The sounds of celebration on the street below are muffled by the double glazing, but I've no intention of going down to join in. The truth is that at the moment I feel ashamed to be a member of the human race.
Margaret Thatcher's emphatic Rejoice! is the word on the majority's lips at this hour, for victory is ours (even though 'we' played no part in it, other than offering post-facto moral support: The deed was all but over and done by the time President Trump presented his fait accompli to the British government as well as NATO) Still it's 'our' side wot won it, and we should all be at least relieved, if not glad it turned out this way. In any case the cheering isn't about the declared end and the result of the war, but the government's announcement of a partial relaxation of the UK State of Emergency decree, though we're still exhorted to remain vigilant, just in case of an attempt at some asymmetric retaliation...
In truth my senses - along with those who've not allowed their critical faculties to be swamped by this tsunami of Anglo-American chauvinism - are still reeling at the speed at which the world has been turned upside down, and how the lunatic now occupying the White House actually dared to press The Button, as well as getting away with doing so. But this is only the latest in a series of unconscionable recent events which have been difficult to absorb.
I hate to say I told you so, but I did. The warning signs were plain to see from the moment when The Donald won the republican nomination and then the Electoral College. (Even now, we outside the USA looking in are still nonplussed how it is possible for a candidate in a supposedly 'democratic' election to get the most votes but not win.) But we all chose to dismiss Trump's more outrageous statements as gauche inexperience bound to be tempered by the realities of office weighing on him; and how we were proven wrong!
It's so typical of the new President's flip-flopping policy style that he decided to prove his virility on the world stage by grabbing Kim Jong Un, whom he had previously considered engaging in talks over hamburgers with, by the pussy. Of course it was easy to escalate the latest of the Dear Respected Leader's attention seeking tantrums into a proper casus belli, and launch an unexpectedly successful nuclear decapitation strike against the DPRK leadership. Wham, Bam, Thank you ma'am and goodbye Pyongyang, along with a few other places. Out of consideration not to unnerve the financial markets any more than was necessary the operation was timed to be launched after Wall Street had closed. Having been utterly Trumped, the Supreme Lard-er - as one of our knuckle dragging tabloids described him - joined the other two deceased godheads of the North Korean trinity in commie heaven, raptured there with an incandescent mushroom cloud singeing his arse.
It's not that the juchebag (a word coined by a paper which should have known better) will be missed by more than a few fellow travellers: Mine, and the international peace movement's revulsion is at the cavalier manner of the regime change, and those hundreds of thousands of innocents killed or grievously injured dispassionately counted as 'collateral damage' in the process of achieving it. There's also a disgust at the eruption of a crowing jingoism best exemplified by the shamelessly unrepentant NUKED YA! headline published by the You Know Who.
Events should have taken a different course. I don't agree with Trump's justification that Pyongyang's ambitions were getting out of hand, and it was better to deal with the DPRK now rather than later when they were stronger. Given time, even if it took decades, the North Korean leadership would have realised their best course of action would be to follow the road taken by the Chinese to global engagement as well as rapprochement. But instead of taking that route, the points have been irreversibly switched and now we're all on a different track; unwilling passengers on a runaway train being driven by a maniac engineer at full speed for the buffers. Our destination is a nervous world; one where both China and Russia are on maximum hair trigger alert, both warning if the US dares to intervene anywhere else Washington DC will be wiped from the map. Beijing in particular isn't bluffing, announcing a crash expansion of their armament programme as well as reinforcing the South China Sea artificial island bases with everything they can send to or cram on them.
