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Boris Johnson

THE USUAL SUSPECTS

When I was younger corrupt public servants

were always some sort of foreign Johnny –

like the chief of police in ‘Casablanca’ –

and events like Covid-19 the result

of utterly unique and totally

unforeseen circumstances not neglect,

incompetence or insouciance,

much less deliberate mayhem.

 

Now the malfeasance is in plain sight.

The crooks in all but name – public school boys

and their acolytes of all classes

and genders, the useful idiots,

the ready sycophants, the gong-chasers,

the jacks-in-office, and their main stream

media apologists and enablers –

are the same entitled class that purloined

the so-called Elgin Marbles, and had away

with the Benin Bronzes, and murdered

Iraqi Kurds and Kenyan Kikuyu.

 

Now that, for the masters and the mistresses

of the universe, self-righteousness

is justification enough for greed

and thievery, and self-interest

and the public good are one – unless

you are in receipt of so-called benefits

obviously. So those who, consequently,

die or are maimed are always undeserving

and dispensable. Thus, by default,

Aristotle’s Great Chain of Being

appears not only intact but well-oiled,

the concept of choice of the Establishment –

that exclusive sui generis elite.

 

 

 

COMETH THE HOUR

Cometh the hour, cometh the greedy fool.

Though a classicist from Balliol,

he eschewed role models like Pericles and

Spartacus, preferring the Lion King.


Bank-rolled by the money of oligarchs,

he was their unkempt, useful idiot,

an adipose, amoral narcissist,

in that land of public malfeasance,

of conspicuous inequality,

corporate manipulation, media

compliance, self-righteous kleptocracy,

institutionalised xenophobia.


Ever the opportunist and the dicer,

to distract from drunken scandals that mocked

the unnecessary deaths of tens

of thousands of his fellow citizens

he employed foreign flags and foreign corpses.

 

CIRCUSES WITHOUT THE BREAD

We are told by a Minister of the Crown

that the ‘death toll is mercifully low’,

that we must ‘learn to live’ with the pandemic.

We are a mature democracy but

allow ourselves to be treated like infants.

Though his writ runs only in the largest part

of these unequal, disunited kingdoms,

his pronouncements dominate the media.

He is the son of working class Pakistani

immigrants. A banker by trade, his vowels –

though not those of one who would have ordered

“Over the top!”, while brandishing a pistol –

have been completely shorn of his past.

He is a trimmer led by a trimmer –

that sinister clown, that jovial

sociopath, that idler, that sponger –

leader of a circus of distractors,

of seedy rhetoricians, of swindlers,

that extols the charity of food banks.

The coterie seems to be kept in power

by a clique of greedy, threatening, snobbish

xenophobic, racist parliamentarians,

obsessed with the zealotry of abstractions –

‘freedom’, ‘sovereignty’, ‘culture’ – but all merely

servants of the corporate masters

of the universe, who have already

acquired their gated Ararats, and designed

the manorial space stations to which they may

need to repair. Meanwhile, liberty,

we are told, must be measured in Starbuck’s

coffee cups and Wetherspoon’s cheesy chips.

THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS: WINDOWS OF DISCOURSE

‘The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum—even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate’. THE COMMON GOOD, Noam Chomsky

 

A dormouse, leaping into a boiling cauldron,

leaps out, protesting. Some others, resting,

with breathing apparatus, trustingly

at the bottom of a pot of water

arctic-cold, will never ever notice

the incrementally increasing heat…

 

For nearly twenty five years the BBC

broadcast, on week days, a pre-school programme

called ‘Play School’ – its title no doubt to warn

its viewers there would be no play at Big School.

One of its features was three windows – arched,

round and square – through which short films would show…

 

Imagine the dystopian edition

broadcast to celebrate the abolition

of the civil service, and the launch

of compulsory, daily visits

to Wetherspoons in order to consume

buckets of chlorinated chicken wings…

 

‘Look, boys and girls, in the arched window

is Permanent Prime Minister Johnson

and Grand Adviser Cummings enjoying a joke!;

in the round window is the Permanent

Opposition being elected

every five years; in the square window…’

 

…are whatever scenes from a civic hell

you may fear to conjure – where clowns rule,

and the wise are laughed at, where prejudice

is extolled, learning punished, gradual

hierarchies of wealth and worth approved,

and official violence is esteemed…

 

You may choose whatever shape of window

you wish – from the range available, of course,

a range in which each one constrains your view

to the absolute limits of whatever

protocols of debate are acceptable

to stenographers and broadcasters

of those who control public discourse.

So, your choice: be a colony of dumb

dormice in a tepid pan – or be the one

that leaps, speaks…

 

 

 

2019

‘O what fine thought we had because we thought

That the worst rogues and rascals had died out.’

NINETEEN HUNDRED AND NINETEEN, W.B. Yeats

 

Where the four main thoroughfares of our erstwhile

Roman city meet, a many-legged dragon,

in vivid gold and red, curved and reared, to gongs,

drums, fire crackers on a February day.

Dancers whirled long white ribbons, a whorl

of streamers like a wild, wispy sky.

This was the year of the omnivorous Pig,

saturninely devouring its own children.

Next is the Rat, ubiquitous, cunning –

happy for self-harming fools, tax-dodging knaves.

 

 

***

 

Some of the elected representatives

of the people turned their tailored backs

on ‘The Ode to Joy’ – Alle Menschen

werden Brüder – that song of protest,

that anthem of jubilant community.

Two hundred years ago was Peterloo,

one hundred Amritsar. Injustice

is never forgotten – and good sense

may prevail. The parochial rhetoric

of violent, bitter men may choke them,

in their locked courts and gated houses!

The wisdom of the crowd, not its ineptness,

its ignorance, its folly may save us:

reform our lottery democracy,

unite Ireland, free Scotland, make Wales

autonomous, England a federation!

 

***

 

The new decade is close. You can hear

its jostling caravanserai of guile

and deceit; its proxy civil wars; its

alchemy of assertions made truths,

lies transmogrified into speculations,

hatreds tempered into virtues, histories

traduced, honesty persecuted.

But listen!  There, far off, is a mustering

of rustling drums, the subtle summonings

of gongs. Let chaos be our only hope,

and the triumph of youth!