I think that, at last, I have something clear in my mind: we are not living in a New Normal.
This is a shot of the interior of my main fridge, featuring the thermostatic control:
Now, given this is a refrigerator we’re dealing with, you would expect the higher numbers to be to the right (as we all read from left to right) and you’d imagine those higher numbers to mean ‘more cold’. And indeed, the arrow to the right has a ‘+’ sign to confirm it.
But no: what you have to do is wind to the higher numbers, where you will see a ‘-‘ sign, to the left meaning…..um, that despite the higher numbers, what you’re choosing is something less. Which, of course, you aren’t.
This fridge is six years old. It came long before Covid19. It is weird in myriad ways. It sings like Yoko Ono, it rattles like a snake, and it breaks wind.
Here’s a picture of two arseholes:
Their weirdness is infinite, and thus impossible to define adequately. The bloke on the left dreamed up most of the sound bitten by the bloke on the right, both of them perverted the Constitution, and both of them live under the illusion of having something relevant to offer UK politics today.
For some years now, many of our major institutions – the Church, the BBC, the Opposition, The Guardian and the Police – have been of the opinion that cultural diversity, overpopulation, generally making idiots of themselves, appeasement of violence and toleration of a misogynist 5th century religion are to be welcomed, whereas people who refuse to offer such a welcome are racist Nazis with a serious case of Islamophobia.
In my book, all of that is weird.
48% of the British population voted to remain in a fascist, bankrupt and wastefully corrupt bloc rather than leave and thus not go down with the Eutanic. 48% is smaller than 52% (I was attentive in maths class, you see) but the losers paraded their 48% as if it was a triumph – and in many ways, it was indeed a triumph for being weird.
What we have now, given the reality of gutless surrender to a piddling virus, is not the New Normal. It’s just the New Weird replacing the Old Weird.
We’ve been weird for a long time. We live in a capitalist culture but can’t get return on our capital. We have negative interest rates. We have huge swathes of unemployment alongside AI that infuriates almost every human who comes into contact with it. We deposit money in banks, and become not customers but creditors.
We are very weird indeed. A race of aliens with toenails for hair and brains for feet would study us briefly and conclude, “These mothers are fucken’ A1 weird, Man…best not to get involved”.
Here and there, the New Weird in this Stage 43 of developing weirdness holds out the possibility of the odd silver lining. In the aftermath (sorry, had a thought-crime moment there) of Covid19, there’s a very real trend in Europe of people now abandoning City life and heading to something else where confinement might mean an orchard rather than a 15th floor box with stunning views of the Thames. As an entertainment medium, the Thames has severe limitations.
This could result in more community entrepreneurs, and a more natural spread of smaller settlements where self-sufficiency becomes feasible.
As Premier League Covid alarmists, the BBC’s rather silly élite may act as a catalyst for their own destruction. More and more folks now lok at BBCNews, and decide that the high-IQ Oxymorons who dominate it are better defunded than defended.
I was for many years in the latter camp. I think if we rooted out the 150 or so Common Purpose fanatics in there, it could be reformed….but not by politicians: they’re the interfering bullies who messed it up in the first place…beginning with the characters we met several paragraphs north of here earlier.
And last not least, I think the outcome of C19 in the immediate term will be to remove Boris Johnson from any access to power. Having grasped onto him the way a drowning man is wont to do, once Brexit is signed off and Barnier retreats to a monastery, I will be glad to see the back of Boris.
Long term loyalists to this site will know I spent years on Bojo’s case as the cover-up merchant at Elm House, the justice perverter over Newscorp phone hacking, the villain behind his Tory mate’s London taxi scam, and the man keen to model London as a City State on Singapore.
But his dodge and weave incompetence exacerbated by an obvious tendency to broad brush-stroke idleness won’t get him through this one. I confess to having been fascinated in recent weeks by watching the usual suspects in Whitewash, sorry, Whitehall quietly leaking, memo-rewriting and email backdating to ensure that Doris De Pfeffel Jobsdone remains the only Christian in the amphitheatre when the lions are released. “Aye-aye, thumbs down for a full ‘ouse”.
The same process is taking place in the Cabinet. The three field-leaders (or pacemakers if you like) are Gove, Raab and Sunak – if only because they can show they were End Lockdown hawks, and do at least seem to have grasped the madness of going with Neil Desperandum, sorry, Ferguson.
Have you noticed the clever (in the sociopathic sense) online campaign of leaking that Boris “is still unwell” and “may well make way for a younger incumbent over the next few months”? Cummings is furious about it, but the Establishment will have its sacrificial lamb (although in Johnson’s case, a goat seems more appropriate) before reverting to Old Weird.
However, here’s an interesting thought. As de facto PM in waiting, Dominic Raab has kept a profile so low in recent months, only an Olympic Limbo Dancing gold medalist ant could double-joint his way under it. I thought him a breath of fresh air three years ago, but the evil Sedwill slimed up to him like plasmic antimatter during Bojo’s illness, and now he seems to me shifty at best.
Shifty enough, perhaps, to appear brave in coming out to say, once the economic disaster is fully revealed, “I stayed with the policy as part of Cabinet solidarity, but now it is time to recognise the error, and pull out of this dangerous spiral”.
The Tory Party often survives by slagging off the previous CEO: Thatcher after Heath, Major after Thatcher, May after Osborne, Boris after May and so forth. Raab not only has the credentials to continue this tradition, he can also point out that the Party Opposite would have had even less of a commercial perspective had they been passed the Coronavirus parcel.
He may even – miracle of miracles – present a programme design to get us back to an Old Normal.
But the only trouble with ‘Old’ in contemporary cultural debate is that it is, vilified.
New word for ‘old’, anyone?
The Slog 