The Countdown Begins...

I was hoping to hit the ground running after our mini-break in the blue-remembered hills of Shropshire [I've always felt it somewhat strange and a little sad that A. E. Housman never actually lived or indeed spent much time at all in the County so feted by the poet in "A Shropshire Lad"], but the sight of Elon Musk wielding an enormous, bright red chainsaw in drumming up the mob's affirmation for his 'efficiency' drive has left me feeling kind of queasy and rather unbuckled me from what I imagined was actually the world I live in.

This kind of stunt is what normally gets youthful protesters bad press - cf any number of environmental protesters locked up for 'stupid' stunts - but Musk is fifty-three-years-old, ferchrissakes, and the richest man in the world. And yet he still acts like a juvenile finding its feet in its strange new world of adolescence: a man-child who also takes horse tranquilliser on a regular basis. Classy. Maybe that goes some way to explain his tenuous grip on the reality of the world outside of his billionaire bubble. Just what the world needs right now, eh? A drug-deranged psychopath with his hands on the reins of the government of the most powerful nation on Earth.

At the helm of this chaos is of course President [how??] Trump, whose own mental anchorage to the shores of the real is constantly in danger of breaking loose completely. But in the interim between the now and the inevitable when of his descent into complete personality breakdown - whereupon one would hope that external forces would intervene and gently guide him to a padded cell for all our sakes - he holds the world's fate in his tiny, gesturing hands. All I can say is God help us all: geopolitically, the world is now back where it was over sixty years ago. My estimation is that we are at DEFCON 3 right about now...