I was watching the breakfast news once again, and there was a contrast in the lead stories this morning so stark that I’m certain that I couldn’t be the only viewer to have noticed it. In fact I found it rather chilling. The lead story was of course the Artemis mission, and humanity (Americans) once again heading to the moon. However, this was followed by the news of Trump and his increasingly ghastly pronouncements on Iran. This created a kind of juxtaposition which only a complete fool could ignore: America’s triumphant rocket launch, heralded as a magnificent human achievement; abutted against the increasingly dark, deranged and even fascistic behaviour of that country’s president, igniting a global catastrophe which has already killed tens of thousands, and expecting everyone else to clear up his mess. America’s behaviour recently means it deserves only our utter contempt, yet as a nation it seems to think it still seems to think itself the leader of the world, at the forefront of the exploration of space. It is behaving like everything is normal and it is still worthy of our respect, while digging an ever deeper, darker hole and dragging the rest of us in with it. The way that the one story was followed directly by the other this morning was in fact quite jarring, like two huge trucks crashing head on into one another, and I’m sure mine wasn’t the only spine to feel a shudder.