“hello i just send you a proposal did you got it?” asked an email that plonked pointlessly into my inbox this morning. My reply was, “Yes I don’t got it, will you needing a garden shed?”
I have managed to almost entirely obliterate all nuisance telephone calls both here and in England by using the same ruse. So taken aback are the callers that my question evokes a silence, which is just enough for me to dive in and say, “Please buy my garden shed, I have just had all my money stolen here in Cairo, and my mother is dying of multiple burns sustained in her selfless attempt to contain the Fukushima disaster”. There is then a “click….brrrr”, and they’re gone.
It’s far more effective (appearing to be unhinged, I mean) than waiting for any alleged ISP anti-spam software – or France Telecom’s marketing department – to do something about the problem. Somewhere, I feel sure, there is a blacklist of nutters these lowlife circulate, and I am now firmly on it. Trust me, it’s the only way to fly.
It dawned on me yesterday that politicians are way ahead of the curve on this one. Me falsely trying to sell garden sheds to double-glazing salesmen in Delhi is the commercial equivalent of Jeremy Hunt saying to the House of Commons, “I have done nothing wrong”. It is so illogical and unexpected based on the data to hand, the wind is completely taken out of the critic’s sails.
God knows why I’m doing this, but I feel the need to give MPs and Congressmen a helping hand when it comes to making insane attack the better part of rational defence. (The one exception here is Grant Shapps, a man who has already demonstrated a talent for online lies way beyond anything I could recommend).
Let’s say, for instance, that you are Wolfgang Schäuble and facing criticism for trying to help Greece by destroying its economy. The thing for Wolfie to say in that situation (it seems to me) is, “We have promised you two submarines and only supplied one….so think of what you’re saving on running costs”.
Or suppose you are a Republican Governor called (for the sake of argument) Chris Christie, and you are up against charges of misappropriating disaster funds to promote yourself. The Unexpected Attack in this instance would be, “I promoted myself as the best means to the end of becoming President, and thus in the best position to deal with future disasters”. So far, Governor Christie has plumped for the hackneyed solution of dumping on his underling staff; he needs a week at the Slogger’s Roost Wriggle out of Pits Course, price a mere $2million, to get him back on the right track.
Alternatively, you might be UK Labour Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls, and evading a Tsunami of media questions about why you sold your CoOp political sponsors into Hedge Fund slavery, after having received huge dollops of cash from a now disgraced CEO of the CoOp. The sure-fire way to put naysayers on the back foot is to insist that, “As Economic Secretary under Gordon something or other whose name now escapes me, I secured the Treasury’s backing for a new Private Member’s Bill that allowed the takeover to be pushed through and thus help ordinary hard-working families make a turn on their deposits in the newly-enlivened and hedged CoOp that was thus rendered able to compete in the global economy of today, to which of course there is no alternative for fundamentalist social democrats like what I am”.
Listen, complete bollocks it is – but in the can’t-tell-bollocks-from-Nelson’s-Column world we inhabit, it is by far the best strategy for all unethical arseholes everywhere.
Commenting on 1984, Orwell wrote, “I do not believe that the kind of society I describe necessarily will arrive, but I believe that something resembling it could arrive.”
Orwell assumed it would be a State Socialist society, because he’d never heard of Milton Friedman or Margaret Thatcher. Equally, he couldn’t have conceived of a world in which self-styled socialists tried to reposition themselves as happy to co-exist with disgusting monopolist gargoyles in order to get themselves elected. For those two reasons, he would’ve been astonished to find an alternative to the State – rapacious commercial greed – dancing the up is down black is white left is right big is small psychos can be nice fandango we see today.
And so I shall return to my keyboard, renewed by the email I received last week, which solemnly promised me my desperate lady surely to be coupling pleasedly with me after member extension has changing my life of sexuality.
Well, you can’t say fairer than that.
The Slog 