle of Trump unchecked will reveal misapprehensions endemic to the culture that valued him so highly. His descent will be as loud and ugly as his rise.

What comes after will be a reaction to him, profoundly different. So there, at least, is something.