Oh Babe, What Would You Say

Apparently, Paddy Power have already paid out on Hillary Clinton winning the election. I'm glad they're sure. The reason why bookmakers do such an odd thing is, I understand, because they believe (or must know from their research) that winning investors will re-invest their winnings and they like to encourage them to do so if a conclusion is quite so foregone. But we mustn't be blasé about such things. It must have happened that bookies have been rash and had to pay out on the other, eventual winner as well.
There is a review of an exhibition on Vulgarity in this week's TLS and I was grateful enough for the word in the poem below before it is also the one I want to describe Donald Trump. 
We should, of course, be grateful for democracy, however imperfect and open to abuse it is, because we can read about what countries are like that haven't got it and how keen to vote they are in countries where it is introduced. But, has it come to this.
A few weeks ago I began to wonder if he had gone so far that I might start to admire something about the incorrectness, his irrepressible nature, his insistence on being awful but it was never going to be possible. Alex Larman's account of Byron made it clear that there was not much to like about the 'mad, bad and dangerous to know' poet but at least he had something about him even if he was a disaster area.
The Republican Party must be in a mess, the American answer to UKIP, who also can't find anybody respectable enough to represent them, if they seriously thought it should have been him.
But, maybe it's my mistake. I'm increasingly concerned that I believed, during the impressionable years of the late 60's and throughout the 70's, that the world was improving and everything could be for the best in this best of all possible worlds.  
That might have been something that everybody thinks when they are young, in whatever period they live, and only see through it later. Or was the post-hippie age of David Bowie, Marc Bolan, Roxy Music and a sort of social democracy of liberal education (including grammar schools), landing on the moon and supersonic flight just a glimpse of something possible that was then snatched away.
Or perhaps we have it now, as well as the internet, music so freely available that we don't care about it any more, Man About the House and The Good Old Days still on the telly if you have the right channels and most people, but still not me, carrying with them their own walkie-talkie. Imagine that. Science Fiction has all come true and we still want more. There is no longer any need of liberalism because it has provided all we could have wanted. So now it's time to get serious and make sure it's us that gets even more of what we don't need before anybody else gets it ahead of us.
I am making inroads into the symptomatic over-buying of books I did a few weeks ago and so might one day arrive at Ben Pimlott's enormous Harold Wilson. Remembered now for his chicanery, manoeuvring and political 'nous', I wonder if all he did was use the honours list to gratuitously reward some mates, as David Cameron is said to have done, or if he was quite as obsessed with politics as a game he could play for personal gratification, like Blair, like Boris and, most monstrously, like Trump. 
For all that we are told that the centre ground is where elections are won, there is no sign of a Roy Jenkins making any progress in Britain at the moment. A vacuum has been left in exactly the area that not very long ago was said to be where everybody wanted to be. But perhaps that is my mistake, too, that only the few of us of what might be called the Beatles and Bowie generations ever thought that and really all that has happened is a recovery from that aberration and a return to what it was always like, except with internet and more technology.
I might see if I can join the Whig Party.