Sunday, April 26, 2009

When I Say "We", Of Course I Just Mean "I". You Are Wonderfully Intelligent

Lo, the internet! A brave new world, filled with exciting words and pictures and sound and vision, only 0.01% of which is extremely pornographic, according to QI! (That does seem a little low to me. Possibly the genteel middle-class QI view on pornography is different from mine, and they don't classify it as truly hardcore until the number of phalluses exceeds the number of orifices by at least three) But yet, I am a weaselly creature of habit when it comes to surfing, looking at the same old websites in the same old order - email, email the second, a rifle through all of those lovely gents+dames over there on the right, and finally the peerless BBC news website, which will inform me in clear and unpatronising terms about interesting events around the country and globe, tickle my frivolousity gland with tasteful celebrity factoids, and lie to me about the weather.

But recent events have dragged me from my comfort zone. Try as I might, and believe me, I've tried till my nonchalance-controlling muscles screamed in agony, I cannot ignore the current stinking wave of news stories surrounding politics and the sleazy, nasty, money-grabbing politicians in this once-great land (TM every tabloid reporter currently working furiously on "Kettlegate - Now It's Even Blacker!"). So I ventured into the Politics section to see how long it would be before the picture of David Cameron's chinless, smug face made me so angry I condensed into a super-hot ball of fury and spontaneously launched into an ironically serene orbit around the planet. My ceiling's structural integrity thus far remains undisturbed, which surprises me.

Anyhow. There's budgetry screaming, smearing Dollys, and spouses wanking with subsidised bathplugs, and it all seems to be...well, completely pointless and irrelevant. So there's this bunch of blokes who run things, and most of the running things stuff carries on out of the public eye because it's terribly boring and involved and to do with clauses and sub-clauses and this is why the BBC Parliament channel is niche viewing for democracy nerds and pasty middle-aged white men in suits fetishists. But the rest of it, the rest of the politics that we see, is peacock-posturing and sniping and point-scoring. Great, but who are they talking to? When Cameron splutters indignantly about the irresponsible culture of sleaze, and Brown does his usual mumbled pronouncements of denial interspersed with flashed smiles revealing micro-second glimpses into a truly psychotic mind, who's listening? Us? We may listen for a few minutes, but then we'll get bored and start thinking about Twitter, or Resident Evil, or Creme Eggs. It won't make any difference - we're such a bunch of craven thickos that the 40% of us who actually can be arsed to drag ourselves 300 feet down the road to stick slip in slot will just vote for whoever the Sun tells us to. Such blithering imbeciles that we'll actually spend our hard-earned, credit-crunched money texting into a news channel opinion poll to tell them we don't know how the budget will affect us. We shouldn't be trusted with a democracy.

But yet the pantomime continues, eating up valuable news space that could be used for even more breathless (heh) panic about swine flu (or, One Flu To Rule Them All). Politicians will continue to be somewhere between worthless peons and exemplary members of society, depending on who you listen to, and us numbnuts will continue on our merry way being blithely unaffected by all the ranting and raving and mouth-frothing generated in Westminster and Wapping. Because we're too stupid to do any different.

2 comments:

Kolley Kibber said...

The great love affair of our times is between journalists and politicians - there they go, flirting and fighting and feeding each other tit-bits - and most of the time we (the lumpenvolk proles) assume the role of bored voyeurs.

We might as well be in a moonlit car park on top of the South Downs, watching the dogging. There's the odd flurry of inventive activity that's a bit new and different, but most of the time it's a dull, repetitive spectacle that's really only of relevance or interest to the actual participants. But they still get off a bit on the fact that we're watching them at all.

Now I've got the image in my head of David Cameron fellating Gordon Brown through the open window of a Ford Focus, while Harriet Harman holds the torch. Yikes.

justrestingmyeyes said...

Oh, dude, seriously. Of you, I am in AWE. (and slight horror at the end)