Our own Tony Jay, on “30 Days of Shite”:
Long, long ago, before the Sun first rose to challenge the Moon and when the screens were small and square, in that mythical period known to historians as ‘The Early Nineties’, noted political commentator and semi-professional Monopoly piece Linda Perry emerged lean and raving from sixteen gruelling months of contemplative isolation at Jan-Michael Vincent’s Nevada sweat-lodge to pen a searing admonition of the outgoing Bush Administration’s many foreign policy scandals entitled “What’s Going On?”, an obvious call-back to (and some might even say, straight-out swipe from) the identically titled brickbat of vituperative lyricism released eleven years earlier by hirsute urban troubadour Marvin Gaye in which he drew attention to widespread opposition to the Vietnam War, glaring disparities in the lived experiences of White and Black Americans, and persistent questions surrounding the pedestrianisation of Ludlow town centre. To say that these are all well-known facts that barely require checking up on (so you can put that Google search down, chum) is almost beside the point, because these familiar cultural touchstones are so firmly welded into place by the metaphysical glue of ur-memory that they obscure a greater truth, in that Perry and Gaye were only the latest in a long line of alternative spokespersonages to take up this particular idiomatic interjection and wield it as a performative goad to the consciences of their listeners.
For example, relatively few people are aware that before Gaye ever darkened the doorway of a Motown recording studio there had been ‘Dixie’ Van Beddows’ 1955 Rockabilly Classic “What’s Buzzin, Cuzzin?” demanding free white T-Shirts and a sensible nuclear strategy from the Eisenhower Administration, 1932’s Jazz standard “Blow The News This Way” from Mack ‘Mack’ Mackie and the Sweet Trumpet Chorus, which lambasted everything from Herbert Hoover’s economic policies to the shortage of olives for martini cocktails, and perhaps the least well-remembered of them all, “Answer Me This You Fragrant Swiss Miss”, the 1908 Music Hall singalong popularised by Little Dicky Owenwilkie and the Pink Petunia Twins that channelled general unease over the Tunguska impact’s lingering climatological effects into political pressure on Leopold II to formally relinquish his personal control over the Congo.
Going back even further in time we hear echoes of Perry’s bellowed confusion in the late 18th century marching song “Ce Qui Se Passe? Mes Amies”, author unknown, that inspired both the violence of the French Revolution and Pope Pius VI’s threat to excommunicate any Vatican occupant found drawing willies on the noses of Michaelangelo’s cherubs. Gaye’s sexually charged plaintiveness resonates in kind with the bawdy Baroque call and response chant “How Flows My Tide? Ebb-water, Good Woman, No Coin For A Ride” from around 1658, which many experts on the period would argue precipitated Europe’s most virulent outbreak of herpes oyster and the fall of the Cromwellian Protectorate, and only the most philistine ear could fail to pick up on the thematic similarities evident between all of the aforementioned examples and both the early Tudor protest anthem for the harpsichord “Verily, Indulge Mine Curiosity Upon The Roots Of Thy Present Circumstance” and “Tristis Temporibus Gor Dei Populus”, the medieval Gregorian chant popularised by Saint Simbo the Limbless, the first (and last) Christian missionary to visit pagan Ikealund.
What has any of this to do with the latest black-comedy catastrogasm being inflicted upon poor old Perfidious Albion? Not a lot, and yet everything. Sort of. Mostly it’s just a delaying tactic to avoiding actually talking about the situation we’re in because, quite frankly, it’s as depressing a scene as can be imagined without sepia-tinged commentary from an over-ketamined Ken Burns, and nothing leads me to believe there’ll be any noticeable improvement in the status quo in the near to middle future. It turns out that the near total lockdown on ‘politics’ that took up the end of September was actually the high point of this Third Elizabethan Age, and it’s been all downhill slalom with hungry wolf outriders every day since.
I mean, come on. Truss was gifted the opportunity to follow Flobalob Johnson’s ghastly show onto the national stage, a warm-up act that might have started off with gushing reviews and a lot of buzz courtesy of his chums in the Press, but eventually wore out its welcome with the audience through a series of off-colour pratfalls and not entirely accidental wardrobe malfunctions, all of which concluded with a humiliating exeunt Hard Right pursued by bears. Any functioning politician with the common-sense of a damp roof-tile should have been able to slide into that gaping chasm of credibility and, merely by virtue of not being a petulant gasbag of selfish dishonesty, enjoy a honeymoon period where they literally couldn’t help but appear reassuringly solid and capable in comparison.
You see where I’m going with this?
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