Monday 24 June 2019

A FANFARE FOR THE COMMON MAN

Up all night, leaning on the windowsill, I turned on the TeeVee;
it was on mute and I was half-asleep. It looked like a get-together, a knees-up, a community-sing-song in an old folks' home; there was a big guy, with that big hair which Americans have and a big tie, ending down around his zipper and the big guy was working the crowd of old folks, clapping them back as they clapped him, dunno when that started, the recipient of the applause him- or herself clapping the applauders, we are all in this showbiz shit together, ain't we all just wonderful?


Bruce Forsyth in Hell was my first thought, 
until I sharpened my focus and read the crawler text along the bottom of the screen which revealed that it wasn't the late, pitiful but nauseating Brucie but Donald Trump, Leader of the Free World.
It really was like a Rally of the Simpletons, simple people from Simplesberg. Fla. 


Trump wandered the stage saying de-dah-de-dah-de-dah-de-dah-de-dah an'  it was great, it was  reallygreat and the place would erupt, cheering and clapping and him doing a desultory handclap in return.


 Bob Dylan said thirty years ago, Gee, shucks, I dunno, but things're pretty crazy, when I started out, the backing singers,  they'd just run up to the 'mic and do a handclap; now they got machines that do that, c'nya believe that, digitised hand-clappin'?
There oughta be a law against it. 




Trump's handclap responses are just like that, mechanistic and meaningless.

 

And then, again,
de-dah-de-dah-de-dah-de-dah-de-dah an'  it was great, wasennit, that thing,  it was reallyreallygreat;  more cheers, then he went into third person greatitude, I see we got Governor Hiram T. Cheeseburger here, tonight and he's a really great governor of this great state, done some really great work, really great governor, and his wife BetsyLou, a really great first lady of this great state, she's here tonight, ain't that great, no, I mean it folks, these are really great people, doing great work.


 A bit more simianism followed, 

 hooting and clapping and whistling and cheering and then it was time for the Wall, 


 that's a really great wall, folks, reallyreallygreatwall, a reallygreatwall an' we're getting it done, we're holding back that tide a criminals and terrorists that have been stealin' the jobsa our great, reallygreat AfroAmerican communities. really great people, our AfroAmericans.  Really great.

The Trumpster was launching his 2020 re-election campaign  and the more I watched the more I realised that he's actually a much better politician than were the contenders for Tory leadership and brief UK premiership.

Were it down to me Boris Johnson, Ken Livingstone and the Cameron-Clegg cabinet'd all be in jail over Grenfell Tower, alongside the dreadful harpy Firefighting Supremo, Wotsername.
Yes, stay in the building and burn to death,
 this is your best chance of survival. 
 These are my orders.

But no matter, having turned London Town into the money-laundering capital of the world the Austerity merchant-criminals still lord it over us, with their staggering venality, conceit and sense of entitlement. Meantime  Mediaminster rejoices in the braindead, tittle-tattle gossip of the drunken slapper, 




pontificating like a joyless, one-woman conclave of cardinals.

Just when you think Newsnight couldn't grow any worse - Paxman, RentBoy Davies and the skriking, cross-dressing hunchback banshee mutant, 
 Wark, 
all bestriding the dead-zone  show like failed, embittered art students, kicking Journalism's corpse - now we have the pisshead trollop, Maitless, making a clown of herself, half-dressed and half-witted, unable to marshal even a bunch of clowns such as these, unable to dent the collective We-Know-Bestism of intellectual giants such as Saj Javid, esteemed political historians  like Michael Spit and  the  romantic, derring-do adventurers like the boy, Rory Boniface.


And the more I look at this tedious homegrown Summer  pantomime of talking and it's lacklustre coverage the more I think,  well, Trump is much better at this, he makes no pretence,  he just mumbles the prejudicial slogans that he thinks his potential voters want to hear and keeps on mumbling them, in a reallyreallygreat  way.






NOW WASH YOUR HANDS.

A night or two before Trumps New Great Crusade I caught a few minutes of something called, I think, Sex In Their Seventies, on Channel Five; 
 it doesn't have Jon Sox or Cathy Newman or Fat Sweaty Krishnan 
Bigotry, bias and perversion;
 ThassChannelFourNoos.
 Good Evening 

but Channel Five, otherwise, is the new Channel Four, sick porn and specious activism.  This show, anyway, Christ, I nearly died. Everybody knows I'm liberal and everything but, y'know, to a degree and this item fair rocked me back in my armchair of laissez faire tolerance.  
It was about two American geezers in their seventies, iron-grey and in that unforgiving  netherworld between fit and flabby and every day, to celebrate their love for each other - and today, on camera, for the whole world  - they slurped in a deranged, antic manner on each other's arseholes for about an hour.  For a moment I thought they must be getting their whole heads up there.
The deep spirituaity of their love was demonstrated by the fact that whilst their mouths and tongues and probably their noses and chins were firmly rammed up their arses their cocks were rubbing against each other's hearts.  
Ah, bless. 
  I love spirituality, me.

Fuck me,  Jesus, I nearly cried-out in horror. 
Before they started-off dung-munching these two flabby old guys, probably from New York or San Francisco, were articulating forcefully that now was the best sex they'd ever had and the director/cameraman was really getting off on this bizarre specatacle, I think he applauded at one time, as this depravity was delivered just  as though it was the Sermon on the Mount or the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights.

Logically there is no difference between these old boys sucking their intestines clean and  conventional, if that's the word, cunnilingus or fellatio - oral-genital  stimulation - and it shouldn't distress me; furthermore what people do with each other is none of my business, doesn't require my approval or permission. 
It is certainly the case that there is nothing new under the Sun  when it comes to human sexual behaviour and societal taboos, well, they rise and fall.  
It wasn't Prudishness, then,  which jolted me while observing these two old freaks, harking-back desperately to  vigourous youth via their alimentary  canals, it was just full-on So-Whatishness, WhoGivesAFuckishness, Who Cares What You Two Old Creeps Do? 
 The truth is that they are desperate old men,  not having the best sex of their lives, they just want you to think they are.  If sucking an ancient and probably  diseased sphincter is the best sex of one's life then these old boys truly have never had a good time
I have always bridled at gay people calling me straight, they really have no idea.

Watching Trump, though, I wondered what his audience would make of the two grey men, desperate for excitement, lovingly munching dingleberries,  they'd probably want to put them in the electric chair.

I wouldn't go that far but I'd certainly bar them and their doings from the TeeVee screen.  When I was a kid I mocked the phrase: "....a tendency to corrupt and deprave" and it was ridiculed by John Mortimer, QC, I think, in the Lady Chatterly's Lover obscentiy trial,  the book being described by prosecutors as "not the sort of thing one would want one's wife or servants to read." As I grew and read more of what we call transgressive literature I came to have some sympathy with the prosecutors' stance;  there are books in my home that I wouldn't pass-on to just anybody, I do believe that given to an immature or unstable individual they may well corrupt and deprave, and the thing about corruption and depravity is that there's no way back,  that's the horror of, just for instance,  child sexual abuse,  there's no way back, corruption and depravity are pits of quicksand from which some cannot escape. 
 It is a tricky one, these days;  the Vatican has a treasure trove of under-lock-and-key porn  whilst simultaneously anyone in the world can access five thousand years of bestial  gangbang Sodom on the Internet without let or hindrance -  what am I doing, having a shelf of books I consider dirty, and what am I doing excoriating a pair of sad, gobby old queers, knocking on Heaven's arsehole?

I suppose I wish they'd just keep it to themselves. 
 I never saw anything like that when I was growing-up and I guess I was in my twenties and thirties when I read Burroughs and deSade  and Miller and the rest and these, we mustn't forget, were simply books about depravity, not on-screen, real-life, presentations. 
 If I was now a young teenager, watching Channel Five, the other night, seeing this odd couple I don't know how I would react.  People in High Places, people like Sadiq Khan,  say we must celebrate Depravity as Diversity but the Acquired Human T-cell Leukemia Virus, AIDS as it became,  resulted  from such celebration and it could easily have and may yet annihilate us all; syphillis and gonorrhea are massively increased in the UK; people like Jon Sox - a plague of his own making - blame government cuts but to see the elderly - aided and abetted by politicians and by Trash TeeVee -   evangelising for vividly  unsafe sexual practices seems to me to represent selfish, stupid, narcisistic, eco-criminal, species-hostile irresponsibility. 

Imagine, a tiny cut on your lip or an ulcer in your mouth or a loose filling, you'd need an IV anti-biotic drip in your arm to make this nonsense safe and even then it'd be madness, especially for older people whose natural resistance  is lower. All the AIDS victims, they were all super-fit, know-it-all musclemen, weren't they, much good it did them.  Fuck 'em, anyway, these two old monsters; I hope their tongues drop off in each other's arses. That's proper spirituality, that is.


And if it's OK for arse-munchers to hold sway over sections of TeeVee, to demand respect, to insist that their dodgy antics be celebrated  then it's equally OK for those whom Trump  personifies to want their borders closed and their jobs protected. It's also OK - and entirely constitutionally proper - for a handful of card-carrying Tories - if they so decide - to shuffle BoJo into Number Ten. What he then does there, though,  that's a whole other story, one which may yet reveal that Brexit, like all political creeds,  was only ever  a means to Ambition's end.


stop press. 
That bloke in Turkey, the dictator, he's demanding another election because his candidate lost;  where's he think he is, the United Kingdom?
 Perhaps Nicky Krankie and Jerry Corbyn can hop on a solidarity flight to Ankara and teach him the ground rules of DemoPhobia.  Annie Soubrie, she could get pissed and ranting on the 'plane, too.

12 comments:

Mike said...

Good morning, Mr I. I was hoping for a Sunday Ishmael (its Monday here) and wasn't disappointed.

I watched some of the Trump rallies in 2016. He knew how to work a crowd, in the same way the US Televangelists do. The comparison with Mussolini was not far off the mark. I was convinced then that if it came to war with Iran I would volunteer for the Revolutionary Guards. I get the sense that a lot of his base feel betrayed by the Orange Narcissus. His re-election isn't a shoe-in; he's fucked up the economy with his tariff war, and if he dares to take on Iran then it will crash the world economy, the US in particular - maybe not altogether a bad thing.

Re your choice of nighttime viewing: I think I left the UK around the time Angela Rippon flashed her legs on Morcambe and Wise. That was considered risque. Times have changed.

call me ishmael said...

A chance encounter, mr mike,not a choice, one from which I fled.

I think the Clintons would already have been at war with Iran and that Trump isn't a warmonger per se and so will happily just sabre rattle. On the other hand, war is good for WarInc but not especially so for Trumps type of business. real etstae, hotels and getting re-elected.

I watched a couple of US TeeVee evangelists earlier today and was amazed by how they repackage and sell that stuff, it was dazzling, some old guy called Ravi Zacharius, he had me spellbound, bewitched. Y'know, if you can fake that you can fake anything.

mongoose said...

Let's be fair, Gentlemen. The Orange Narcissus is, true, a disgrace but he is a different type of disgrace. The "economy" stats - the macro measures of success - don't tell us how Billy Bob Bloggs in the Appalachian mountains is doing or feeling. They do tell us how the profit-creaming machinery of Wall St and California tech are humming.

And the relentless bullshittery of impeachment and "Russia" and everything else has been little short of a coup d'etat by obstruction. The idea has been election nullification by yatter and it has largely worked. The Dems, poor loves, don't understand that a President who does little, "achieves" little is often a good one, often popular.

We have seen the same campaign of frustration and deceit over here re Brexit, and the same traducement by sniping and tittle-tattle of the buffoon Johnson. There is more moral decay on Love Island than there is in Bojo or the Orange King. I'd put Ornage re-election at 60:40 and Bojo coronation at 70:30 this morning. Plenty to play for yet.

Mike said...

Mr mongoose: very true. The GDP stats are just magic. As far as the US is concerned, 70% of their GDP is "services" ie fees for bullshit like financial advice, real estate, legal, medical etc - internal consumption that produces nothing. Just moving money around. Then there is the 1 trillion debt and its servicing that counts to the GDP. Then there are the 1000 US bases around the world that need funding. If you strip out the smoke and mirrors the US is a busted flush. By any normal accounting standard they are insolvent.

Its interesting the campaign against BoJo. I'm no fan of his, but he's probably the Tories last chance. Whatever you think of Sid, he's certainly overturned the apple cart. Good on him. Probably the most significant politician in nearly 100 years.

mongoose said...

I think that we've all been insolvent since fractional reserve banking became the norm, Mr Mike. The value of money is surely illusory. The problem with the economic mix in the developed world is as you indicate the unhealthy reliance upon services. If I iron your shirts and you mow my lawn in payment, what do either of us eat?

There is a sort of interia marketing going on in politics at the moment. Brexit? Too hard, too diffcult to change, too uncertain to unravel. Just like your mobile phone tariff or your power bill. Well, the householder has decided to change his political supplier, and while it may mean a bit of work, it is going to get itself done.

call me ishmael said...

The anti-BoJo campaign will shoot itself in the foot, even Daily Mail readers are wise to it for what it is, even so, they will stop at nothing, the Demophobes, to bury Brexit, anything might happen, a run on the non-existent pound, GlobaCorp businesses threatening to leave the UK, even a well-chosen assassination. Let them stand in the doorway as they may, the times, as you say, mr mongoose, they are a-changing.

mongoose said...

Indeed, Mr I, and if Ginsberg croaks and maybe even Thomas, Donald has won for a generation without lifting a single orange pinky.

Mr SG said...

I’m not a religious man Mr I, but that night time viewing of yours brought to mind the works of Hieronymus Bosch - especially the ‘Last Judgement’. We may have discussed him before - back up the road somewhere. In these latter days, it seems that it is not enough to just accept the descent into the depravity that our medieval forebears warned against but rather we must embrace and, indeed, celebrate it. Maybe that mad old busybody, Mary Whitehouse and her ‘NVLA’ were onto something?...

call me ishmael said...

As I was saying, mr sg, or trying to, I feel a bit of an elitist, sometimes - this stuff won't corrupt me but it will surely corrupt others, that sort of thing. I often wonder about Mother Mary and the NVLA and I never know what to think, save that she was as entitled to want stuff banned as others were to want it published, the contemporary differences being that there is now a pandemical and multi-genderal dimension to risky sexual behaviours, there is a looming failure of traditional antibiotics and a vast generation of info-savvy youngsters whose appetites are now quickly jaded, requiring more and more bizarre sating.

Bosch is an old friend, sort of, yes and Pieter Breughel, The Garden of Earthly Delights and The Triumph of The Dead being respectively their own Chronicles of Ruin.

There's a chink in my moralising armour in that I do wet my lips at a touch of depravity, but only a touch, and I do kind-of forward-sympathise with those young whose appetites and imaginations are jaded before they outgrow their teens; this way lies only snuff.

I was thinking inter alia about your comment on songless music when I posted the Liszt-Schumann piece but I will return to that theme.

call me ishmael said...

There is, mr mongoose, an adverse symmetry to the routing, by Trumpism and maybe BoJoSidism of the bleeding heart liberal - a fool such as I, for instance, and probably you, too - our own anthems now ammunition against us, pop culture entirely malleable, transferable.

I always loathed and detested the cocaine nightmare of Rumours by Fleetwood Mac and felt somehow vindicated when its chug-a-lug bombast was harnessed by Spunky Bill and his leprous doxy, Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow; when the Nonce-Protector General invited the Spokesperson of a Generation to gig for him at the Vatican and when I saw Dr Brian Badger strangllng the National Anthem for Bad Queen Brenda atop Buckingham Palace, such betrayal, one might think, God gave Rock'n'nRoll to us, didn't He, not to Them?

The times they are a-changing, however, is equally apposite as a soundtrack to the Trump Age as it was in the halcyon, half-wit days of Kennedy's Camelot, Kennedy, actually - bless his bruised and bleeding head, O Haupt vol blut und wunden ain't exactly rock'n'roll, I know, but you know whaddamean - being a far bigger asshole that Trump, a warmongering, Irish-American gangster and philanderer who in his thousand days did sweet fuck all about civil rights.

All those phoney, journalistic songs, they achieved nothing, save wealth and worship for their authors, all happy to have the naive sentiments of the 'sixties hijacked by fascistic neo-cons on both sides of the Atlantic. C'mon Trump, c'mon BojoSid, who cares, C'mon Everybody.

mongoose said...

There is indeed, Mr I, danger in it but can it be worse than the fix we're in?

We the people have adjudged that government is still of us but is no longer by us or for us. And therefore the shabby compromise- and deceit-raddled ruin of democracy will have to be burnt down. It's time to strike another match, go start anew.

call me ishmael said...

It is rather like peering through the windows of an asylum, watching MediaMinster and so I don't do much of it, not as much as formerly. I think you are correct in that something incendiary must happen, here or in Europe - Macron has flipped, shitting his pants about Marin le Pen and introducing sanitised national service; Frau Angular is ill; Tracey May is ill and gibbering;
Jerry Corbyn is under voluntary house arrest, the only sign of some sort of potentially restorative upheaval is a general election and a SidBojo pact; Anne Widdecombe more preferable to me as home secretary than Diane Abbott; how did that happen?