‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,’ wrote Allen Ginsberg in his famous poem Howl. I thought of it the other day on reading a column by the alleged ‘comedian’ Stewart Lee in the Observer:
‘Nascent neo-Nazis are looking for confirmation bias for their worst instincts, but back in the good old days at least they had to look. Now social media, stripped deliberately of safeguards and, in Twitter’s case, re-algorithmed to steer far right, will ping lies straight on to your phone unbidden…we can’t let Musk, Zuckerberg and Bezos reshape our reality, and have to encourage every friend, relative, celebrity and institution to disconnect from them…we should now be imposing the same boycotts on Musk’s hideous fascist US that we once did on apartheid South Africa.’
Nurse, the screens!
So on reflection, when I quoted ‘finest’ I probably meant ‘the most mediocre’ and when I wrote ‘madness’ I should more specifically say, ‘A range of interesting psycho-social disorders, starting with Brexit Derangement Syndrome and most recently Trump Derangement Syndrome’. But whatever you call it, there is little doubt that paranoia, pomposity and personal vanity has destroyed left-wing thought in this country.
It’s not just the supremely inconsequential Lee, who I first became aware of in 2020 when he was caught mocking people with Funny Foreign Names. Though I’m rarely shocked, I was taken aback by Lee’s taunting of the Jewish MP Tom Tugendhat over his surname: ‘Many names — Fisher, Cook, Smith — derive from ancient trades. But “Tugendhat” is just different words put together, like Waspcupfinger, or Appendixhospitalwool.’ Why can’t all these funny foreign fellows have solid English names like Lee?
It’s not just Alastair Campbell, either – though what amazing fortune, or lack of such, for one man to act as Groom of the Stool to both Tony Blair and Robert Maxwell! With his obsessive ‘centrism’, he is the embodiment of what Gareth Roberts wrote here: ‘Sticking to a false idea of what it means to be “centrist” has been what’s made the country such an increasingly unsettled, unproductive and unhappy place over the last few years.’
Like many mediocre people, Campbell is fuelled by pure petulance which he perceives as righteous anger; specifically, by the events of 23 June 2016. Campbell, clearly a man on the edge, raved that the vote played into the hands of Isis and swore to do anything it took in order to change the nation’s mind. Instead he had the nation changing channels every time we saw him showing off on some panel show.
The left-wing reaction to Trump’s inauguration this week by the usual suspects has been the low point of left-wing thought, the point when the pimple of anti-populism finally popped. Sadiq Khan squealed about ‘resurgent fascism’, Gabriel Gatehouse on Newsnight told us, of Trump’s use of ‘manifest destiny’ in his inauguration speech: ‘For people on the fringes of the white supremacist movement, that was a nod and wink’. The Guardian jabbered about Elon Musk performing ‘back-to-back fascist salutes’. I’ve come to believe that fascism in general and Nazi salutes in particular are quite like those Magic Eye concoctions which delight the easily pleased.
I’m thinking in particular of what happened with David Bowie in his poncey pomp, when he used to snigger things like ‘I believe Britain could benefit from a fascist leader. After all, fascism is really nationalism’ and ‘You’ve got to have an extreme right front come up and sweep everything off its feet and tidy everything up’ before giving the that Nazi salute from his convertible upon arriving at Victoria Station in 1976. Yet he’s now a lovely cuddly memory for a younger generation who are yelling ‘Fascist!’ at Musk!
Of course there are fascists walking among us; Jew-haters on the pro-Hamas marches which have been poisoning the streets of London ever since the 7 October pogrom. Their foul gatherings have featured such delights as placards showing the Star of David mangled with the swastika to make the point that Jews are the new Nazis, a marcher doing a Nazi salute in the faces of Jews and in Brighton, a man who literally goose-stepped through our peaceful demonstration about returning the hostages – right in front of the police, who did nothing. If the left wants to play spot-the-Nazi, I suggest they look first among their own fetid ranks.
Harking back to Howl, there’s a bit further on which seems pertinent to the moral degradation of the modern left – especially the mediaocracy left: ‘Who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts’. I must say I was tickled by the appropriateness of this line, especially the combination of emotional ‘flashing’ and a permanently peeled eye for the main chance (manuscripts). Regarding the likes of Lee objectively, it’s hard not to conclude that the woes of the Grumpy Old Woke Bros stem from the personal ‘aches and pains’ which are an inevitable part of the ageing process as much as a passionate cry of outrage at global injustice. As Scrooge says to Marley’s ghost: ‘You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There’s more of gravy than of grave about you!’ As anxiety affects young left-wing women more than any other cohort, so extreme grumpiness now appears to affect a huge proportion of old left-wing men. Unfortunately for the gentle reader, many of them are blessed with newspaper columns.
Still, they’re not without their usefulness to we cheery free-thinkers. Just as in Peter Pan a fairy died whenever a sensible child denied that the little pests existed, every time some sensible leftish-person reads a column like Stewart Lee’s or reads a statement like Khan’s, a Trump Derangement Syndrome sceptic is born. These nagging lefty narcissists are the greatest recruiters around to the populist cause – so, though I personally find them as insignificant yet as irritating as a speck of dirt in the eye, I kind of covertly approve of them. More power to their puny pens!
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