I I am often accused of creating a fake taxi driver and creating a straw man spokesperson to embody the easily lampooned counterarguments that stand-up comedians want to kick to death, but that position is From the lofty position of a patronizing liberal elitist from north London who has his own column.of observer. But you don’t have to invent them.
My classic “you can prove anything with facts” line, now so beloved by liberal talk radio hosts, was actually written on a Sunday morning in the summer of 1999 near Shepherd’s Bush roundabout. issued by the driver. This riff was gifted to me in the winter of 2013, somewhere between Balls Pond Road and Newington Green, by the driver of his cab. That routine was already out there, like Messiaen’s birdsong. All I had to do was listen.
But in recent years, the selective selection of highly profitable reactionary speech has diminished. The average angry person is becoming more cautious, but with common-sense avatars like Lee Anderson no longer being blamed, hopefully unfettered stupidity may be emboldened once again. Last month, as we passed the nuclear shelter cover-up site at Finsbury Town Hall on Rosebery Street, a very pleasant, elderly black taxi driver tried not to think I was straight. Out of curiosity, I asked if they had partners of either gender. , and I woke up laughing about having to do that these days because everything is gone.
It’s easy to empathize with his realization that he no longer has the freedom to say anything, his feeling of being blamed for historical attitudes, and his feeling that he didn’t create it, but only inherited it. was. you get old The world has moved on and you’re standing on the side of the road covered in dust and leaves and dog poop, agreeing with Nick Ferrari about immigration and enjoying the music of Ricky Gervais. afterlifeand a big sticky circle of leaking piss radiates out in an oval of reproach from the front of cream-colored pants that I probably shouldn’t be wearing anymore.
My kids think I’m reactionary because I sometimes stumble over modern gender terminology. But at their age, I was marching against homophobic Article 28 in support of Theresa May, and then at a theater performance picketed by the Christian far right. small children handed out an American evangelical comic book that claimed homosexuals would go to hell. Today’s LGBTQ+ community has given me freedom, but I have yet to receive a formal thank you letter or even a gift certificate.
The driver continued his explanation as we passed the Halifax Bank, which I remember as the Pied Bull Pub. The Pied Bull Pub was where my offshoot band played their third and final show. Things change. “I tell it as I find it,” he found himself saying. “If a black guy cut me up, I’d yell, ‘You nigger!’ at him. I’m not a racist. If he was blue, I’d yell, ‘You blue bastard!’ It’s the same. “At this point we were divided.
“Yes,” I said. “But there are no blue people, right?” Unless you’re overtaken by a Smurf on a moped. Even if you’re shouting at Smurf, calling him a “blue bastard” isn’t the same thing. Because it doesn’t have the same cultural weight. There is no history of discriminating against blue people based on their skin color. The main reason is that they don’t exist. ”
I liked that guy. I realized that I had given him a large tip. I think it’s because he remembered his late father, who suddenly got scared when he handed over money in the rain. My father, who was considerably less careful linguistically than a taxi driver, once, without breaking a sweat, wrote an eight-word sentence that was as impressive as it was profane, sexist, and racist. There was something that made me think of something innocent. In fact, it was so relentlessly aggressive that the woman being yelled at probably thought my dad wasn’t completely fine. Of course, today she might simply assume that he is just a rich, untouchable Tory donor and the grateful recipient of an NHS contract worth millions of pounds.
In another week, another racist scandal will fart from the moribund body politic of this rotting, gaseous corpse of a Conservative government. Seeing Diane Abbott on TV makes the party’s biggest donors “want to hate all black women” and think she “deserves to be shot.” Frank Hester’s statement came three years after Jo Cox was actually shot and killed by a white supremacist. But while Mr Hester’s comments were routinely described as “wrong” by Tory MPs who are self-deprecating enough to publicly parrot the party’s line, they still hold dear They’re chasing votes, and they don’t dare give wealthy donors the impression that their money is going to help them. Not welcome just because the factory setting is his 70’s golf club bar. The party believes the time has come to “move on”. Black people, now shut up and do your work.
What I encountered at the hotel on Wednesday was daily telegraph Reading the newspaper at breakfast is like finding poop in a Frosty. When I opened it, there was a column by Alison Pearson. This was the kind of newspaper that found horrible intestinal parasites still wriggling in the manure. daily telegraph.
Pearson’s headline says: “Of course Britain is unhappy, taken over by the diversity mob.””Compassion is the last thing these people need,” said a probably intentionally offensive columnist in a probably intentionally offensive sidebar. [Syrian] “Refugees in Need” celebrates the adoption of a stray cat from Turkey. The cat had a “passport that had not been chewed up in order to pretend that it had escaped from a war zone.” Alison Pearson makes me want to hate all white women. I guess you can say that? Because she can certainly say that about black women as well. And when that black woman tries to speak in Congress, to her shame, she will be silenced while old white men assess her grievances. So in what precise sense has Britain been taken over by the diversity mob?
