In the hours following the US Inauguration pomp and ceremony, CNN triumphally announced that Amanda Gorman had ‘… reminded America of what poetry can do’.

Well, indirectly at least. Absolutely nothing.

We had just watched the world’s most powerful nation saved from the brink of implosion, and once again, aspirations masquerading as values had heralded a feelgood-freebasing frenzy.

We should not strive to sugarcoat it – the poem from the National Youth Poet Laureate (whatever that means) was six minutes of dreary, ambling, abject crud that in literary terms was like being felt up by a bad tranny.

Coded hardcore illiberal liberalism, submerged in a dreadful, cringe-inducing wordsoup. In brief, a dash of empathy and mercy, whisked round with might and, hey presto, the half-baked dish of the day. To summarise: the USA is great, the liberal elite knows what’s best and what’s good for you, and we are going to force it through.

The tragedy for us all was not just that the universal laws of physics made it impossible to unhear the laughable lyrics, but also that we would not be able to unsee the dreadfully over-cooked delivery. She was only a single airgrab away from getting a wildcard through to the X-Factor final.

As the painful recital progressed, I was furiously blowing into a paper bag in order to alleviate the enervating effects of some alarmingly bad barding that wouldn’t have displaced a mouth-fashioned potato-print from Mummy’s fridge.

And this wasn’t poetry. It was an amalgamation of high-calorie, whinging emotion, bluntly shoehorned into an asymmetrical, baggy framework.

The greatest plaudit for the manky verse was not for any of its cringe content but for what it represented as a whole. The poem served as a metaphor for the collective, virtue-signalling elitism that had throttled the joy out of western life to the extent that Americans would embrace a crass populist like POTUS Pussygrabber as a viable head of state.

The fawning, uncritical reaction to it furthermore reminded us of how Trump and all his clones managed to get away with it for so long. In truth, the fridge door was as far as that poem should have gone, but this lass now has her sights on a run for the White House in 2036.

You would have to have a heart of stone not to chortle at that corker. What a colossal embarrassment that nobody has taken her to one side to give her some helpful advice because she really does believe it could happen. It’s truly a shortcut to ‘progress’ when any minority person who superficially ticks some boxes and blathers into a camera is lauded as the ‘future’. She’ll hit the deck hard when some seasoned senator slices through all the slacktivist shizzle and rips her a new one in her first televised debate.

As for the US, I can feel a sobering cycle coming on, but in the meantime, a few years of passive-aggressive supercilious twaddle will at least seem less dangerous than a peak loon with his small hand hovering over the big red button.

At the ceremony, as the pisspoor piece unfolded, Dr Jill, sitting behind the Prez with her hands on his shoulders, looked to be offering a gesture of support and affection. On witnessing this, as the droning word-muzak became more unbearable, I started to drift off and fantasise that she was holding the President back in full-on ‘Leave her Joe, she’s not worth it’ mode. Had he just leapt up and twatted her right in the poorly colour-coordinated mask, it would most certainly have been worth it.

As it was, the precocious poetaster remained free to toddle off back to her Twitter account that had now swelled from 14k to 1.3m followers. The rest of social media had lost no time in expounding on her literary ‘wonder’, brazenly virtue-signalling the ethos of her terrible toil, and boosting their own follower counts to boot.

It’s how the world rolls now.

But if the masses cannot call out obvious crap, it does not bode well for the push to tackle the obvious challenges in society that are bubbling to the boil.

We’ve been here before with all the hacktivists like Greta and Malala who get put up there on stage, sell their books, and then fade away.

Instead of popping in their pants at the next bright young thing who leverages their 5 minutes of life experience and picks up a mic to set the world to rights, the adults in the room need to face up to facts and start working on real solutions.

That’s the hill that we need to climb.