There is a need in the British middle-class psyche to be told what to do. Ideally, the person doing the telling should be a woman – a nanny. It probably helps if it is a posh one. Often, the telling is an exhortation to stiffen the sinews and is couched in terms that hark back to a former, better time. This is usually the second world war.
The British are no different to any other people – in their hearts most believe that they are exceptional. There is a lot of emotional baggage that comes with this, mostly related to martial prowess; the SAS are the best special forces troops in the world, and so on. They may very well be; I don’t know and it really doesn’t matter. But the old soldiers and their generation are the examples that we should aspire to.
My father was British and fought in the 1939-1945 war. I was born in Zimbabwe in 1953 and I grew up in Johannesburg. I have been to Boer War battlefields all over South Africa. I have been to Colenso, Bergendal, Majuba (and I mean I have climbed to the top of Majuba, at least half a dozen times, not stood on the road at the bottom and looked up at it).
I have been to Magersfontein, Modder River and to Stormberg. I have even been to Rorke’s Drift. I have seen more small silver iron crosses marking the last resting place of a poor Tommy than I can remember. Don’t get me wrong: what these men did was awe-inspiring in the genuine pre-debased sense of the phrase. Considering that most of them would have walked a good part of the way to where they now lie, their stoicism alone was marvellous.
Sadly, none of what they did can help mankind in general, and British mankind particularly, in the place we are in now. That is to say, in Trump World. Here, there is no monolithic implacable enemy to be overcome – not yet, anyway. There is only the chaos caused by a narcissistic, cruel old man that nobody seems able to control, least of all the people in his own country. All the rest of us can do is hope that he is removed from office in an election, but even that is not a certainty.
In today’s Guardian there is a piece by Gaby Hinsliff. The headline is: “Doomscrolling won’t bring order to the chaos. It’s OK to put the phone down and take a break”, then “Keep Calm and Carry On: that’s not how people felt as the second world war loomed. But maybe, as Trump stalks, that old slogan is finally making sense”.
Well, at least Ms Hinsliff is here to guide me through the crazy. I feel I should put my iPad down and go calmly to make a cup of tea like it says on tee shirts and tea towels with the famous wartime slogan. It’s an issue that has been vexing me these past weeks: am I obsessed with the news, which by definition means bad news – there is no other kind – and the universal mayhem caused by Trump? Have I become, oh God, please no, a doomscroller?
I admitted as much in a post the other day. Or rather, I admitted to being obsessed with Donald Trump, but this is why I doomscroll. I am looking for news, sure. To be precise, I am looking for news from the front line. In a world where most of it is about Trump the front line is the US, where the old tosser does most of his really dumb shit, every single day.
The Guardian, my default serious paper, will tell me what is going on, but it usually lags a couple of weeks behind my outraged vloggers and, for example, the citizen journalists following the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (which now look like Hitler’s Sturm Abteilung) on the streets of Minneapolis.
Most of the vloggers I follow are on YouTube. If I am honest, every time I refresh YouTube, I literally pray for an item announcing that Trump has keeled over in his gilded Oval Office or crapped out on the crapper of the Lincoln Bathroom that he desecrated last year, but so far no such luck.
In her piece, Ms Hinsliff tries to comfort us about doomscrolling. She says honestly that she does not know what to tell us punters trying to live normal lives while the great orange baboon dismantles the old world order and whether exhortations to shape up really cut it. She falls back on the usual advice about not sweating the small stuff and worrying only about the things we can control.
Her final suggestion is to take our pleasures when we can and try not to let it all get on top of us. It’s not really that deep, but I don’t want to slag her off. It’s a comforting piece, that Ms Hinsliff concludes by mentioning a diary entry by Virginia Woolf in the spring of 1940, comparing the apple blossom coming down in her garden to snowfall, on the very day that the Nazis invaded Holland and Belgium. Bless her gentle heart.
Now that laughing boy has resiled from actually invading Greenland, I hope that the surreal threat of a shooting war with our biggest NATO ally has receded, but really, who knows anymore?
Me, I am going to keep scrolling into the very arse crack of doom in the hope that the diet of Big Macs eventually catches up with the ghastly old prick. Meantime, everyone should just keep calm and keep getting their news in whatever way works best for them. Any way is good, as long as you distrust most of the mainstream and question every damned thing it says to you.
Just don’t be one of those wankers that says they don’t watch the news, as though this is somehow an admirable thing to do. What are you, a child? Doomscrolling may suck and especially if you overdo it but not looking squarely at the world sucks much harder. If you can’t do anything else, just laugh at it. Happy scrolling.
Leave a Reply