It’s getting quite hard to keep up now that January has entered its ninth month. Here at home, the navy’s failure — or refusal — to obey President Cyril Ramaphosa’s order to send Iran home from war-games has many wondering if we’re witnessing our own Mutiny on the Bounty, or at least a mutiny for a bounty, because God knows when morale and funding run low there’s nothing like those little coconut-filled beauties to lift the mood. Further up the coast, meanwhile, parts of the Garden Route are facing a possible Day Zero, a technical term that refers to the number of days South Africa’s wealthier coastal municipalities have spent wondering if growth, maintenance of infrastructure and climate change are ever likely to run afoul of each other.
And that’s to say nothing of the Democratic Alliance’s response to the latest school drop-out figures, which has been, well, to say nothing: for years, the DA has spent a lot of January loudly insisting that much more attention needs to be given to those schoolchildren who never make it to matric, but this year the party has fallen oddly silent, apparently struck dumb by its proximity to power. Further afield it’s getting even wilder, as Donald Trump, flushed with triumph at being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize by María Corina Machado in recognition of all that Trump has done to give her the impression that he might install her as president of Venezuela, has once again threatened to annex Greenland. On Friday, when Tump bade his homunculus familiar Stephen Miller appear by chanting a summoning spell, the main target was still Denmark, with Miller explaining that it could only expect to keep a territory if it could “defend” it, “improve” it and “inhabit” it.
(Of course by these yardsticks Miller can’t really lay claim to either his emotional state or his masculinity, but I digress.) American power, chained for decades by consensus and taboo, has been let free of those bonds by the Gilded Age lusts of Trump and his creatures; and now it will start remembering how it used to do things before everyone got all touchy-feely and invented woke nonsense like child labour laws and weekends. This week, however, the target had shifted northward. In a letter to the Norwegian prime minister, apparently written by Trump during his daughter’s wedding while the undertaker Amerigo Bonasera begged him for justice, the Donald explained that Norway’s decision not to give him Machado’s prize meant that he no longer felt “an obligation to think purely of peace”, although I do suspect other factors were at play.
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(“Stephen, o Stephen, tell me true: is there anyone who can stop us?” “No way, Mr President.” “Hmm, Norway, you say?”) It goes without saying that these are alarming and dramatic escalations. Certainly, the Greenland crisis is unprecedented, the first time in history that a large landmass has been used by a major power to physically delay the release of the Epstein files. But as we reel from one story to the next, sucked in by their mad, fleeting details, it might be worth pausing and acknowledging that at least some of the feverishness of this moment is about something much bigger than all of us, returning from a time before most of us were born.
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