Saturday 20th June 2026. (What are the Fafocene Diaries? See here).
Since the reign of George ‘Dubya’ Bush (2001-2009) I’ve been saying that the Universe wants satirists to starve. You wouldn’t dare make this shit up, it’s far too on the nose.
Now, with the latest farce of the Trump “administration” – the corrupt/botched reflecting pool thing (I am Team Algae. obvs) – I think the universe has decided starvation is not enough; the satirists have to commit suicide in the deepest despair imaginable.
There have been some fun cartoons drawing analogies with the outcome of the Iran ‘war’,
and Trump, like his mini-me in the UK, seems on the ropes (we shall see). The thing that really gets these narcissists is not to be hated (that’s all attention, after all), but to be mocked, to be ridiculed (see the end of Somerset Maugham’s novel about Machiavelli – Then and Now – for a nice explication of this).
On another level, I have no doubt at all that the mostly-pointless academics who wang on about ‘multi-species entanglements’ and ‘more-than-human’ are already submitting abstracts to upcoming conferences with titles like “Reflecting more-than-human agency: Trump, Contested Monumentalism and the Anthropocene.”
Shoot me now.
But I guess, ultimately, that’s the Fafocene, isn’t it? Seeing ‘powerful’ people brought low by their own hubris, incompetence (and corrupt regimes are, by definition, incompetent, because loyalty and greed are the selection pressures, rather than – you know – actually being good at your job). Seeing all this unfold and knowing that you are well within the blast radius, and that, no matter what you do, the sins of the fathers and the motherfuckers will be visited on the sons and daughters. And anyhoos, there’s a complicity here, in the inability to create (extra and infra)structures of dissent and resistance to their ‘power’, to their mayhem.
We can’t say we weren’t warned. We can’t say we didn’t try to get better outcomes. And we can’t say we ignored all our past failures and just kept on – in pure smugosphere – doing the same things over and over again because they made us feel good in the moment and gave us ‘status.’
We failed, ever, to grasp the nettle.
Speaking of nettles, and going back to ‘nature bites back’, here’s a poem I just encountered. I think it’s Triffid. Sorry, “triffic.”
Nettles by Vernon Scannell
My son aged three fell in the nettle bed.
‘Bed’ seemed a curious name for those green spears,
That regiment of spite behind the shed:
It was no place for rest.
With sobs and tears The boy came seeking comfort and I saw
White blisters beaded on his tender skin.
We soothed him till his pain was not so raw.
At last he offered us a watery grin,
And then I took my billhook, honed the blade
And went outside and slashed in fury with it
Till not a nettle in that fierce parade
Stood upright any more. And then I lit
A funeral pyre to burn the fallen dead,
But in two weeks the busy sun and rain
Had called up tall recruits behind the shed:
My son would often feel sharp wounds again.
Was this useful? If so, why? If not, why not?
What did you agree with? What did you disagree with? What have I got right, and, more importantly, what have I got wrong, misconstrued, overlooked.
What should I be reading/watching?
What do you think of ‘Fafocene’ as a term? Does it work for you? What does it miss, beyond the fact that not everyone Fucked Around the same amount?
What other topics would you like the Fafocene Diaries to cover?
marchudson.net 
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