It’s been quite the year for Rudy Giuliani. First his haunting, eerily convincing portrayal of sex pest Rudy Giuliani in that hard-hitting Borat drama, followed by his lead role in screwball comedy Four Seasons Total Landscaping, in which he plays idiot lawyer Rudy Giuliani, manically barking out baseless election-rigging conspiracy theories during a press conference held in a garden centre car park, handily-located between the crematorium and a buttplug boutique.
A majestic, Colonel Kurtz-sized performance, all but guaranteeing an Academy Award nomination, and one that neatly encapsulates the last four-plus years of American politics. Or perhaps the last four-plus years full stop, where stupid has ridden high in the narrative, and where we’ve spent much of it cowering in the bombed-out ruins of our mental health.
Polarisation. That’s the theme that’s underpinned Brexit, Trump and Covid-19 throughout. More than 73 million people voted for Trump this time around. 73 million folk who, having watched a petulant, corrupt, sociopathic fluorescent sac of noxious gas smear his faeces across the walls of the White House for four years, decided that what America really needed was a petulant, corrupt, sociopathic fluorescent sac of noxious gas smearing his faeces across the walls of the White House for another four. You can’t be ambivalent on Trump. There’s nothing equivocal about what he stands for. Nuance has long vacated the building. This is where we’re at.
17.4 million people voted to leave the EU. 17.4 million folk who, having chanced upon Dominic Cummings wanking in a cupboard over his copy of Atlas Shrugged, decided that what Britain really needed was Dominic Cummings wanking in a cupboard over his copy of Atlas Shrugged. You can’t be ambivalent on Brexit. There’s nothing equivocal about what it represents. Nuance has long vacated the building. This is where we’re at.
Per the World Health Organisation, 1.26 million people worldwide have died from Covid-19, including – in a savage blow to the UK’s light entertainment industry – 33% of the Goodies, and 50% of both Little & Large and Cannon & Ball.
Some of us have spent the pandemic cocooned in our own private k-holes, venturing out to the shops only when the wine has run out, and even then, avoiding others quite literally like the plague.
Others, however, consider Covid-19 as something more hypothetical, like the Chomsky–Schützenberger representation theorem or the existence of Kingston-Upon-Hull. In shops, on trains and buses, they wear their facemasks beneath their noses, beneath their chins, across their perinea, or not at all. They take their cues from Mumsnet. From David Icke. From semi-literate Ian Brown tweets. They generally act – to paraphrase comedian Rich Fulcher – as if the pandemic is a day at the zoo with Uncle Bobo, and why we’re in a second wave I’ll never know.
The internet has democratised stupidity. Has intellectually commodified it, bottled it, then sold it back to us at more than the going rate. Well done us; I’m not sure what’s more terrifying – the prospect of mink-mutated Covid sweeping across the continent, or the fact that in this day and age we still farm mink for their fur.
But now there’s a vaccine, kind of, so everything’s alright forever (terms and conditions apply). All we need to do is wait for Little Lord FauntleFuck and his gang of merry chancers to roll it out equitably and efficiently. Just like they did with the world class test and trace system that ensured the nation was barely impacted by coronavirus.
The prime minister governs by fuck-up; fuck-ups that seem such a wonderful wheeze whilst Dominic Cummings briefed Robert Peston or the Telegraph beforehand. But they’re fuck-ups all the same, which means that when the moment arrives for the inevitable U-turn, Johnson has to make an even bigger fuck-up elsewhere to divert our attention from the original.
The problem with iconoclasts is that, in their compulsion to smash everything to pieces, they sooner or later chance upon their own reflection, and break that, too. Which is exactly what Cummings ended up doing. “Left to his own devices,” FauntleFuck “will wander off from decisions and read Pliny or Pericles or eat or shag,” a Tory source told Observer columnist Andrew Rawnsley, and because Carrie Symonds will make him dinner then – inexplicably – offer herself as dessert, Cummings et al whispering about her in the presence of Westminster hacks became the moment it all blew up. Just as Brexit will explode right in FauntleFuck’s entitled chops if he doesn’t get a deal with the EU (and quite possibly if he does, too).
Dominic Cummings will end up back where he belongs – playing The Ghoul in German expressionist cinema of the 1920’s – but he’s not the real story, here. Neither is FauntleFuck, Giuliani or Trump, even as the latter is dragged from the White House in leg irons and a spit hood. Privileged, white, middle-aged men; it’s always the privileged, white, middle-aged men, with their privilege and their whiteness and their shrivelled, weeping cocks.
And now it’s mid-November. Leaves off the trees, the days defined by fog and adverts for an M&S Christmas that won’t be the best Christmas ever. The death toll ain’t slowing anytime soon, this concatenation of lockdowns punctured by a political system ill-configured to handle a pandemic and half-witted hordes too selfish to follow the rules. The end is the beginning is the end. Or as FauntleFuck tweeted on January 2nd: “This is going to be a fantastic year for Britain.” The podgy-fingered spunk trumpet.
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