My Word | How to make things great again

But then you’re just pandering to a particular age group.

So, how about embedding every office and factory computer with free editions of Super Mario World and The Legend of Zelda?

That would make everyone under 40 really happy.

Of course, the idea of making things great again supposes that things are terrible now, but they were once really great.

The difficulty with this line of thought is deciding when exactly things were really great, and which generation enjoyed the best life.

For some of us, it might be the 1960s when The Beatles were still around, and Barbie and banana bikes arrived along with the contraceptive pill.

There was no 24-hour news, and you could buy a home on a single wage.

Unfortunately, the 1960s also had the Vietnam War, political assassinations, civil unrest, institutionalised sexism and rampant homophobia.

Donald Trump and his global ‘make things great again’ movement, including his ‘Back on Track’ sloganeers in Australia, have decided the best time was the 1950s.

That was when everybody was the same colour, climate change wasn’t happening, gay and trans people did not exist, and nobody was woke.

Yep, the 1950s were definitely great.

The point here, of course, is that you can’t repair the faults of the present by returning to an idyllic past.

Human culture is not a static thing — it keeps changing and moving, and there is only one direction in which history moves — and that is forward.

Unless you’re a dog.

For dogs, there is no past, just the ever-present now, and that is their secret to living a happy life.

I gleaned this valuable insight from a book I’ve just finished reading called The Happiness of Dogs by Mark Rowlands.

Mr Rowlands is a philosopher — not the Sunday armchair kind.

He’s seriously steeped in the theories of big-gun thinkers from Socrates to Jean-Paul Sartre, and he concludes that all our anxieties, doubts and even anguish are the result of thinking too much.

Unfortunately, we are human and are burdened with consciousness, so we live more in the past than we do in the present.

He doesn’t think that is a good thing.

He says we should live more in the moment, like a dog chasing birds.

The dog knows the birds will always fly away — so his chasing is pointless, but he chases them anyway.

He pointedly disagrees with Plato’s belief that the unexamined life is not worth living.

Mr Rowlands says that a dog’s ability to enjoy life, particularly a life that involves endless repetition — like chasing birds and balls and cats — is because a dog lives every moment with conviction.

A dog knows that ultimately his actions may be pointless, but he enjoys them regardless.

Sometimes, my Jack Russell terrier, Dezzy, thinks he is a bird and not a creature of the earth.

He jumps with unbridled joy and comes crashing to earth every time he sees somebody new.

But he does it anyway.

We have to struggle with the banality of being human, doing the same things every day, and wishing for a better life.

But maybe instead of trying to make things great again, sometimes we can just enjoy our life and our times for what they really are — transient, inexplicable and beautiful.

Difficult to turn that into a catchy hat slogan though.

John Lewis is a former journalist at The News.