Our gift to Ian Dunt. A new screensaver!
With coronavirus the must-have disease of the new season, let us not forget about two other conditions still raging, with no sign of any cure, on both sides of the herring-pond. Trump Derangement Syndrome continues to reduce US Democrats to pop-eyed, paper-tearing dribblers while, in Blighty, Brexit Derangement Syndrome has reduced campuses and media offices to quarantine status.
Apart from America’s surprise presidential incumbent and the UK’s shock decision to leave the EU, those two anti-establishment election results reveal two important facts. The first is the existence, on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, of deep states, states within states working against the good of the people. The second is the bitter division within those people. Has research been done on the extreme closeness of both votes, and most other global ballots? Two countries divided almost exactly, is this not curious, such schizophrenic near-parity? Schizophrenia, from the Ancient Greek phrenos, meaning the mind, or sometimes the head, and schizein, meaning to cleave in two.
These divisions follow exactly the same pathologies; the rabid hatred of the losing sides for the winners, and the bewilderment of the winning sides for the subsequent behaviour of the losers. The Yanks, as you would have guessed, have gone full retard, but the Brits are not lagging by far, and are putting up a fair showing in the March Hare Stakes. The students and slacking, shirking crusties we can just point at and laugh, but it is interesting to note the stance of the political writers, such as they are.
Ian Dunt is one such. Before we behold the man, let us look at the opening paragraph to a piece of his on the bland internet outpost politics.co.uk, presumably a shortened version of its full title of ‘mawkish Left-wing politics .co.uk’ (this is a magazine happy to run a headline such as ‘Sometimes you need to tell voters they’re wrong’, the ‘you’, of course, being ‘them’). The piece was published on January 31, Brexit Day, and is called The end of the dream. The start of the resistance. Maestro, please;
‘Terrible day. The worst. There’s no other way you can put it.
You deal with it as best you can. Maybe you watch the news. Maybe you make sure it’s off. Maybe you go party to forget it all. Maybe you settle into quiet contemplation. Be with friends. Be alone. Mark it. Ignore it. Whatever. Deal with it however you think best. There’s no political meaning to how you take it, nothing to be achieved. So just be kind to yourself. That’s the main thing’.
He is talking, perforce, about Brexit, the process voted for by a majority in a democratic election the oafish silk-hatted poltroon David Cameron was sure he could not lose.
Now, our excellent editor here at British Intelligence (Won’t wash. I still need to see you in my office later. Ed.) often tells us that the sensibilities of the Left are whetted on the strop of television, and Dunt’s opener certainly reads like an out-take from EastEnders. The maudlin tone of a jilted market-trader mixes with the pathos of a balding man using the phrase ‘go party’. Certainly, this opening fusillade instantiates a fact which has become axiomatic to observers from the Right flank; the Left cannot write. A motor-car manual would seem a belletristic conceit in comparison with this trex. But onwards. Enough of Dunt the writer. What of Dunt the man?
He is editor of the tawdry, pixel-wasting entity that is politics.co.uk, it transpires, and is often – as you would expect - on the telly, stepping up for the usual suspects, the waning BBC, the hilarious Sky and – hello hello – Al Jazeera. He also a journalist who writes lifestyle pieces, which is like an Olympic long-jumper telling you they do a bit of hop-scotch on the side.
Reading the rest of the piece is like swallowing that bile that collects in the sump of your jaw when you have drunk a good deal too much. That will make you sick. This man is not an essayist, he is really no more than a pound-shop blogger. There is a bit of cobbled together WikiJournalism in the middle to make him look like he knows his history – a lot of them do that – and, naturally, being a creature of the Left, he misses the obvious parallel of a post WW2, newly created state; Israel. There are valid comparisons, but the Left don’t and won’t write approvingly of Israel because they tend to hate Jews. Now there is another independent, sovereign state as a result of yet another European shitshow orchestrated by the Germans, only this is less of the Zionism, more of the three-lionism.
The prose, as noted, is execrable. I wrote love letters to Mandy Clare when I was 14 that had more intellectual clout. When Dunt writes, ‘they have destroyed something beautiful’, one recalls the Oscar Wilde quote about needing a heart of stone not to laugh at the funeral of Little Nell.
Before we leave the land of submarines, let us just parse Dunt’s penultimate paragraph. It is an inchoate rag-bag of sixth-form gew-gaws, and it as well to leave this dreary episode with a bloody good belly-laugh at an all-time loser.
History doesn’t have a direction.
Well, except a temporal one. But, you know, what’s time?
We were wrong to ever assume that the pathway was always towards greater freedom.
Pot calling kettle. Come in, kettle. The Left are making bloody certain of the truth of that statement.
Progress goes backwards as well as forwards.
No. It doesn’t. Look up the Latin derivation of the word, you fucking dolt. I know Lefties think language is a moveable feast, but meaning remains what Dunt would undoubtedly call ‘a thing’.
There is no guaranteed victory.
Wow. Positively Senecan. I can get that stuff from José Mourinho.
But this movement has much on its side.
Oh, Christ on a fucking pogo-stick. Now what?
It has commitment.
I have never heard yelling gormlessly called commitment before, but we’ll let it pass.
It has identity.
Well, it certainly has identity politics, cocker.
And, more than anything, it has the young.
Oh, stroll on. The young. Yes, a cohort or two of Gender Studies graduates in pink pussy hats and soy-boy glasses should win big.
It has the future.
No, chucklehead. Like the Wehrmacht, tomorrow belongs to me.
There is no law that says it must win.
Not yet.
But it can win.
That is the only eventuality that keeps us awake at night.
We here at BI urge you to read the whole piece at https://www.politics.co.uk/blogs/2020/01/31/the-end-of-the-dream-the-start-of-the-resistance It works on many levels. It sets a gold standard for piss-poor prose. It shows that anyone can write for politics.co.uk if this is the editor’s input. And, more than anything, it is a window into the egg-bound, sterile, intellectually moribund state of Remainer thought.
Don’t give up your day job, son. If this is your day job, definitely don’t give it up. Now the Left are going all out to ban humour, hardcore laughs like this are as rare as a tranny at a rugby league match.
Photo credit: Robins 7