Extract from Eureka Street
- Home
- Vol 36 No 8
- Stop the world! (Or is that the point?)
- Gillian Bouras
- 23 April 2026
I find that these days I think a lot about the workings of the ageing brain. Well, I would, wouldn’t I, seeing that I’ve been around for quite a long time. Flashes of memory come: I’m on my tricycle, pedalling down a suburban street to meet my grandmother and her brother. The plane trees are forming a canopy overhead, and my ancient relatives are both wearing hats. I might be four, but certainly not older.
The ageing brain is also like a kaleidoscope in the way it shifts and falls, with little pieces arranging and rearranging themselves, and always in technicolour. I’ve just remembered, for example, Anthony Newley’s musical creation Stop the World, I Want to Get Off, which was a big hit when it was first produced in 1961. The protagonist has the significant name of Littlechap, and “Stop the world” was his cry of protest whenever things went wrong. I’ve had a fellow feeling with Littlechap for ages, but this feeling has become more intense over the last two or three years, and I find myself muttering the aforementioned injunction quite frequently.
The grandmother I had gone racing to meet was a practising Christian of a pronounced evangelical bent. As my sister and I grew older, Nana would mind us every so often and read the newspaper while we played. At intervals she would put the paper down and say mournfully, “Oh girls, the sin in this wicked world.” As a child I was bemused by this comment, but now realise the truth of her remark, and wonder what she would say today, when the depths of wickedness and sin seem impossible to plumb.
Another flash: George Bernard Shaw, the genius playwright, once wrote to a friend, expressing the idea that the longer he lived (he died when he was 94), the more convinced he became that some other planet was using this one as an insane asylum. Which leads us to the question of what insanity is, exactly. A little research indicates that it is a legal term rather than a medical one, as doctors prefer to concentrate on particular disorders. But of course lay people have their own ideas, and a popular definition involves the notion that insanity consists in doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Going by this definition, perhaps we are all a little mad? My mother, however, was at pains to make me understand the difference between mad and bad. It could be that some people are both.
President Trump is always in the news, which is his favourite place, really. Liberal commentators have been losing their slight grip on patience for months, and it comes as no surprise to observe that Trump’s posting of a blasphemous, AI-generated picture of himself as Jesus Christ is the last straw. The list of epithets is quite long: bonkers, mad, off his rocker, nuts, insane, bats in the belfry, loopy, crazy. Some Australians would simply shrug and say that he clearly has a kangaroo loose in the top paddock. He does seem to have lost touch with reality, which is another definition of insanity. The workings of his ageing brain are of great interest, but are quite mysterious: nobody really knows what is going on in his head.
But how bad is he? Very, is my answer to that. Versatile British intellectual Rory Stewart ponders many subjects, and one of these is that of evil. He thinks of evil as a kind of casual carelessness, and he singles Trump out as an individual who has a whimsical and complete disregard for consequences: he simply refuses to anticipate them or to think them through. Stewart also uses an apt phrase of Trump: a slick, charming recklessness. (Although I confess that the use of the word “charming” is lost on me.) This recklessness has unleashed untold misery on the whole of the Middle East and indeed on much of the world at large. The Gulf States, for example, may well take a decade or more to recover from the consequences of the Iran war, which is, the experts agree, a war of choice: it certainly did not have to happen.
And if the threat to end a 5000-year-old civilization overnight is not evil, what is? As is the idea that civilians are expendable. Trump and Netanyahu seem quite indifferent to the fact that their actions cause the deaths of a great many people. The concepts of responsibility and accountability are unlikely to be ones they dwell on. Nor do Trump and Netanyahu seem to feel remorse.
I would suggest these are arguably ‘bad’ people, but whether they are mad, the experts may have to decide. But I am reminded of the great American writer Edgar Allan Poe, famous for his poetry and his pioneering work in the genre of Gothic horror. His life was extremely turbulent from infancy on, and he died a mysterious death at the age of 40. Various people thought him mad and said so. He himself riposted: “I don’t suffer from insanity; I enjoy every minute of it.”
Perhaps the same can be said of Trump and Netanyahu?
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