Salatat Al Jazar

Just when one thought that the madness had reached a kind of stable equilibrium, the Sweden Democrats surge again in the polls. I struggle for explanations for what essentially amounts to society-wide self-harm behaviour. With an allusion to Zarathustra and the Last Man, it is almost as if people are drawn to destruction for its own sake, as if they have become completely consumed by hate of whatever still holds the world together.

Some other day, I want to write about post-feminism and whether all these angry men, if they knew there was some kind of ultimate “end point” to the feminist project, would perhaps be slightly less frightened. The same of course goes for racism, that rather than a long list of things one should not do in the present, there needs to be an aspirational vision of a world where race has ceased to be a defining category. After all, the future remains the weakest point of every nationalist movement, just think of how laughable their strictly divided world will seem in a few hundred years’ time – perhaps a bit similar to how we today think of “Dackefejden” in Sweden.

But right now I am just sad and frustrated by the sheer stupidity of it all. I know it is not much of a protest but I make some Moroccan carrot salad with haloumi. Nevertheless, it turns out to be enough to remind me of the shared future world that is still very much possible.