Howling

The next full moon this year is not until the 15^th of August but to see the distressed state of the perpetually offended you would be forgiven for imagining we were experiencing a full-on, extended super-moon phenomenon. So maybe it’s the heat which is making all those mad dogs parade their inadequacies so openly? No, of course not; it’s Boris. Boris, for all his demonstrable faults, is a force of nature so powerful it has its own gravitational field into which are sucked the political detritus; the also-rans, the unemployables, the gibbering loons, orbiting chaotically at his command, responding to his every syllable. They think they have agency but ‘Britain Trump’ is playing them like a shrill penny whistle.

I’m talking about people like Steve Bray and the other idiots who practically live outside Parliament to register their individual and collective disgust at the exercise of democracy. Donning the flag of a non-country, swearing allegiance to cynical political appointees, ignoring the hideous and non-human technocracy of their new church, they look like adult children, complete with tantrums and tears. Bray in particular has stood there, chanting ‘Stop Brexit’ and shoving his facile placards in the faces of all who would pass his way, year after year. Somewhere in his captive mind is a belief that he acts of his own free will, but he is clearly in thrall to a peculiarly 21^st Century delusional madness.

This isn’t dedication to a cause; this isn’t helping anything; this isn’t a decent person’s opposition to enacting the wishes of a majority with whom he happens to disagree. This is mental illness, plain and simple. It is a wish to be thought relevant; by these actions he shall be remembered… and quickly forgotten. All he has achieved is to show every potential future employer that if he doesn’t accept what you have decided to employ him to do, he will refuse to do it. He has rendered himself a laughing stock, a braying idiot and an embarrassment who will forever have to live on the kindness of others or the charity of state.

But he is not alone. One could argue that, as a private citizen, he has fallen prey to a temporary madness and without wise counsel has naively exposed his inner thoughts to an unforgiving world, but such excuses don’t apply to many prominent others. Alistair Campbell, Jon Snow, Adam Boulton, Anna Soubry, David Lammy, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, Owen Jones and many others – name after well-known name pops up to openly demonstrate their lack of perspective, judgment and temperance in demeanour. Imagining themselves somehow ‘better’ they use their platforms to bleat far and wide exactly how disturbed they are. And how wrong we all are.

Bray by name...

And it is becoming a concern because this has gone beyond anything to do with Brexit, the country or whatever newly minted grievance you happen to have dreamed up. This isn’t about protest, is about them, the individual and their need for validation in a world that really couldn't care less. “But, look at me!” they cry, “Look at me, damn you. I am anti-Brexit and you are all racists and have but a fraction of my moral worth!” Like a child acting up the only effective response is to just ignore them and hope that one day they realise that they are nobody.