A group of six women returned to Earth from space on Monday, including Katy Perry, the former wife of the Trump cheerleader Russell Brand; and the former Fox news presenter and philanthropist Lauren Sánchez, fiancee of Donald Trump’s media lapdog Jeff Bezos, who bent Washington Post editorial policy to favour the New American Fascism ™ ®. It’s a shame they didn’t fly straight into the heart of the sun.
The six compliant women were sent to space as a costly PR exercise for Bezos’s commercial space flight ambitions, although Perry said it was actually about “finding the love for yourself” and “feeling that divine feminine”. Tell that to all the women worldwide whom Bezos’s pal Trump’s policies are penalising. Singing idiot. Katy Perry said she kissed a girl and she liked it. As Trump rolls back on LGBTQ+ rights I’m surprised the Trump-adjacent Bezos allowed a bi-curious woman into space. I suppose discussions of sexual identity don’t matter if they’re mere titillation. And if Perry is bisexual, she is at least less likely to influence vulnerable young people while orbiting the Earth.
Sánchez, meanwhile, is vice-chairman of Bezos’s Bezos Earth Fund, an environmental group that ended its funding of decarbonisation initiatives in February, in line with Bezos’s support of Trump, who denies climate change while simultaneously seeing that a defrosting Greenland offers superb mineral mining opportunities. Why are all these wankers so totally and unashamedly full of shit?
So I have come to Cornwall for a week, but still I can’t escape the news. As I drove the Penwith peninsula in search of sacred underground Cornish fogous to decompress in, the dead car radio suddenly found a frequency to tell me Perry had sadly survived her Bezos-boosting spaceflight. If those women really cared about the future of the planet they’d have sabotaged themselves to discredit Trump’s big tech donor, but they selfishly chose not to. History will be their judge.
Ostensibly I’m here to see the Tate St Ives exhibition of the mighty 20th-century surrealist Ithell Colquhoun, whose greatest works were inspired by the landscapes of Cornwall, and who died in its loving arms in 1988. Like the late standup comedian Jethro, Colquhoun is indivisible from the land that nurtured her talent, and both created works called This Train Don’t Stop Camborne Wednesdays, though only one features an impressionistic portrayal of the vulva as twin columns of flame.
Thirty years ago I’d pick up Colquhoun’s signed books, their value unacknowledged by vendors, in secondhand shops and wonder at her obscurity. But tides turn, and now she is venerated, 47 years from her passing. Maybe one day I may yet help Bloomsbury’s Museum of Comedy stage that long mooted Jethro retrospective? But first, I have to file my final Observer column.
My sister asks why I am not appearing at Norwich Theatre Royal, and so do I, as my tour shows always sell it out, sometimes twice over. I begin rambling about “visibility”, and how a whole generation of us, as printed news and trustworthy current affairs television began to wither, came to rely on social media to bob us along on its churning sewage-strewn surface. Then Trump’s tech bros skewed the algorithms away from liberal content and, in Google’s case, even agreed to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to appease him. History is mutable, it seems.
I can feel people glazing over as I explain this. What does the end of verifiable information matter to them? After all, The White Lotus was fine, despite the flawed final episode, and that’s enough surely? And all politicians are as bad as one another anyway. And I realise I sound like that American bloke on acid at a Butthole Surfers gig in 1988 saying The Man is controlling our minds with miniature ear robots and hidden smells. But this time around, all those stoned paranoid imaginings are finally true!
We put our futures, and it seems the future of facts themselves, in the hands of bent balding billionaires, still nursing a grudge against the kids from their high school who played guitar or drew cool comics. The Trump administration, accommodated by the likes of Keir Starmer and Katy Perry, is the geopolitical equivalent of a football player stuffing the face of the boy who won the spelling competition into the toilet bowl. For ever.
Here’s where we, and random Venezuelans with random tattoos, start paying. Sometimes, I think one routine I wrote about immigration sometime in the early 00s was shared by socials so often it basically gave me a career, culminating in the Times calling me the world’s greatest living standup comedian by osmosis. I’m the Ralph McTell of champagne socialist satire. Let me take you by the hand.
But now everything has changed. Campaigns, comedians, critics, charities, writing careers and worthy causes that gained traction in the tiny toilet window between the downturn in print media and the twin horrors of Musk’s annexation of Twitter and Google’s apparent abandonment of its “Don’t Be Evil” mantra would never flourish today. We give birth astride the grave. The light gleams an instant as Twitter helps Tracey Thorn from Everything But the Girl become a bestselling author. Then it’s night once more.
I think someone needs to build a new global news network, disinvested from media money men and Trump knee-benders, to save objective truth as we know it. Maybe Andrew Neil could do it, using the skills he learned from kickstarting GB News? Meanwhile, sign up to my monthly mailing list at stewartlee.co.uk to find out if I ever play Norwich Theatre Royal again, or whether my permanent absence from eastern England becomes just another victory for the fascist future. So long and thanks for all the fish!
