Spitting Image
‘The Male Gaze’, ‘White Privilege’, ‘Deconstruct Whiteness’, ‘Decolonise the Curriculum’, ‘Smash the Patriarchy’, ‘Just Stop Oil’ …
‘Support Our Troops’, ‘Make America Great Again’, ‘Axis of Evil’, ‘Guns Don’t Kill People, People Kill People’, ‘Jesus Loves You’, ‘God is Great’ …
If you think there’s any difference between the above, congratulations, you’re a moron.
Labour, Conservative, Liberal Democrat, Green, UKIP …
If you think there’s any difference between the above, congratulations, you’re a moron.
If you think there’s any difference between the Guardian, the BBC, the Daily Mail, Channel 4 News, ITV, the Spectator, Novara Media amid countless others (too many to mention), congratulations, you’re a moron.
I’ve travelled across the world; lived and worked with people from all over the world; taught English to people from all over the world. Personally, my experience of encountering people from all manner of cultures different to my own has been overwhelmingly positive. If anything, it’s taught me that people have more in common than what we’re encouraged to believe divides us. Equally, however, I have found people from cultures different to my own – be it Eastern European, African and especially Asian (particularly South Asian) to be notably more conservative in disposition.
I’ve lived with a Ghanaian who was pro-Bush. I’ve worked with a Nigerian immigrant who voted Brexit. I asked her why and she said, ‘I don’t want people coming here taking all the jobs’ (‘But you’re an immigrant!’ I replied, incredulously). Not to mention the most enthusiastically capitalistic, staunch Thatcherites I have ever met have not been any white, Bullingdon Club poshys (not least because I’ve never met any though don’t doubt they exist) but from Southern Asians: ‘Privatisation is good because the workers are lazy’, one recently informed me.
As for those ‘Smashing the Patriarchy,’ feminists have long been domesticating the arts, media, politics and academia into a null gentrification ever since Edward Bernays duped egoistic, high society women to light up their ‘Torches of Freedom’.
Why, therefore, does the West, specifically its white, urbane, middle-class ‘intelligentsia’, insist on paternalising supposedly oppressed groups into a faux-left, identitarian fantasy through vapid slogans masquerading as theories mentioned in the opening of my lament? How do they not see the assumptions inherent to their bias? How do they not see they are Nietzsche’s ‘Tarantulas’, Orwell’s ‘Sandal-wearers’ or Yuri Bezmenov’s ‘Useful Idiots’?
How do they not see the exact same totalitarian use of language as their right-wing ‘opponents’ cited in the following line of my lament?
How did we arrive at such a woefully abject, utterly stupid, homogenised, infantile Disneyfication of the human experience?
Is religion to blame? Or is this all really just technocratic capitalism reaching its nadir before we evaporate in a nuclear apocalypse due to man’s pathetic inability to master his own shadow?
Please tell me where, if anywhere, the intellectually curious and artistically free reside. I wish to emigrate from a world where such things have become taboo … before it’s too late.
December 2022
© Percival Alexander