Destitution (Poverty), Jakub Schikaneder, 1884
Said baby I’m gone stay witchoo
‘Til the money runs out
Tom Waits
A while ago, I defined the ‘newspeak’ of the current generation of political activists as ‘placardism’. This truncated form of discourse serves as a simulation of genuine expression, condensing what might well be valid cultural and political ideas into the written equivalent of soundbites. These snack-size and often poorly spelled diktats can, of course, be unpacked, but that is not their aim, which is to repress any such attempt to understand the deeper meaning of their signification. They have the added attraction of saving time and the expenditure of mental energy and ability – both increasingly absent in the modern political bearpit – in favour of something that is easy to chant.
But it is not just the gormless flagellant procession which tramps constantly through the once-great cities of the West who have their semaphore system, their political morse code. The media also has its pet phrases. These hip jingles are often widespread across social media, and make the press appear to be talking with and to young people, a tendency towards infantilism being now common currency in the media as it is throughout modern culture or, as Theodore Dalrymple says in the title of one of his books, what’s left of it.
So it is that we have the ‘no-brainer’, the ‘roadmap’ to peace, or equality, or human rights, or whichever bland and unrealistic ordinance is the flavour of the month, ‘joined-up thinking’, and a host of other Christmas cracker mottoes and fortune-cookie aphorisms. And we have, of course, our domestically trained pachyderm, the ubiquitous ‘elephant in the room’.
This last phrase is particularly irritating in that it is never thought through. Because our current generation know none of the work of Charles Dickens except via a mixed-race television production here and there, they don’t understand that metaphor has a life of its own, and its implications are as important as its modeish appeal.
So, to return to our disenfranchised elephant (as with the perpetrators of violent crime, MSM commenters routinely omit in informing us whether it is African or Indian). I have mentioned the handyman-cum-security-guard here at British Intelligence Towers, Barry Shand. Now, Barry has a coterie of friends you may well know, should you happen to be a circuit judge or parole officer, and one of his acquaintances is a Mr. Clovis Gatling. As I have mentioned Dickens, it would not be ungermane to describe Clovis in the same words as the great writer used to describe a friend of Reginald Wilfer’s in Our Mutual Friend, ‘a gentleman of convivial habits connected with the drug markets’. Such is the social milieu of a factotum.
Clovis’s conceptual unpacking of the ‘elephant in the room’ runs as follows; “What’s all this fackin’ ‘elephant in the room’ ballocks? They don’t even know what it means. First off, if I was in a room with a fackin’ elephant, I wouldn’t be in the fackin’ room, would I? Elephants are fackin’ dangerous and massive. But they say it, and they think it means that all the dozy tossers still in the room can’t see it. Course they can. They just don’t want to tell everyone in case they get nutted off”.
It should be made clear that ‘nutted off’ refers to compulsory detention under the UK’s Mental Health Act of 1983, or ‘sectioning’ as it is commonly known. Clovis has cause to know whereof he speaks, having been nutted off more than once in his career, once under the impression that he was the late Don Revie, manager of the successful Leeds United Association Football team of the 1970s, and ultimately manager of the national side. But I digress. The oft-mentioned elephant at the moment is easy to spot.
What if - or just when - the money runs out?
I know what you’re thinking. Ah, shaddapa you face. You’re just another doom monger who wants it to rain every time there’s a parade. But financial collapse on a 1929 USA, Weimar, Zimbabwe or Venezuela-type scale is something neither the media nor the government are talking about, asking you to watch the birdie instead. And if you think it impossible that the magic money tree might soon stop responding to a good shaking, that we aren’t all rolling high-stakes dice in a casino of ill repute, that this can’t happen to us, did you think, this time last year, that you would all be looking like Japanese tourists every time you left home, or that the police would be more interested in kneeling to a bunch of angry young people than stopping them throwing statues in the bay? If the already horribly over-leveraged Western economies suddenly go to the well and find a bucket with a hole in it attached to a broken rope, do you think the political elites and their media catamites are going to warn you? They will be too busy squeezing onto the last chopper out of Saigon, and there won’t be any room for you or your family.
We are, of course, familiar with the conspiracy theory – of which there are more than enough for everyone – that says a financial crash was coming down the pike in any case, and the coronavirus made its timely entrance, aided and abetted by the badmash hordes of BLM, simply to be used by the elites as part smokescreen, part scapegoat. But if you find yourself waist-deep in a quicksand of merde, it doesn’t much matter how you got there, it’s getting yourself out, or at least keeping your head above the quagmire until help comes, that is important.
I have said for a long time that a reset would only come if a depression comes first. But what would that produce? It would depend on whether anyone has anything hidden under the mattress, rainy-day money on a grand scale. Someone like, ooh, Saudi Arabia. If a depression completes 2020’s hat-trick of disasters, expect to see a lot of Muslim outreach to the ruined inner cities and blighted suburbs which will have no other defence, the government having spent all your money – and pension – on diversity officers and Arts-Council-Funded plays about Rosa Parks. There will be a price for a reset, of course. It’s called Islam.
So, if the stock-market grand viziers who hold the fate of nations in their sweaty palms decide that there is no more money to be lent to pay off the interest on the interest on money already lent against debt held as a collateral (this actually happens), there are, to quote Withnail and I, gonna be a lot of refugees.
Then, the BLM carnage merchants are going to look like a sewing-circle. The cops will defund themselves, the internet will mysteriously disappear, it will be 10 days until empty supermarkets, and you will be left alone with the cold and your local post-code gang.
If I were you, I would get in touch with Barry and Clovis, get yourself a generator, some big bags of rice, a Koran and a shooter. Could be a tough Christmas.