Thoughts on War and Fascism

I weep for what's going on in the world. 2025, and it feels like we're all descending into Hell. I was watching the David Bowie documentary Cracked Actor the other day, and it feels like he summed it up better than I ever could: "this isn't rock n' roll, this is genocide". His obsessions in the seventies are what we're living through right now. Only instead of the "European Canon", as explained in "Station to Station", it's America and the monster in the White House. I don't demonise Trump. He is, in some ways, a tragic figure. Petulant and child-like, not emotionally grown thanks to an abusive father and wealth which excused intelligence. He has come up against real cold-blooded vipers like Putin and Netanyahu, both of whom bald and with silvery hair are eel-like in appearance. Trump himself, this bloated orange jelly, is no looker. Then again, just as the two other leaders I mentioned were shaped by their own history, Trump with his robust figure and tan is surely a product of America's plenty.

The War in the Middle East is so horrible and unspeakable, it will have a negative impact upon generations. The endless, deliberate killing of children. That these children are born, quite literally, just to die, is one of the most horrifying facts of our century. Once, it was thought tasteless to watch a child die on screen, now it feels like a naïve lie if they survive when so many children are slaughtered in real life.

I must admit I gave Israel the benefit of the doubt to start with. But Netanyahu's bloodlust knows no bounds. He is quite literally pushing the envelope of international law, to see just what he can get away with. Same with Putin. And I must admit, the same with Trump.

We live in frightening times, friends. Oddly, this summer with its extreme heat in the UK feels both like the end times and the beginning times. That primodial period where the world was just desert. Last year, I was lucky enough to visit the Hollywood Bowl is L.A. (a city now being brutalised) and as the sun went down, I felt like Los Angeles was a place with its desert and its burning sun that had the beauty of an unvarnished world.

In some ways, the end is the beginning. I think T.S. Eliot said that. Make of that what you will but this feels like a time beyond conventional understanding of history. Not so much a land before time but a land outside time. A land outside meaning and convention.