THE VIEW FROM THE BLUE ROOM 1
When I was a child and I was faced with difficult choices or
unpleasant activities I would go out and play, believing the longer I played the
more the dilemma would go away. I did once put off a visit to the dentist in
this way, though it proved a pyrrhic victory. I thought about this form of
magical thinking when I saw pictures of David Cameron surfing in Cornwall as
the refugee crises unfolded. (Being swept ashore by the waves just as the
bodies of refugees were being swept ashore on the waves – the Prime Minister is
not only morally blind but does not even have the wit to understand how such an
image might be perceived).
There is something very deficient about David
Cameron, it is the sort of deficiency one finds in those who have had it too
easy in life, who have never really known what it is to taste defeat or
deprivation. He throws tantrums when thwarted, blusters and goes red when he is
bested and sulks, as he did after the Syria vote, when he cannot get his own
way. Famously he wanted to be Prime Minister because he thought he would “be
good at it.” Whenever he is in the presence of a serious politician,like Angela Merkel, for example, the
scale of his fatuous pretensions glares back at you like body heat exposed by infra-red.
The killing in a targeted drone strike of two British ISIS
fighters is to be welcomed, the government showing at last that it is serious.
The correctness of this decision being underlined by the grotesque array of
those who opposed it from Glenn Greenwald to Diane Abbott.
Abbott managing to
tweet possibly the stupidest tweet of all time, and believe me the competition is stiff.
The creation of the term Islamaphobia has been one of the greatest
frauds perpetuated in the era of ‘political correctness, and in an era replete confidence
tricks and verbal chicanery, that is no mean achievement. By the standards set
by this absurd ‘phobia’ objecting to the element of human sacrifice practised
by the Aztecs would be an invidious example of a form of prejudice, an
irrational ‘phobia.’
Of course the aim of this cloak, part of the ever increasing
wardrobe of human victimology, is not to combat anti Muslim bigotry but to ring-fence Islam from any serious analysis, criticism or debunkery. It would be churlish
not to admit it has had some success in this regard.
I cannot yet bring myself to abandon Twitter, but the
atmosphere of the Twittersphere has grown steadily more rancid. As Chris Deerin
points out in the Scottish Daily Mail:-
‘The nastiness and
aggression of the cybernats during the referendum campaign was one thing. They
are an odd, unpleasant and intellectually limited bunch – but at least the
existential nature of the issue justified the engagement. In recent months,
though, this tiresome trend has spread south as the Corbynites – effectively
cybernats without the whisky tears – have risen. My Twitter feed became a
conveyor belt of anti-Semites, moral relativists, America-haters and pop-eyed
ideologues spewing tedious old guff.[1]’
I am currently reading Proust, a great antidote, though obviously also for the sheer pleasure
of absorbing his rich, delicate, intricate and life affirming prose. Proust is
not, as some seem to believe, ‘difficult, ‘ however he is so rich that he
demands your full concentration.
