“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock? Come to my arms, my beamish boy! O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!” He chortled in his joy.
Well, I haven't actually, Dad. Slain the Jabberwock. And please don't call me Beamish Boy. It's a museum in Northumberland. I've asked you, like, a thousand times. No, while I was standing by the Tum-Tum tree and having an uffish think, you know, it occurred to me that wanting to kill all jabberwocks is kind of racist. Or jihadist. Or a genocide or something. I think it is essential to engage in respectful dialogue, considering the humanitarian impact and the complexities of regional dynamics. And, while we are having a sleeves-rolled-up heart-to-heart father/son soul-baring discussion, I know you won't mind if I point out that sending me out alone, away from home, to kill a flaming-eyed, whiffling, not to mention burbling, monster (sorry, is that monsterist? I retract the monsterist slur unreservedly, and maybe I can make up for it by bunging £5mill to the charity of your choice, but not the Labour Party, obvs.) where was I? Yes, sending me out, alone, armed only with a vorpal sword, kind of breaches child protection safeguarding protocols. I'd need Abrams tanks, Leopard Tanks and Challenger tanks, not to mention some Storm Shadow missiles if you are seriously expecting me to conduct your poxy, sorry, proxy war, on the Jabberwock nation. If that was even a good idea in the first place, like. I mean, we don't even know the Jabberwock's preferred pronouns, let alone whether it was fed puberty-blocking drugs by evil doctor/scientist/ideologues when it was a wee small brute (sorry, no offence intended, again, can I assuage your pain with another bung of £2mill or so?), resulting in brittle bones, the inability to breathe effective flame and the lack of winkie-development causing insufficient penile tissue to hollow-out like a sausage skin, turn inside out and ram up inside its downstairs parts and a complete inability to enjoy itself with another Jabberwock in the sack, and not be able to have little Jabberers.
Yes, I see your position, my son, and I completely respect it, but how are we to get to the last verse if you won't fulfil your role?
Thank you for respecting my position, Dad, and for desisting in the whole Beamish Boy thing, but your question draws in the whole issue of free will. Do I have it, or not? Am I no more than an instrument of Western aggression, white supremacy, a coercive tool, a puppet? or do I have my own soul, my own spark of divine fire?
I was also counting on you to do your bit against the JubJub Bird and the Frumious Bandersnatch, while you're at it. I'd go myself, but I'm too old for armed conflict. I have to confine myself to strategy, these days.
Yes, Dad, I do appreciate that you are a senior now and that we may need to have a family conference soon to decide if we should approach Dr. Shipman for a touch of physician-assisted very end of life care, but if we prop you up and move you around you can still read the auto-cue very convincingly and win the people's votes. But could you tell me what the last verse is that you need my help in achieving?
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe: All mimsy were the borogoves, and the mome raths outgrabe.
But that's the first verse!
Indeed, my son, Whatever has happened before will happen again. Whatever has been done before will be done again. And there is no new thing under the sun. Ecclesiastes 1.9
Watching Diane Abbott jump up and down like a fiddler's elbow on the 13th March during PMQs and being totally and completely ignored by Mr. Northern Speaker, whilst the white boys were talking about her and deciding between themselves just how bad remarks made about her 5 years ago were, several conclusions leapt forth: nobody likes her, nobody wants to hear her, this row was not actually about her, she was just a handy peg to hang the usual PMQ badinage upon, racism remains great fodder for publicity and, primarily, there has to be a better method for ordering Parliamentary business and deciding who gets to speak than this business of jumping up and trying to catch Mr. Speaker's Eye. I thought it was a disgraceful, opportunistic shambles.
Now, mr ishmael has had a great deal to say about Diane Abbott over the years. This is not because he was racist, nor were his posts racist. It was because, as a politician, and a rather dim and hypocritical one at that, she was fair game. There's a difference between being nasty about someone and being racist. Okay, it is not very nice to be rude, and it seems that being nasty is about to be reclassified as hate speech and to become a major offence - all part of the contraction and denial of free speech that is currently blighting our society, crippling debate and strangling satire.
Wiki tells us that Satire is a genre of the visual, literary, and performing arts in which vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, with the intent of exposing or shaming the perceived flaws of individuals, corporations, government, or society itself into improvement. Although satire is usually meant to be humorous, its greater purpose is often constructive social criticism, using wit to draw attention to both particular and wider issues in society. A feature of satire is strong irony or sarcasm —"in satire, irony is militant", according to literary critic Northrop Frye, but parody, burlesque, exaggeration, juxtaposition, comparison, analogy, and double entendre are all frequently used in satirical speech and writing. This "militant" irony or sarcasm often professes to approve of (or at least accept as natural) the very things the satirist wishes to question.
That is what we do here - not racism. Judge for yourself: here's some pieces by mr ishmael for your consideration.
VOTE4ME, SAYS TELLY'S SOCIALIST STUNNA, DI, AND ALL YOUR CHILDREN CAN GO TO PRIVATE SCHOOLS, LIKE MINE DOES. (20/5/2010)
It is my commitment to socialist values - and to appearing on telly with comrades like the feminist, Peter Stringpenis - which makes me the outstanding candidate to lead this great party, this great nation, this great audience. People want to watch better late-night telly and I'm just the person not to give it to them. If people vote for me, I can guarantee that I will be on all channels, waving my arms around, tongue-tied and giggling, like a fucking ignoramus.
Twenty years I have run my constituency and it's now worse than ever - poorer, dirtier and more violent; that's the sort of leadership I can offer the viewers.
Vote Lard for a Britain fair to clapped-out career politicians and social climbers.
Now, the moral of this story, the moral of this song, is simply that one should never be where one does not belong.......
Not for nothing are journalists rightly despised, scribbling rubbish in the London papers and spouting drivel on telly, Diane Lard has made a comfortable, private school living pretending to be one of them; in addition to her handsomely-paid public servant role Abbott has boosted her income, not due to her talent or merit - there is much better commentary in these cyber-pages than would ever spring from her leaden opinionising - but due to her position; last night, she found that journalism is a little more brutal than she had imagined.
Bumptious, hypocritical gabshite beasted on mainstream Tee-Vee
Abbott and Costello debate the week's news |
Under the guidance of Andrew Neill |
If you missed this week's This Week, among the usual frothy rubbish, pantomime journalists in boats and numbskull, nobody celebrities, there was a dark moment or two of political reality as Andrew Neil effortlessly exposed the hypocrisy and self-interest, the utter poverty of intellect or principle at the heart of Ms Abbott; she really is as stupid as she sounds, as venal, as precious, as astonishingly maladroit and incompetent as one has always suspected. Unable to explain, refute or even divert Neil's questions about her expenses, her own, stagey racism, her contradictory, greedy, self-centred parental decisions, she floundered, Oh-Andrewing, as though these straightforward - and long, long overdue - questions were beneath her. So utterly banal and worthless was her performance, so embarrassing, that one wondered, not for the first time, why it was that Neil has for so long pretended to value her opinion.
Had Abbott fanned a few flames of hope, that she might wrest a shadow front bench role from this pretend leadership bid, she will today be staring into their embers.
MINDLESS CRIMINALS RECALLED, NUMBER 1.
DIANE "I HAVE WALKED THE STREETS OF HACKNEY" ABBOTT. (11/8/2011)
I would just like to say, Mr Tiny Speaker, that I have walked the streets of Hackney and I would simply say that these people should be like me, they should flog a load of intolerable old bilge to the newspapers - or columns as I like to call my oeuvre - for fifty grand or so, get themselves on the BBC with that wearisome old poof, Portillo, and get paid about a grand an hour for dribbling and waving their arms around and then they should get get a job moonlighting in this place, along with six hundred-odd others who really know the meaning of the word looting. Oh yes, Mr Tiny Speaker, and they should take several holidays a year in the Caribbean and of course send their sons to decent public schools. Like I do.
Cheers, waving of order papers, singing: for she's a jolly good darky, for she's a jolly good darky, for she's a jolly good darky and so say all of us (apart from the Old Etonians, former Bullingdon Club members and HM Govament, prop. skymadeupnewsandfilth)
Cheers, waving of order papers, singing: for she's a jolly good darky, for she's a jolly good darky, for she's a jolly good darky and so say all of us (apart from the Old Etonians, former Bullingdon Club members and HM Govament, prop. skymadeupnewsandfilth)
Mr Tiny Speaker: I call the Unelected Prime Minister. Mr David CallHimDave.
Mr CHD -Well, I thank the honourable skanky 'ho and would just like to remind members that this whole rioting thing is an ideal opportunity for the public to forget that we, the cops, the press and the bankers are all picking their pockets, closing down their services and shitting in their faces. And is, therefore, a jolly good thing, for us at any rate. And that's what matters.
Cheers, hear-hear, singing: we're all going back on a Summer Holiday.
Revisited: Prompted by mr oldrightie I checked Abbott's entry in the Register of Members' Bungs; the BBC only paid her approximately three hours @ £300 for her hourly appearances on This Week probably an hour in make up, an hour getting pissed and an hour on the sofa, not quite a grand an hour, then. ITV, by contrast, paid her the whole grand for her appearance on Cash In The Fucking Attic. Got her finger right on the pulse of urban deprivation has Comrade Abbott. Fuckpig.
As well as a regular income for appearing on BBC1's This Week on Thursday nights, she received a £14,326 "pre-production fee" for the BBC's Play It Again programme in which she tries to learn the piano.
What happened to little master Abbott, for whom his mum sacrificed her socialist principles on the altar of her maternal ambition just so's he could have a private education?
Little James Abbott-Thompson is now 33, and after his private school education, his degree at Cambridge, his career in the Foreign Office and his diplomatic posting to Rome, he became addicted to crystal meth and chased his mum round her house, wielding scissors, claiming he had a gun in his dressing gown, bit a police officer who was attempting to detain him under the Mental Health Act with drug-induced psychosis, committed eight further attacks, assaulting two nurses, a doctor, a therapist and four police officers. Three of his victims were female. He later exposed himself at Homerton Hospital, racially abused a nurse, assaulted her and smashed her glasses. The next day he set upon another policeman, and a few days later assaulted two officers outside the Foreign Office, where he had been employed. He eventually pleaded guilty to carrying out 12 assaults as well as racially aggravated criminal damage, making threats and exposing himself.
Diane Abbott herself has a bit of a history of racism. In 1996, writing in her local paper, the Hackney Gazette, she criticised the appointment to posts at Homerton Hospital, Hackney, of "blonde, blue-eyed girls from Finland, instead of nurses from the Caribbean who know the language and understand British culture and institutions''. Nursing unions and the hospital were furious, and Sir Patrick Cormack, Tory chairman of the all-party Finland group, said: ``Finland has the most excellent health service, and very fine nurses, and I'm sure an authority employing them won't be employing inadequate people.''
And, of course, Abbott is currently suspended from the Labour Party and under investigation by them following a letter she wrote to the Observer, in which she stated that only Proper Black People, really Black People, can experience racism. Any negative experiences by white people who aren't Proper White People, Really White People, like Jews, or redheads, are experiencing prejudice, not racism. This view is considered to be racist.
So, the remarks made by Tory tosser and donor, Frank Hester in 2019, should be considered within the context that everyone is racist. Including the Abbotts, mère et fils. Mr Hester said: "It's like trying not to be racist but you see Diane Abbott on the TV, and you're just like I hate, you just want to hate all black women because she's there, and I don't hate all black women at all, but I think she should be shot."
Gold to the Labour party, of course, who are demanding that Mr. Hester is given his money back and unpersoned. £10 million. No wonder Sunak is resisting. "He's said sorry, hasn't he? And we want to keep the money."
Parliamentarians are now falling over themselves to prove that British politics is not racist, calling in aid the following:
Unelected Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Rishi Sunak
Unelected First Minister of Scotland, Humza Usaf
Unelected Leader of the Welsh Assembly, Vaughan Gething
"No, I'm not giving back the £200,000 given me by my criminal chum, David Neal. It's a legitimate political donation, look you". David John Neal, twice convicted of environmental offences as head of two companies, Atlantic Recycling and Neal Soil Suppliers. Gething's ministerial colleague Lee Waters, described the donation as "completely unjustifiable and wrong".
"Want to make something of it, boyo? I yam the first Black person in my family for a thousand generations to attend university. Oh no, that was Kinnock. And he was a Ginger"
Are all Welsh politicians pompous windbags?
Labour leader in Scotland, Anas Sarwar
Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan
They must have run out of white, upper-class, middle-aged chaps. We'll see how racist the people of Britain are when all these unelected post holders go to the country and seek to be elected later this year. They are saying the Plotters are suggesting Penny Mordaunt, Sword Bearer, should wield her sword into Sunak's back and lead the Tory boys into another glorious Reich of unending glory.
"You are old," said the youth; one would hardly suppose
That your eye was as steady as ever;
Yet you balanced an eel on the end of your nose —
What made you so awfully clever?"
"I have answered three questions, and that is enough,"
Said his father; "don't give yourself airs!
Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff?
Be off, or I'll kick you down stairs!"
The four-volume Call Me Ishmael oeuvre, collected and curated by editor mr verge, is available on Lulu and Amazon.
Honest Not Invent, Vent Stack, Ishmael’s Blues, and the latest, Flush Test (with a nice picture of the late, much lamented, Mr Harris of Lanarkshire taking a piss on a totem pole) are available from Lulu and Amazon. If you buy from Amazon, it would be nice if you could give a review on their website.
Ishmaelites wishing to buy a copy from lulu should follow these steps :
please register an account first, at lulu.com. This is advisable because otherwise paypal seems to think it's ok to charge in dollars, and they then apply their own conversion rate, which might put the price up slightly for a UK buyer. Once the new account is set up, follow one of the links below (to either paperback or hardback) or type "Ishmael’s Blues" into the Lulu Bookstore search box. Click on the “show explicit content” tab, give the age verification box a date of birth such as 1 January 1960, and proceed.
Link for Hardcover : https://tinyurl.com/je7nddfr
Link for Paperback : https://tinyurl.com/3jurrzux
https://www.lulu.com/shop/ishmael-smith/flush-test/paperback/product-9yjvn7.html?q=Flush+Test&page=1&pageSize=4
With the 15% voucher, PB (including delivery to a UK address) should be £16.84; HB £27.04.