The end of the world as we know it (and I feel fine)

It doesn’t bode well for 2019. Keith Richards ditching booze exposes a world where little other than Trump tweeting is certain.

Keith Richards, whose name is synonymous with excess, says he has virtually given up drinking. Picture: AFP

OPINION

History is littered with bad punditry predicting the end times. I don’t want to join the cavalcade of weirdos who have imagined a fiery apocalypse and drawn a red circle around a particular date on their desk calendars as to when ignition occurs.

Still, I have to wonder, if 2018 has been calamitous just how bad might 2019 be?

There is one augury that I have found particularly disturbing.

Yesterday Rolling Stones’ 75-year-old guitarist, Keith Richards — he of the gargantuan appetite for booze and drugs, has announced he is on the wagon.

This brought a flurry of selling in the entertainment sector on global equities markets and left the makers of Stolichnaya vodka staring into the abyss.

In these uncertain times, a heavily refreshed, giggling Richards was the one thing we could rely on.

What a sober Keith Richards means to the world is not exactly clear, but it is bound not to be good. Will he pop a guitar strap over his head and then look blankly at the instrument bouncing around his tummy before musing out loud: “And what the hell are all these pedals for?” before strumming away in a tuneless rendition of Honky Tonk Woman?

Reports reveal Richards is still on the cigarettes, so I guess that’s something we can still hang our hats on.

The end times, a looming Armageddon, the planet glowing orange before bursting into flames is not just the purvey of contemporary human society. It has been standard fare delivered from on high by religious nutters and grim soothsayers for centuries.

French bishop, St Gregory of Tours predicted the world would end in AD799. He was spared any enduring humiliation by having died two hundred years earlier.

Most recently, American doomsday cultist, David Meade pointed to a date somewhere between September 23 and October 15, 2017 (possibly coinciding with school holidays) when an asteroid favoured by many doomsday cultists known as Nabiru would come into sight in the sky, make some really pretty colours before crashing into Earth and sending humanity the way of the dinosaur.

Quite obviously, this spectacular cracker night did not come to pass but without any apparent embarrassment, Meade declared he had forgotten to carry the one and turned instead to April 23, 2018 as the day life on Planet Earth was extinguished once and for all.

I was in hospital at the time and was relieved to emerge from my bed to find the world was more or less still in one piece.

Still, beyond Keith Richards unlikely tilt at sobriety, there are other bleaker bodings that would seem to indicate Meade may be on the money if his calculations are not to quite to the third decimal point.

Demonstrators clash with riot police at the Arc de Triomphe during a protest of Yellow vests (Gilets jaunes) in Paris. Picture: Abdulmonam Eassa/AFP

Yellow vests, Brexit, and Boris

Paris is burning and London may yet explode into flame.

The United Kingdom in particular and Europe more generally has decided to take a running jump off an economic cliff without knowing where the bottom is based largely on the Brits’ displeasure with having a Romanian over to do their bathroom renos.

It promises to strike a great blow for British nationalism while turning the UK economy into something the size of my aunty’s sock knitting home business.

The IMF predicts a reduction in GDP growth in the UK of between five and eight per cent in the first quarter after a no deal or hard Brexit. The UK is growing around two per cent per annum now, so if those predictions are accurate, the UK will tumble back into GFC style recession with no one able to point to when that recession might end.

For all that, Boris Johnson remains cheerfully optimistic.

In an Op-Ed in The Spectator (UK), he mused, “Are we going to abandon a thousand years of national self-rule, and adopt foreign laws — over which we have no control — because we cannot be fagged to make whatever preparations are necessary for the microscopic risk of us running out of Mars Bars?”

But if you substitute insulin, interferon or pembrolizumab for the UK’s popular chewy nougat treat, suddenly the Oxbridge bravado sounds a little hollow.

The pound sterling is likely to go into freefall in or around March 20.

This could be excellent news for Australian tourists visiting the Old Dart for the Ashes which starts later than usual in July to make way for the ODI World Cup in May and June.

Furthermore, and perhaps more importantly, the Barmy Army will be unable to call upon their ugly anti-Australian chant, “Two dollars for every pound”.

Indeed, they may not be able to afford to go to the cricket at all unless Australians dig deep and send food parcels, containing a Mars bar and 15 pints of Scruttock’s Old Dirigible.

In an obtuse way, this brings to mind one of the more amusing moments in The Adventures of Barry McKenzie where (plain, old not yet a Dame) Edna Everidge visits relatives in the UK and hands the housewife a heaving, pustular bucket of lard she said she had been collecting since 1948.

Part of the post-war effort. Care packages for the Brits.

Should we start collecting lard again for our British brothers and sisters?

I think we all know the answer to that. Scrape off that bacon fat and hurl it into a bucket, Australia.

Trump’s Twitter promises new delights

Meanwhile in the US, there is Trump and only Trump. The prospect of impeachment looms. Many Australians and even more Americans misunderstand what an impeachment means.

It is one step in a process, delivered by the House where the Democrats now enjoy a majority.

The prospect of impeachment leading to a conviction, requiring a two-thirds majority in the Senate where the GOP have the majority, is infinitesimally small.

With solid 2018 form, Trump’s 2019 Twitter game is set to be spectacular.

Nevertheless, as many Bill Clinton advisers are saying now, the process of impeachment is so all encompassing and draining on an administration, that Trump will feel the walls (no, not THAT wall) closing in.

The tweets alone in 2019 from @RealDonaldTrump promise to be spectacular. Those who follow the 45th POTUS on Twitter in Australia are used to seeing his early morning social media rants appear around midnight AEDT. But if he is especially ornery the tweets start bouncing out at around 9pm our time, meaning he is either up at sparrow’s or wrestling with insomnia.

Either way I can’t escape the image of him sitting up in bed with a bucket of KFC and a six pack of Diet Coke, pumping out the hot takes.

The only thing that can be safely predicted is that the US will be more divided and angrier with itself than it was this year.

Meanwhile in Australia, all we have is a federal election to worry about. Regardless of what team you’re on, there is little chance of people being so impassioned about the result we will take to the streets armed with milk crates of Molotov cocktails.

The choice between a stop-gap Prime Minister and an unpopular opposition leader is likely to draw a collective utterance of “meh” across the nation.

2019 should be a bumper year. Dangerously ugly at times overseas but not especially Apocalyptic. But if the planet starts to glow orange, relax. We’ve got the best seats in the house right here to watch it all go pear-shaped.