Melania isn’t laughing now
Melania Trump spent Wednesday as any woman would in her place, surely; in her bedroom, door locked from the inside, curtains drawn, a hole kicked in the TV screen, shredding wet handkerchiefs with her teeth and begging god to let the Democrats win everything. Please!
The result’s worrying for the world, but it’s her I feel most sorry for, condemned to home detention yet again. What’s in it for her? Only media criticism of her frocks, and listening to Trump’s endless bragging with a vacant smile. If she’d known it would end like this she’d have married a proper billionaire and taken up gardening.
Trump seems to need Melania chained to him on demand, a robot ventriloquist voice saying, ‘‘I adore my husband’’, and ‘‘he listens to me’’ on endless repeat at the touch of a button.
He grips her hand in public in times of tension, much as he once gripped the hand of his mother who, being a McLeod, would have been a fine woman. She had equally remarkable hair.
Melania’s life is sad because she has to pretend she likes it, even with the pop-up scandals that trail behind him. In her life before politics she’d have been enjoying long lunches with her girlfriends in New York, laughing merrily at him behind his back, but she won’t be laughing now.
It can’t be fun to be married to a man who chooses publicity-hungry women to fool around with, ensuring his forays gain maximum publicity. Men who’ve given up the chase, or were never in it, look up to a guy who seems to be sexually relevant at 72. The old grey men vote would explain the Republicans winning the Senate.
If only Melania could talk. Really talk. Meanwhile she’s under constant surveillance in case she tucks her diamonds into her bra and tries to sneak out the back.
America is naturally nervous with a trillion Isis troops camouflaged as foreign-looking women and children carrying bombs, anthrax, and bubonic plague towards the border of the United States. Luckily the US has more weapons than people. They don’t stand a chance of escaping their misery.
Britain’s self-destructing over Brexit, Vladimir Putin’s laughing at everyone, China is flexing its muscles, Saudi Arabia’s unspeakable, Brazil’s a worry, America’s got Trump, all wildlife is doomed, and the seas are choked with plastic.
Inevitably, then, we focus our thoughts in this country on three disasters.
Armistice Day, marking the end of World War I, commemorates the men who died for the British Empire, something we no longer belong to or believe in. By some fluke both my grandfathers returned from that slaughter, while better men, I have no doubt, perished. We’ll be celebrating that. As if it was a good thing.
Then we’re remembering the flu pandemic a century ago that swept the world, and this country, after the troops came home. Nine thousand New Zealanders died of it in two months, and let’s smooth over how our administrator in Samoa let a ship’s passengers already sick with the virus go on shore to spread it, and swiftly kill one in five Samoans. It had already killed hundreds of thousands of people internationally, but who could have guessed?
And there’s the 40th anniversary next year of the Air New Zealand crash on Antarctica’s Mt Erebus, killing everyone on board, to look forward to. A memorial is planned for the commemorations, with the Government pledging $3 million towards it. There are already Erebus memorials, but this will be bigger and flasher, as befits an appalling stuff-up that was, as always here with stuff-ups, nobody’s fault.
Welcome to my world.