Witness the Days of Gammon Rage

The times we are living through are so crazy that we are led by children wiser beyond their years while older men behave like spoilt brats.

This week observers of Donald Trump’s social media activity – such a role exists – were confused as he wailed on Twitter then mysteriously stopped mid-sentence, as if coitus interruptus he had lost his train of thought. The president had sensed the mood turning on the much redacted Mueller Report and his pudgy-digits went into overdrive. As David Corn reports, “there is no exoneration”.

Reports have less impact when they aren’t published it seems.

Whether it’s Trump tweeting through the night, Tommy Sheridan failing to overturn his conviction for perjury, Peter Hitchens and his ilk howling at the moon about the new public understanding of our climate breakdown, or Carl Benjamin paraphrasing ‘Millennial Woes’ and justifying tweeting to Labour MP Jess Phillips – “I wouldn’t even rape you”, this is the cesspit of the internet seeping into public discourse and the despairing cries of a lost generation of men confused and disoriented by the times they themselves have created.

As Nigel Farage talks the language of violence and George Galloway confirming what many have known for a very long time, that is he is an opportunist and a hypocrite and a charlatan. Whenever has been elected he has always represented a constituency of one.

 

 

Those on the left who have apologised for Galloway’s behaviour for years, on the grounds of rhetoric or fedoras, or some undefinable loyalty should take this moment to have a word with themselves.

The rage takes many forms but at root is the sense of innate assumed privilege being checked and questioned. For many this is intolerable. The reality is the new climate  consciousness challenges the very heart of our economic system. Endless growth and consumption is no longer tenable and this is intolerable for many who will find this a challenge to their core worldview.

Adam Boulton couldn’t contain his rage at a young Extinction Rebellion spokesperson on SKY News in an outburst that, in different times would have been a sackable offence:

 

But as Jordan Peterson and Slavoj Žižek whitter-on in a bubble of self-importance it’s not just the right-wing media that are exposed in their terrifying bewildering rage. Here Andrew Marr, for many the paragon of liberal media goodness, lost the plot in an incredible outburst:

 

 

None of this should or does come as a surprise, nor is it fair to tar a whole demographic with the same brush. But the sense of self-entitlement is palpable. To complete the set of ageing orange-faced men struggling to re-adjust to life out of the spotlight, Tony Blair joined with Andrew Marr to express the new normal of mainstream racism: “Migrant communities must be compelled to do more to integrate to help combat the rise of “far-right bigotry” in a report by his Institute for Global Change.

It’s an extraordinary outburst of victim-blaming and a marker of how far we have come for views which used to be thought beyond the pale are now openly expressed by the radical centre.
As Gary Younge remarked: “Eton, Bullingdon, Oxbridge, Westminster. There is a group of people who have struggled to integrate into British society and fuelled the far right. They’re not migrants.”
It’s a deep irony that for all these privileged white men it took another privileged white man to shake them from their climate slumbers.  This week saw the BBC’s Our Planet screen and articulate simply what many of us have been saying for a decade and more.
David Attenborough said simply:
“I find it hard to exaggerate the peril” … “This is the new extinction and we are half way through it. We are in terrible, terrible trouble and the longer we wait to do something about it the worse it is going to get.”

Comments (9)

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  1. Willie says:

    Galloway would recover the gold teeth.

    He’s that type of guy.

  2. James Mills says:

    Galloway – Ego on stilts , to paraphrase one of his favourite phrases .

  3. Alasdair Macdonald says:

    Mr Galloway was once my MP. I found his solipsism overweening. I have always enjoyed the quote by Mr Donald Dewar when asked why so many people took and instant dislike to Mr Galloway, his reply was, “it saves time.”

    People like Messrs Galloway, Farage, Johnson, et al, are influential because the media give them platforms, justified on the premise of ‘representing a range of views’. How many minority groups actually get their issues an airing on the media?

  4. Jim Hagart says:

    “Migrant communities must be compelled to do more to integrate to help combat the rise of “far-right bigotry” in a report by Tony Blair’s Institute for Global Change.

    Scots might just remember Blair expressing his regret that he did not do more to ‘integrate’ Scots into his notion of Great Britain/England when he realised many old and new Scots preferred to set the goal of governing themselves and were willing to seek Independence instead of falling for hoary old tales of Home Rule and equality in a Federated Britain. In other words he seemingly wished to assimilate everyone on the British Isles into some common culture with a single identity, with the South Eastern element as reflected through the BBC and corporate media deemed superior/more desirable than other national and regional cultures/identities.

    His views have apparently changed little since then, simply widened in scope.

  5. J Anderson says:

    Galloway is the ultimate useful idiot. This all falls in to the space where the right and the left overlap, there’s a faction on the left who are totally paranoid regarding people like George Soros, they think him and a cabal of Jewish influencers are behind all privatisation, neoliberal and neocon ideologies, they seem blissfully unaware as to why he is their billionaire of choice to be frightened of, it all comes from the conspiracy dumpster of the internet. Who ultimately benefits from this? most obviously the Russian administration, whether sponsored by them or not, this disinformation era plays in to the hands of kremlin foreign policy, the right are pulled in for a bonfire of regulations and the left to be free’d from the shackles of the neolib eu and controls on immigration to protect the british worker.

    They see brexit as breaking up freemarket europe, despite the fact that the UK is to the right of most EU policy, and has a terrible voting system and record for right wing politics, this won’t bring about a socialist awakening, in the one parallel universe where it does, is it worth the risk if you instead find yourself in one of the multiple farage/mogg/johnson branches.

    Yes the BBC is a failing institution, it isn’t the licence fee that is the problem, it is the complete loss of journalistic integrity, this would be worse under a corporate model as we see in the USA, but it needs change as it is literally one of the cogs that has elevated the UK to a frothing right wing disaster area.

    This leads to another observation regarding Russian influence, Russia Today is heralded by many who want to put an end to the BBC as an alternative, again many on the left refer to RT as a source for real information, this is one of the most obvious delusions out there, RT is an absolute propaganda mouthpiece, its western output is tailored to lure in the followers of Galloway and those on the left that have lost their critical thinking faculties. It doesn’t represent the information that Russians are fed, it doesn’t represent the persecution minorities suffer in Russia, the only purpose is bring you in line with Putins thinking. How can so many people with the right answers toward protecting the NHS the environment, constitutional change and equality be OK with RT knowing Russia’s human rights record, could the Saudi’s produce a news service that falls in line with RT’s output and people be ok with that?

    As it stands the EU is one of the few entities that can stand up to a large corporation, yes it is a free market privatisation spreading machine in many ways, but it could be brought back to the people. Think of it this way if you’re ultimate goal is the breakup of the EU, you’ll end up with 28 countries open to corporate take over with no hope of tackling climate change, pitted against one another for the betterment of Putin.

    1. J Anderson says:

      Forgot the root point of my rant, but here it is, Galloway the hero of the left luring in more followers for the RT treatment.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RItTpnDDtQ

      As the BBC continues to fail it accelerates this shift to other channels.

  6. Jack collatin says:

    It is about to blow up in their faces.
    Imagine Gorgeous George as Minister in charge of Foreign affairs in a Brexit ERG TIG Blue Tory Coalition?
    Farage as Deputy to PM Johnson?
    That’s the direction of travel Down There in Merrie Olde Engerland.
    May will resign before the summer recess precipitating a UK GE, and this lot will sweep, sorry, sluice to power on a tsunami of Leaver Rage.
    NS must make a significant statement on the timetable for (imminent) Indyref 2 before Conference.
    We go now, before Johnson Rees Mogg Farage Gove and, the Chief help us all, Galloway are running England.

  7. Gavin says:

    Our Planet is not produced by the BBC, it’s by Netflix, the WWF, and Silverback. Small point regarding your last paragraph.

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