For David Cameron

Comments

Anonymous said…
I sense a Willian kind of comment, though somewhat disguised, Bob. Have you read Norm's insight on the personality you delicately refer to as "cunt"?

http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2010/05/on-your-marks-david.html

Would a "cunt" say something like this?

... those who can, should, but those who can't we will always help."
Anonymous said…
Oops. It's Noga in the last comment.
Matt said…
I have to say, I like cunts and the women to which they are attached. I don't think the word should be used as a slur.
bob said…
Hmm. I guess I don't like ALL the women to whom they are attached, but you are right. Apologies for the lapse into Willism.

I posted this as an immediate response to the depressing moment of seeing the BBC headline "David Cameron Prime Minister". I am consumed with hatred for the man, both rational and irrational; his voice and his face make me sick.

However, with a couple of days' time for reflection, I think it is more appropriate than I thought. Two points I notice: 1) the C-word is in the plural, 2) "still" running the world.

The problem is not Cameron as such, but the systems he represents. On the one hand, he represents. He is the 19th prime minister we've had to have attended Eton and half the new cabinet went to schools like Eton, Westminster, Rugby, Cheltenham, Charterhouse. How can this be right?

And secondly is the role of the anthropomorphised (is that what I mean?) "markets". The BBC in the days after the election gave as much prominence to what "the markets" wanted as to what the electorate wanted, and then "the markets" breathed a huge sigh of relief when they got what they wanted: a government made up of people with close personal connections to the world of finance capital.
dom
"I am consumed with hatred for the man, both rational and irrational; his voice and his face make me sick."

I knew nothing about him so I googled a bit and learned about the rending experience he and his family have been through with the birth of his eldest son. Being a mother (which obviously comes with a .. you-know-what)I was overcome with imagining their pain and heartbreak. There are better ways of criticizing a political leader but I guess this is the internet, a zone of unbounded linguistic brutality and debasement. In the old "Sangbaggers" series which I love, the expression was "old school tie network" to indicate suspicion of privilege. Now it's simply "cunts". At least in the old way, the meaning was more or less clear upon some reflection. The new idiom can be universally applied to anybody and everybody.
bob said…
Duely chided I will return in my posting to an attempt to use more precise language.

I do feel sympathy for his family's travails, and I am sure that if he wasn't a politician I would manage to be perfectly civil with him if, say, he was one of the other dads at the edge of the soccer pitch on Saturday mornings. However, he seems to me - in his personality, in his persona, in his performance, in in his accent, in his odd turns of speech, in the way he wears his clothes, in the lifestyle he conspicuously leads - to so embody or exemplify so many things that are wrong with the United Kingdom at this moment in time, that I find it hard to see beyond that.

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