March of the Lemmings Page 19
To Palestinians, Trump’s Jerusalem embassy is a provocation. To American Christian fundamentalists, it is a kind of giant mousetrap for a giant mouse Christ, designed to lure him back to Earth a little earlier than he was perhaps planning. But thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God, not even with cheese.
Mrs May’s latest plan for the Northern Irish border is similarly fraught. Work has already begun on a series of giant watchtowers, named the Pillars of Democracy, each several hundred feet high and electronically equipped to read the details of people and products crossing the border.
But in an error of judgement as catastrophic as Trump’s Christ-baiting embassy, each tower will be made to look like a massive Oliver Cromwell, who, while honoured here in mainland Britain as the founder of the democratic process that delivered the electorate’s beloved Brexit, is viewed by Catholics on both sides of the Irish border as a genocidal war criminal.
Similarly, the folly of Trump’s Jerusalem Christ trap is obvious. We don’t need to shoot protesters to bring Jesus back to Earth for the benefit of American Christian fundamentalists. If I were a religious person, here in London, I would see Christ every day.2
Last year, he meandered, in shawl and slippers and female form, along my tube carriage, singing polyphonic clicks and buzzes, and holding out an empty cup. I put in some coins, and the woman opposite me, who was wearing a silver crucifix, made a disapproving face. I leaned forward, gestured towards her jewellery and the departing beggar, and whispered, ‘That was Christ. Just there. And you missed him.’3
Sometimes I see him in Kentish Town, a man I vaguely knew in south London a quarter of a century ago, now street-sleeping, and I buy a bag of toiletries from Boots and leave them at his feet. He is Christ. And so am I, I suppose, for buying those toiletries. Greater love hath no man than to lay down his Lynx.4
If I were faithful, I would see Christ everywhere, on buses and at borders, both pulling the trigger and taking the bullet, and I would not be able to bear the sorrow of it. But I don’t think I would have seen him in the triumphal, hate-filled benedictions of Trump’s surrogate Jerusalem speakers.
Christ was at the bus stop outside the house this morning, where I waited with the kids; Christ manifest as two street prostitutes, crazy and angry from a long night of low earnings, their curses the blood of Christ, their kicks the body of Christ; and Christ was in the newspaper just now, contemplating his toilet purchase and the loss of his privacy, preparing for surgery.5
1 Nobody seemed to have warned Meghan’s dad that having a royal daughter meant he had to know how to conduct himself in front of the press, and wedding-and journalism-related stress gave him a heart scare.
2 I remain an atheist, but my Catholic wife has inculcated in me the value of Christ as a metaphor, and now I keep seeing that metaphor, schlepping about the city of London at all hours of the day and night. Only this morning she was weeping uncontrollably on the pavement outside Tesco’s in Finsbury Park, and I gave her all the change I had from buying the Observer, a finger in the dam of the world’s misery, and virtue-signalling to boot no doubt.
3 I actually did this. I hope the woman was suitably chilled.
4 The man in question used to be a male model, on the fringes of my mid-’90s circle. He loves to ridicule me in front of my kids about how different I look now I am fat, and how handsome I was when I was young, and I take the hit. He looks pretty different too, to be honest, but it would be churlish to go on about it. I am glad the kids understand that a homeless person could be anyone, could be someone your dad once knew, but when my daughter asked why the former Cool Britannia face couldn’t come and live with us, I realised the limits of the extent of my concern. Virtue signaller.
5 I was in a church choir for five years as a kid, though I personally was neither sexually abused nor converted to Christianity. I listened to the service three times every Sunday from the stalls. The liturgy never leaves you, however monotonously it was recited, and it was, in retrospect, a formative influence.
How to treat Morrissey? Stop listening to him
8 July 2018
Morrissey fans have for years equated his more unpalatable pronouncements with the babblings of a beloved but out-of-touch relative. Some of the things Uncle Steven says seem a bit racist, but he has seen a lot of changes in the area he lives in, he got food poisoning from a bad curry on the Bristol Road in 1978 and he says he couldn’t get on Top of the Pops in the ’80s because he wasn’t black.
But are Morrissey fans justified, in the light of Morrissey’s unambiguous support for both the violent tanning salon entrepreneur Tommy Robinson1 and the far-right For Britain party, in finally losing faith? Either way, it looks like I picked the wrong year to take an eighteen-month break from stand-up to work incognito as a Morrissey impersonator, fronting a Smiths and Morrissey covers band.2 I know it’s over. My Boz Boorer lookalike has been put to work in the garden, trapping jackdaws and building a gazebo.
Until last week, I had four Mexican musicians holed up in the spare room, working on a mash-up of ‘This Charming Man’ and a Paul Simon song, entitled ‘Here’s to You, Tommy Robinson’. ‘Why ponder the law’s complexities, when Robinson’s done for a breach of the peace?’
My deliberate Morrissey-style weight gain was all for nothing, it appears, and now I am just a fat fifty-year-old man, of whom passers-by remark, ‘Morrissey has let himself go. What with the weight gain and the Tommy Robinson stuff.’
The late Sean Hughes, a fellow stand-up comedian to whom Morrissey meant a lot, had insisted on being cremated last year to the sound of The Smiths’ ‘Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now’, and Morrissey’s calculated black-comic misery made even Sean’s actual immolation momentarily funny. Sean also had the perfect Morrissey joke: ‘Everyone grows out of their Morrissey phase. Except Morrissey.’3
But Morrissey’s controversial song lyrics should not be taken as evidence of their writer’s true feelings, any more than this column, by the Observer-reading columnist character of Stewart Lee, represents what the real Stewart Lee actually thinks.
Thus, in 1988, when Morrissey told the titular hero of ‘Bengali in Platforms’ to abandon his ‘western plans’ and understand that life in England was difficult enough even if you ‘belong here’, the bewildered immigrant was perhaps merely an ill-judged metaphor for loneliness; in 1992’s ‘The National Front Disco’, when Morrissey sang ‘England for the English!’ from the point of view of a disenchanted young man seduced by the far right, we accepted that exploring that point of view was not the same as endorsing it.
Just as, in 1967, when John Lennon said he was the walrus, goo goo g’joob, goo goo goo g’joob, goo goo g’joob, goo goo goo g’joob, we knew John Lennon was not the walrus goo goo g’joob, goo goo goo g’joob, goo goo g’joob, goo goo goo g’joob at all. John Lennon was in fact the eggman. The walrus was Paul.
The credibility problem would arise if John Lennon, having said he was a walrus in a song, had then gone around actually being a walrus, choosing to live as a walrus and do all walrus stuff, like eating benthic bivalve molluscs and engaging in competitive courtship displays. Then we would have had no option but to believe that John Lennon actually was a walrus after all. Which is sort of what Morrissey has done.
This isn’t the time for ambiguity, or irony, or publicity-seeking controversy. Those days are gone, and I miss them, as I am part of a generation that profiteered from the assumption that political correctness was a done deal, and now we could have fun jumping in and out of its boundaries, like street kids round a spurting water main. But the Nazi-saluting pug bloke has just joined UKIP, so his racist dog doesn’t seem remotely funny any more.4
If Breitbart or Spiked can roll out your comments approvingly online, you have fucked up. Nowadays, your true intentions have to be written through every inch of your content, like the word ‘Blackpool’ through a stick of rock, so if at any point the useful idiots of the hipster alt-right and their fellow travellers in the opinion industry
choose to snap it, it still can’t be repurposed.5 The trouble is, there’s no longer any way to make the case that Morrissey ever means anything other than what he says.
But what to do when our idols disappoint us? Like a lot of the centrist dads who constitute his audience, I suddenly found I finally had to decide what to do with my Morrissey records.
I’ve got vintage and modern psychedelic vinyl by actual murderers, and books of poetry by anti-Semites and paedophiles, who are hard to write out of literary history. And the increasingly reactionary comments made by Mark E. Smith in his latter years will not tempt me to part with even the most unnecessary Fall compilation. But somehow, illogically and sentimentally, I held Morrissey to different standards.
As it happened, the break came easily. The last few weeks, I’ve been smashing the plastic cases of my CDs and filing the discs in folders, to save my children a tedious purge of obsolete physical media when I die. Oddly, when I got to ‘S’ (I file Morrissey’s solo stuff alongside The Smiths), I found myself putting Morrissey’s entire works, without really giving it any thought, into the box I was taking to the charity shop. I kept the vinyl of The Smiths’ debut and the Hatful of Hollow compilation, totemic physical objects that link me to a certain mindscape, but the rest just suddenly seemed irrelevant.
There was no great fanfare. I didn’t ceremonially smash Morrissey’s works or burn them in the street like Entartete Kunst. It all happened with a whimper, not with a bang, and with sadness for the sorry state of things, not erectile pride in my own virtuousness. Suddenly, I just didn’t want Morrissey in my home any more. And I couldn’t imagine any circumstances under which I would ever listen to him again.
Morrissey has developed some pretty outrageous views but he’s never been predictable, unlike Stewart Lee, a great peddler of dull but worthy opinions. Mike Spilligan, Twitter
After 25years of such stories still not sure Morrissey is bona fide racist. But on the basis of two ghastly evenings am certain Stewart Lee’s stand-up shows are sanctimonious, self-indulgent & tedious. Oliver Horton, Twitter
Stewart Lee is a virtue-signaling dolt. Johnnydodo, Twitter
Morrissey is as irrelevant and dated as Guardian anointed public school class warrior, Stewart Lee. PollyTicker, Twitter
Lee throws Morrissey stuff but keeps books by pedos and antisemites. Typical leftist. Dee Dangus, Twitter
1 Tommy Robinson enters our tale, a far-right football hooligan, mortgage fraudster and founder of the English Defence League, who, under normal circumstances, would have made little impact, but has become a freedom-of-speech cause célèbre for right-leaning libertarians, and was briefly seen by Steve Bannon as a flagpole around which to rally various aggrieved racists. After Robinson was appointed to the position of advisor by UKIP, the party’s former leader Nigel Farage described him as a ‘thug’. Farage prefers fascists in suits. Robinson is a little too authentic.
2 I am now too fat to be a Morrissey impersonator anyway. Despite the ravages, I doubt there are any waterslides that are off-limits to the former Smiths singer, who doubtless delights in whooshing down massive tubes in his trunks and splashing into a big pool.
3 A lot of fifty-something comedians died in 2018.
4 Markus Meechan, aka Count Dankula, is a ‘shitposter’ from Coatbridge. A shitposter is a man who tries to annoy people on the Internet. In 2018, he was arrested for posting film of his girlfriend’s cute pug dog, which he had trained to do Nazi salutes whenever he said, ‘Gas the Jews.’ The joke was that the girlfriend loved the dog, so he made it to do the worst thing possible. I get this, but it was an excuse the judge didn’t buy. I was among the self-loathing comedy liberals who signed a petition in defence of Meechan, a threadworm broken on a wheel, and of free speech generally, though I read online somewhere that I had called for him to be banned. Meechan subsequently spoke alongside Tommy Robinson at his Day for Freedom rally, and then joined UKIP. I don’t know what I think of the whole thing any more. I suppose if you aren’t in a racist organisation, or aren’t friends with racists, and you teach a pug to Sieg Heil, maybe it is funny, but if you are in a racist organisation and you’re friends with racists, and you teach a pug to Sieg Heil, it isn’t. I don’t know if there is a name for this nuanced position. Whatever, I blame the Internet. I wouldn’t sign a petition like that again, and I don’t know what I think of that.
5 Writing in the London Review of Books in February 2019, Patricia Lockwood described the current situation, in relation to its online manifestation, thus: ‘In contrast with [my] generation, which had spent most of its time online learning to code so that it could add crude butterfly animations to the backgrounds of its weblogs, the generation immediately following had spent most of its time online making incredibly bigoted jokes in order to laugh at the idiots who were stupid enough to think that they meant it. Except that after a while they did mean it, and then somehow at the end of it they were white supremacists. Was this always how it happened?’ I read this and it made me feel less alone, which is what the best writing does, I suppose.
Trump’s struggle not to tie himself in nots
22 July 2018
I spent the weekend at the Latitude festival in Suffolk with my children, Nelson and Mandela. Like a good metropolitan liberal elitist, I had all my tastes and prejudices confirmed, and all in a safe family-friendly environment. But when I left the site on Monday, it seemed that, while I was eating sushi in recyclable rice coatings and cheering the snowflake oi of Idles, the post-Second World War power balance had shifted beyond all recognition. I can’t turn my back for a second.
Donald Trump, having spent the previous week calling the European Union his ‘foe’, like a mad medieval king, was now taking the dictator Vladimpaler Putin’s side against evidence-based investigations into the kind of Russian meddling that helped swing an American election, destabilise the EU, fan the global far right, popularise Fortnite, drive swarms of hornets into Dorset, kill our English newts and deliver Brexit.
‘I don’t see any reason why it would be Russia,’ Trump proclaimed at the press conference, having already fondled a football presented to him by master puppeteer Putin, which made the president look like a disturbed zoo monkey given toys to stop him flinging his excrement at visitors.1 I expected the tanks to roll west into the Baltic states unchallenged within hours, showered with Stars and Stripes confetti in a New York-style ticker-tape parade.
Luckily, overnight, Trump realised that what he had meant to say was not ‘I don’t see any reason why it would be Russia,’ but ‘I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be Russia.’ This is fortunate, as otherwise he could have been executed for treason, an event that would doubtless have drawn even larger crowds than his famously full inauguration, especially if it saw a repeat performance from the TwirlTasTix baton-twirling group.
Overnight, the Republicans had constructed a paper-thin plausible denial, hoping that no news agencies, in our micro-attention-span world, would run Trump’s explanation of his misspeak alongside the press-conference footage, where context and his repeated use of the preposition ‘but’ would show he had clearly meant to say exactly what he said in the first place, without a shadow of a doubt. Which is exactly what happened.2
Nonetheless, even in a period of unprecedented stupidity and cynicism, Trump’s ‘would’/‘wouldn’t’ gambit represents a new low in contempt for human intelligence, and a rejection of language itself, words and their actual meanings now a kind of obsolete tool in the battle for the hearts and minds of the very worst people on Earth.
How easy it appears to be to unravel and reverse the great statements of the past with a simple negative insertion. Neville Chamberlain returns from seeing Hitler in 1938 and utters the reputation-saving denial, ‘I do not have in my hand a piece of paper.’ Martin Luther King’s 1963 address is re-remembered, to satisfy the racist vote, as: ‘I do not have a dream, and anyone who says I did must have misheard me.’ Descartes is reverse-engineered to proclaim the perfect
philosophy for the Trump– Brexit era: ‘I do not think, therefore I am.’ And his philosophical forebear Shakespeare is retooled to offer the timeless truism ‘To not be, or to be, that is not the question.’
Meanwhile, our cowardly, self-interested MPs were given many opportunities in Parliament earlier this week to sabotage Brexit in the national interest, but the traitors put pride and party loyalties before the future of the country, choosing instead to stoke the petrol engine of the out-of-control Brexit Flymo™ with even more incendiary lies as it hurtles towards the landscaped no-deal ha-ha.3
Instead of voting against Brexit, the Liberal Democrat Tim Farron was actually in Dorset, charging milkmaids £5 to watch him struggle to accommodate his feelings about the homosexuals and his feelings about an all-knowing God whom he imagines has very strong views on the specifics of marriage legislation.
God would have wanted Tim to vote. Anyone can tell that snowflake God would obviously be a Remainer, but if the result of the corrupt referendum must be honoured, the Lord would at least favour a soft Brexit. Like Jeremy Corbyn, Jesus Christ would be a hard Brexiteer, but only because he imagined a fairer society could be built from the ruins of the old one. Drive your plough over the bones of the dead.
Nonetheless, if Tim and Vince Cable had turned up, Monday’s Brexit trade vote would almost have been a dead heat, and the nation would be a little bit closer to avoiding the need to stockpile tins of alphabetti spaghetti in its cellars.4