This peace prize was hard to accept, but I’m willing to be corrupted

I guess I’m guilty of taking the world as I see it, accepting too easily that how things are is how they will be, not being brave enough, or maverick enough, to look beyond existing norms into the world of the possible … the Nirvanas, Utopias, Elysiums, Shangri-Las and neato Twilight Zones that the seers see. I’m just not the sort of freethinker who would have said to himself: “The President of the United States is inconsolable because the Nobel Committee won’t give him his peace prize. But who made them the boss of peace prizes? Hell, why don’t I chip in and give him one myself?”

Bravo, Gianni Infantino, innovator, philanthropist … gifted cynic.

It’s a brilliant stroke of paradigm-busting abstraction. And having just watched the president of one of the most historically corrupt organisations to ever regularly exchange bribes with jabbering potentates give a hastily invented peace prize to Trump, it occurred to me that if a scourge like that could do it, then why not me?

I suddenly saw there was no power on this unholy planet preventing me from promoting myself to the role of prize-giver. Why have I never thought to elect myself as a bestower of major global awards before now? Nobels with no bells and whistles … it’s a no-brainer.

When the toadying to Trump becomes as barefaced as this, there’s an expectation among moral people that his MAGA deplorables will be forced by some flickering ember of remembered conscience, some fossilised vestige of honesty deep in the gut, to admit they were wrong, and that corruption is once more gelatinously slumped on its throne. Sadly, barefaced bribery essentially works the other way – its openness and shamelessness indicate it is, and should be, legitimate.

When people aren’t ashamed, you assume they have no reason to be. People see bribery working and understand the deal – tithes to kings, frankincense and myrrh to the baby in the barn, money in the plate on Sunday, fanciful trophies for egomaniacs – flattery and bribery have always been traditional stepladders for aspirants. Get on board the Largesse Express or get left behind, sucker.

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Open bribery can’t be morally wrong when everyone’s doing it, surely. You’d be a fool not to grease the despotic palm and snog the absolutist freckle if that’s where the gold is. When the backhander becomes accepted business practice, it must be factored into expenditure as an investment. And once the sling is a cultural norm, criticism of it is offensive, unpatriotic and naive.

But we’re not quite there yet. From his long career of milking weasels, Signor Infantino of FIFA knew Trump would be the only person of the nine billion on the planet unable to see their peace prize for what it is – a lollipop force-fed to a simpleton prince. A gift from the giver to himself. Using a grotesque bauble as currency, Infantino bought himself an orange house elf for Christmas.