The presidency of Donald Trump contaminates everything that touches it, like dogshit on the end of a pointed stick. Be careful, politicians of the world, entertainment brands, and commercial properties, that you don’t get any on you. It stinks.
On Monday night, one of my lovely rescue cats, having battled the cat flap into submission, disappeared in the stupid firework dark. He’s not back yet and I am very sad. Like me, he was abandoned to his fate as a child, but in a cardboard box outside the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ place rather than in the Children’s Society offices in Lichfield (a town from which I have been banned from performing by the mayor’s office since 1990). Dependent, like me, on the kindness of a chain of strangers, the cat’s arrival and survival felt like a small balancing of the book of life. But maybe, like many millions of us worldwide, he just couldn’t face Wednesday morning.
Last week, Robert Jenrick, our new shadow justice secretary, was trying to blame Keir Starmer for the early release of sex offenders from the very prisons his own government had carelessly overcrowded; another mess left for someone else to pick up. The Tories spent 14 years treating the whole country like a teenager’s bedroom. I only went in to gather up all the old coffee cups, and ended up tripping over a series of abandoned infrastructure projects and falling into a vast network of sewage-filled waterways.
But, one has to ask, if Jenrick’s so worried about sex offenders being on the loose, why is he so pleased that one is now in the White House? “If I were an American citizen, I would be voting for Donald Trump”, the child-hating sod told GB News’s calcified opinion-vampire Camilla Tominey, Britain’s 49th most influential rightwing figure, in September. It looks like it’s one rule for white working class British rapists and quite another for orange American billionaire sex offenders with their fingers on the nuclear codes. Two-tier Jenrick can do one! Accommodating Donald Trump will invalidate us all.
This week, Bob Dylan is at the Royal Albert Hall. I couldn’t buy a ticket, and wasn’t about to pay five times over the odds to one of the Tories’ ticket criminals. But I may go down to Kensington and hang around outside hopefully, like a dog, in case another middle-aged man with an opinion about the relative merits of the five extant takes of She’s Your Lover Now wants to sell a sudden spare to “the world’s greatest living standup comedian” (the Times).
I would like to see Bob Dylan one more time, at least, but wonder what it would feel like to watch one of the architects of postwar progressive America performing in a world where the culture he helped create is so obviously in retreat, as a sexual abuser reclines in Washington inflating himself like a bulbous brown toad. One thing you can say about Dylan, who rarely offers the casual fan the opportunity to enjoy any of his back catalogue live without a significant ontological struggle, is that he was never a nostalgia act. Well, he is now. Trump has moved the dial and made him into one. The times they are a-changing. But not in a good way.
Since the second world war, America’s most powerful tool has been the soft global diplomacy of its irresistible, and broadly liberal, popular culture – rock’n’ roll, cinema, and latterly the comic-book characters that are now the tentpoles of the international entertainment industry. But how do those American icons make sense in a Trumpian world, where the star-spangled iconography that informs their costumes is now redolent of fascism and climate denialism rather than freedom and the future? Nobody would want their child to be saved from a burning building by Swastika-Chest Man and his kid sidekick Drill Baby.
Because working-class Jewish autodidact visionaries, producing the pop art primers of tomorrow on a pittance, drew Captain America punching out Hitler in the early 40s, and because formerly one-dimensional superheroes were made thrillingly two-dimensional by acid-fried college dropout creatives in the 60s and 70s, Marvel Comics, though their roots are obscured, remain broadly liberal, even almost countercultural. That’s how I reverse-engineer my infantilised pseudo-intellectual desire to keep reading them at the age of 56, anyway.
Indeed, in September 1963, Jack Kirby, the 12-cent William Blake of the Lower East Side, drew the Fantastic Four fighting the Hate-Monger, a villain whose superpowers were not the ability to control soil or infuriate moles, but the ability to whip up hate. “We must drive all the foreigners back where they came from. We must show no mercy to those we hate,” he cries, in his purple hood, as his followers agree – “Long live the Hate-Monger. He’ll clean up this country for us!” – and the Invisible Girl observes, helpfully: “He seems to have the crowd in a trance. They … they’re agreeing with his un-American sentiments.” Hang on! Was that Fantastic Four Issue 21, 61 years ago, or Sky News last week?
Scarlett Johansson, Marvel’s Black Widow, pointlessly assembled a squadron of Avengers actors to denounce Trump, arguably emphasising America’s divides, but the real Avengers would oppose Trump. If they existed. In 1974, as Watergate’s curtain fell on Nixon, the comics writer Steve Englehart, a former soldier who became a conscientious objector, had Captain America abandon his costume and take on the identity of Nomad (“the man without a country”) because he couldn’t square the fictional character’s values with his country’s corrupt figurehead. My Captain America would not sling his vibranium shield for Donald Trump. The success of Trump invalidates the shared, if naive, notion of what America is. I’m going to look for my cat.
Stewart Lee’s 2025 tour Stewart Lee vs The Man-Wulf begins at London’s Leicester Square theatre this December, with a July Royal Festival Hall run just announced.
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