Trump drags world to brink of destruction through medium of Elton John lyrics
We've known for a while that we're all going to die in a big ball of fire, but who knew Elton John was going to be involved?
Your support helps us to tell the story
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.
At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.
The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.
Your support makes all the difference.He must be feeling like J Robert Oppenheimer, Bernie Taupin.
How could he have known, back in 1972 as he stared at a shooting star out the window and had an idea for a song about the daily grind of astronaut life, that he would eventually become death, destroyer of worlds?
But we'll come back to that later.
It was a United States President, Franklin D Roosevelt, that came up with the name “United Nations.”
No one appears to have asked the great man, in his final busy years winning a world war while pretending not to be dying of polio, what he was getting at with the name “united nations.”
But Americans have always been partial to truths that have a touch of the self-evident about them.
United nations. Nations united. You don’t even need to concentrate for longer than it takes to bang out a tweet at 6am and push the world to the brink of destruction to pick up certain clues as to where Franklin D was trying to go.
There’a also the big metal gun tied in a knot by the entrance. The bible quotes on the walls about beating swords into ploughshares, about nations not lifting swords against nations. All these things, taken together, should be enough to give a vague intimation as to what it’s all meant to be about.
We must reluctantly conclude then, that Donald Trump must have had some clue what he was doing when he called the leader of another member “rocket man” then threatened to “totally obliterate” his entire country.
“The rocket man is on a suicide mission for himself and his regime,” Mr Trump said, all te while drawing his tiny thumb and index finger up and down the outside of a tiny imaginary flag pole, as he so likes to do. “This is what the United Nations is for.”
It really, really isn’t.
The United Nations, by the way, holds a lottery to decide which country gets to sit where for nominally prestigious occasions such as this. The North Korean delegation had bagged a spot in the front row, but sadly chose to leave it vacant for the duration of the talk of their own obliteration. A terrible pity: they would have been some remarkable TV cutaways.
A pity too that, having chosen Elton John songs as the medium through which to bring the world to nuclear war, Trump didn't go any further. "Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids, Kim Jong. In fact it's cold as hell." That kind of thing.
Analysts are already searching for some sort of coherent thread, a doctrine even, that might be said to run through this short list of Countries Donald Trump Doesn’t Like. North Korea is number one. Iran number two, then a not altogether surprising appearance for Venezuela.
If there was one, it appeared to be the idea that nationalism can save the world. It was, apparently, patriotism that prompted “Poles to fight for Poland.” It was patriotism that made the French fight for France and the “Brits fight for Britain.” That it was also patriotism that sent Germans goose-stepping down the Champs-Elysees was a point he strangely did not make, as he sought to recast the UN as the new go to place for “independent, sovereign nations” to make threats of war against one another.
We must assume, also, that Franklin D Roosevelt did not imagine, foresee or hope that future United States Presidents would use the UN stage as the place from which to inform the world of the $700bn they have recently spent on their own armed forces.
America, we learnt, in those early years after the war, “Did not seek territorial expansion. We did not attempt to impose our way of life on others.”
And yet, somehow, whilst not attempting to impose their way of live on others, American soldiers had managed to die “In the deserts of the middle east, and the jungles of south east Asia.”
On previous occasions, notably in Warsaw earlier this year, President Trump has shown himself more than capable of reading from a script of statesmanlike language written down for him by someone else. But whoever that someone else was, it is highly likely both they and their replacement have at some point been sacked.
We are, it is increasingly clear to see, moving into phase two of the Trump presidency, and that phase is goading volatile nuclear enabled sociopaths with Elton John songs. There's still three and a half years to go. I think it's going to be a long, long time.
Join our commenting forum
Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies
Comments