Imitation, they say, is the greatest form of flattery. I’m
not sure I necessarily agree entirely; on marking my current class’s
assignments I realised you can get too much of a good thing. Or in this case,
too much of a bad thing. You would expect that in the age of near-universal
interconnectedness when copying your mate’s homework you would at least be able to find an app to select a mate with the correct answers. But no, when you routinely cut and paste
your world together why bother going to the trouble of reading it before you
print?
This isn’t new of course, but at least back in the days
when you had to laboriously copy stuff out by hand there was a faint glimmer of
the possibility that you might actually learn, albeit accidentally, some little
something while you scribbled out your facsimile on the back seat of the school
bus. Now – and for quite some time now – it has become the norm to lift your
assignments wholesale off t’internet, secure in the knowledge that hard-worked
teachers and lecturers, overwhelmed by the sheer weight of supporting equality
and diversity paperwork would cast only the most cursory of glances over your
piracy.
But it’s not just students who are seduced by easy-access plagiarism.
Aside from that middle east medieval no-go area artists spent centuries knocking out garish
reproductions of religious figures until they got bored and started just
chucking paint about willy-nilly. Writers, if you accept the thesis that
there are only seven basic plots, spend their entire careers re-hashing other
people’s work. And in journalism today so fast-paced is the information
stream that stories are regularly half-inched, tweaked, presented as ‘news and
consigned to history within hours. Nobody notices though because, as the French
say, plus ça change, plus c'est la même
chose. And so to politics.
I wonder how many actual, original policies there are?
One on immigration, one on health, one on dealing with Johnny Foreigner, one on
‘the economy’ and maybe a few more, here and there, but little of any real innovation or novelty. Nothing new under the sun; no wonder the various parties are loath to broadcast their latest variation on
the same old shit; come up with a brave new tagline and before you know it the
others have stolen it and sold it as their own. A bit more of this, a bit less
of that; when it comes down to it that’s all the choice you have.
The only thing to differentiate between the three Europarties
seems to be the skill of their scriptwriters, turning kitchen sink drama into summer
blockbuster to get bums into seats. But we’re getting wise to that nowadays.
When you watch a crowd-pleasing Hollywood thriller you know who the bad guys
are by the actors portraying them and while you may not guess the plot twist
you know there’s bound to be one… although when you get to it you wonder why you never
saw it coming. Which is why, despite the big studio offerings, it’s the low
budget, indie-house Ukip, The Movie which has been creating the buzz so far.
Beautiful British badinage...
But there’s a copycat killer on the loose. In a barely
disguised parody, comedian Al Murray has launched FUKP to broadly try and
do to Ukip what Ukip has done to the big three. And just as the big three can’t
lay a glove on Nigel, the Kippers are powerless to do anything to counter the ‘Fuck
Ukip’ party except watch, laugh along if they can bring themselves to and hope
that enough people realise what is really going on. But the pub landlord might
want to be careful what he wishes for; in deliberately sabotaging Farage, posh boy Alistair Murray, scion of nobility, might well resurrect Labour. Politics - even if it looks new and sounds different you can be assured it's the same old shit.
