I awoke this morning to find Southern Britain carpeted in slush. Tuesday's playful dump of snow is departing, leaving behind hideous globs of melting, blackened snow. Real life returns with cold toes, looming unemployment and headline interest rates desperate for us to return to the spending binge of the last few years, yet unreflected in any overdraft of mine.
The BBC rather sweetly pointed out that we haven’t had any notable satire to illuminate systemic collapse of the banking system. Two unnoted satirists were invited to explain why. Will Self claimed to have predicted economic meltdown for some time but the public had to give comedians a good few years to find funny things to write about our shared misery. Why doesn't clever Mr Self get a job steering monetary policy at the Bank of England. I suppose he’d see it as a dead end job with poor prospects and it will be a couple more years before we can get Alistair Darling to sit alongside an inebriated northern comic making fart jokes on the panel of Shooting Stars.
This morning’s funny guys suggested that the role satire was to act as a beacon of hope, reassuring its audience that at least one other person understands the gap between common sense and the way things are. Common sense is a phrase that has everyone nodding knowingly in agreement. But, I suspect, that my common sense is not yours and is certainly not Will Self’s, or Alastair Darling’s.
The lovely, intelligent and completely misguided Cosmo Duff-Gordon, who writes for the South African Sunday Times, is always telling me about “the man in the street” who doesn’t see why British schools and hospitals should be made available to every Johnny Foreigner who decides to take advantage of our fine climate and haut cuisine by moving to our sceptred isle. He calls this common sense and I’m sure the German’s felt similarly about Jews and Romanys in the 1930s (or the Israelis about the Palestinians right now).
No, common sense, is a short hand for those who would summon an imaginary army to support their argument regardless of its merits or implications. We shall have no common sense in this blog.
3 comments:
More of the sane.... sorry a typo. More of the same please.
Great articles, Newsbunny, written with much sensitivity and style.
Nice piece Brer rabbit....I particulalry liked the way you connected yr friend's views on foreigners to Hitler, the Holocaust, and the Israeli apartheid with the Palestinians. Quite an emotive link. But, as you appositely aver in yr final line, "we shall have no common sense in this blog." Quite.
Post a Comment