Mooing in defiance

Trump got elected. It’s not hugely surprising. Poor people responded to their unhappy situation by voting in a man who plans to cut taxes for the rich. Uneducated people voted for a guy who will make it far, far harder for the average child to get decent schooling without parents who rob banks. It turns out people are stupid. Shocker.

A couple of years ago I probably would have been spitting feathers about it all. But there’s no rage for politics left in me. All that’s left now is to laugh.

This truly is the crowning glory of human achievement – the setting up of a system so confusing to the layman that they willingly truss their own hooves and leap onto the cart to the abattoir, mooing in defiance at the man with the bolt gun. If you can’t laugh at that you must be a Mrs Brown’s Boys fan.

I predicted some months back that Britain would vote to leave the EU and Trump would end up president, and that both would be hilarious. I also predicted that Boris Johnson would end up Prime Minister, but if anything his stunning move to Foreign Secretary has proven even more side-splitting. I know I’m prone to the occasional “You’ve brought it on yourselves”, but come on, you’re making it too easy now.

After all that, it’s a curious position I now find myself in, having raged at international-sized events for 20 years or more. Sure, my rage will return. But it’ll be rage at the small things in life.

Cats, for example. Cats can fuck off. A cat bit me a couple of days ago and it took all my mental strength not to shoe it off the nearby balcony onto the curiously round helmet of a man driving by on what sounded like a lawnmower. They are devious, pea-brained mini-Satans who would eat you without a thought in a fucking heartbeat if you were small enough, and if you think cats are clever, you are not.

Or flash photography. I promise we don’t need to be told before every news report that it will contain flash photography. Every fucker on earth has a camera that they use to photograph everything from their cock to their dinner. If epileptics still have a problem with flash photography the poor bastards wouldn’t so much as peak above the blanket, let alone watch TV.

Or writing. Trying to be someone who can write and be read is hard. If you’ve got this far you can probably tell. Lately I read ‘The Legend of the Holy Drinker’, by Joseph Roth. A literary classic. A dull, badly written classic that I could have shamefacedly wiped off myself at 3am after a dream about the barmaid. Perhaps that book exists to give us all hope, because if that can be a classic, and that woman’s still churning out Potter, someone will one day pay me to scream obscenity at easy targets, right? Right?

Or Hitler. Isn’t it time he got a break? Every time something bad happens it gets compared to Hitler. But consider this: if Hitler hadn’t been such a monumental disaster as leader of the Third Reich, they would have won, he’d have ambled to retirement and we’d all have ended up ruled by some even more evil motherfucker, like Goebbles. By badmouthing Hitler, you’re basically saying you want Goebbles to rule the world. What the fuck is wrong with you?

Or dragging out grief. Epitomised by seven English people vomiting off a boat in the Mediterranean, out there to tip dead man’s ash into the water, oblivious to the hundreds of bobbing Libyan heads the other side of Sicily. The noise the empty metal urn made as it rolled from side to side on the deck shouldn’t have made me laugh, I know that, but I’d clutch at anything to avoid the sorrowful looks and retching sounds all around me as I felt nothing, nothing at all.

Or gnats. What in the name of all the suffering saints are gnats for? I’ve taken to cultivating spiders in every corner of every room in the house, but what do gnats do? Oh, there’s a man’s face, let’s fly straight at that.

Or smoking. I’m as quietly pleased with smoking being banned in public places as the next man. But reducing the maximum number of fags allowed in a packet, massively increasing the cost and even putting pictures of destroyed lungs and teeth like roof tiles on the carton? Should we consider that, given it’s still legal to smoke, we might not want to treat the people who do it as worse than all the Jimmys, Stuarts and Rolfs in the world combined?

Or people who don’t get their round in. Or Woody Grill. Or men who do their top button up. Or the creeping extinction of the proper landlord. Or ‘like’.

Or people who are late. Most of all, people who are late. For every minute you are late to meet me, at the time we’ve agreed, I will stamp on the foot of a pensioner. Really fucking hard, mind, no “Ow me toe!” – proper amputation job and “Honestly Mr Baker, now you’re here we might as well put an end to it.” Every weeping grandchild will be your fault because you figured a few minutes wouldn’t hurt, then you checked Facebook, then missed a train, then it took longer than you thought to walk 200 metres, then you checked Twitter, then you had the fucking cheek to pull that face at me when you realised I’d been nursing the last dregs of a pint for the past half hour you selfish cunt.

You see, it doesn’t take long to get the juices of rage flowing once again. If you’re one of those people who thinks we’re all about to die at the hands of our smirking blonde chum with the tiny mouth, it’s worth considering that there are many, many things killing you bit-by-bit every day. What good does it do you to fret about rich men playing games as they always have, when there’s a gnat arrowing its way at your eye?

Politics isn’t actually real life. Real life is, for example, homelessness. Real life is knowing that you have nowhere to sleep indoors that night, and knowing that no politician in the western world – not Trump, not May, not even Obama – has the will or motivation to do a damn thing about it. Real life is people who say “You shouldn’t give them money, they’ll only spend it on drugs”. Yes, they might. I would. Wouldn’t you?

Don’t worry about Trump. Don’t worry about the big things. Don’t even worry about the small things. Worry about the tiny things that infuriate you far more than they should, like David Gandy. He’s a man on an advert for Wellman, vitamins and energy supplements and things you stick up your arse to provide vim and vigour. ‘Vitabiotics’. There’s a picture of this guy on the tube, looking semi-serious, head resting on fist. David fucking Gandy, it says. Who?

King John ruled England and the place is still there. A few months back I saw a statue of Ivan the Terrible, now a tourist attraction, despite the number of people forced to sit on his pointy sticks back in the day. It might not seem like it right now, but Zimbabwe will somehow survive Super Bob.

Trump is 70. He gets eight years at the absolute most. Let’s just let the steaming thundertwat get on with whatever outrageous nonsense he wants, while we get on with real life. I’ll meet you back here when he’s done.

Don’t be late.

2 thoughts on “Mooing in defiance

  1. Agreed.
    And being Scottish, having enduring the Referendum result as well as Brexit, Trump and football, I’m way ahead of you mate.
    Keep up the good work etc etc

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