Alien vs Predator

My latest postcard as the PNG Courier's overseas correspondent

Back to America, where the electorate is sighing in relief that it didn’t put a histrionic woman in charge.

In a plot twist only Barbara Cartland could have foreseen, the pair of emotionally fragile billionaires who for the last six months have been staying up too late together have fallen out.

MAGAs explained that this was ‘high agency males’ going at it, a sentiment which would have held more testosterone if the protagonists had done this face-to-face when they’d had the chance, rather than in public like a pair of fifteen-year-old cheerleaders who’d been overtraining for the Nationals.

Only last week ‘first buddy’ Musk appeared next to Trump in the White House sporting a blackeye. He was exuding all the gravitas of one his Cybertrucks - deeply unpopular and looking like he wanted to press for a battery charge - but things appeared amicable.

Fast forward a week and the doughy PW Botha enthusiast was calling Trump’s signature Big Beautiful Bill an abomination. Trump retaliated by threatening to cancel Elon’s subsidies. Elon pointed out that Trump was in the Epstein files. Trump replied that he was probably the best at something. Elon cancelled a spaceship, shit-posted a lot of sycophantic memes, went to bed and found a horse’s head in it. But only because he’d stolen its medication.

A lot is made of Elon’s genius which, scrutiny suggests, extends little further than his decision to be in the batch of semen his diamond mine owning father ejaculated into his mother. Certainly, taking your kid into work with the paedo-friendly rapist for whom you bought an election, and only calling him out on this when your EV subsidy is cut, hints more at Weinstein than Einstein.

Even so, it was box-office stuff. And that’s the thing about great theatre - we all react in our own way. For example, hackneyed patsy JD Vance remained tight-lipped (possibly through Botox rather than choice), while acned Nazi Steve Bannon demanded Musk’s deportation.

Thus, while the Israeli government commits genocide, Sudan faces apocalyptic famine, and the Western Antarctic ice shelf melts, the world ate popcorn in front of the worst instalment of the (Illegal) Alien vs Predator franchise so far.

A lot is made of what an actual alien’s first impressions of our planet might be. Against the backdrop of eliminating women’s reproductive rights while refusing to help the resulting babies, and abusing immigrants while poisoning their own soil, the sight of two of the world’s richest men engaged in cliché-ridden dramatics about the best way to enrich the already affluent while limiting food and healthcare assistance for the poor, might not be cause for optimism.

It’s all completely free. But if you pay me, I write more.