OF COURSE, the genuine day-to-day horror of the Jackass in the White House turns Halloween, John Carpenter’s 1970s benchmark splatter film about the child-murderer, Michael Myers, into a sidesplitting comedy. Where Donald Pleasance and Jamie Lee Curtis only had to outwit and outrun a knife-wielding maniac for 91 minutes, the whole world has to endure this Twitter-wielding Donald Unpleasant for the next three years; where is a heart attack when you need one?

My own worst nightmare is that someone will assassinate Donald J-for-Jackass Trump and catapult a moron who doesn’t belong in the company of his immediate predecessor into the group that, if America got it right, would have their heads on Mount Rushmore: John F Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and Bobby Kennedy, men assassinated for their bravery by cowards.

TRINIDADIANS AND, to a far less psychologically-devastating extent, Tobagonians, will next week enter what has been, so far this year, uncharted territory: six back-to-back weeks without a single public holiday to soften the blow of having to go to work every day, like every sufferer in every country in the world.

It seems to go against the very marrow of Trinidadian-ness.

This is the Trini definition of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: six working weeks, each five days long. It cannot help but result in mass catatonic shock. Understandably. But how, in that context, will Trinis continue to convince themselves that God is a Trini?

BILL MAHER’s HBO show, Real Time, is the most crucial television in the world now. A funny guy, a jokester, a man who became rich and famous by being a total smartass, Bill Maher may be recognised, in the future, as the most serious person in America right now. He could carry the title of ‘the Conscience of the United States” but I prefer to think of him as the grain of sand in the oyster that might yet turn the American Left into a pearl. And Bill has had one thing going for him ever-since, as we say in Barbados.

Bill Maher has always known that Americans are stupid.

They are. This is not opinion, but fact.

THE AMERICAN NATIONAL Rifle Association and every religious person anywhere in the world share an illogical approach bewildering to a rational mind, cleansed of either pro-gun or pro-God brainwashing.

An insane man opens fire with the kind of weaponry you have to be a member of the SAS to get in Britain (but which you can buy over-the-counter at Wal-Mart), kills five dozen people and wounds 500 in nine minutes of murder & mayhem – and the NRA seizes on it as proof that American gun-ownership laws should be relaxed, so that Americans have a chance to defend themselves against just this kind of attack. (Up to my time of writing, the NRA had not actually issued a statement but I’m using them as an umbrella under which all the gun crazies find shelter.)