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.
By David Selzer