This is how America ends; not with a bang but with gay disco and red hats as far as the eye can see.

Laura Jedeed

The woman in the quote above is a freelance journalist. She tweeted that while experiencing what she termed an 'existential crisis' when surrounded by weird crowds during a recent campaign rally in the Bronx – which, in case you don't know, is a section of New York City. The madness was beginning to get to her, and it was only May. Sigh.

I'm seeing more and more people whose intellect and personal kindness I respect commenting in near-despair over the state of the world. My unconscious has started throwing up random quotes from my youth.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness. . .

Allen Ginsberg, 'Howl'

Look what they done to my brain

Well, they picked it like a chicken bone

And I think I'm half insane. . .

Melanie, 'Look What They've Done to My Song'

It's increasingly hard to maintain perspective during the downward slide of civilisation, isn't it?

Now – and this is just my personal view: nobody's obliged to take me seriously, and few do these days – I trace the trouble back to 9/11 and its aftermath. It is my private opinion that if you let people get away with telling lies about how things like physics and other sciences work and how we know what we know, eventually people's brains start cracking. Some of them think they can make up their own realities. Pretty soon, you're living in an idioverse and shouting at your neighbour from the other end of a black hole.

As it happens, I've been living in an idioverse since at least 1983, so I'm used to it, but I gather the rest of you are finding it a tough slog. So let me offer a bit of advice: if you know where your towel is, you'll at least be able to wipe the spit off your face.

Or, as the book saith, 'That we henceforth be no more children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the sleight of men, and cunning.' See? That sort of thing's been going on for quite a while.

What do I mean by knowing where your towel is, besides yet another attempt at sounding 'cool' by throwing in a reference to that book/movie/radio series everybody likes? I mean, more concretely, that it's a good idea if you don't get your opinions from the news media. Their job's information. Or your barber. His job is to cut hair. Or the person who showed up at your door. Thank them kindly, but don't buy any magazine subscriptions.

It also helps if you can try to distinguish between 'things that are happening and have never happened before' and 'things that have happened before, keep happening, probably shouldn't happen, and which we really ought to know how to deal with by now, because when stuff like this is left unchecked all kinds of mischief result.'

In category 1, I would include things like 'flying a helicopter on Mars.' That was definitely a new thing. Not a new thing that excited too many people who weren't space scientists, but still, a new thing. Almost everything else I can think of has happened before – just not to us personally. Things like:

• Giant auroras. One happened a couple of centuries ago. Hardly anybody worried about it except the telegraph operators. Of course, it's a bigger worry now, what with all the 42G towers and such.

• Volcanos, hurricanes, tornados, weird weather. Yes, global warming is probably contributing to the mix. But earthquakes and floods have happened before. That's why there are seismologists and oceanographers and limnologists (look it up, lazy) and vulcanologists and . . . So listen to them. And take measures. The same goes for potentially harmful agricultural practices. Have we learned nothing from the Dust Bowl? Yes, GMO is bad for living things. Yes, the US is growing WAY too much maize. These are not new issues: the patterns of silly, short-sighted human behaviour, driven by greed and laziness and gullibility, have been known quantities since Nimrod was a pup.

• A species getting out of control and threatening to 'unalive themselves and everybody else,' as they say on Twitter. (I suspect they say that because they fear the algorithm. Our AI overlords are vigilant against certain trigger words.) Let us think of the dinosaurs and be zen. We don't want to go that way.

In the face of mounting crisis and uncertainty, it can be hard to be sure our mental foundations aren't being eroded. If we aren't careful, shifty people will keep moving the goalposts on us. It's like the old gospel song says, 'In times like these, you need an anchor.' Proving, once again, that none of this is a new phenomenon.

It is my contention – and it has been for donkey's years because I am a rather old donkey by now – that what is needed is a good memory. Liars aren't the only ones who need good memories: people who have to deal with these 'lying liars and the lies they tell' need even better memories.

The first thing you have to guard against with memory is getting the idea that in the 'past' – for a certain value of 'the past' – everything was much better than now. My parents used to laugh about that. They grew up during a period of prolonged economic crisis so severe it was called the Great Depression. Whenever anybody started talking about 'missing the good old days,' they'd bring up the myriad inconveniences of their childhoods, such as outdoor toilets. For the British: when I say 'outdoor toilets', you think about little houses in your garden with flush toilets. I, on the other hand, had relatives with wooden outhouses. These did not flush, but frequently came complete with spider webs, snakes, and other unwelcome wildlife. So my parents' generation were clear-eyed about the alleged romanticism of the past.

This is not to say that the opposite view is correct: not everything that happened in the 'old days' was terrible. Food often did taste better. The world was less crowded before my generation came along. It wasn't our fault – we didn't decide to all be born in the 50s. Our parents had just been through a war, you see, and were in a hurry to make up for lost time.

What I am saying is, in the words of the old union song, 'keep your hand upon the dollar and your eye upon the scale.' Follow up on statements. Check their veracity. Do not judge the reliability of your informants by how many followers they have on social media. Remember that the 'past' had good things and bad things in it. Nihil sub sole novum, friends. Ask yourself: what would Abgal the Sumerian do? And be ready to flap your towel to chase away the flim-flam man.

Dmitri Gheorgheni

10.06.24 Front Page

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