Republican presidential candidate, businessman Donald Trump speaks during the Fox Business Network Republican presidential debate at the North Charleston Coliseum, Thursday, Jan. 14, 2016, in North Charleston, S.C. (AP Photo/Chuck Burton)

US president-elect Donald Trump

So what just happened?

David Wall,  ‘sheet reader and  “31 year old who is disappointed and concerned”, writes:

How did it happen? I’m shocked. I’m appalled. How could they be so stupid? How can we be so blind?

It’s us. We are complicit in the whole thing. We’ve stopped caring. Our concern is not for those at the bottom of society. Our concern is not for the ill or the elderly or the disadvantaged. No, society is about being top-dog.

Those at the bottom are left to rot, forgotten and marginalised. We could point fingers at who is to blame but what will that achieve? Nothing. Creating blame is an irrelevance, a distraction. Potentially we could argue the real answer is everyone is responsible and, in that contradictory way, this means nobody.

Currently, the public service is falling apart: guards, teachers, nurses, doctors, the members of SIPTU all looking for their share of the pot. Aggrieved at years of austerity and being told that the recovery is happening without actually partaking in the spoils of recovery they are buckling under the strain of society.

The private sector, in turn, glares at the public sector with disgust and disdain.

Men and women trying to hold their own and make ends meet being almost pitted against each other. Against this, a backdrop of homelessness, suicide, depression and anger. Of course people gravitate towards men like Donald Trump.

It’s happened over and over in history, yet somehow we are shocked and appalled. It’s happened in living memory and I don’t think there is any reason to start listing names.

Possibly the most galling aspect of this is the pseudo-disgust at Donald Trump and his supporters. How can we be so arrogant as to create this world and be shocked when people are forced to support the likes of Nigel Farage, Donald Trump and populist right wing demagogues?

We cocoon ourselves in bread and circuses. This isn’t a new trick, the Romans had worked it out by 100AD. Rather than watching gladiators we build life hopes and dreams around the Kardashians, we watch comfortable fuzzy reruns of Friends and Gogglebox, we lose the run of ourselves over sport.

We are averse to bad news and, as such, cannot bring ourselves to empathise with others. As long as our lot is ok others are an irrelevance. We create the other to justify how we treat those humans who don’t fit our safe, compartmentalised world.

We have voices like Katie Hopkins reinforcing that hate is good and foreigners/fat people/ refugees, etc, are bad and to be hated. We have been conditioned to look down on each other, conditioned to despise each other, conditioned to stomp on those who are most in need.

The cuts to public services here, in the UK, and further across Europe, have had a disproportionate impact on people, real people, who are deemed at the periphery of society.

The drive for profit and cost-cutting again disproportionately hammers the weakest. And yet we have the arrogance to attack people who have been forced to look for any avenue of escape.

The likes of Trump and Farage are an extension of what’s gone before and extension of our complicity in the world we now inhabit.

By, once again, blaming the “other”, we are condemning ourselves to legitimising the Farages, Trumps and the le Pens and further damning the ones who are most in need.

Donald Trump is not a reaction. He is the product of a cultural shift which can be seen the whole way across Australia, America and Europe. To counter this, we need to stop looking for others to blame and begin to take responsibility.

Pic: Salon

collateral-beauty_poster

What you may need to know

1. Brace yourself.

2. Wealthy New Yorker Will Smith suffers a personal tragedy and, after withdrawing from the world, Makes Sense Of It All™ by writing a series of letters to the universe itself.

3. Miraculously, the universe replies. That, or his friends hire actors to pretend to be his cosmic pen pals. Which would be an extraordinarily cruel thing to do to a man with mental health issues.

4 Hugh Jackman, Jason Segel and Johnny Depp were all set to star before Smith’s Overbrook Entertainment took over and he cast himself. No sign of Jaden this time.

4. Poor old Will Smith doesn’t know whether he’s coming or going these days. A Grammy-winning start in music led to enormous success in TV, before he would become one of the world’s most bankable blockbuster stars. But his forays into dramatic territory over the years have mostly misfired.

5. There’s no denying his charisma, but Sidney Poitier he ain’t. All the way back to and including Ali (despite the Oscar nomination) there’s just always something that doesn’t click. Try as he might, he has just never managed to shake the Fresh Prince.

5.He was mad to turn down Independence Day 2, even if it was tripe.

6. Lots of fine actors slumming it in the supporting cast, in particular the enormously likeable Michael Peña. Catch him next year in a comedy reboot of CHiPs (yes, as Pancho) and also Kenneth Branagh’s Murder on the Orient Express.

7. Ed Norton, Kate Winslet, you’re better than this. Kiera Knightley, as you were.

8. But we’ll watch Helen Mirren in anything.

Verdict: Cinematic Diabetes

Release date: December 30

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This afternoon.

Westbury Hotel, Dublin 2

Singer, pianist and frock designer Myleene Klass launches the new Myleene Klass Winter 2016 Collection available to Littlewoods ireland.

Myleene is wearing one of own designs, a Myleene klass strappy maxi dress in gold with a provocatively generous ‘split’.

Yours for a slinky 105 lids.

Leon Farrell/Photocall Ireland.

1

“For Lily and Ben, there are only two certainties in life, death and… is it tax day already?!”

The season closer for the Dublin-based web comedy series following the trials of a millenial couple from the minds and acting chops of Kelly Shatter, Luke Benson and Kevin Handy.

In fairness.

Previously:  Episode 5, Episode 4, Episode 3, Episode 2, Episode 1

scarborough

Gulp.

MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough reflects on the self immolation of the mainstream media during the US Presidential Election.

Meanwhile…

“When the conventional wisdom is wrong this often, we really ought to take pause. It’s a sign that those in charge of reading the world for us aren’t reading it right. It’s like they’re speaking the wrong language.

It’s one thing to call an election wrong here or there. But to do it again and again should have alarm bells ringing very loudly in newsrooms, in academia, in the corridors of power generally.

It is simply not good enough that almost all of our pundits, researchers, presenters, producers and ‘experts’ are clearly so out of tune with so many voters. It’s one thing to call elections wrong, but what makes it worse, and obviously contributes to all those wrong calls, is that the ‘experts’ are indeed so out of tune and so out of sympathy with so many voters. Worse than that, they have huge contempt for huge numbers of voters”

In fairness.

FIGHT!

‘Conventional wisdom’, based on contempt for voters, got it wrong (David Quinn, Irish Independent)

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