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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."
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 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.
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.