Soooo… I had a lovely birthday, and thank you all for your greetings :)

And then I came back and tripped over this.

And I thought: okay, I do not get into US politics more than I have to, because it is, y’know, US politics and I’m a Brit.

And then I thought: are you kidding me? I have family over there. And it’s the US. I love the US.

And then I thought: Plus, you know, world’s only superpower. I do have an interest.

So here – this is for all those reasons.

Basically: this is one of the scariest things I have ever seen in my entire life. It is scary not only because of what it means today but because of what it might mean tomorrow, and it is scary because the idea that anyone could consider it appropriate to bring a provision like this to the floor of the US Senate should utterly appall pretty much the entire US and it seemingly hasn’t. It should actually be unthinkable for anyone to do this.

Look: it doesn’t matter whether you are a dandy New York elitist pinko metrosexual or a red-eyed gator-wrestling Lone Star gun nut. This is the most wrong-headed bit of regressive, oppressive crazy since King George. It messes with some of the most fundamental rights you have – rights so old that you had them before you were even an independent nation. The framers of the US Constitution? They knew Magna Carta was important. John Locke? Drew on Magna Carta. The rights this bit of drivel casually does away with are one chamber of the beating heart of US democracy. And here your Senators are either actively trying to take them away from you or messing with them for political gain during an election. If the former, they are merely horribly wrong. If the latter, they’re like kids playing with a live high voltage cable to scare mom. I leave you to decide which of those is more wretched.

So here’s a recommendation from someone who lives in a country with a long and inglorious history of Empire and bad behaviour, a country which still has a monarch, and which – if this goes through – will be more free than the US by a mile: you should not only write to your Senators to tell them to vote against this bill; if they fail to do so, you should elect someone who cares about the freedoms which define the US. And the muffinheads who wasted your government’s time with this during a financial crisis? Show ‘em the door.

This has been a rant by an irritated fabulist. Thank you for reading.