Sunday, November 20, 2011

Brains in the posterior position


When you think about it, it is a pretty bizarre idea, interviewing one of your employees and putting the result on the front page of the product which you insist – with decreasing conviction – on calling a newspaper. But then, when it comes to Boris Johnson, pretty bizarre rules seem to apply all right, including a belief in some quarters that this man is a serious politician with anything intelligent to offer.

By no measure, though, should anyone take seriously any article or statement – as with this one - which complains that a plan will "wreck democracy in EU". The concepts of democracy and the EU are so far apart that any idea of juxtaposing them is totally off the wall. Anyone who seeks to link them simply is not worth listening to.

Frankly, that applies in general to anything produced by Boris, including his latest nostrums for solving the eurozone crisis, which fail to recognise that the "colleagues" are reacting to the crisis politically, and are therefore not in the least minded to listen to a man who has a long history of shallow thought, and an appeal to the masses which is, frankly puzzling.

Here we have a nation that took Churchill to its heart (albeit getting rid of him in 1945), but which then embraces a man who, even on a good day, would struggle to qualify as a lightweight fool.

Part of the reason, of course, is to do with the essential triviality of the media, and its insistence on reducing serious issues to soap opera status. For the ineffably lightweight political journalists of today, the ineffably lightweight Boris Johnson is the perfect foil.

But there is also underlying this the lamentable failure within the political classes, but also the mindless Failygraph reader to think past the extruded verbal material (EVM) and think about what the man is actually saying.

For how many years have we all be complaining about the lack of democracy in the EU, to the extent that it is an anti-democratic organisation, on then to have this buffoon make his ludicrous comment about democracy? And the response, rather than universal scorn, has a goodly proportion of the readership braying "right on Boris!" or words to that effect.

One can only observe that, when in a political culture that embraces this refined stupidity, those that indulge in it get everything they deserve. The big, and almost insoluble problem, however, is that the rest of us do not deserve to have our politics dictated by those with their brains in the posterior position.

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