Dan Jones: Carnage in Las Vegas, and still America is deluded over guns

One good definition of Donald Trump’s phrase “American carnage” would be an accountant gunning down country music fans in Las Vegas.

Carnage bears here the sense that Milton gave it in Paradise Lost: the smell of “prey innumerable… the savour of death”. And the scent of slaughter has uniquely American base notes: death wrought for reasons unknown by a civilian using insanely effective weapons whose public availability is claimed as sacrosanct under the US Constitution.

I left the United States yesterday, having spent a fortnight travelling 10,000 miles around that great, raucous nation and concluding that it is completely f***ed. Led by a nuclear-armed reality TV star, politically divided and gridlocked on almost every issue, battered by climatic disasters, with racial tension hotter than at any time since the Sixties, there is a palpable sense that Americans today are labouring under the Chinese curse: condemned to live in interesting times.

I have been reading James M McPherson’s classic study of the American Civil War, Battle Cry For Freedom. Its argument is stark and relevant. One hundred and fifty-odd years ago the United States tore itself to pieces in an effort to resolve the Founding Fathers’ constitutional equivocation over the “right” to own slaves.

Disarming America and reimagining the second amendment would require an equally momentous lurch of history.

The current President, despite his promise to end the metaphorical American carnage, is clearly not up to the task — even if he did not owe his position to the pro-gun lobby, he is clearly too inept to pursue any policy of any description right now. But it is hard to see how any of his successors could do so either, without literally starting a war.

Thus it is ugly but preferable to let American carnage continue, the guns and bodies piling up proportionally, and the cycle of shock, grief, prayer, outrage and inaction continuing with every mass shooting.

All the while the American yen for self-deception lives on. Just as in the 1860s, the South went to war to preserve slavery and called it a war for freedom, so today millions fetishise their right to bear military-grade murder weapons and call it a matter of personal safety.

How’s that for a paradise lost?

Interviewers have been asking tweeny pop favourite and Frozen soundtrack übercrooner Demi Lovato all the tough questions as she promotes her new album this week.

Among the scoops is the revelation that Lovato — drumroll, please — does not listen to her own music while having sex.

“Oh, wow,” said Lovato, under interrogation. “That’s creepy.”

And, indeed, it also means that she differs wildly from R&B horndog Usher, who is on record as saying he positively enjoys pouring the pork to the sound of his own hits.

In this important debate I am firmly with Lovato, and as a courtesy have never put the moves on any other human being to the sound of my own recording oeuvre, which consists mostly of spoken-word audiobook editions of my backlist of medieval history classics.

To quote Lovato, if I ever did that I think I’d have a heart attack.

Stanley Gibbons was a name I’d not thought of for decades, until reading this week that the company is in debt and losses are piling up.

The news brings the memories fluttering back. As a rather gimpy child I collected stamps — and Stanley Gibbons was where you went to obtain rare specimens.

So many details of the stamp game seem from another age: relatives who went abroad to send interestingly stamped letters; soaking loose the postage from envelopes; affixing little squares into an album with double-sided sticking mounts; poring over mail-order sheets and dreaming of one day happening upon a penny red.

I suppose stamping was on its way out even in the late Eighties when I took it up. Even collecting Pokémon seems outmoded to my children, and that craze was only two years ago. O tempora! O mores!

Nothing on TV makes me happier than Larry David’s HBO series Curb Your Enthusiasm, and the ninth season started with a splendid episode featuring Larry at work on a show called Fatwa! The Musical. I laughed harder than I have since ... oh, the last series of Curb six years ago.

However, my wife will not watch it with me. She finds the humour unmoving and painful. An American version of Fawlty Towers, she calls it, which is not meant as a compliment.