Alice in America.

There’s something real and yet surreal going on in the USA at the moment. It has a distinctly Lewis Caroll feel about it.

First there was the man thrown into prison for writing something critical of Israeli policy on social media. Then there was the college professor sacked and deported for taking part in a pro-Palestinian rally. And then along comes Mr Bannon bemoaning the fact that the new Pope might be American, but critically is not America First. Why would anybody think that he should be? The Pope is the spiritual leader of the world’s Catholics, not America’s altar boy. (It’s hard to know with Bannon whether he’s a complete imbecile, or whether he’s sufficiently au fait with the culture to realise that 43% of Americans really are complete imbeciles and he can get away with acting like them.)

But we haven’t come to the best one yet, and this is the important one: Trump’s entourage are seriously – or so it is said – considering suspending habeas corpus. If there’s one thing giving rise to the serious suspicion that the USA, the ‘leader of the free world’ (and for ‘free world’ read ‘democratic world’), is sliding or being pushed into fascism, it’s this. Habeas corpus is a major part of the foundation of any democracy. It has to be, otherwise you might as well be living in 1930s Germany, and look where that led.

Personally, I think one of two things needs to happen. Either the bulk of Americans needs to rise up to remove Trump and his donkeys from their positions of power, or the rest of the world – especially Europe – should find a way to turn its back on the USA.

Neither is likely to happen, of course. Big capitalism has ingratiated itself too far into the American psyche. I’m quite sure that the lure of trinkets and baubles, devices and lifestyle accessories has long since killed off the spirit of 1776. Nobody with an outdoor swimming pool, four cars in the driveway, and a plethora of electronic devices with which to bitch, insult, or praise effusively is going to want to occupy the barricades. (Ironically, the only ones likely to do that are the hardcore Trump supporters. That’s part of why the whole thing is surreal.)

As for the second part, that’s also not going to happen because it would mean reordering the whole system of world economics. America is too big a player to simply shut it out, much as we would like to.

And so I suppose all we can do is wait and see. Sometimes I like the idea of a cataclysmic nuclear war coming along to kill off most of the human population, and then maybe we could start again and make a better job of it next time. But it’s easy for someone like me to say at my end of life. What about my daughter and her kids? What about the Lady B and hers? What about all the young and middle aged adults and the millions of babies being born every day?

And so we wait. And, as usual, maybe I’m wrong.