Attack of the Giant Baby

To be honest I’m trying hard to ignore Donald Dick, at least until the bombs start falling. I am trying to access a state of mind wherein his pronouncements are of no more significance to me than the wailing of a baby in a distant room - which is not so far from the truth when you think about it.

He is an endlessly needy creature, a flimsy container for a black hole of narcissism, which must by its very nature drag everything into it, or die.

To be fair, a baby does have the excuse of being completely helpless; Donald Dick is at the other end of the scale in this regard. It is we who are helpless.

I know I am. In spite of my resolution, I have to look and I have to listen. I mean, what’s this? Here he is claiming that many more people attended his inauguration than did Obama’s even though everyone can see that they didn’t.

This wail of frustrated neediness must perforce be conveyed to the world  through words, necessitating the appearance of Press Secretary Sean Spicer, who – in order to translate it into a language the assembled hacks might understand – has to resort to the use of ‘alternative facts’. It’s as though these might lead to a full-blown alternative reality, one in which Dick is a real dictator, not just a half-assed one – because, of course, a real dictator could have ensured that those crowds were actually there, even if he had to pay them.

(Or those crowds might have turned up voluntarily I suppose – but even in a universe of endless possibilities, that one does seem remote.)

Or perhaps Dick is just having a laugh. He’s probably seen Veep, wants to know how it will play out in real life. Whatever, the important thing is that Dick is being himself, whether that self is a yapping dog, crying child, or cackling imbecile.

When Dick talks about the ‘dishonest’ media he seems to imply that he himself is ‘honest’, but his idea of honesty does not relate to facts, it relates to emotions. It’s an American tradition, expressing yourself, not bottling everything up, and one which Dick is wholeheartedly in favour of, as long as the emotions being expressed are his.

His ultimate goal, I would suggest, is not just to express his emotions but to enforce them on the world, a goal perhaps best achieved through the use of nuclear devices, for which he displays a childlike enthusiasm.

In this way the black hole inside him will be able to reverse its trajectory and become for a brief moment a blazing star once again as it obliterates the real world and all its inconvenient truths.

Would things have been any better under Hitlery Klingon? I doubt it. Maybe it's just the difference between finding the killing of a child 'justifiable' and actively exulting in it. 'Why the Hell not?' - it could be Donald Dick's catchphrase. But make no mistake, Hell will be unleashed – just in an alternative reality, if we’re lucky.

The Fandango Farrago

Who is Noel Fandango?

Once upon a time this was clear, or rather it was at least comfortably fuzzy.

Noel Fandango was a representative of ‘ordinary decent people’ who were sick of being sneered at by ‘elites’ who thought that they were cleverer than them, and ran the world accordingly.

Fortunately these ‘elites’, assuming that they ever existed, have now been overcome by ‘the will of the people’, after an astonishing revolution that has completely overturned the system we live in even though the system we live in is still later-than-you-think-capitalism, and as such fundamentally unchanged.

Once upon a time, ‘clever elites’ might have pointed out a contradiction in the above statements. Fortunately, we have now entered a realm of dream logic, in which what seem to be mutually exclusive propositions may both be absolutely valid.

This is a very exciting time to be alive. And if people find it hard to negotiate this new world they only have to turn for reassurance to Noel Fandango, who presents us with the face of ‘an ordinary bloke’, ‘just like us’ who talks ‘common sense’ which everybody can understand.

Noel Fandango is like one of those people who knows he could run the country very successfully if he wanted to, but instead wisely confines himself to backseat driving, demanding why that thing ‘the will of the people’ wanted hasn’t happened yet. ‘Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Why aren’t we there yet?’, he says. Over and over again.

The underlying implication being, of course, that if we don’t arrive at ‘the sunlit uplands’ soon he will have to take the wheel himself, and then everything will be fine. Even though he has never driven before.

However, let it not be said that Noel Fandango has done nothing. Hasn’t he already proved his usefulness by cementing a relationship with Mr. Donald Dick of America? Donald Dick also likes to impersonate an ordinary person - or possibly many different ordinary people simultaneously - by spouting all kinds of rubbish based on whatever is going through his head at the time. Which is all very refreshing.

But Donald Dick’s assurances to Noel Fandango, whatever they might be, are surely to be taken seriously. Why, he has even suggested in one of his famous twitterings that Noel Fandango would ‘make a great UK ambassador’ even though he hasn’t been to Ambassador School and there is no vacancy for an ambassador currently.

But who the Hell cares about that?, as Donald Dick might say. Hell, why not make him King?

The Royal Family are just another ‘elite’ aren’t they? Everyone hates ‘elites’ nowadays.

Why not replace the Queen with an ‘ordinary bloke’? Even if, in the famous picture of Noel Fandango in a gold-plated lift (or ‘elevator’) with his new best friend Donald Dick, he doesn’t look much like an ordinary bloke at all.

Come to think of it, he looks very odd, like a cross between Cesar Romero’s Joker from the original Batman TV series and a duck. It is as if his grin might get so large that it will split his face entirely, leaving nothing to relate to at all. What has happened?

Perhaps, to use a well-known American phrase, what has happened is that in ‘crossing the pond’ Noel Fandango has ‘jumped the shark’.

This phrase, a reference to a scene in the television programme Happy Days, refers to the moment where a popular TV series reaches a point where it begins to caricature itself, and starts to lose its appeal.

Noel Fandango unthinkingly celebrates the connection between his success and that of Donald Dick, but many of his supporters are made uneasy by Dick. What seems like ‘a triumph for ordinary decent people’ in the UK can so easily look, when transferred to America, like ‘the lunatics are taking over the asylum’.

Fortunately in our new dream world Noel Fandango’s supporters are no longer obliged to follow their thoughts through to a logical conclusion. This is how Noel Fandango can simultaneously occupy the position of one who has ‘jumped the shark’ and one who is swimming with the shark.

Let’s hope it doesn’t eat him.

here we go backwards

A lot of people were shocked that Mr. Thump won the US election, which surprised me, as he was one of only two candidates in the race, and thus more likely to win it than anybody else in the world - apart from the other one, obviously.

But I suppose it is surprising that he could do so by ignoring the golden rule of campaigning: pretend not to be an asshole.

Most candidates feel obliged to kiss babies, but throughout his campaign Crump (as I remember) was either groping them or having them taken outside and shot - possibly both. Unapologetic assholery seems to have won the day.

It’s a hard position to criticise and harder still to mock. Many jokes were made and none were able to stop him. It’s as if humour, as a way of destabilising authority, has become redundant. When Mr. Bump appoints someone called ‘Mad Dog’ as his Defence Secretary his message is clear: I’m making the jokes now.

The only thing is, they aren’t funny. Still, you have to laugh.

Recently, someone published a book called Why Dump Deserves Trust, Respect and Admiration. Its pages are blank.

Yet its content is surprisingly incisive. It tells us that, with his contradictory statements and blatantly unrealistic promises Mr. Stump has, almost skilfully, manouevered us to a point beyond language.

The perceived politically-correct ‘policing’ of language has made those who seem to ‘say what they think’ and ‘tell it like it is’ into perceived truth-tellers. Of course, if Mr. Pump were really to ‘tell it like it is’, he would have to preface each statement he makes with: ‘I’m lying.’ And then we are already plunged into a linguistic crisis – if he says he’s lying does that mean he’s really telling the truth?

The truth is, it doesn't matter.

Mr. Jump is known as an entrepreneur but far more importantly than that he is a celebrity. Celebrity, as we know, is not about skill or talent. It is not about what one can give to the world.

It is about using the world to affirm one’s existing personality: it is about self-expression.

Thus, the importance of any statement Mr. Lump makes lies not in what it says, but in the fact that he was the one who said it.

Each statement is an individual product of Mr. Gump’s celebrity mind, to be marvelled at separately. It does not necessarily have to tie in with any of the other statements. It does not necessarily have to ‘make sense’. That all of these statements emerged from the same organic source, now the world’s most powerful celebrity, is their entire justification.

This is why Twitter is the perfect vehicle for Mr. Hump, with every statement becoming an event for people to react to, separately. Social media in general has helped with Mr. Rump’s possibly-unwitting project to destroy language. There is, simply, too much language going on. Employed, on the instant, without due care and attention, it starts to lose its meaning. It softens.

In this context it is understandable that Mr. Slump feels no need to sculpt his statements into works of art. They are not polished or perfected. They are more like lumps of organic matter ejected from the celebrity orifice, into our sphere, where eager scavengers soon fall upon them.

If there is any sculpting to do that is a job that can be left to the world. Illegal immigrants, if there are any left, might be willing to wade into these lumps, like turds from a giant dog’s arse, and struggle to excavate ‘content’ from them. But it seems like a waste of time. There will be another one along in a minute. This matter is not in short supply.

The important thing to remember is that this is not language – it’s dogshit. And yet, it is dogshit from the Top Dog. Someone will have to do something about it.

In time, who knows, roses may grow from it. But for now perhaps our only option is to turn away, from the dog’s arse to its mouth, assuming that it is still possible to distinguish between these features. Here we may uncover an opportunity to develop a method of classifying Mr. Sump’s statements by measuring their tone.

For example, his statements might be divided into:

Excited yapping (no likely real-world implication; safe to ignore)

Playful growling (probably safe to ignore, but monitor)

Angry barking (at least pretend to take notice)

This is a work in progress, but hopefully will eventually furnish us with a way of responding to Nump now that human language is becoming redundant – many of his supporters will already be fluent in this method of communication, even as high-minded liberals may not hear it at all. Going forward, we will learn from each other.

As for humour, it should be remembered that philosophers like Henri Bergson have seen laughter as a kind of ‘civilized snarl’.

So that, at any rate, is still with us. The snarl, if not necessarily civilization.