THE SUNDAY ISHMAEL. POST-HURRICANE EDITION.

 WHAT'S ALL THIS CHARLIE SHIT?

I have just checked and in the current edition of Private Eye, including strips and counting them as one, there  are about fifty cartoons, 

twenty-six  issues per year produce, therefore,  about - what - thirteen hundred. I have been reading the Eye for most of my life and must have seen tens of thousands of the bloody things;

 

 the  odd one makes me smile and occasionally I laught out loud at some barely discernible  sketching of domestic absurdity but  I cannot remember even one of them, unsurprising, for there has been nothing in them which did not merely poke fun at something I already knew stank to high Heaven, that, after all is usually what cartoons do, they assume, for their existence, that the viewer will have some prior knoweledge of the subject, 
the doodler and the viewer must be party to the same in-joke.

Cartoonists are, to put it mildly, vastly over-valued. 

And whaddayoudo for a living? 
It's a very important job, actually,  I draw pictures which capture and  condemn the eternal untruths, superficially light-hearted, yet pungent, profound, scriptural, even, some of them. 
Change the world?  I should say so.  Just look at how, everywhere, thanks to cartoonists, Villainy and Vice are  in retreat, while Virtue advances on all fronts. Cartoonery more important than plumbing, is it? Ab-so-lutely. All our freedoms depend on heroic doodlers like me doodling. Course they do, sweetie, course they do. And it beats working for a living, right?

Photographs, though, are a different story.  Who can forget the impact of this

or this?

No deft caricaturising,

 
no speech marks

just the photograph, 
stealing a moment, forever; 


 the camera's larceny and the photographer's boldness, 

not too many of these produced in Ian Hislop's office.

And there's a doodlers' pecking order. People  wax hysterical about Ralph Steadman's blood-drenched  gargoyle caricature  output but actually I didn't need Ralphie to inform me that Nixon was a deranged criminal. 
 
 And nor should have anyone else. 

Should there be doodle-therapy on the NHS, to help us understand shit, can't we tell by the smell? 

Ralph's Gonzo Fear and Loathing collaborations matter nothing,


 save to a dwindling,  dying band of perma-adolescent  Hunter S Thompson fans;
 his Oddbins illustrations matter even less. 


 Maybe mr verge will have a more positive view of Steadman; 
surely he cannot be as trivial as I contend, Steadman, that is.

 Gerry  Scarfe's dark ouevre  proves  a little goes a long way and since he so artistically  augmented the preposterous, juvenile  mewlings and pukings of Pink Floyd's The Wall,
 
 he now, with rare, dextrous flexibility,  
draws and inks and washes with his head up his arse,

 
 A portrait of the artist as a rich man.

No business quite like show business. 

We don't need no edu-cay-shun.  
Right, profound as fuck, that.

I don't know quite how to caricature les caricaturistes Francaise;  worthless,  decadent,  layabout  dilletantes; publishers' ink-stained rentboys, drawing dirty pictures, but not too dirty, whatever they do it's not a proper job, doesn't produce anything, doesn't serve anyone.  What's the point, today, of a dead-tree press cartoonist, if it's not to become not a recreational but an occupational martyr?

I don't give a fuck about a handful of French scribblers, Christ, I'd be hard-pressed to care if the entire British press corps was put up against the wall and shot;  these guys, actually, were asking for this to happen to them, they knew, everybody knew that you can't argue with those who don't care if they live or die;  now that it's happened, why must we beat our breasts?

And there is a wider, more realistic view of la Belle France, in which she is not, never has been Freedom's last redoubt.

France's aggressive secularism, its historical repression of religion, its own glorious headchopping past and  its recent denial of religious expression through clothing and diet are hardly emblematic of a   nation wedded to treedom of speech, thught and expression, of a nation  which we are now urged, commanded to admire, a nation in whose hysteria we must all painfully  share, lest our arses fall out, a nation with whom we must all, twittering,  solidaritize.  I saw several of the NewPeople interviewed, 

they said they'd queued all night to get a copy of Charlie Hebdo's Greates Hits, took a bloodbath, mind,  for them to even be aware of political satire but now that they had a hold of it they were all gonna soundbite the fucking thing to death, whatever it was. 

Solidarity, they intoned, with some idiot editor, that's what counted; values, freedom, rights; all that was missing was Gordon the Ruiner, micing onstage and  gobbing-off about his moral compass, his mad father and the right sol-you-shun for hard-working families. Christ, have we ever been so platitudinised, and by such  brain-dead, Twittering imbeciles?  They couldn't even spell sanctimonious, most of them, jerking about in the moveable maelstrom of a crass shitegeist. Death to the NewPeople 'swhat I say, stone them with their i-things, their latte coffees and their moisturising products. Solidarity with racist, Nazi-loving scum bags, that'll do for them, until the next thing comes along.

The recent Frog banning of the burqa and the hidjab are redolent of  surrenderiste Nazi France, in which only a few bravely resisted while  the many collaborated with Hitler's Godlessheathenbastards, sucking Hermann's bratwurst and rooting-out French Hebes for the death camps. 

Now, it's How dare these Muslim bitches dress as they wish?  We, their masters, must be able to see into their eyes, and mebbe 'ave a peep at their duskee tits, too, for aren't we Frenchmen, a-ha-ha-ha and uzzerwise we do not know if zey are planning to bomb our arses off. Ah, oui, d'accord, le freedom de speech and  de thought, c'est magnifique, but not for ze niggers and les Allah-bothereurs,  merde, non.  Whaddayoumean, zey are as French as moi, moi, Jean-Claude de Paree?  'Ow can zey be French, when zey are fucking niggers,. eh, vous etes 'avin ze laff, n'est ce pas? 

In some regions, M'sieu Frog has insisted that - in mainly Muslim schools -  pork must be on the menu, for true secularism demands that religious dietary concerns have no place in public life.  Aye, tolerance, freedom, rights.  Cunts is what they are, these Frogs with their nasty, cowardly bullying.

There have always been racists, the French, they've always hated the Jews.

 The slopes in Indo-China and the wogs in Algeria gave them a good kicking, denying their supposed military superiority and despite de Gaulle skulking away the Hitler war in London - at my parents' expense - the haughty monsterqueen barred his former allies and protectors from entry to the then Common Market, hard to believe, now, really, when you think of the boys gutted on the Normandy beaches, that the French would shun the British so. Must be their concern for rights and freedoms and tolerance which excluded us from their private cosying-up to Hermann, post-war.

And le premier frog, Hollande, he wasn't in office five minutes before he wanted to bomb previous colonies, massacre the natives and then suck Obama's cock all the way from Washington to Damascus; socialiste, he claimed to be, internationaliste, he claimed to be, now, having betrayed both causes he has leapt on this relatively minor contretemps murdereuse as though it was his electoral salvation.

So, mind you, has everyone else, 
from old HamFace, CallHimDave

Lessbeclear about this,
if, back home, you believe in Freedom
I order you to vote for me. 

to Bibi The Crook Netanyahu;
 
Vote for me
or it's fire and fucking brimstone,
a morrain of frogs, burning bushes
all that shit.

Although, in Paris, this was the reality,
 

  back in BibiLand

all the gentile whore leaders
 had been photoshopped out of reality,
maybe by Jehovah, Himself.
Values, you see, solidarity.

Even Andy, the other night,

Did I ever tell you I went to Glasgow University,
before helping Mr Murdoch destroy Britain?

betrayed his true, vile self - was so outraged by a French totty calling him  what he is, a white, eldery, comfortable entitlementista, living in middle class environs that I was sure the hateful old playboy was going to have a stroke, maybe next time, if it please God. 


 Freedom of speech is all very well, Mademoiselle,
but not on my show.


And now, as if all that Je suis Charlie shit was not enough, we must endure this further abomination, first compulsory Froghood, now compulsory Judaism. If I was Jewish I'd kick their fucking teeth in, these two, resurrect Irgun and the Stern Gang, hang these two  from the nearest hotel balcony.

No, Eric, you're not, you're a fat, lying, worthless, thieving, opportunist  old cunt, for which God, if He is, will punish you by making your arse fall out.

No, you're not, Tracey, you're just a decrepit old Tory slapper, one blessed with the Everything-I-Touch  - border controls, passports, immigration, extraditions,  police reform - Turns-To-Shit magic of the wannabee prime minister.

This Tracey May shit, this mad, screeching  old crow, vowing to eradicate something which no-one has been able to eradicate for at least two thousand years, even by the miserable standards of the Coalition of Greed, this takes some beating. She can't even  manage to count the immigrants in and the emigrants out, how's she going to perform this miracle.  Doesn't matter, logic, history, none of that matters,

Have-nagilah, have-nagilah, have-nagilah
ve-nismeha.

cos Tracey, the dancing queen, is  gonna stomp out anti-Semitism;
even though the Jews don't want it stamped-out, it is central to their faith, their scriptures and their politics, their exceptionalism, as God's favourites, just them, mind, not us, for even though their connection, one to the other, is religious, they insist, bizarrely,  that they are a race; a mad, inverse racism. A race is something that one cannot convert to. But never mind that. What's love got to do with it, one for another? Those mad fuckers'll see us all blown to Hell, Jews, Arabs and  Christians; Abrahamians, what are they good for?

Burbling about Freedom, what they're interested in, all of them,  those orchestrating Charlieism and Hymieism,  is ever greater control, ever greater censorship, ever more intrusive and brutal, militarised  policing.  The NewPeople, of course, complicit in their own degradation, believe whatever they are told, as long as it's vaguely sentimental, each passing, viral banality a Beautiful Obsession.

I am so often reminded by current events of George Steiner's remark that the Holocaust happened because the 'thirties Berlin intelligentsia was too busy listening to the string quartet in the salon to hear the cry in the street; the NewPeople,  shoulder-to-shouldering, are equally immune to Reality's signature notes, indifferent, in their stupidity, to the hot breath on their cheeks, of the Jihad. Serve 'em right if Ahmed, bringing it all back home,  visits their local Free School or worst of all possible big bads, takes a stroll through the quadrangles of Harrow or Eton or the colleges of Cambridge.

Always dreaming of another, vaguely better, more reformist world, we are told, endlessly,  that there was a time, before photography, an eighteenth and nineteenth century time, of pamphleteers and broadsheeters, when cartoons made monarchs quake and politicians cower but there never was such a time, political satire has never meant anything, never achieved anything, always been done amongst and to a tiny,  political chattering class, then, as now, gleefully and pointlessly fucking its own arse. And the self-acclaimed successor, the inheritor of this mythical, satirical greatness is the public schoolboys' co-operative known as  Private Eye, itself so radical that it  engages in some  annual, Westminster Oscars-giving political celebrity dinner,  its smirking editor nothing more than  a wealthy, Oxbridge PBC Tory on a nice little earner, Villainy's licensed Fool, pretending to be bold, rather like wotsisname, the pub landlord, rather like this jerk
 
Apres moi, le deluge racialiste.

leading his friends and employees to  a bloody, pointless death;  bestowing their friends and family  grief and bereaevement and gifting to the PBC, skymadeupnewsandfilth, C4 News and the entire ghastly political elastiblshment, at home and abroad an unexpected but entirely welcome New Year thoughts'n'prayers  jamboree. 

I would rather they were all still alive, the doodlers; I'd rather that Obama shut Guantanamo, jailed the CIA torturers, that Bibi stopped expanding into Palestine and that......fuck it, it doesn't matter, what I'd rather.  mr mongoose and others have described this as  the time of the Islamic Reformation;  we had ours, we may not deny them theirs, no matter how hard we try.

  JeSuising his scabby arse off, Hislop said, last week, that nothing seemed very funny, just now; 

welcome, FatBoy, to the real world.