December 1932

Clouds scudded through Berlin skies. Seated on a bench in the Tiergarten, Ilse and me, just looking at the sky together. “Do you see the cloud there?” She asked, “that one!” She pointed almost above our heads.

I laughed. “It’s a clown!”

“No it isn’t,” she said, blowing a puff of smoke right into my face. “Watch! Look properly!”

Four billion years had passed. Our ball of earth had been through the torments of birth and becoming and for the shortest of time was allowing the microbes infesting its surface to breed and become, breed and become. Action, reaction, action reaction. The fantastically complex pattern of karma had so conspired to put me and Ilse right there, at that exact time, looking at these clouds.

And clouds in those precise formations and those precise shapes had never existed before in that place, at that time, for four billion years.

And Ilse and I, representatives of the microbial infestation, were there to see it.

“It’s a devil,” she said. “It’s the devil. See the horns? See the tail?”

I laughed and held her hand more tightly. “It’s a cow” I said.

“No you’re just being silly” she snapped her hand away. “LOOK. Use your eyes!”

I wanted to make a joke out of it. I wanted to get her off the subject and back to the apartment so we could fuck. “No, it’s a clown ” I said. “See the hair?”

“I don’t know why you refuse to see it. It’s Satan. It’s Armageddon”

“Why do you always make everything political?” I asked, exasperated. “Let’s go home and fuck. It’s probably about to rain anyway.”

“It certainly is,” she said.

Being a highly intelligent person (well, you’re reading my blog) you will understand the rather heavy-handed metaphor in this piece. We are reliving December 1932 now – the week before the election of Adolf Hitler as Chancellor of Germany. Is Trump really as dangerous as Hitler? He is certainly as mentally unbalanced. Every descriptor of the Sociopathic personality applies according to Tony Schwartz, co-author of ‘The Art of the Deal’, Trump’s so-called autobiography. Schwartz dealt with Trump regularly and his description of the process is hair-raising. Interviewed on the PM Programme BBC Radio 4 on Friday 28th October, Schwartz stated that the idea of a Trump presidency was “terrifying”, and he is arranging to take his wife and family to Europe in the event Trump wins. Trump’s popularism is the exact equivalent of Hitler’s. His racism too. Chants of “JEW S A” ring out at Trump rallies.

And this narcissistic sociopathic populist demagogue could have his finger hovering over the nuclear trigger. That’s the main difference.