Aftermath

Awful weather here this afternoon; yet another named-storm remnant from across the Atlantic: further sign still of the damage we have done to the climate of our planet over the generations. Simon Kuper was reflecting in his column in this weekend's Financial Times that after all the immediate stuff that the current generation of youth are having to face: Covid, Brexit, etc., are sorted one way or the other; they will still eventually be facing up to the ultimate challenge that is the unfortunate legacy of industrial revolutions, corporate capitalism and unregulated growth: climate change.

Our rapidly changing weather patterns seem to bear out that gloomy prospect. Kuper's piece focusses on those 'named' generations post Second World War; boomers, X-ers, etc.; framing his discourse within the disparate experiences, opportunities and problems afforded to each. His take is that we shifted from a politics of dealing with existential threat to a 'cult of personality' politics sometime around 2015.

Some would argue that the drift towards political celebrity started a lot further back than that; the Americans in particular objectifying past Presidents in the service of the mythology of the American Dream and personality cults are well known throughout the world and are a fixture of 'modern' politics in many countries, although not usually considered normal in the 'First World' or 'The North'. The paradigm shift into the parallel universe that has been the last four years suggests that the normalised process of historicist idealisation of politicians and the 'great & the good' of the past in 'The First World' had recently mutated suddenly into a blind idolatry of the emerging 'personalities' of the present. 

Rewind to the beginning of our personal descent [reflected across the world] into Alice's rabbit hole and we find the Leave Campaign's special advisors worming their way into the crevices of Number Ten's workings. Taking on the established political/bureaucratic ethos was as it turned out ironically, exactly what motivated Dominic Cummings et al, to embark on their project of political disruption. Cummings was known not to like many, if any, of the politicians he worked with; hated bureaucrats and aimed ultimately to decimate the Civil Service. His strengths lie in his ability to stand aside from and abstract out the issues germane to the situation at hand. That he can organise a campaign effectively is evidenced only too well by the successes afforded to a government that would struggle on its own to organise a jumble sale.

His subsequent, highly publicised problems started when he allowed himself egotistically and probably contrary to his former best instincts [intellectual vulnerability comes to us all as we age], to become part of the news himself. In trying to become one of the cast of characters he had created and to stand centre stage with the leading actors, sharing; or rather attempting to hog, the limelight, he thrust his head well above the parapet and he and the rest of the cabal became sitting ducks: and since the US election and its mind-boggling aftermath, the game seems to have shifted radically away from Cummings' brand of personality politics, which now seems to be likely to get dumped along with all the other worn out props into the skip at the back of the theatre.

I've no doubt that like any other seriously well connected individual, he'll continue to rake in a decent income playing exactly the sort of games he professes so much to hate; his ilk always do: the job's merely a game, a highly paid intellectual exercise. Fortunately for him, he won't be one of the very many facing a winter of poverty and an uncertain future due to the failure of his big ideas and the Theatre of the Absurd that politics has recently turned into; but then I don't suppose any of this will cross his mind for a single moment this Christmas. Happy holidays, Classic Dom...

Postscript: Kuper rounds his piece out with the even more sobering fact that the nuclear Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists now stands at one hundred seconds to midnight; the closest to Armageddon we've been since its inception in 1947. The cult of the personality has edged us even further towards global disaster. Let's hope that the changes that appear to be happening currently are real and that we can start to navigate our way to a safer future.