I have started salivating excessively at night. I wake each morning in a pillowed swamp of my own effluvium, a noisome pond which is — I suspect — redolent of rapidly approaching death. I have done the hypochondriac thing and googled the possible causes and there’s a whole bunch of stuff — pancreatitis, close exposure to ionising radiation, rabies, pregnancy, serotonin disease and liver failure, to name but a few. My suspicion is it’s either rabies or pregnancy because I exhibit other symptoms common to both conditions, according to the internet. I cannot abide drinking water, for example, which suggests that I might be hydrophobic, a key indicator of rabies. And when I see Fergal Keane, surrounded by Syrian ‘refugees’ — a putative brain surgeon here, a cheerful transgendered cripple there — emoting himself senseless on the News at Ten, I begin to froth at the mouth and yap furiously, incoherently enraged. That’s rabies, isn’t it?
On the other hand, I have put on a little weight recently, which is inexplicable unless I am with child, for my diet and exercise regimen has remained the same. It may well be that I am in the same position as those cretinous women, usually from places like ‘Leeds’, who present at their local surgery complaining of stomach pains, unaware that they are eight-and-a-half months pregnant as a consequence of some hurried act of sexual intercourse with a fairly close relative. Either way I am obviously very worried, and so is my wife, who has to change the pillow cases every evening.
There are always upsides, however. Always a silver lining. Think positive, as they continually tell you, encouragingly, in places such as hospices. The good news for me is that my hyper-salivation came in incredibly useful this week when I was up in Manchester to protest at the Tory scum attending their annual conference. Others, around me, had long since exhausted their reservoirs of phlegm, gobbing at the smirking, superannuated right-wing filth preparing to enslave us all in perpetual austerity while setting fire to tramps and stamping on the babies of impoverished single mothers.
But reader — let me tell you — thanks to rabies or pregnancy, I was like that Duracell bunny, the one that kept on drumming: I expectorated longer and harder than even the most visceral entryist bearded Trots. Dry-mouthed by teatime, my comrades looked on in awe as I continued to shower Theresa May, Boris Johnson, George Osborne, Michael Gove et al with airborne lagoons of disease-occasioned spittle. For once I was respected, as a community activist and a political warrior, as swathed in my own rectitude as the loathsome Conservatives were eventually swathed in my copious emissions.
This performance of mine may be sufficient, by itself, to elevate me to branch secretary of my local Labour party, that gibbering cabal of perpetually enraged Corbynistas — because it is pretty much all the party has to go on, now. Who has the most capacious vat of adolescent bile in their guts. Who can be the most petulant, irrational and offensive? Who can gob 50 metres or more in between screaming ‘Stop the cuts!’? The rest of the country — that is, 99 per cent of the electorate — may have looked on, either askance or bemused or in utter disgust. But these quiescent dupes do not know the meaning of ‘community justice’ — a phrase used to describe spitting at or punching or maybe simply howling obscene abuse at people with whom we politically disagree, the presumption being that we have the support of ‘ordinary people’ for these actions.
Which of course we do, theoretically, if not actually. They do not know that they support us, of course. But they do support us, dialectically, objectively, as a consequence of their estrangement from the means of production, no matter how comatose these idiots might be right now. We know about alienation and anomie, we know what it does to the souls of Ordinary Working-Class People. We are expending our phlegm, our precious bodily fluids, and our hatred precisely for them — the dozing multitudes who are objectively oppressed by Osborne’s austerity and the City of London and the big multinational companies and the ghost of Margaret Thatcher and also Murdoch and the rest of the lying fascist press. We know all this, because we, fortunately enough, are enlightened — and sure, they don’t, yet, quite get it. But one day they will, surely. Even supine imbeciles one day need to stand up.
Spitting in the face of Theresa May is a revolutionary act and one to be unequivocally commended. I would direct you to either our new leader Jeremy Corbyn or the intellectual colossus that is his shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, for evidence to support this thesis. Both believe in something called ‘direct action’ and that other charming thing ‘community justice’. It is true that Mr Corbyn rather late in the day enjoined the rest of us not to make political protests personal because it somehow harmed the democratic process. But this was surely a sop to the establishment, given what the two men have previously said about how to fight the appalling Tories. On the streets, according to McDonnell, fight them on the streets. When you don’t get your way via the bourgeois ballot box or as a consequence of entirely justifiable trade union action, take to the streets and burn stuff, wreck stuff, have a bit of a punch-up with the rozzers — and flob. Flob for Britain! Cough it all up and let it all out — the further the better.
My mysterious condition ensures that I can flob like a wizard, like a daemon. I am the Che Guevara of tobacco-inflected greenies. That is all what we, on the left, still have. Expectorant, by the gallon.
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