The Gist: A Confederacy of Dunces

What is most galling about it all is the level of cliche and hackwork. There's a genuinely evil dictator running Russia and he's invaded a European country. There's a high-stakes election in the US for president. There is a cartoonishly terrible candidate, who wins against a black woman hobbled by association with a disastrous Middle East policy. And there's also a tech villain who owns a media outlet.

This is exactly the kind of regurgitative cinematic universe slop everyone expects now that Amazon has bought the Bond franchise. It is more upsetting to discover we're stuck inside it as reality.

The last fortnight has seen the upending of the post-WW2 order. We haven't seen more than just the first beginnings of the consequences, but they will probably play out for the rest of the lives of everyone reading this. Some decades nothing happens, and some weeks decades happen. This has been a month of those weeks.

Axis to Grind

The US has switched sides from Europe to Russia. That was the plan. And that is what has happened. The Trump regime did not do this because it didn't have a good meeting with the president of Ukraine. Nor did it start crippling Ukraine's defence systems against Russian missile attacks because of a personality clash.

The consequences of this are so large it is difficult to absorb them all.

The key reasons do seem clear, however. The US Republican party led by Trump is now an anti-democratic movement. It is committed to the promotion of authoritarianism at home and abroad, in a simliar way that US administrations of previous decades were committed to "anti-communism" as the guiding force of their whole foreign policy.

And, just as in the "anti-communist" age, this new authoritarian US is happy to align itself with other powers who share its primary goal. It's taken a few decades, but we finally have an actual Axis of Evil in the world.

The fact that it is also insultingly stupid just makes it worse.

Europe, the continent, not just the EU, is trying to come to terms with this reversal of 80 year old currents. It is as though you walked out of your house and found your concrete driveway was now made of quicksand. Lethally unwanted, yes, but also just disorientating.

Airplanes will have to be redesigned. Satellites will need to be launched to replace the inevitable Starlink betrayal. Horrible sums of money will be diverted from productive or humane uses into building, not just arms, but an entire European heavy industry of re-armament.

All while the world is already awaiting delivery of the geopolitical instability it ordered back in the 1970s when it decided dealing with climate change seemed like kinda a pain. Those problems are now "Out with Courier" and will be arriving tomorrow and every day thereafter.

Is there anything to be said for another bowl of Shamrock?

Ireland's place in this maelstrom has barely been discussed. The longstanding hardware enthusiast's position of advocating to join NATO is a dead letter. Joining NATO after a US heel turn would be like trying to rejoin the UK, after Brexit. A bad idea to start with, rendered absurd.

But we don't know what the next week might bring, let alone the next four years.

So we send the Taoiseach to the Oval Office to deliver our annual shamrock, basking in the toxic glow of Trump's declaration of Irish-American Heritage month. "Signing the proclamation, the president said the Irish were "great people", adding: "They voted for me in heavy numbers so I like them even more."

Talk about taking shots from a drive-by.

But go the Taoiseach must, or he breaks the annual chain of invitations, attention and favours for Europe's most glic gaels. A cancellation would see future invites collapse into depending on which faction held the White House.

But trips to the White House now carry risks where once there were only rewards. The dragon's voice may sound civilised enough as it invites you in, but it sits coiled on a bed of gold and will burn the world to grow its hoard.

Struck, Dumb

But despair is not the right response. The future is not written, let alone set in stone. Remember, none of these people are particularly intelligent. Low cunning only gets you so far, when you find yourself wandering out of your own weird petri-dish environment and start trying to guage your abilities in the real world. We should remember that in 2019, one in eight US men believed they could get a point in a tennis game against Serena Williams. And in 2021 nearly 10% of them believed they could defeat an elephant in a fist fight.

In a similar vein, evident enthusiastic elephant pummeller JD Vance thought he could out-alpha Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the world would be persuaded through the force of his manliness. Instead, the Very Online VP earned himself the ultimate online disgrace- a dismantling from the Menswear Guy.

The main weakness in this House of Weaknesses is Elon Musk. This is because the man himself is the anthropomorphic personification of the word 'liability', of course. But also because, in his rush to wield unaccountable political power, he forgot what that power was built on. Musk has power because of his money. But he is the richest man in the world only for so long as his Tesla stockholding remains bubble-inflated. And Tesla, despite his frantic recent claims otherwise, is a car company whose CEO has been successfully persuading people not to buy their cars.

Outside the US, Tesla sales are a busted flush. And inside the US, a grassroots, distributed protest has formed around the idea of picketing, shaming and damaging Tesla's brand value.

This week Musk tried to insinuate the Takedown Tesla protests weren't spontaneous expressions of political speech but were. something something something funded by a group of people (he named them). He cited an Investigation as his source. It is possible these Investigators were distracted. For example, one of the masterminds they identified behind Tesla pickets turned out to have been dead for six years.

Tesla may yet join him, unravelling its largest shareholder's life and power along the way.

See. There's always something to look forward to.