A picture of an expensively suited up Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage covered from head to toe in a protestor’s banana milkshake on Monday caught my attention. I wondered: What the hell’s going on in today’s UK politics?
When I was a resident in our once upon a time “mother country” people talked all kinds of rubbish in public without the hint of an insult fired in retaliation. Hyde Park Corner was the place to be if you truly were a glutton for punishment cursed with the irresistible need to be entertained cost-free by weirdly attired over-ambitious buffoons, whether born in the UK or, as with the murderous Abdul Malik and jazz singer-cum-pimp Lucky Gordon, immigrants from Trinidad and Jamaica.
Which is not to say you didn’t from time to time bump into a wannabe Joan Baez waiting to be discovered, or a visiting Californian Black Panther. It seemed British patience was inexhaustible. The worst a performer might experience was a loaded Irish heckler—a supporting act worthy of its own gelled spotlight!
But if in this age of mainly impersonal communication Britain has become intolerant of face to face mindless prattle, still the notoriously gelid English have never sank to showering their politicians with human waste collected over several days—a whole lot more than might legitimately be said of us. Not with the daily reminders of how we arrived at our discombobulating ugly present. Nothing is more offensive to the hypocrite’s olfactory system than the sight of a regular human being enjoying in the light of day what he secretly engages in only while the sun sleeps.
Lately we’ve been preoccupied with the sins of Ubaldus Raymond, once a fairly well regarded senator until several presumed private and harmless phone conversations with a scheming Trinidadian female of short acquaintance were weaponized by cyber mercenaries and made into titillating news headlines and irresistible fecal fodder for insatiable Facebook flies. In his own naïve telling, “I broke no laws, I committed no fraud, I betrayed no official secrets. I had what I considered private conversations, some of which were edited and turned against me.” The truth of the statement, delivered in answer to a question I put to him during a recent appearance on my TV show TALK, served only to set him free to find new employment not connected with the government.
Before the age of Ubaldus it was regular behavior for elected officials to sleep with under-aged constituents and their close relatives; to write them childish letters on notepaper bearing the nation’s embossed crest; to pretend they were generous close relatives of the impressionable teens. Even the soi-disant agents of God, in their collective selfish interests, looked the other way, sometimes blaming the little victims for the sins of their faux fathers, sometimes called sugar daddies. If only Ubaldus marked a national change of attitude. If only his crucifixion was the price to be paid for a new society determined to make amends for past atrocities. To borrow from Bob Dylan, I may as well try and catch the wind.
We still have not even talked about invasion of privacy and the relationship between that and conversations surreptitiously acquired. Neither have we considered the political environment that permits the publication of photographs or video calculated to demean and embarrass individuals, their relatives, friends and employers. For the most part, such photographs are pornographic. As things stand at this time, there is nothing to prevent or deter, at the very least, an Allen Chastanet detractor from publishing photo-shopped pictures of the prime minister, his wife or their daughter.
For several years now we’ve had school children in recognizable school uniforms performing illegal sex acts on the Internet. To date there have been no related arrests but lots of cover-ups. We seem to have forgotten the responsibilites that come with free speech, and that even public officials are entitled by law to their privacy. If our laws, in the new scheme of things are inadequate, then what’s stopping our lawmakers from enacting new and appropriate legislation?
