So sang the artist known as Beck Hansen in 1992, the song "Loser" becoming a grunge hit and launched his career. The ‘slacker’ style at the time was resolutely anti-capitalism, and to a degree ‘un-American’. Rejecting as it did the crass brutality of the hard sell of the 1980s, and looking for something deeper and more human, crossing over from the alternative in the shapes of REM’s Michael Stipe and Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain. The young Johnny Depp and Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder at the time eschewed the term ‘ambitious’ in favour of ‘hungry’.
Trump's barometer of success
These progressive cultural ideas clearly passed a busily real-estating Donald Trump by, presumably waist-deep in peroxide and gold trim banisters while his more aware country-folk strove for a premillenial attempt at post-capitalism. Trump’s rhetoric stems from the genuine belief that material gain in the business world is the best, if not only, barometer of success. Despite his past business failures, which without his already vast inherited fortune would have been calamitous, his pre and post-election platform has rested on this apocalyptic version of the American dream. A road to nowhere.
Desire to lock out the Muslim world
Trump presents as a no-nonsense, post-politically correct kind of guy.
Or one who more likely never had any time in the first place for the less fortunate in society that political correctness was trying to help. Thus, anyone not winning economically, whichever side of the debt spectrum they might lie on, becomes a ‘loser’, and all other aspects of life have to genuflect to the shame inherent within the term.
After expressing a desire to lock out the Muslim world in recent times on numerous occasions, he clearly felt it incumbent upon himself to comment, statesmanlike, on the string of fundamentalist Islamist attacks in the UK.
Insidious greed that Trump represents
He felt the deceased perpetrators might have enjoyed the pejorative media cliche 'monsters' too much from beyond the grave, so chose to damn them from his pedestal from the White House with 'losers'.
To paraphrase John Cleese, losers like North Vietnam? Or how about losers like the Green Party or the NHS, organisations which are permanently under real attack, attacks which stem from the insidious greed that Trump represents? What the acts of the perpetrators of these callously calculated and executed assaults on UK culture did, beyond the unimaginable grief of those affected by the events, was to drive divisive, media-fed fear deep into society just before a surprise election. The term ‘losers’ is an arbitrary opinion coming from a binary perception of all that human life is – which tells us as much as we need to know about the sitting potus as it does about his role in attempting to end the present dire situation.
The world has had enough of greed
It’s no secret that the surprise US president and unelected UK prime minister Theresa May are quite fond of each other, holding hands and everything - and we all know where that leads. But this affection isn’t all they share. It’s the new Tory - ok Thatcherite – belief that greed is good, profit is everything and those who do not make it, or put others’ needs first, are somehow lacking ethos that also binds them. That May does it anaemically compared to Trump’s orangelly is neither here nor there. The world has had enough of greed as much as the populace have had enough of ideologically-driven violence. The UK general election this Thursday will show to what degree this is the case. Let’s make Cobain and Cornell proud, and let someone else choke on the splinters for a change.
