Pushing your Buttons

Coke or Pepsi? They taste the same to me and they are both just gassy, sugar-filled teeth-rotters, but millions swear by one or the other. Wine experts in blind taste tests can’t tell the difference between red wine and white wine dyed red, yet supposed connoisseurs hang on their every pronouncement. And the vast majority of ‘energy drinks’ contain nothing more exciting than lots and lots of sugar... and are consumed mostly by fat kids and gullible fat adults who presumably need the supposed energy boost to enhance their sofa surfing experience. It’s not what you sell, it’s how you sell it... which is part of the problem.

You no longer go on a day trip, visit a museum, or just potter about at home; you are under pressure these days to undergo an ‘experience’. Even when you are experiencing almost nothing; marketing indolence as achievement you are invited to ‘hang out’, or ‘chill’, ‘de-stress’ or reward yourself for your industry by indulging in ‘me time’, thus making a virtue out of what would once have been openly derided as sheer laziness. What happened to filling the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds' worth of distance run?

Every wasted hour is an hour you will never see again; every wasted day, another day closer to death. I’m not saying you should make yourself sick with worry that you haven’t achieved some goal today, but don’t kid yourself that lolling about on the sofa is taking you one step nearer to your nirvana. Tell it like it is. And there’s your problem; whether it is a fizzy drink, a toilet roll, or a political party you are in competition with other providers; and considering that one arse-wipe is much like another it is little wonder that choosing a party to back is fraught with confusion.

Party politics, I believe, is undergoing its ‘Ratner Moment’ with the two main parties no longer sure what they are selling, but everybody admitting that, at best, it’s cheap crap. Both have resorted to attack ads, unable any more to sell the positives. But branding ordinary people as bigots, racists and too stupid to know what’s good for them is never a good look; especially when they do that to each other anyway. So what do we have left?

Identity politics is so risible as to appeal pretty much only to eternally blinkered and narrow-minded; that ramshackle, rag-tag army of LGBTQI-plus-plussers and their hangers on. Allied with the ultra-feminists, the islam appeasers, the Jew-haters, various-shades-of-lives-matter and the look-we’re-so-not-Nazis-we-even-called-ourselves-anti-fascists agitators, the sheer contradiction of their multiple stances makes for an ugly coalition that should ensure the Labour Party remains in the wilderness for a generation or more.

It’s not even certain that Labour could unseat Theresa May any more and in any case the Conservatives are quite capable of doing that all by themselves. Schism is in the air and as for branding, the Tories have long since lost the seal of approval as far as running the economy is concerned (and for quite a long time that’s all they’ve had). Nobody watching with any interest can seriously believe that the current crop of politicians has the first clue about running, well, anything, really.

The new consensus?

So, your serious choice right now is ‘none of the above’. I’m guessing that come the next election nobody is going to see a majority from a derisory turnout. But when big brands disappear the gap in the market is soon filled and in the true spirit of enterprise, expect to see a plethora of new offerings to dilute and dissipate those votes. Single issue parties, ultra-minority collectives, freak-show candidates and voters so fed up to the back teeth that they’ll vote for anybody but the same old brands. Regardless of Brexit, politics is broken and this time there is no happy status quo to protect. Coke or Pepsi? It might just be Irn Bru. Or Tizer... or Umbongo.

Alarums!

Everybody loves a good conspiracy theory; Dan Brown and other such sensationalist authors have made fortunes from peddling tales of outlandish plots, secret societies, centuries-old mysteries and good old myths and legends. It’s stirring stuff, especially the dénouement when in that last race to The End we discover that we have been deceived from the beginning and the kind old professor/grandmother/ protector-of-the-faith is really the guiding hand of the whole illicit enterprise... and in the final act the Nazi gold is once again lost, paving the way for a sequel and revealing that even now we know we were fooled, we’re always ready to fall for another bout of deceit.

On the BBC news this morning, sinister dealings are revealed, that targeted social media campaigns are disseminating hated and fomenting division and ‘damaging democracy’. Naturally, such underhand perversions of the natural order are at the behest of the Russians and the Leave cartel. Did you know, by the way, of the dark masters of the Brexit Syndicate?  Oh yes; I couldn’t read to the end for laughing but I wouldn’t be surprised if the fingerprints of giant space lizards are all over those shenanigans. Turns out – allegedly – that all this disorganised, uncoordinated bumbling is really part of the plot, disguising the slick operation beneath. I say, give them all Equity cards!

But back to the hate news; is it for real, or is it that – the way I see it – that humans are just like that and they rarely play nice when not face to face? Isn’t the simpler explanation just that once wedded to an idea or even better, an ideology, you seek out that which confirms your bias? We all do it. I see the left as being the side most likely to engage in threats and violence. The left assume that only those of the right would be so dastardly. Strikes me it’s not ‘internet hate’ we should be educating kids about but that humans are a pretty shitty species. But I guess the truth can be hard to swallow.

The problem with deep conspiracy is another aspect of human nature; we can’t keep secrets. We are atrocious at it. If we really wanted to give our kids an advantage in life we would teach them how to be good liars. Then they could enter politics and happily de-couple their cognitive dissonance as they simultaneously cut the ribbon on the new school even as they pressed the button for the demolition of another. They could cut funding for the NHS while cheerily announcing an increase. And they could repeatedly tell the public the lie that Ted Heath made it perfectly clear that joining the Common Market meant loss of sovereignty.

If there is one conspiracy worthy of the name it is the grand conspiracy to cut off the head of the nation state and in particular this nation state. Many warned of this, but the official line was to deny it, to obfuscate, to change the subject and to point to trade. But look, we’ll be rich! But we’re not rich are we? Are you? Only relatively recently has it been clear we no longer steer our own course, but it has been represented as an agreed end state when it was never anything of the kind.

Leave overspent during the referendum? Oh, fuck off – Remain’s champions have lied to the public for decades and continue to lie. Most people must be able to see that David Cameron offered a referendum only because he had been backed into an electoral corner and only because he was convinced he could win it. It was supposed to have been won by Remain and a 52/48 result would have absolutely sealed the deal; there would have been no marches, no targeted ‘hate’ campaigns. We would – as a state – have meekly donned our shackles, continued boarding the EU galley and grabbed an oar.

If you want more, here are a few links to feed your curiosity:

Brits too stupid for the EU

A case for Treason?

Sovereignty and the European communities

Apocalypse Not Now

Parliament goes off on its holibobs and Project Fear has a spring in its step, I see. When will all the wailing end? You’d like to hope that when the sun rises, as surely it will, on Saturday, 30th March, 2019 the Remainers will rub their eyes, blink and decide to take those first few bold steps into the future, but I fear it won’t be so. Dominic Grieve has been warning of famine and fever; that food and medicine will run out within weeks and pestilence will stalk the land. Death will surely follow... Others, such as John Major have preached that we should confess our sins that we be forgiven and allowed to re-enter the Kingdom of Euro-Heaven via a ‘second’ referendum. The prodigal will be received back into the fold and fêted as a returning hero.

It’s all sounding terribly biblical – Old Testament, naturally - and they are warning of nothing less than the coming of the Four Horsemen and the end of days. Abi Wilkinson (yes, her) now exiled to Washington DC, has literally tweeted that very sentiment, although I couldn’t tell and really couldn’t be bothered to find out whether she meant Brexit or Trump. But have no doubt, evocation of those pale riders still has the power to chill malleable minds and you can be sure Theresa May will be busily picking away at the first of the Seven Seals during the Parliamentary recess.

But, being good old, stalwart, bloody-minded Tommy Atkinses we will pick up our rifles, recover our phlegmatism and soldier on. The Remainers are whipping themselves up into a frenzy, sensing blood and victory, but we’ve been here before and when the vainglorious projects of our ‘betters’ become shitstorms of iniquity and finger-pointing failure, somebody has to steer a course to calmer waters. Because we Leavers know that our shared world will need rebuilding and we may need to offer kindnesses to the Remainers whose longed for Armageddon will not have occurred. The-Day-After-Brexit will be just like any other day for all but a tiny few.

But they will be furious and cognitively dispossessed when they discover no great calamity has befallen them. They will be distressed that no mayday call need be issued. They will be bereft yet strangely numb that their beloved EU survives, albeit weakened and that it makes not one jot of real difference to them. And in order to realign the evidence with their beliefs they will become – for a while at least (and possibly forever in the case of the Soubry-Graylings) – even more manic in their insistence that the world did, in fact, end and that we are merely waiting in purgatory for the final descent into hell.

10p on the price a loaf of bread will bring them out in ecstatic hives of misery and every single new pothole will be proof – proof! – that we cannot survive Brexit beyond Tuesday. The Queen will pass on the crown, due to Brexit and the lengthening of days as we progress towards the increasingly annual event we call ‘summer’ will be greeted with alarums and the rending of garments. I would not be entirely surprised if some of the more invested resorted to human sacrifice to reverse the horror of... of what, though?

I expect Brexit Day will not even be a bump in the road for most. Millions will awake and not even realise as they carry on in their jobs, their kids continue to go to school and the rain still comes sleeting in. The long history of this bejewelled fortress isle will record Brexit not as the cataclysmic, seismic extinction event the Remainers portend, but simply as the time that Britain went mad and then, just like George III, went un-mad again.

The racist flag of Olde Englande...

The headline shrieked out from The Daily Telegraph, the other day: ‘Labour's shadow sports minister suggests St George's flag is associated with 'far-Right ideology'. Oh dear, how sad, never mind. Citizeness Khan becomes yet another foot soldier in the Battle against Britain. This is such a tired old saw and paired with the tedious business of calling everybody racist whenever they express an opinion which doesn’t please the politburo is becoming just as impotent.

Not that the play hasn’t been clever: Start out by saying that flying the St George flag offends muslims, due to its association with the crusades, etc. Suggest that it is an emblem of imperialism and drum into school pupils how monstrous those enlightened times really were. Extend the thesis to affirming that those who do fly the flag are expressing, albeit unconsciously, racist sympathies. Link to a bit of video football violence – largely unrelated to race, but it fits the ‘rise of the right’ agenda – and let time do its work.

Now, blow the Pavlovian whistle. Express concern that the flag has become tainted and watch as the hands start wringing and the dog pack of disgusting white working class experiences shame and guilt and quietly takes down its banners. That’s the theory, at least, and it worked a treat among the middle classes who, being better educated, are far more easily indoctrinated. But the workers – those stupid, ignorant bastards – are harder to condition, because where is their treat for obeying?

Nobody is patting them on the back and cooing ‘good boy!’ to them. The smugger classes do this for themselves, but when it comes to the masses it’s the stick all the way. Damned if they comply, excoriated if they don’t. But has nobody yet learned that when you’ve taken everything else from people, all they have left is the intangible? And in this case it is pride; it is their identity. Even when they were given a vote on their future it was on the understanding that they would come to heel and roll over for the EU.

And now you have people like Diane Abbott demonstrating the same sort of contempt for public opinion as she ineptly tried to attack the government for washing their hands of the jihadi ‘Beatles’. The establishment would never dare put capital punishment to a referendum, would they? Tony Blair famously had the ultimate sanction removed for treason; could it really be mere coincidence that shortly thereafter he put in train the conditions that would put him firmly in the treacherous frame? You decide.

Its bite is far worse than its bark.

One thing seems certain; our elected officials are afraid of losing control and flags have been used to rally armies as long as we have had recorded history. But the flag is only a piece of cloth; it is what it represents that you can’t take down. The Standard of St George is not only a flag, it is also a march. And a stirring one at that. The blood is up, the English are angry. And plenty have learned to their cost that you really, really, don’t want to make the English angry.  

Which is more...

It’s official; the world has gone mad. If the news that Dorset police are planning on sending out ‘thank you for not speeding’ letters doesn’t fill you with foreboding – we know where you were; we know where you live; we’ve been watching you - then consider the lunacy which has been visited upon those poor, oppressed students of Manchester University. Not content with seeing everybody with opposing views as, literally, Hitler, they are now determined to once again seek offence from beyond the veil. This time their target is that icon of Englishness, Rudyard Kipling. 

So what that they think he disdained the brown man? (Though what of Gunga Din?) He was a man of his times and is a valuable ice core, revealing many of the views of those far-off days. We live in less enlightened times and I wonder how history will judge the youth of today. No charges of light brigades for them, no play up and play the game. Instead they are the generation which opened the door to the Trojan horse of multiculturalism and buried their own cultural identity forever. Will a future Sir Edward Gibbon record their part in our downfall?

But hey, if they are going to so willingly deface our heritage, I may as well get in first.

IF NOT

IF you can lose your rag when all about you 

Are wearing theirs and blaming it on you,

If you can blame yourself when brown men loathe you,

And make allowance for their loathing too;

If you can wait and simply keep on waiting,

Or being lied about, just accept those lies,

Or being hated, join in with all the hating,

You don't look good, and neither seem too wise:

Forget your dream - their dreams are now your master;

Try not to think – just fold and take the blame;

If you can bring both Crisis and Disaster

And accept those two sage prophets in your name;

If you can bear to hear the lies you've spoken

Enhanced by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the truths your father gave you, broken,

And stoop to blunting all his worn-down rules: 

If you can make one heap of all your scratch-cards 

Bought with welfare aid, who gives a toss?

And pile up all your values in the scrapyard

And plan to make islam your future boss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

To sell your soul when honour has all gone,

And be so hollow there is nothing in you

Except the book which tells you it’s haram!'

If you can shun your kin but cling to virtue,

And sell your friends and lose the common touch,

If neither sense nor proven facts can reach you,

If reason seeks you out, but cannot touch;

If you can fill your worthless every minute

on your knees and show the world your bum,

Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,

And - which is more - you'll be imam, my son!

What's not to like?