How long will it be before the word ‘voting’ is no longer associated with ‘governing’?
How long will it be, do you reckon, before the connotations of the word ‘voting’ are all about reality television, and hardly about government at all? Not long, I’d say. With President Blair, with goats and General Dannatt, I worry that voting and government are drifting apart. You’d think more of us would mind.
I don’t think you can blame reality television. Back when it was new — a decade ago, or thereabouts — there was a vogue among satirists for pointing out how hilarious British politics would be if it followed the same rules. ‘Iain Duncan Smith!’ people would chortle. ‘You have been evicted!!’ It sounds pretty trite now, but at the time this was cutting-edge stuff. Some of us built our careers on it. But strangely, or at least to the best of my knowledge, nobody ever did the reverse.
If The X-Factor worked like British politics, you’d vote at the beginning, not at the end. Across the country, divided up locally for no reason you could discern, you’d cast your vote for somebody of whom you’d never heard. Most likely they’d each have marketed themselves, on leaflets, by means of some recognisable reality TV archetype. Teenage Single Mother. Fat Scot Who Might Be Bonkers. Mixed-Race Secret Gay in Hat.
So you’d mark your paper, and one type would win, and that would be the end of your involvement. Then the victors, the Fat Scots Who Might Be Bonkers, say, would get together and pick their own leader from their own ranks, without considering it any business of yours at all. Thereafter, the triumphant Fat Scot, the one that all the others had chosen without you having anything to say about it — let’s call him, I dunno, Gordon? — would look back among his group, and decide who all the runners-up should be, all by himself. Or, if he didn’t fancy any of them, even for second place, he could just choose somebody else. From outside. From anywhere. Even somebody like his old school-friend Mandy, who’d been in previous competitions but was kicked out, twice, for cheating. Maybe this time Mandy would get a special sash, which said ‘Britain’s Second Favourite Person’ on it. She’d wear it, too, knowing her, and you’d wonder how she had the right. Possibly you’d even complain to Ofcom.
It wouldn’t make for great telly, though, would it? It doesn’t make for great government, either. Why should there be people in power who are effectively answerable to nobody? Why no fuss about Mandelson, or Brown and goats? Why not more fuss, for the right reasons, about David Cameron and Sir Richard Dannatt? Everybody raves about Lord Adonis but who the hell is he, aside from being a bright chap with a healthy interest in trains? These people rise without a trace, like appointees to some sort of Politburo. In the US, at least the Senate gets to approve the Cabinet. Here, it’s just a leader’s whim.
You wonder why nobody riots in the street over Tony Blair? Why, even though our continent is about to get an overlord with about as much personal mandate as Hu Jintao, nobody really cares? It’s because we’re used to it. It’s because our expectations of direct representation are so low that we barely even notice anymore. Unless we’re voting by SMS, for somebody who brought tears to our eyes when they did a key change. Only then do we care.
Karl Lagerfeld is one of those rare individuals who has managed to look like his own dessicated corpse without first having died. Whenever I see pictures of him, rocking that Nazi-zombie-meets-waiter-from-Strada look that he does so well, and clutching a small and emaciated dog, I always wonder if the poor dog is on a diet, too. And then I wonder whether it eats more or less than he does.
As such, Lagerfeld’s views on the desirable weight of models should probably be taken with what you or I would call ‘a pinch of salt’, but which he and his goblin dog probably call ‘a five course meal, oh my, I feel so bloated, pass me the patent leather sick bag’. Still, he’s been speaking out this week against people who say models are too thin. Or, as he puts it, ‘fat mummies who sit with bags of chips in front of the television saying that thin models are ugly’.
Some analysis here. The ‘bags of chips’ bit is initially confusing, seemingly suggesting that the real power in fashion lies with characters who might be played by Kathy Burke, lolling around on their sofas with a fish supper, somewhere in the North. I suspect he actually means ‘crisps’. Easy mistake to make, if you never eat either. No, the ‘chips’ bit isn’t the real insult here. And nor, actually, is the ‘fat’. The bit with bite, the bit where you really feel the hate, is ‘mummies’.
Finally, I think I get fashion. I never understood how an industry so dominated by women could seem to hate them so much. Now, I see. Fashion isn’t anti-women. It’s anti-human. A model, for people like Karl Lagerfeld, should be a coathanger with a face. To be human — to eat, to smile, to give birth, to have visible eyeballs — is to be base and disgusting and worthy of contempt. To look like a mummy is the worse thing in the world. Unless you mean an Egyptian one. He’s probably all in favour of that.
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