The weirding

We’re in near election mode in the US, UK and here in Aotearoa New Zealand. Politics is making as much sense as fashioning underpants out of scorpions.

The Orang with the Tan is way ahead as the Republican candidate in the US. He doesn’t even need to show up to debates. Yet, I could make a better President by throwing my voice into some toenail clippings and a Mars bar wrapper. It’s going to be a wild ride for the man named after a fart. Come Christmas he could be back in one of the most powerful positions in the world. Or he could be in stress positions in a cell with Jake “The Snake” from Alabama. 

Trump is apparently one of the finest humans Americans could find in their population of 340 million people. But I know for a fact that Keanu Reeves and Ben Folds are still alive. So I have to assume there is something catastrophically wrong with this system.  

In the UK, Rishi Sunak is abolishing policies that never existed. He's reversing a ‘war on motorists’ that hasn’t happened. Either somebody has spiked his favourite ‘Mexican Coke’ with something festive, or they should do soon. The next UK election isn’t due until January 2025. But Sunak understands leadership about as well as penguins understand the Eurovision Song Contest. The UK has been going through unelected Tory Prime Ministers like they’re bacon-flavoured Cheezles. So it could be any moment now. 

And here in the land of the long, white, supremacy, several parties are campaigning against history. They deny the colonial toll on Māori people. Like taking control of someone else’s country and trying to exterminate their culture is just one of those things. This is despite the fact that the parties concerned are led by people who are Māori. They argue that everyone should be treated equally. So most indigenous people should stay poor and powerless. They’re saying this in English on Pacific islands with no hint of irony. The concept of Stockholm Syndrome must be as much a mystery to them as the library. 

Let's blame the internet. Elon Musk is suggesting we pay for an endless stream of unqualified opinions, ignorance and prejudice. I grew up in Essex pubs. If I’m going to pay for that again I should at least get the occasional pint to wash away the stale taste of racism from my teeth. 

There are a couple of common threads at the moment. One is the rise of ‘populism’ all over the industrialised world. Populism is a genteel word for the kind of proto-fascism that can’t be bothered to even work up an ideology. The other is the greatest flight from reality since Syd Barrett. 

There’s a lot of areas in which this is playing out. Let's take a contentious example. Many industrialised young people are very engaged with what gender they might be. If we believe the Zeitgeist, they're mostly protesting for toilets, slots in the ladies’ 100m hurdles and the right to read children stories. 

This can be baffling to older people like me. But then, when I grew up, many of my friends identified as elves. Nobody made any serious attempt to stop us playing Dungeons & Dragons. Nobody said teachers shouldn’t recommend Tolkien. More worryingly, and less realistically, for a while I even identified as a potential Royal Marine Commando. Jordan Peterson doesn’t question the morality of that sort of thing, even though I was actively planning to kill people. We got surgery, well, tattoos, and took drugs to facilitate these fantasies. Some of my best friends are basically still elves. I ended up an anti-war activist blocking arms expos.

People say there seemed to be less transgender people back then. I agree, that is how it seemed. But then, I went to a predominantly white, all boys secondary school. It also seemed that black people didn’t really exist. Or gay people. Or autistic people. This was despite it being about a 45 minute drive from the vibrant black communities of London. And that quite a few of the people at my school did turn out to be gay after all, once they were far enough away from urinals to avoid being pushed into them. Oh, and there seemed to be quite a few kids with 'special needs'. And I was autistic. So maybe we weren’t entirely paying attention.

The whole toilet issue seems to be one of interior design, not morality. I recall the concept of a ‘cubicle’. Anyone at all can wee there in privacy. It doesn't matter what clothes, genitalia and sexual preferences they have. Even Glastonbury Festival can manage this, occasionally. I’m not seeing the difficulty. 

The sport thing seems plain silly. I don’t play most competitive sports because I am crap at them. I can throw a basketball for hours without any sense at all of how I’d get it through the hoop more often. I might as well be trying to throw chocolate eclairs at the Moon. As an autistic person I also find the most popular sports quite bewildering. Why can’t we get a ball each, so we don’t have to fight over it?

Either a competitive sport works or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t work or it's unsafe, change the rules. Most concerns expressed about trans competitors are about them winning too often. But the same types of people win all the time now, so what’s the actual problem?

Genetic advantage was never an issue when I was trying to rugby tackle monstrous, lightly bearded school boys that were twice my size. Can’t we just accept that some people are better than others at totally arbitrary things? 

We already have paralympics. Let's go for it. Amphetamine-fueled amputees on turbo charged wheels vs the genetically-modified half-cheetah people. That'd be more interesting than people of any gender simply running round in circles. 

Finally, let's address whether it's safe for drag queens to read children stories. There’s more risk driving our children to the library. Paedophiles are far more prevalent among our friends and family. There are very few people who dress as flamboyantly as possible to carry out these crimes. They're Catholic ministers. Or aging children's TV presenters. Maybe a belated guilt response to that is where this nonsense is coming from?

Is your local literary drag queen your Dodgy Uncle Dave? Have they presented Top of the Pops or conducted the Eucharist? If not, you’re probably fine. If you find yourself sharing a loo with Archbishop Rod Hull and Emu then shit yourself. At least you’d be in the right place to do so. 

Worried about your kids being influenced into becoming drag queens? Cast a critical eye over your own dress sense and lifestyle. I’m more concerned that my kids might be influenced into becoming a clinically depressed middle-aged librarian. I wouldn't mind them laughing hysterically on Drag Race. I don't want them living a dreary, solitary existence with an incontinent Cocker Spaniel.   

Maybe all this is happening because almost none of our absurdly individualised identities are working for us anymore. Picking on trans people seems to come from a fear that actually we’re all losing our grip on who we think we are.

We envy the LGBTQ+ community, because they might actually have a community. They have their jolly rainbow flags. Our flags get us killed. Our society bombs children to stay rich. The idea that we can take a moral stance on anything is ridiculous. 

What we’re witnessing is a new generation attempting to redefine its own reality. This is a natural and healthy process. It always undermines the pseudo-certainties that previous generations were clinging to. That’s a good thing too, since those ideas are the ones that look set to destroy the world. 

In short, if it’s too queer, you’re probably just too old. The best contribution white, male, middle-class, middle aged Europeans like me can make may be to shut up and get out of the way.    

But the culture war is a great way for the powerful to distract us from class war. There’s still a family in the UK that demands to be called Your Royal Highness. They include “Prince Andrew, Duke of York KG, GCVO, CD”. He was friends with the convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. The Prince was forced to pay millions to a woman who said Epstein had coerced her into having sex with Andrew when she was 17. The establishment thinks that’s basically okay. 

Boris Johnson identifies as The Right Honourable. There are cannibalistic rats infesting the fatbergs of London with more honour than he. 

Witness what they wear on state occasions. If you’re getting angry about how to address dodgy people in strange outfits, there’s a better place to start. 

In these mean times, any of us with any kind of physical or mental health issues should get help. Me, you, the kids, even the librarians, politicians and princes. 

The problem is the fact that we’re having to fight about all this at all. It's because we find it increasingly difficult to discuss things sensibly. In response, a lot of youngsters are spending their waking hours in virtual worlds. They're not building barricades. They're AI prompting pornographic cats to mew out Rick Astley songs. I’m not seeing anyone blockading Google. Priorities people, priorities.   

The most disturbing thing is the rising surrealism. It is being fueled by politicians, the media and the corporate tech giants. On so many levels we’re no longer even attempting to behave rationally. We've woken in a baffling world, where we’ve forgotten what we’re doing and why. Our civilisation doesn’t need to collapse, it’s already lost its mind down the back of the sofa. 

We can only hope this presages a return to sanity. But it may only come through the revolutions that now look inevitable. My fear is that we might also have to go through a World War before we can move on. We’ll probably still be promoting the circular economy as we pick through the cluster-bombed ruins of Kmart.

Sadly, it looks like it’s going to be global crisis, or war that brings us together. There’s nothing like a good solid threat to society for this. We’ve had our order in with Amazon for one for about 20 years. 

But the omens are not good. The epaulette-wearing weirdness of the 19th century was machine-gunned in World War I. The excesses of the 20s got nuked by the end of World War II. Both led to reforms, but neither swayed us from our unsustainable course. Instead, we accelerated.   

War sobers us up a treat. It also kills a lot of people, injures and brutalises more, and wrecks all our stuff. Oh, and it's extremely environmentally damaging. 

Regardless, you can see people rubbing their hands and preparing for this all over the world. You can smell it on the bushfire breezes. People, especially men, are yearning for release from their peaceful, pointless lives. Something primal within longs for moral certainty, or the kind of mortal struggle that blots out that need. Check out what’s currently on offer on Netflix or in politics if you disagree. 

Sanity is becoming a burning platform. The western world refuses to tax the rich. The poor are goaded into protesting against the sustainability initiatives intended to help them stay alive. 

I have an idea about these particular absurdities. Conspiracy theories have to be as far away from the truth as possible. If they’re even adjacent to reality then sanity might seep in. You have to have conspiracies that can only be thought about in their own terms. Otherwise, people will think about what you’re saying in the context of the objective world, and snap out of it. Of course, it helps if the objective world already looks like the craziest conspiracy of them all. 

Doing the right thing now carries with it the risk of becoming a stranded investment. Like spending hours typing an obscure blog to a handful of people, while the most popular thing on a screen is Mr Beast blowing up cars full of money.

We don’t have many good options left. We must navigate through this madness while loving as many people as we can stand.