A couple of months ago I wrote that “the prospect of the Americans, Trump foremost among them, soon boasting about walking on the moon again and hosting the ‘greatest olympics ever’, as though only they could do such things, really is unedifying.” That is to say, with the world’s attention on their country this summer and indeed for the foreseeable future, the spectacle of the yanks basking in the global limelight wasn’t one I was looking forward to. However, I now think that ‘unedifying’ was far, far too mild a world. It’s already becoming clear that the world cup kicking off this evening is a total train-wreck; it’s already mired in xenophobia and corruption, before even a single match has been played.

Frankly, what the world now has before it is truly, truly hideous: A despotic, far-right nation headed by a vainglorious megalomaniac, being given the right to boast about itself before the globe, celebrating it’s 250th birthday, preparing to launch rockets to the moon and to host the Olympic games in two years time. All while it bombs the shit out of the middle-east, bans the citizens of several muslim countries from entering it, and targets it’s own people with a racist gestapo. Just ten years ago this would have been unthinkable, but this is what the United States has become: the nation which likes to boast that it is the greatest in the world and a shining light of democracy has become a corrupt, fascist cesspit; and at a moment when the rest of the world should be telling America that the direction they are heading in is unacceptable, we are sending athletes to participate.

It would seem that what I once called “the new American era” is about to begin. The global limelight is on the yanks, as they always want it to be. Yet a sequence of events which may once have been enjoyable, interesting and fun have now been replaced with the prospect of something dark, arrogant and frankly horrifyingly ugly. I don’t think I’m being hyperbolic or exaggerating: as a nation the USA becomes more frightening every day. With so much of our attention now upon it, surely it is up to the rest of us to stop it going too far.