You Actually Think You're 'Saving Democracy'?

The Guardian puzzles over US politics again...

Try as we might, we could not close the deal at every door. I still think regularly about a Bucks County man I met in the fall of 2024 who told me that he could not imagine his state supporting Donald Trump, but he refused to cast a vote for Kamala Harris. I wish I had done more to convince him to hold strong for democracy.

He was 'holding strong for democracy', though - he just wasn't prepared to listen to some stranger who wanted him to change his vote. 

Does the door-to-door approach still work when Republicans are successfully using digital strategies that seem to bypass the doorbell entirely? Free votes is a cornerstone of democracy.

It's a credit to the political situation that you are allowed to canvass, but it's pointless crying 'foul!' when people use technology to avoid you... 

Those questions feel valid, particularly in a country where so many have fallen prey to the lures of Trumpian authoritarianism.

Of course, they’ve been ‘lured’, it can’t possibly be because they weighed up the alternative and found it wanting… 

For those of us who have been feeling unmoored by the state of the country and the future of US democracy, those doors are where our ideals meet unforgiving reality. If we want to build a better future, we will have to do it right here, surrounded by unfriendly dogs and intrusive Ring doorbell cameras.

The only legitimate  reason to own a pitbull, to keep people like this away!

Well, That's A Turn-up For The Books..!

Bloody misogynist right-wingers, denying a feminist shibboleth like th...Oh hang on, 'Guardian' letters page? Really?

I write about the recent coverage of the Fordingbridge case (Court of appeal to review rape sentences of three teenage boys, 26 May). I experienced a remarkably similar crime over 20 years ago: same number and age of perpetrators, same incident, same court outcome.

Still, I’m worried by some of the discourse for the girls in question and others who have experienced similar. There have been comments in print and social media which, in attempting to emphasise the severity of the crime, have said things like “their lives are ruined” or “they’ll never heal”.

Yes, that’s been the case for some time, why, when the perpetrators are from an identity group, do you want this not to be the case? 

Now, on the one hand, the impact on my life can hardly be overstated. I’ve struggled to make healthy decisions for myself, had a number of harmful coping mechanisms, and spent many years either feeling numb or creating or fabricating problems in the present because, surely, the pain I’m feeling can’t still be a result of what happened. I’ve allowed people to treat me very poorly and struggled to see it, subconsciously modelling a template that had been set.However, to say that my life is ruined? Hardly. I have many wonderful friendships, a successful career in a field I’m passionate about and I’ve travelled the world.

The girls in the Fordingbridge case – and others in a similar situation – are going to need a lot of support, time and space to feel a lot of things (I would advise them to seek out places and people that provide these, and to give time and space to themselves too), but I hope they can know that there is hope for the lives ahead of them.

Its a measure, I suspect, of how cynical I’ve become, that I firmly believe that we’re the perpetrators of this crime white men of Christian Anglo Saxon heritage, not only would we not be seeing members of the lanyard classes writing in to the ‘Guardian’ about it in this fashion, they wouldn’t be published if they did!

Well, Don’t Buy Them Then!

It's a Christmas miracle, the 'Guardian' finding a drag artist to whinge about something other than how people are so mean to men in womanface:

It’s lovely going out for dinner in London. It’s a gastro capital with cuisines from all around the world. One night, Indian, French the next, Peruvian, Ethiopian. You can travel the globe without leaving Hackney.

And since we now have the recipes, do we really need the people as well? 

But one pernicious dining trend that refuses to go away and which I detest is “small plates”. My heart sinks and I become inwardly furious when I sit down and the waiter asks: “Have you been here before?” “No, it’s our first time.” “Well, we do ‘small plates’ and we suggest you order between three and 20 per person.”

A suggestion. Simply that. You're free to ignore it.  

People think I’m a hipster, being an east London drag queen, but I’ve got nothing on the purveyors of “caulifower bites”. Suddenly you’re handing out a tenner here, a tenner there, for tiny saucers of pomegranate seeds, things sprinkled in petals and a random blow-torched lettuce leaf. Just give me a bloody dinner!

Just bloody order one - or go to a restaurant that doesn't do the small plate thing. There's plenty, even in Hackney.

I’m 53. I grew up in Kent in the 1970s in a perfectly normal working-class, borderline lower-middle-class household, the kind so wonderfully explored in Mike Leigh movies. It was the kind of home where the food was dished from the pan on to the plate. And then the whole plate was plopped in front of you and you were told to eat it all up – or you couldn’t go and watch Grange Hill.

And look how you turned out, despite that upbringing... 

In small-plates hell, you end up trying to reconstruct a normal meal and paying twice the price for it. Death to small plates – that’s the hill I will die on. Unless you’re in Spain, of course; I love a spot of tapas, but that’s different.

Really? I fail to see how, unless you simply revere anything foreign over your heritage.  

Don't Forget The Batteries This Christmas...

 It's that time of year...when the 'Guardian' starts to publish lists of gift suggestions that no-one in their right mind would give anyone. This one in particular caught my eye for all the wrong reasons...

'Vegan'!! Are you too wondering if the 'Guardian folk' are a little confused about which orifice this thing is designed for, Reader? 

'Humankind Cannot Bear Very Much Reality'

Gaby Hinsliff is a case in point:

A few days ago I was in Aldi, making the usual small talk at the checkout (Ed: a sign the rest is bullshit. Who has time for small talk with the speed demons on German supermarket checkouts?). When the cashier said she was exhausted from working extra shifts to make some money for Christmas, the man behind me chipped in that it would be worse once “she takes all our money” (in case Rachel Reeves was wondering, her budget pitch-rolling is definitely cutting through). 

Stick with me, Reader, it gets even more unbelievable....

Routine enough, if he hadn’t gone on to add that she and the rest of the government needed taking out, and that there were plenty of ex-military men around who should know what to do, before continuing in more graphic fashion until the queue fell quiet and feet began shuffling. But the strangest thing was that he said it all quite calmly, as if political assassination was just another acceptable subject for casual conversation with strangers, such as football or how long the roadworks have gone on. It wasn’t until later that it clicked: this was a Facebook conversation come to life. He was saying out loud, and in public, the kind of thing people say casually all the time on the internet, apparently without recognising that in the real world it’s still shocking – at least for now.

To whom is it 'shocking'? Not to me, and probably not to anyone reading this. Secure in her 'Guardian' bubble, Gaby probably only hears support for the shower of shite in the HoC, but out on the streets and in pubs and offices and bus queues all over the UK, it's quite normal. 

I thought about him when the health secretary, Wes Streeting, voiced alarm this week that it was becoming “socially acceptable to be racist” again, with ethnic minority NHS staff fighting a demoralising tide of things people now apparently feel emboldened to say to them.

Streeting mentions a patient saying he only wanted to be treated by white staff, which he cites as racism, despite the fact I don't recall him having such qualms over Diane Abbot's whinge about 'blonde, blue eyed Scandinavian nurses.

You can feel it at bus stops, where polite inquiries about why the 44 doesn’t stop here any more end up wheeling off at sudden wild tangents about chemtrails or the government spying on you; or in casual school-gate chats, where otherwise perfectly ordinary-seeming parents turn out to have some very odd ideas about vaccines.

After the Covid fiasco. it'd be surprising if they didn't!  

A friend calls it “sauna politics”, after the surreally conspiracy-laden conversations she overhears in her local leisure centre sauna. But whatever you want to call it, it’s as if people are suddenly voicing their interior monologues – things that until recently they’d have been embarrassed to say in public, or sometimes even to admit to themselves that they thought – out loud. After all, they can say this stuff online and nobody bats an eyelid. Why not in a hospital waiting room?

A hospital waiting room is the most likely place you'll hear it, as the parlous state of the NHS becomes fully apparent, even to those who fondly believd in 'the wonder of the world'. 

Middle-aged radicalisation sounds almost like a contradiction in terms, a reaction to all the stereotypes about settling comfortably into your rut. Besides, in our own heads, if nowhere else, gen X were always the mild-mannered peacekeepers of the culture wars: not old enough to be deemed reactionary or young enough to be woke, and instead occupying a kind of cheerfully moderate Goldilocks zone in-between. But something seems to have happened to us as we hit the midlife crisis years.

The Royal 'Us', Gaby? I thought you were above such things?  

It’s gen Xers, not grumpy pensioners or teenage boys beguiled by rightwing influencers, who are powering the populist insurgency now.

Well, Gaby, sometimes it's grumpy pensioners too... 

Don’t Listen To The Misanthropes

It is cheap, often poorly made, and usually ends up in the bin or buried among the other knick-knacks, takeaway menus and birthday candles in the kitchen drawer. Known as “fast-tech”, these low-cost electronics are increasingly common – from mini-fans and electric toothbrushes, to portable chargers and LED toilet seats, often bought for just a few pounds online.

Yees, Reader, the misantropes at the 'Guardian' are at it again - how very dare you get a moment's pleasure from something they don't think you should have? 

But behind the bargain price is a growing problem: many of these items are difficult to repair, not recycled and quickly discarded. Electronic waste is one of the world’s fastest-growing waste streams, and experts say fast tech is playing an increasingly significant role.

Oh. 'experts'. Well. they are never wrong, I suppose? 

In the UK, it is estimated that more than 1.14bn of these small electronic gadgets (including vapes) are bought a year and about half (589m) are disposed of in that same time, which is equivalent to 19 a second, according to Material Focus, the organisation behind the Recycle Your Electricals campaign.

“We’ve had fast food, we’ve had fast fashion, and we’re now in the age of fast tech,” says Scott Butler, the executive director of Material Focus. “We’re not moralist against technology, but what we are concerned about is the volume of low-quality, cheap, flimsy products that are flooding the market, which end up binned or unused.”

Not moralist? Methinks he doth protest too much... 

Butler highlights “fad” fast tech as a key issue – cheap items that are bought at certain times of year or for particular occasions, such as mini-fans as the UK warms up or light-up Christmas jumpers. About 7.1m mini-fans were bought in the UK last year and more than 3.5m have already been discarded or forgotten in drawers in that same period.

*glances at cute, useful minifan standing on computer desk* From my cold, dead hands, Butler! 

Laura Young, an environmental scientist and campaigner, says fast tech represents a new kind of environmental threat – not just because of the potentially toxic chemicals many contain, but because of the sheer volume and disposability.

These people won't be content until the entite population lives in tiny grey identical boxes, owning nothing, eating and drinking only what the 'experts' say is good for us. 

So, There’s One Invader The Left Want Rid Of and Of Course, It Isn’t A Foreign One…

Deserts are spreading across great tracts of Britain, yet few people seem to have noticed, and fewer still appear to care. It is one of those astonishing situations I keep encountering: in which vast, systemic problems – in this case, I believe, covering thousands of square kilometres – hide in plain sight.

Really? 

I realise that many people, on reading that first sentence, will suspect I’ve finally flipped. Where, pray, are those rolling sand dunes or sere stony wastes? But there are many kinds of desert, and not all of them are dry. In fact, those spreading across Britain are clustered in the wettest places. Yet they harbour fewer species than some dry deserts do, and are just as hostile to humans. Another useful term is terrestrial dead zones.

A bit like the 'Guardian' break room, then?

What I’m talking about are the places now dominated by a single plant species, called Molinia caerulea or purple moor-grass. Over the past 50 years, it has swarmed across vast upland areas: in much of Wales, on Dartmoor, Exmoor, in the Pennines, Peak District, North York Moors, Yorkshire Dales and many parts of Scotland. Molinia wastes are dismal places, grey-brown for much of the year, in which only the wind moves. As I know from bitter experience, you can explore them all day and see scarcely a bird or even an insect.Not that you would wish to walk there. The grass forms high tussocks through which it is almost impossible to push.

Molinia challenges the definition of an invasive species. The term is supposed to refer only to non-native organisms. But while it has always been part of our upland flora, it appears to have spread further and faster than any introduced plant in the UK, and with greater ecological consequences.

Such as? Well, it’s hard to believe that it’s a dead zone entirely, as George claims, but then he is prone to exaggeration. Are there no remedies, aside from manual eradication? It seems there are:

Rewetting the land, by blocking drains and building bunds and perhaps, as one team is attempting, planting clumps of sphagnum moss among the grass, in order to restore the peat, seems to be the only means of reviving blanket mire. It also makes the land less prone to fire.

You know, don’t you, Reader, that there’s a ‘but’coming? 

But anyone who wants to rewild upland ecosystems hits a wall of vested interests – mostly sheep farmers and grouse moor owners – who, like the commercial fishing sector, insist on doing the wrong thing until it destroys their own industry.

How handy that George can make one of his sworn enemies - people who enjoy a sport he detests - a culprit in this, his latest attempt to sow panic. 

It Seems A Really Easy ‘Fight’ To Win, To Me…

I am uneasily aware that around this time last year I wrote that my drive to acquire material things had somewhat subsided: I was older and wiser, had everything I needed, was repelled by the sheer volume of stuff in the world, blah blah blah. Unfortunately, the internet seemingly viewed that as fighting talk, an impossible-to-turn-down challenge, and in recent months I have once more found myself wanting stuff. Lots of stuff.

I suppose you've not considered putting the phone or tablet down?

It’s not surprising perhaps – stuff is everywhere, whispering, or shouting, to us from every screen we stare at. “The constant stream of ads on Instagram is exhausting,” said my best friend gloomily just last week, and she’s right: my eyes are constantly assaulted with offers of miracle goop for my mature skin, wellness gadgetry, expensive knitwear and greenwashed “disruptors” of almost everything. I just spent a minute scrolling and was offered, in quick succession, a “calfPRO” (no idea, alarming), kombucha, cleanser, an eco frying pan, “reminiscent of Phoebe Philo-era Celine” jumpers and, bafflingly, Canadian sea urchins.

That seems a rather odd selection of targeted ads. 

In this newly lawless age for social media there are bigger problems than the relentless onslaught of targeted ads, but in addition to the urgent upskilling in critical reading the world needs, we need to work out how to fight back against all the stuff the internet wants us to buy.

I already have - ignore them and scroll past.  

I’ve been trying to deinfluence myself in recent weeks and it’s quite the battle – I am weak-willed and made stupider by the minute by internet nonsense, and the algorithm is tireless. But I have a secret weapon: I know my craven, ridiculous desires intimately, which helps me shout them down. Now when tempted, that’s exactly what I do.

There! Wasn't so hard after all, was it? 

She Sounds Like She’s Making Some Pretty Good Points, John

Sooner or later, someone is going to have to call a halt to Liz Truss’s public appearances. Not for our benefit, but for hers. We’ve nearly reached the point where we’ve tipped over into the Theatre of Cruelty. A freak show where audiences turn up just to see what mad thing she says next.

So, what sort of 'mad things', John?

She believes all that went wrong is that we didn’t get enough of her. Elle ne regrette rien. Her confusion is total. She was brought down by the establishment; unaware that she once was at the centre of that establishment as prime minister. Others were to blame for her ignorance. Britain was in the clutch of a socialist cabal led by the Tories and Labour establishment. Wokery was bringing down the west.

Seems pretty sane to me. Maybe you're the one who is delusional? 

"But I am undoubtedly overthinking this."

The selection process for these punters is still a mystery, but they are clearly a far cry from a random assortment. Everyone has a good story to tell or a revelatory taste in music. The Instagram-ready young blonde Brooke turns out to be a law student who loves classical music and plays Poulenc’s Novelette in E Minor, though narratively speaking she is beaten by Ellis, a boxer from a rough council estate (“high crime rate but we’ve got a Costa, so it’s all good,” he says, deadpan) whose mother saved up to buy him a keyboard from Argos when he was four. There was no money for lessons so he learned through council-funded schemes and his own hard work. He plays Chopin’s lyrical, lovely Ballade No 4 and takes everyone’s breath away. “Do you think he’s aware of how difficult this piece really is?” says Mika. Is that an odd thing to say? I feel it’s an odd thing to say – as if anyone from a council estate who can play such a piece must be a kind of idiot savant rather than a true musician.

It's a nice feelgood show about music talent so yes, you are overthinking this. But you wouldn't be a 'Guardian' columnist if you couldn't somehow manage to shoehorn your political viewpoint into absolutely anything you're given, would you?  

Look, an old man can still play! Look, a nine-year-old who seems to be on the autistic spectrum can play with emotion! There is an unspoken agreement that it is as amazing Amy has pink hair and still likes Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata as that she is self-taught, via tutorials on the internet.

*sighs*