Member-only story
The Turnip Kingdom
A dinner-time conversation illustrating why the UK chose to emulate the Hermit Kingdom of North Korea
Sometimes life creates situations that no novelist would dare to fabricate for fear of being criticized for clumsy contrivance. No political satirist, for example, would have created a character like Donald Trump — he’s simply too stupid, too ignorant, and too repulsive to be convincing as a character. Until 2016, readers would have rejected the idea of such a creature stumbling into the White House as being incredible. Any good editor would have turned down the manuscript and asked for a re-write to make the lead character more relatable. Surely no human being can be so utterly without a single redeeming feature? Trump is far too mono-dimensional (or moron-dimensional) to work as fiction.
It turns out, however, that real life is far less constrained by credibility than are novelists and editors. In real life absurd, stupid, and self-destructive things happen all the time. History, in fact, is largely the record of human folly repeated endlessly down the ages — a record from which we resolutely learn nothing at all.
Folly is seen so reliably throughout the course of human affairs because we’re not evolved to cope with complexity. Our brains seek simple patterns because thinking burns glucose —…
