An ambulance for 2020

THANK GOD IT'S FRIDAY

THERE CAN’T be a person on the planet who’s not glad 2020 is over; and, if there is, you wouldn’t want to meet him or her. Apart from Liverpool winning the Premier League (which this Chelsea fan cheered) and there being just barely enough decent American voters to dump Trump, 2020 brought us absolutely firetrucking nothing, not even Old Year’s Night parties (in most places).

The best we could hope to squeeze out of a truly
horribilis annus – the inversion is almost onomatopoetic – is that we were lucky enough not to bury anyone ourselves.

Spare a thought, though, for the poor British, who will be figuratively stuck in 2020 for the next 20 years. Yesterday was the last day of the Brexit transition, making today the first day of 21st-century Britain’s sordid isolation. The only thing worth celebrating for Brits today is that things aren’t yet as dreadful as they’re likely to get.

Brexit may turn out to be a good thing in the long run, but, as rock-star economist John Maynard Keynes wrote in 1923, "In the long run we are all dead.”

And the first to die will be the old firetrucks who voted, by a whopping four per cent (a statistical dead heat), to leave the biggest trading bloc in the world, the single market that made plural Britain so singularly rich. It’s hard to imagine the UK thriving on the trade deals it makes with Grenada and Pakistan.

For four years Boris Johnson has repeated, orally, the lies he wrote immediately after Vote Leave won the 2016 referendum: “British people will still be able to go and work in the EU; to live; to travel; to study; to buy homes and settle down…with access to the single market.”

The Vote Leave campaign was the slickest propaganda spiel since Hitler sold Lebensraum to the people who would become anti-Semites, but Brexiteers haven’t benefited as much as WWII Germans from indulging their coarser impulses. Through low tricks and high production values, the Brits – honestly, mainly the English, specifically the English Defence League – were persuaded to throw away the equivalent of VIP Platinum European Union membership. When the British rejoin, they will have to give up the pound, accept the euro and join the Schengen passport-free area. The unrestricted immigration that so terrified Brexit voters will then be impossible to stop.

The only hope Britain has of getting out of the cellar position in the world league tables of horrible prospects for 2021 depends entirely on the ignorance and stupidity of Americans.

So Britain is in with a fairly good chance.

By this time next week, the very worst place to live in the world could be the sorely mis-nicknamed “Land of the Free,” where “liberal” is the new n-word.

It’s so unlikely to actually happen – one hopes – that it perhaps shouldn’t be raised at all. But if 2020 taught us anything, it was that the unthinkable would become not just the acceptable, but the official version.

Next Wednesday, December 6, Republican stooges of Donald Trump will rise in the Senate to protest the Electoral College count in favour of president Joe Biden, just as Democrats did, four years ago, to protest Fat Nixon’s.

Four years ago, then vice-president Joe Biden, as Senate chair, told the Democrats to shut up and sit down because the election was over and they’d lost.

Do not be surprised if Mike Tuppence-for-a-Brain upholds the objections next Wednesday. And don’t be surprised if the armed militias Trump has been encouraging to get “wild” in Washington do go wild.

It’s shocking to think the US may harbour an Abu Bakr, ready to carry out, next week, an armed revolution without having read past lesson one in the primer. But look at Nashville last week. There are a lot of madmen in the USA, with mad guns. And one of the maddest is egging on the other crackpots.

Don’t say goodbye to 2020 just yet. Because we may have one more week of it.

And we may need an ambulance or two ourselves.

BC Pires has to explain this column was headlined “An ambulance for 2020” because his editor refused* the headline “Firetruck 2020.” Read the full version of this column on Saturday at
www.BCPires.com

*Editor's note: Actually she had just other things to do.