The would-be prime minister’s racist vulgarity is childish – and reveals the nostalgia for empire that underpinned Brexit
Johnson, who has spent much of his career being beastly about those who had the misfortune not to be born British. This despite his own Turkish ancestry – a severe case of over-compensation perhaps. His rude poem about Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan having sex with a goat (“There was a young fellow from Ankara / Who was a terrific wankerer”) certainly seems to bear out this psychological interpretation.[Freud for beginners?] ...He thinks they [the French] are “turds”, a remark disgracefully pulled from a BBC documentary...Calling the French “turds” for being intransigent on Brexit is a sign of Johnson’s vulgarity and stupidity. As his second-class degree [I thought it was a Third, in Classics] suggests, his is a second-rate mind trying desperately to persuade us it is a first-rate one by using Latin tags and improper jokes. His useless, vapid books are the measure of the man.[Classic petit-bourgeois class hatred of nobs here,of course]
Everything that Johnson has ever said about the world is jokey, insensitive, stupid and needlessly provocative. His racism is well-rehearsed. ... “What a relief it must be for Blair to get out of England,” he wrote. “It is said that the Queen has come to love the Commonwealth, partly because it supplies her with regular cheering crowds of flag-waving piccaninnies.”...He went on: “They say he [Blair] is shortly off to the Congo. No doubt the AK47s will fall silent, and the pangas will stop their hacking of human flesh, and their tribal warriors will all break out in watermelon smiles to see the big white chief touch down in his big white British taxpayer-funded bird.”...In 2006 Johnson had to apologise when he suggested that the inhabitants of Papua New Guinea were cannibals. “For 10 years we in the Tory party have become used to Papua New Guinea-style orgies of cannibalism and chief-killing,” he wrote (in the Telegraph again, of course), “and so it is with a happy amazement that we watch as the madness engulfs the Labour party.”
“The problem is not that we were once in charge [in Africa],” he wrote in the Spectator in 2002, “but that we are not in charge any more. The best fate for Africa would be if the old colonial powers, or their citizens, scrambled once again in her direction; on the understanding that this time they will not be asked to feel guilty.”
What does all this tell us? That Johnson has an upper-class aesthetic compared to Moss's petit-bourgeois one [and that both are very limited] ? No -- self-taught psychology is required:
Johnson is a classic example of arrested development: he remains the eternal privileged 15-year-old having everything done for him at Eton, devoid of empathy, failing to understand that words have consequences, useless with money (as his current inamorata has noted), utterly self-centred, childlike....Arrogance and lack of emotional intelligence no doubt explain many of his remarks but, as others have noted, beneath the endless layers of bluster there is a yearning for empire and a kernel of nationalism that ultimately led him to support Brexit in 2016. Reciting fragments of Rudyard Kipling’s poem Mandalay on a visit to a Buddhist temple in Myanmar in 2017 suggests that a nostalgic imperial vision still lurks in that atrophied adolescent brain.
Johnson did not quote Kipling, certainly not these bits, but Moss does:
“An’ I seed her first a-smokin’ of a whackin’ white cheroot, / An’ a-wastin’ Christian kisses on an ’eathen idol’s foot: / Bloomin’ idol made o’ mud / Wot they called the Great Gawd Budd / Plucky lot she cared for idols when I kissed ’er where she stud! / On the road to Mandalay …”
Kipling was himself doing populist ventriloquism here, of course. Is it possible Moss thinks these were simply just Kipling's views though? Or that anyone who might quote Kipling must share the views of his protagonists? There might be the usual tin ear for indirect speech. Moss solemnly ends his piece with the constant bafflement Graun writers have that many others do not share their aesthetic or their constant seriousness and literalness either:
Johnson’s racist remarks – set alongside equally outrageous examples of sexism and homophobia – should disqualify him as prime minister. [not his economic views?] Instead, they appear to endear him to the Tory membership
According to the Grunida,:
Stephen Moss is a naturalist, writer and broadcaster [lots of programmes with Bill Oddy] , who also lectures in nature and travel writing at Bath Spa University. His latest book is Mrs Moreau's Warbler: How Birds Got Their Names.
I also found this online in the South Wales Argus:
A NEWPORT-born Guardian journalist has defended his portrayal of the city in a piece which provoked anger today....Stephen Moss, who grew up in Ringland and whose parents and brother still live in the city, wrote in his editorial piece for today’s newspaper that Newport was a town, that it was “culturally confused” as to whether it was English or Welsh, that it was “industrially depressed” and that its train station was “hideous”....[obvious over-compensation here then?] He told the Argus he meant the piece to be “affectionate” and that he admired many strands of its history, such as its “radical edge” [clearly an evasion]He also wrote a piece for the Graun in 2015 about the need for a non-Tory alternative to the Labour Party, which gives some idea about what he takes to be proper politics:
predicated on a belief that Corbyn was never going to sweep Labour back to power. That view, which may reflect the fact that I live in Surbiton...Class politics are dead; Labour’s day is done....[we petit-bourgeois, media branch, are the masters now]
He talked to some Labour figures, then wrote a brief for the new party -- which he described himself 'as several pages of this waffle' -- and then 'signed up hotshot design company Havas Work Club'.These authorities quickly came up with a name 'This is Britain' . Then:
“We started to write the brand into behaviour [said HWC]. This is Britain democratised the brand.”...This debate, though, proved to be academic, because This is Britain was quickly history, replaced by a party name we really liked – “Just”. Within 24 hours we had a logo, and some snazzy posters. It was bright, modern, convincing, classless....[then]... David Owen, co-founder of the SDP in the 80s [that went well] ...suggested a “progressive alliance”
Moss talked to C Lucas, then the East Devon Alliance [one good idea at least] , and:
...warmed to this notion of a disparate band of locals demanding greater transparency and accountability in local government, drawing support from all parts of the political spectrum and taking on the might of the Conservative political machine....This sounded like fluid, grassroots modern politics, not the class-based trench warfare of old. I mooted a national Citizens’ party to Arnott, the EDA writ large. “If you are prepared to launch the Citizens’ party,” he said, “the East Devon Alliance would be interested in opening talks with you.”... Labour, the Lib Dems and the Greens will hold national talks to agree a common set of values. Shirley Williams, former Labour cabinet minister and now a Lib Dem peer, told me to take it slowly: values first, policy later [SDP to a T] . Once that is agreed, local parties will – as Lucas suggests – cooperate to decide on a common candidate...Work Club and I decided to [re] brand [the party as] “Platform”....The branding is clever [job obviously done then] : a single bar that echoes a train platform, beneath which is the word “Platform”, and on top of which sits the name of whichever party is contesting that constituency....With a majority in the Commons, a progressive alliance – backed by the SNP and Plaid Cymru – could introduce proportional representation, push through federalism, decentralise power to the English regions and replace the House of Lords with an elected senate.
After all that sketching of unicorns, Platform seems to have sunk without trace. Back to the old purely negative politics...
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