Nancy with the laughing face, 2012
It seems so long ago,
Nancy was alone.
Leonard Cohen
There must have been a time when a young butterfly named Nancy Pelosi tripped into Washington with her head full of youthful idealism and a genuine desire to do good things for an American people she loved and felt a part of. What, then, reduced her to the petulant oikophobe harpie standing behind a triumphant Trump and tearing up his speech? (She can be seen pre-tearing the pages, incidentally, to make sure her stunt would work).
One hesitates to make ad hominem – or rather ad feminam – attacks, but there is a touch of the Dorian Grays about Pelosi, only it is supposed to be the picture in the attic that shows the ravages of time and corruption, the skull beneath the skin, not the living person. Pelosi looks like a cross between the female alien abused in a grocery store by Roddy Piper in cult movie They Live (only you don’t need the sunglasses, film fans) and Mrs. Skeletor. She has not, shall we say, aged well.
And, while the outward form decays in zombie-like fashion, the inner woman has stick-shifted sharply into reverse as she regresses into petulant childhood. We here at BI ‘hang out’, as the young people say, with all sorts of fascinating types, and one of those psychologist Johnnies tells us he spent two years working on something he calls ‘the psychopathology of the Left’ only to arrive at an answer he could have reached in five minutes; the Left are children. And, as the poet Auden wrote in September 1, 1939, they are very much;
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.
Amiable and bearlike YouTuber Dr. Steve Turley is of the opinion that Pelosi’s hissy fit was iconic and is a harbinger of things to come from the Democrats, who are beginning to resemble one of the chimpanzees’ tea-parties that used to delight children at London Zoo in the 1960s. The chimps were dressed as humans, and given all the accoutrements for a nice, Edwardian tea-party but, of course, messy chaos ensued.
Trump, of course, will be watching the video on a loop with his trademark grin as wide as the Grand Canyon. What did I do, he will be thinking, to deserve a campaign team as good as the Dems?
We see this infantilism, of course, on both sides of the herring-pond. The British Labour Party recently took a larraping at the polls and for much the same reason as the Trump train rolls on; people – remember them? - are sick to the back teeth and beyond of being treated as though they were the children.
We have often mulled this over at one of our endless pint-and-chaser sessions at The Spin Doctor’s Arms (They are focus groups. Could you pop in again when you’re done? Ed.) and come to the same conclusion. The first politicians who start treating the populace as though they don’t need help with buttons and laces will carry the day. Nancy Pelosi and her crew of cartoon characters (doesn’t Nadler look like Dangermouse’s aide de camp Penfold?) seem determined to row in the opposite direction, and only Trump and the two or three Republicans who actually are of the elephantine political persuasion will benefit.