Wednesday 30 September 2020

Current and Prospective Nightmares.

Shall I make a valiant effort to describe today’s nightmare in detail? No? Oh good. It isn’t easy to describe the individual characteristics of every creature in a can of wriggling worms. Suffice it to say that it involved the changing of mobile phone supplier, and Virgin Media was the nightmare factory as usual. I’m changing to Plusnet. Their customer service procedures, along with their service operatives and technicians, are excellent.

This is how the days are at the moment, alas. I still have disturbing dreams at night, but they’re nothing compared with the nightmares which keep landing on my head during the daylight hours. Most days my head spends so much time swimming that it’s forgetting how to stay afloat, and the evenings are ever wan and weary. It explains why I feel scared, or at least reluctant, to get up every morning.

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But enough of that. Let’s talk about Trump for a change. The BBC’s American correspondent described last night’s debate in Ohio as ‘chaotic.’ Well of course it was. Trump was involved, and it pleased me just a little to read that everything happened more or less exactly as I thought it would.

But at least Donald did manage to emphasise his right wing credentials, and that’s the worry. If Americans were to put him back into the White House in November, the occasional whiff of Fascism which seeps out of his Twitter account would become a full blown unwholesome smell. America would be establishing itself as a near-Fascist state run by a Fascist-minded President put there by a Fascist-minded population. In that case, I hope that we in Europe would be able to maintain as much distance as possible from the Land of the Free.

The second worry is that, no matter who wins in November, there will be a lot of ill feeling going around in consequence. The body of America is in danger of becoming a diseased mass of pustules ready to burst, and it wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest to see a few litres of blood being spilt on the streets of American cities in the aftermath. That’s Trump’s legacy, and I hope I’m wrong.

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