The tin cup is empty, and the ass has gone under. Joe Biden’s political career is over, and he had to do it by autocoup. His two most trusted aides came to him at Rehoboth Beach and told him from a distance – because he has Covid – that he no longer had a path to victory. The money had dried up, he was trailing in all the usual swing states, and even in states the Democrats usually win without spending much money, like Virginia and New Mexico. The next day he posted his resignation letter to X (formerly Twitter) and followed it up with an endorsement of his vice president. Oh, yeah, c’mon, man, keep her around. So came to an end a month of blather about the way Biden had become King Lear. The final reckoning was less like Julius Caesar than like sending the president to the self-checkout till at Tesco to pay for his own hemlock.
The streets around the Seine have gone silent: restaurants are almost empty; there are only a few people walking along the footpaths; bike traffic is practically non-existent; the odd car and motorcycle goes through, still stopping at red lights, even though the way’s clear. This is the ‘grey zone’, a restricted area set up by the Paris préfecture to secure the river before the Olympic Games opening ceremony today.
In the early days of the war, I came across a photo of an orphanage in Gaza City, mainly for children with disabilities. Searching for more information online, I found a GoFundMe page from a few years ago: a British man was running a marathon in support of the Mubarat al-Rahma orphanage, which seemed to be the same place. I sent a message via GoFundMe and heard back a couple of weeks later – the man and his wife have been supporting the orphanage for years, and still are. They introduced me to Hazem al-Naizi, who manages it, looking after twenty children. Hazem and his wife also have five children of their own.
Sitting in a road is annoying; being late to a job interview is inconvenient; missing a funeral is upsetting. But the mass displacement of people, the failure of crops, the loss of entire species: these are rationalised as ‘externalities’, or ignored, or imagined as a distant prospect that will somehow be averted with capitalist ingenuity. The imprisonment of those who are trying to shake us out of this denial is discombobulating.
My sleep is broken by a terrifying thud. I leap out of bed to the sound of another one. The sirens wail. I fling open the door to my room and bolt out, calling for my father. He is hurrying from his study to the shelter. I yank open the door and we scramble inside. We strain to listen. A third rocket hits. It’s a sickening sound, difficult to describe. The sound of impact between a rocket and the earth. A boom that sometimes feels like it’s down the road. The people in Gaza, I think, have no warning and nowhere to hide.
We wouldn’t want ‘people to think we were “afraid” of its existence’, Carlos Eduardo Machado, of the Portuguese secret police, wrote in a report on the literary journal Mensagem in the 1960s.
The days leading up to the final were worrisome. If we lost, would everyone lose the plot? If we won, would everyone lose the plot? The BBC shared footage of a bus en route to Bellingham being mobbed in celebration of Jude Bellingham. Keir Starmer hinted at a bank holiday if England won. The Coldstream Guards played ‘Three Lions’ at Buckingham Palace. The king encouraged the players ‘to secure victory before the need for any last minute wonder-goals or another penalties drama’.