Fleapit revisited:The Night Notre-Dame Burned.

"The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire. We don't need no water. Let the motherfucker burn" - The Roof Is On Fire, Rock Master Scott & The Dynamic Three.

Fortunately for the citizens of the French capital, the Paris Fire Brigade (brigade des sapeurs-pompiers de Paris, oh yes) do not receive their training from old school hip-hop artists from the Bronx who have a laissez-faire, at best, approach to all matters pyromaniacal. Although there is one moment in Storyville's The Night Notre-Dame Burned (BBC4/iPlayer) when Emmanuel Macron makes such a considered gamble with the safety of his firefighters it's hard not to side with Rock Master Scott and his crew.

Thankfully, Macron's gamble paid off and not a single person, firefighter or otherwise, was killed and only three people were injured in the twelve hours that followed a huge fire breaking out in Notre-Dame, the 12-14c cathedral that sits on the Ile-de-France in the middle of the Seine at the heart of Paris and is a symbol of that city to almost rival the Eiffel Tower, just after 6pm in the evening on April 15th 2019.

The beginning of holy week! Which is, quite obviously, a big deal at Notre-Dame. Via interviews with volunteers, students on a school trip, Mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo, Monsignor Patrick Chauvet, the chief architect of historic monuments, and, most of all, the firefighters themselves (including the sketch artist of the Paris fire department - yes, the Paris fire department appear to employ a sketch artist) the tale is told of how one of the most famous buildings in the entire world was nearly lost to the world, to France, and, most of all, to its home city of Paris.

April 15th had been a sunny day so we're treated to some of the most Parisienne sights imaginable to set the scene:- boats on the Seine, accordion music, and the Eiffel Tower proudly keeping vigil over the twenty arrondissements. If a cyclist in a striped jersey had passed by ringing his bell with a couple of baguettes in his basket they would have hardly made the scene any less cliched.

So when the transepts and spiral staircases of Notre-Dame went up in flames, threatening the sacristy, priceless art, the holy relics, and a collection of "treasures that transcend humanity" according to one observer, a crowd soon gathered by the banks of the Seine to take in the spectacle. A spectacle that some could barely believe. 

Notre-Dame couldn't be on fire! It was supposed to be there for ever! Words and concepts that show how Christianity echoes the folly of the Egyptian pharaohs lampooned in Percy Shelley's 1818 sonnet Ozymandias:-

"Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck"

But as a shower of embers falls from the roof to the floor and the mouth of the fire opens like a huge mythical beast come to swallow the building whole a realisation takes place, if a specifically French and poetic one, that this fire won't be putting itself out. When the spire dramatically comes off it drops to the ground as surely as this sinks in with the assembled viewers and firefighters, a group that now includes Hidalgo and Chauvet (who had been out on his regular bistro call - work, of course).

When Chauvet asks of the fire "pourquoi?" he reminds me of Leonard Cohen in the Tower of Song asking "Hank Williams how lonely does it get". Hank, famously, hasn't answered Cohen yet and Chauvet's god, too, has remained silent. Almost as if he didn't actually exist.

A committee is hastily assembled to decide a plan of action because the fire, as reported by one firefighter - this was, remarkably, Marie-Ange's first ever fire - is now so hot that their helmets are changing colour. The final decision goes to a suitably solemn looking Emmanuel Macron. To let the fire continue to burn and evacuate the firefighters for their own safety or to send them in and risk losing up to thirty lives.

From thereon in the film is a tribute to the bravery of the firefighters that went in to the burning Notre-Dame and saved it. None of them talk like heroes, all speak almost blithely of the encounter - a good day's work but essentially a day's work, but the risks they took that day (and others, and continue to take) render them the heroes of the piece far above any monsignor, mayor, or president.

Before this point I'd been wondering if, well made though the film was, it really deserved an hour and a half running length but when the story of the events that finally ended the inferno were told (still using interviews but spliced with contemporary news footage and drawings - too detailed, I'd wager, for even the most dedicated of on the spot sketch artists) I was both gripped and moved.

The intervention of Quasimodo was not required to keep my attention though the regular images of gargoyles protruding into the sky from the heights of the cathedral did add a visually pleasing gothic dimension to the story as did the resplendent cross shining in the splendour of the aftermath of the fire - almost as if nothing happened.

I found the poetic narrative of some of the observers highly enticing, I found the heroic battle against a deadly primal element let loose in a public place frightening and touching, and I, of course, found the nods to religion a silly irrelevance when very real human lives were placed in danger, not least in a country that proudly boasts freedom of religion, freedom of thought, and whose population is 40% atheist.

I'd not have risked the firefighter's lives to save a religious symbol, no matter how cherished it is, no matter how beautiful it is, no matter how iconic is, and no matter how much money it pulls in to Paris, but I'm glad those brave men and women managed to save Notre-Dame and, next year - all being well and Covid permitting, I'll be leading a two day TADS walk around Paris (the first to ever leave the UK) where I will, no doubt, reheat this story for the benefit of the walkers. It'll be good to look at the cathedral of Notre-Dame as I do so and it'll be even better to know that nobody had to lose their life to save a church.

Fleapit revisited:Small Axe - Mangrove.

A system as "crooked as a damned ram's horn", lies that could "make a stuffed bird laugh", and a police force so institutionally racist that they play a card game in which the player that draws the ace of spades has to "go out and nick the first black bastard they clap eyes on".

Steve McQueen's Mangrove (the first in five films the 1999 Turner Prize winning artist and 12 Years a Slave, Hunger, and Shame director has made for his Small Axe series, showing Sunday nights on BBC1 and iPlayer) aims, like the other films in the series, to tell the story of the British black experience and not only is it accurate, realistic, brilliantly filmed and acted and played out against recognisable locations for anyone growing up in the sixties and seventies, it pulls no punches when it comes to showing what life was like for black people in a country that had then, and still has now, a very big issue with race.

Notting Hill 1968 looks like a building site and, with the Westway being constructed at the time - cannily included by the team behind Mangrove, much of it was. The hills of concrete rubble and playgrounds that wouldn't pass even the most cursory health and safety inspections foreground walls covered in graffiti reading 'EAT THE RICH', 'WOGS OUT', and 'POWELL FOR P.M.' - a reminder of a time when racism in politics was even more overt and mainstream than it is now.

A refuge, or safe haven, in this unwelcoming environment comes in the form of Frank Crichlow's Mangrove soul food restaurant where the local black population meet to socialise, eat goat and mutton curry and crab and dumpling, and try to forget about the troubles of daily life - if only the police would let them.

When the nakedly and unashamedly racist local police aren't smashing up Crichlow's (an excellent Shaun Parkes) restaurant and business they're wilfully smashing up his home. Sam Spruell plays Police Constable Frank Pulley as an uneducated, violent, vindictive liar and bully, a small man whose uniform and his sense of being in a gang, an entitled gang, gives him a sense of power in a world he's too small to understand or engage in.

He's the most obvious villain of the piece but he's an unwitting pawn in a much bigger game. That of the rich white male establishment and its desire to not cede an inch of power to anyone who doesn't look like them, talk like them, or, most importantly, think like them. The vintage shots of London look amazing and the retro cars and pub facades cannot but help evoke a grim, slightly unrealistic, nostalgia for a time that was never that great anyway.

A time when, it seems, everybody smoked all the time and a time when crude racial epithets were bandied about as casually as police beatings. A time we really shouldn't be aiming to go back to. A time that was difficult for a lot of people but a time that was particularly difficult if you were living as a black person in Britain.

Uplift from being treated as a second class citizen in one's own country comes not just with the food of the Mangrove but the steel pan and reggae music imported from the Caribbean (Toots and the Maytals and Harry J Allstars feature on an excellent soundtrack along with homegrown British ska band Symarip and American country singer Jim Reeves) and a possible route out of constantly being crushed under the heavily booted foot of the British establishment comes when two of the members of the 'Mangrove Nine' (those who were arrested while protesting police harassment of the restaurant) decide to represent themselves at the Old Bailey.

They have their day, or nearly three months, in court. Darcus Howe (yes, that one - played by Malachi Kirby and first seen reading The Black Jacobins, about the Haitian revolution, by Trinidadian historian C.L.R.James much to the annoyance of his partner Barbara (Rochenda Sandall) who wishes he'd do some housework) and Altheia Jones-LeCointe (Letitia Wright), inspired by the tactics of Civil Rights activists and Black Panthers in the US and spurned on by the approach of maverick Scottish advocate Ian MacDonald (Jack Lowden) slowly, yet surgically, peel off the skin of a fabricated case to reveal the beating heart of a wholly exclusionary establishment of white privilege but will that be enough? Will their 'day' in court, ultimately, be a victorious one?

That's one for the history books but what McQueen does with his second act, essentially a good old fashioned court room drama that starts off somewhat dry but soon starts to wet my eyes, is show how interconnected and impervious various pillars of the establishment are but also how with constant, and measured, probing they can be tested thoroughly and proved to be unfit for purpose.

The court case leads to heated debates among defendants, family members, friends, and associates about self-representation and in a way - and future episodes will prove me either right or wrong about this - I think that's what McQueen is trying to do, or - more correctly - doing, with his Small Axe extended portmanteau of films. 

As with many others in recent years, and following this summer's Black Lives Matter protests - now supported by the national broadcaster and put on its main channel, he's taking control of the narrative 

and telling the story of his own people through their own lived experiences and on their own terms. When introducing Mangrove, the BBC's continuity announcer spoke of a 'hidden history' but the history of Black Britain was only hidden if you chose not to look for it. 

For Black Britons themselves, their history was not hidden so much as it was partial or misrepresented. Steve McQueen is one of a number of film makers, artists, musicians, and writers who will no longer apologise for telling that story the way they want to and by refusing to sugar that pill McQueen, and others, are making British society fairer and more inclusive for everybody that shares it. Racism comes from fear and fear comes from ignorance. With Steve McQueen's Small Axe you can be educated out of that ignorance and fear while, at the same time, being entertained by quality Sunday night drama. As if you can't tell, I'm looking forward to the next four.

Stag Night:In Search Of Cernunnos.

"I'm horny, horny, horny, horny, so horny" - Horny '98, Mousse T Vs Hot'n'Juicy

Mustafa Gondugdu's late nineties pop-house anthem, held off the number one spot by B*witched's C'est la Vie, may well have been an anthem to many a stag night during the Loaded/new lad era but it could also, if you try hard enough, serve as a soundtrack to a very different kind of 'stag' night. A night in service to the stag god Cernunnos.

I was at home on a Thursday night, with a bottle of San Miguel, some breadsticks and hummus in hand, using Zoom and YouTube to take in a SELFS (South East London Folklore Society) talk about the horned God of Celtic polytheism, Cernunnos. A chap, I must confess, I had previously been unfamiliar with.

So In Search Of Cernunnos would act, to me, as an introduction but I have to say that by the time the talk had finished, and unlike most SELFS evenings, I was possibly even more confused than I had been going in. It was a pleasant enough evening, George played a nice song on his guitar - Gentlefolk Into The Greenwood and there was a Q&A that took in riding horses backwards to Southampton and Lithuanian paganism, but I just wasn't as enthralled as I had been by previous SELFS events.

On 28th May 1891 a group of peat cutters in Denmark uncovered the remains of a collection of decorative plates that, when pieced back together, made a two thousand year old silver vessel which became known as the Gundestrup cauldron and is now on display in the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen alongside bronze age helmets, 4c golden horns, and the skeleton of an auroch.

The work appeared to be of Celtic, or even Thracian (an ill defined are between the Aegean and Black Seas shared today by Bulgaria, Greece, and Turkey), origin rather than Danish and speculation, there is more speculation than fact about Cernunnos - strangely enough, had it that the cauldron had been brought to Denmark by a Teutonic tribe that had taken it as spoils of war following a military victory over their Serbian rivals.

So far, so pan European but what actually is/was the Gundestrup cauldron? What did the engravings on it mean? What did they represent? To describe something as 'ceremonial' is rather weak and vague (a towel is ceremonial, so is a dishcloth, a bottle opener, or a pair of pants) but to try to decipher every image on the cauldron is a task that will probably outfox even the most patient historians.

Instead, on our search for Cernunnos, we drilled down on just one image from the vessel. Below we can see what we believe to be the god of the hunt, the lord of the animals, the stag god, our elusive prey, Cernunnos. Stags were believed to eat snakes and to have the power to shake off any hunter's arrows they may receive, it was held that they were unable to catch fevers, and Alexander the Great's court had it that they could live to be over one hundred years old.

Presumably they'd receive a telegram from the Queen. The translation of Cernunnos, 'the horned one, suggests that one of these impressive beasts has somehow shapeshifted and become a man but it was here that the talk, or maybe this listener, unravelled a bit. While I understood how Cernunnos came to be viewed as a lord of fertility, wealth, and mystery I didn't really understand how skittish trout, leaping lords, and feeding nuts to blackbirds came into it and I was utterly bemused by references to a ram's head discovered in Cirencester, the Hobbit, and the mystical Irish hunter-warrior Finn McCool.

Sections relating to Caesar's decade in Gaul, the Roman god Dispater, and the Hobby Horse/Obby Oss traditions across Europe, though interesting, seemed only tangentially related to the matter in hand but at least the image of a 13c century mosaic from a baptistery in Florence (worthy of Hieronymous Bosch) and St Augustine battling a green demon whose naked bum has a face were certainly eye catching.

In Hungary they sang of an astral deer and elsewhere horses and stags were once worshipped in temples, all suggesting a religion of animal folklore that Cernunnons, flanked by wolves and adorned with torcs, was but one small part of and possibly not enough is known of him to really flesh out an entire evening's entertainment.

So it was we drifted off into realms partially related. Margaret Murray's God of the Witches, Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor (according to Murray, related to Cernunnos), and even the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance in Staffordshire. A yearly event that involves triangle players, antlers, a fool, and Maid Marian.

Maid Marian, of course, is more associated with another midlands county, Nottinghamshire, and that county's heroic outlaw Robin Hood and the final diversion on our mystery tour was into the world of the hooded man as our speaker, George, enthused about HTV's mid-eighties Robin of Sherwood, a drama with fairly low production values and starring Michael Praed as Robin and a young Ray Winstone as Will Scarlett.

Rula Lenska, Patricia Hodge, Jason Connery, Phil Davis, Richard O'Brien, and Lewis Collins all also put in appearances, I know - my friend John Patrick Higgins once forced me to watch episodes upon episodes of it when I wanted to go to the pub, but of most interest to those in search of Cernunnos, as we still nominally were, was John Abineri's Herne the Hunter, a ghost rumoured to haunt Windsor Great Park and nearby areas who by 1984, it seems, had moved to Sherwood Forest.

A horse riding, chain rattling, cattle tormenting spectre with antlers growing from his head who is believed to be a modern (or fairly modern, he first 'appeared' around 1840) iteration of Cernunnos. The 'cern' part of the name is thought to have derived from a mispronounciation of 'herne'. 

None of this makes the story any more believable, or the evening any more satisfactory - sadly, but it does show how these stories about myths and ghosts not only travel across space (from Ireland to Denmark or from Serbia to Germany) but also through time. On both of these journeys the names and the characters change but the essence of the story, the myth, remains. 

People make up stories so they can entertain each other, teach other, communicate with each other, and have fun with each other. They can come in the form of accepted mainstream religion, folklore, Coronation Street, or Hollywood movies or they can, as I tend to prefer, come in the form of evenings like those hosted by the South East London Folklore Society. This may not have been one of their best but I shall certainly be back for more.

Fleapit revisited:Pepe The Frog:Feels Good Man.

"What did people get wrong about Pepe?" - Arthur Jones

"Probably when they put Pepe on the Internet saying 'kill Jews'" - Matt Furie

How did a harmless amphibian slacker who loved eating pizza, hanging out with his buddies, and dancing in his pants to Shania Twain become the poster boy the white supremacist movement, an alt-right icon, and a symbol for incels and NEETs to rally round? How did the mellow green fellow become a meme loaded with such toxicity that he was eventually listed as a hate symbol, the equivalent of a swastika?

Arthur Jones' Pepe the Frog:Feels Good Man (part of the Storyville strand and available on BBC4 and iPlayer) tells the story of how laid back cartoonist Matt Furie lost control of his own creation and had to watch helplessly as Pepe moved to the dark side. A move accessorised by a new wardrobe of MAGA hats, FEMINISM = CANCER t-shirts, and swastika tattoos.

Via interviews with Matt, his girlfriend Ayiana Udesen, their hirsute flatmate Chris Sullivan, psychologists, other cartoonists (including the creator of Bojack Horseman), occultists, lawyers, a director of something called the Network Contagion Research Institute, and some utterly soulless wanker who made a fortune in crypto currency and now drives round in a Lamborghini, Jones plots a story that not only explains how memes take on a life of their own but shows how damage and hatred played out in the supposed safe space of cyber can turn easily, and quickly, into damage and hatred with very real consequences in the real world.

Pepe the Frog's journey began both at the Community Thrift store in San Francisco and in Furie's fertile and - let's be honest - hardly overworked, brain. Pepe hung out with his anthropomorphic buddies Andy, Brett, and Landwolf playing computer games, eating takeaway food, and smoking bongs and when he was discovered peeing with both his trousers and pants all the way down and asked why he was doing that a catchphrase was born. "Feels good man" was Pepe's response.

When Pepe and his catchphrase appeared on Myspace it resonated with many and soon weightlifters started using it to accompany photos of their feats. Later "feels good man" would be attached to photos of cats, dogs, and that one of Kermit the Frog drinking a glass of Lipton iced tea. John Goodman, of course, got co-opted.

Furie, a loving father and happy-go-lucky Californian type dude, didn't even know what a meme was, he somewhat disingenuously claims he's still not sure, and as an artist he wasn't into the whole litigation thing. It seemed pretty uncool to complain that his creation was becoming famous even if it was in ways he'd never imagined.

So he let the use of Pepe continue - and spread. It's hard to know if he could have stopped it even if he'd wanted to. In 2003, the fourteen year old Christoper Poole had launched the anonymous imageboard website 4chan while he was still living with his mum and 4chan's methodology, even more than the algorithms of Twitter and Facebook, rewards offense. The more somebody comments, or shares, content the further up it's pushed on to people's feeds. 

Offensive comments always win so 4chan soon became a hotbed, or cesspit, of abuse and hatred and in Pepe the Frog peeing with his trousers and pants down the NEETs (not in educataion, employment, or training) and incels (involuntary celibates) who made up huge swathes of 4chan's user base found a hero. They loved the idea of Pepe 'owning' his loserdom. 

4chan users, often spending entire days on the Internet in their mother's basements, railed against those who used the Internet to post inspirational quotes and proudly announced that they were doing anything but 'living their best lives' and soon Pepe had made friends with a character named Wojak, or 'feels guy', a crudely drawn outline of wistfulness whose dejected air seeped into Pepe's life and made him a a very sad frog indeed.

Pepe's sadness was the vehicle of expression of grief and sorrow for those without the emotional tool kits to deal with their own issues and those incapable of plotting a map out of their despair. Many of these were 4chan's army of incels but when pop stars Nicki Minaj and Katy Perry shared images of Pepe on Instagram their young female fans became interested in Pepe and jumped over to 4chan to see what he was all about.

Disappointed to find out what Pepe's 4chan fans were really like, some of the new female recruits began to post videos saying they'd like to chop the frog's head off and called the boys of 4chan, reasonably accurately, "virgin losers". The increased popularity and 'normie' adoption of Pepe sparked a backlash that was first directed at women but soon spread out to couples, hilariously dismissed as "sex havers" by one 4chan user, and, soon enough, anybody from a different background. 

Race, religion, and politics were all weaponised in the battle for control of Pepe. In retrospect it was not the best time for Chris Sullivan to get a Pepe tattoo on his arm or for Matt Furie to launch a range of Pepe clothing that included a "sad frog golf shirt" that you could "wear to have a pasta meal with your family". Any right thinking family would struggle to digest their penne if they saw the newly created images of Pepe as a Nazi, Pepe flying a plane into the Twin Towers, and Pepe as a member of ISIS beheading Wojak.

"They're always just jokes all the time and you can't prove otherwise" is how commentator Joel Finkelstein explains how the creators of these hurtful memes justified their doing so. But this get out clause was exposed for the lie it is when, in 2014, in Isla Vista, California, twenty-two year old Elliot Rodger killed seven people, four by gunfire, three by stabbing. Rodger had written a 'manifesto', My Twisted World:The Story of Elliot Rodger, in which he described his hatred of women, his inability to get a girlfriend (can't help thinking those two things might be linked), and his contempt for couples, particularly interracial couples.

He also spoke of his desire for 'retribution'. So when he got this supposed retribution (and ended his night of killing by taking his own life as so many do) did those on 4chan condemn, or even disavow, his actions or did they support him? I think you already know the answer to that. They celebrated Rodger as a 'boss' and a 'virgin with rage' and, in the world of memes, Rodger's image lived on, hanging out with his new friend Pepe the Frog.

There was talk of a 'Beta uprising', an idea that Rodger would be the first of many to exact fatal retribution on women, couples, and normies. Online conversations and memes took place under the premise of justifying and normalising violence against vulnerable people. Pepe the Frog's new found love of power and his delight in the suffering of others saw his expression move from sadness to a very sinister and very smug smirk.

In fact he resembled nobody more than Donald Trump, the soon to be 45th President of the United States and now, in his own words, a 'stone cold loser. An old GQ cover showed just how much Pepe's latest iteration owed to Trump and on 4chan, where they loved Trump's message of white nationalism and the idea of hurting libs, they began to see Trump as the human personification of Pepe. 

Pepe made flesh and a Pepe that made your flesh creep. Dank memes flowed like molten lava from the volcanoes of sickness that passed for brains in the heads of people like David Duke (a former grand wizard of the KKK), Alex Jones (chief conspiracy theorist for far right fake news site Infowars), Richard Spencer (a leading American neo-Nazi and white supremacist memorably described by Dave Gahan as a 'cunt' after he branded Depeche Mode the official band of the alt-right) and Steve Bannon of the xenophobic and racist news site Breitbart who went on to become Donald Trump's chief strategist in 2017.

Pepe's friends now included some of the very worst people in the world and soon even the chief turd, Turd of Turd Hall himself, Donald Trump was promoting himself as a cosplay Pepe with his vice president Mike Pence (pre-fly) taking the role of Wojak. Echoed by today's QAnon 'community, Pepe supporters would yell out his name during Hillary Clinton's speeches. Bemusing most political commentators who mistook it for random nonsense but dog-whistling directly to the alt-right movement that they were upping their game.

It became an article of faith that they could make Hillary Clinton collapse in public and when she did do just that the fact she was diagnosed with pneumonia was irrelevant. To Pepe's alt-right fan club, they had willed this into happening and they would will Donald Trump into the White House too. They would use 'meme magic' to meme a man, a monster of a man, into the White House.

Steve Bannon identified the media, not the Democrats, as the opposition (a view the far right share with the far left) and his way to counter them was to flood the zone with so much shit that nobody knew what was real or not. The point was to completely obliterate objective truth and, in the style of Vladimir Putin and the Russian political philosopher and fascist Aleksandr Dugin, to create a new truth. An untrue truth but one that enough people would believe in that a significant minority would support a man who represented that 'truth'.

Those that didn't would be too busy arguing the point or trying to understand why blatant lies were being espoused in public to ever catch up. Lies could be issued far faster than they could be fact checked and dismissed and if the rate of lying was expedited enough then honesty and decency would crumble under the new aurora of Trump and Pepe's golden dawn.

Predictably, conspiracy theories and racist ideas of 'ethnic homelands' and 'blood and soil' prospered in this new landscape of misinformation and, back in San Francisco, an apolitical hippy trying to write children's books, Matt Furie, found his innocent cartoon frog had been so bent out of shape by the alt-right and the Internet that he'd been listed as a hate symbol on a par with the swastika.

Furie, who'd finally wised up to the damage his creation had been weaponised into doing, took on Alex Jones in a legal battle, he killed off Pepe in a cartoon strip, and he launched the Peace Pepe Database of Love to reposition Pepe as a figure of peace and an icon of hope. My favourite is the one that borrows from, and pays homage to, the Iwo Jima Memorial in Arlington County, Virginia.

But the fight for Pepe's soul didn't end there. Furie may have created Pepe but he didn't own him any more. Pepe had become whatever you wanted him to be. A tabula rasa that could be enngraved with the hatred of Bannon, Duke, and Trump or a symbol of freedom, democracy, and youth protest as he did, along with the equally unlikely umbrella, in Hong Kong.

Society, rather than Matt Furie, chose what Pepe became and what Pepe, and others who find themselves co-opted into the land of memes, will go on to become and, in that, Pepe is an analogue for every child born in this world. We can fill their minds with hate, racism, xenophobia, and misogyny or we can imbue with them love, empathy, compassion, and curiosity and teach them to work with, and not against, others to make the world a better place. Because, as we've seen over the last four years, filling people with hatred simply fills the world with hatred. Those who take Pepe on his next journey need to be better than those on 4chan who corrupted him and those who are taking over, and will soon take over, the running of the world need to do the same. That really would feel good, man.

Kakistocracy III:Gary Sambrook Eats Big Dinners.

What is government for? What is the primary reason for its existence? I remember my mate Shep once saying that it's chief aim should be to care for the people of the country. To make sure they have roofs over their heads, to make sure they have food on their plates, and to make sure they're safe from harm. All the other stuff is, or should be, secondary to meeting these primary needs. 

Meet them and government is free, entitled - even, to look at the bigger picture, implement lasting change to regional and national infrastructures, and even, if it so desires, opt out of hugely beneficial trading blocs. The trouble is this government, the kakistocracy overseen by Boris Fucking Johnson, has, quite spectacularly failed to meet any of those three key performance indicators.

Homelessness is rising to levels not seen since the era of Thatcher, possibly higher, and, unlike the first wave of coronavirus, homeless people are not being sheltered during the second so called lockdown. With the weather starting to worsen it doesn't taken a superforecaster to work out the likely endgame there.

As regards to protecting the public, the likelihood of a no deal Brexit would be cavalier enough but a mishandling of the Covid pandemic that has resulted, as I write, in 50,928 deaths (the fifth highest in the world - behind only the USA, Brazil, India, and Mexico - all of whom have considerably larger populations) is evidence as stark as you like that Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Matt Hancock, and the soon to go Dominic Cummings have been lethally negligent in their work.

Is Cummings' departure, and that of Lee Cain - who nobody had even heard of a week ago and yet suddenly many are experts on, a handy distraction from a Covid death toll that has gone above five hundred in the UK three days in a row now - and looks likely to rise further - or are the rats deserting a ship that's sinking under the weight of its own lies and incompetence and soon to be fatally scuppered by a woeful, and wilful, Brexit.

Maybe Cummings and Cain have looked towards America, seen the joyful events unfolding as Trump becomes, in his own words, the stone cold loser in the most important election in decades, possibly ever, and seen that the writing is on the wall for populism. Populism has been found out. Joe Biden's speech was one of hope, respect, dignity, empathy, and compassion and in Kamala Harris the United States of America has elected the first female and the first woman of colour to the second highest office in the country. At long last.

They won't be progressive enough for everyone, and they'll certainly do things we all disagree with, but that's what progress means. Getting better. It doesn't mean starting with perfection or ideological purity. It means working together, with those who support you and those who don't, to make society better for all. Trump will soon be gone, tweeting away from Mar-a-Lago or even kicked off Twitter and sent to Parler like Katie Hopkins, but Biden, Harris, and everyone who wants a better and fairer world must be mindful that the confused and vile ideology of Trumpism lives on.

It's a mindset in which everything is a zero sum game. There has to be losers so that there can be winners and victory is always measured in wealth, power, and material assets. Never in happiness, kindness, friendship, or love. It's a small mindset beloved of small people who are unable to plot a route to their own happiness and instead try to drag everyone down to their level like crabs in a bucket.

When Trump leaves the White House, it saddens me to consider this, the UK will remain a bastion of Trumpism. With Johnson in power, the era of cronyism, culture wars, and deadly chumocracy will look more isolated from the rest of the world than even before. Britain will be weaker and with less allies and it will be the doing of the likes of Johnson, Gove, and the professional rage harvester Nigel Farage.

When I saw the American political commentator Van Jones crying on television, saying "it's easier to be a dad, to tell your kids truth matters" when Trump's lies finally saw him ousted, I wanted to cry too. Tears of joy. I wanted to dance in the streets, hug all my friends, and buy them drinks - which, due to Covid restrictions, I was not allowed to. It almost seemed unfair but the fireworks that erupted into the sky though nominally marking Guy Fawkes Night seemed to ring out just as clearly in their condemnation of Trump.

Either way they celebrated the end of a person who endangered democracy. Us Brits can celebrate properly when we remove our own deadly populist clown Boris Johnson and though we may have to wait nearly four years before we can do so we must be sure not to forget the lies, not to forget the negligence, and not to forget the cronyism. Not to forget the avoidable astronomical death toll that Boris Johnson has presided over.

Without his bully buddy, the stone cold loser Donald Trump, by his side Johnson looks exposed and the loss of his SPADs further accentuates that. Though Johnson himself has half-heartedly congratulated Biden on winning the US election, in a tweet that had Donald Trump's name feintly written and removed in the background - hey, these guys are pros, some of his outriders have taken a somewhat different tack.

Scott Benton, the recently elected Conservative MP for Blackpool South, has already complained that Joe Biden's respect for the Good Friday Agreement, a multilateral agreement that brought to an end a conflict that had claimed over 3,500 lives on the British Isles, makes him a bad president and a bad leader.

When Tory MPs are not complaining about people upholding peace agreements they're gleefully trying to starve poor children. Ben Bradley, the Conservative MP for Mansfield tweeted to say if the government were to provide children in his constituency with free school meals during the holidays they would sell them to buy crack and heroin. 

I'd love to see Ben Bradley try to score some horse with a Tupperware box full of Dairy-Lea Lunchables, a packet of Teddy Pom-Bears, and a small plastic bottle of Robinson's Fruit Shoot but no matter how embarrassing that might be for all concerned it could hardly compete with the excruciating spectacle of Nicky Morgan (the woman who said she'd never serve in a Boris Johnson government but now not only serves in a Boris Johnson government but has been elevated to a life peer in the House of Lords by that administration for her fealty to it) on Question Time suggesting that the reason the government chose to go against the kind plan of the much loved footballer Marcus Rashford and refuse to extend the free school dinners scheme was because Labour's Deputy Leader Angela Rayner called Chris Clarkson, the prematurely ageing Tory MP for Heywood & Middleton, 'scum'.

Which isn't even harsh if you consider he'd just voted for, and argued for, taking food away from hungry children. It's straight out of the cry-bully's playbook. Be horrible to people below you and then complain, when it's pointed out, that you're the real victim. It's what controlling men in relationships do and it's what populist politicians do. Another newly elected Conservative MP, this rogues gallery feels endless, Selaine Saxby (North Devon) claimed that businesses stepping in to fill the void and donating free school meals should not ask for government assistance if they find themselves in trouble as they're clearly doing very well if they can afford to give stuff away.

This statement illustrates almost better than any the Tory mindset. A mindset, memorably described by Charlie Brooker as "an eternally irritating force for wrong that appeals exclusively to bigots, toffs, money-minded machine men, faded entertainers, and selfish, grasping simpletons who were born with part of their soul missing" and a mindset that thinks giving to charity is something people do because they have money to throw away and not because they actually care about, and for, their fellow man.

One Tory MP, Caroline Ansell (Eastbourne), at least had the moral fibre to resign from her job as a parliamentary private secretary at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs over the issue but one good apple, or even one bad apple once doing the right thing, doesn't mean that the whole tree is not rotten to the core and should be chopped down as soon as possible. Gary Sambrook, the Tory MP for Birmingham Northfield who voted against free school dinners and soon saw the wonderful piece of graffit this blog is named for appear in his 'honour', is entitled to eat as many big dinners as he likes but if his government can't find the magic money tree when it comes to providing for poverty stricken kids than it really shouldn't be picking fruit off that tree to subsidise Sambrook's pan fried salmon with courgette provencal or his slow cooked pork belly with pancetta and root vegetable spelt.

It certainly shouldn't be shaking that tree so hard that money falls out for Baroness Dido Harding and Tory donors but not for doctors and nurses at the frontline of the ongoing Covid crisis. But we shouldn't be surprised that this is the case. Tom Bower's recent biography of Boris Johnson, by most accounts fawning, laudatory, and way too apologetic towards its subject, Boris Johnson:The Gambler, tells of how when Johnson was editor of The Spectator "applications for employment bereft of nepotism or patronage were automatically binned".

That's dreadful, shameful, behaviour for the editor of a magazine. For the Prime Minister of an actual real country, and during the time of a pandemic, its consequences are more real. For tens of thousands of people the consequences of Boris Johnson's self-serving behaviour has been the loss of their life the loss of a loved one. While it's possible to feel sympathy for the young Boris Johnson watching his father, another 'character', punching his wife, and Johnson's mum, Charlotte so hard in the face he broke her nose we should certainly not, as Bower seems to suggest, excuse Johnson's own behaviour because his father was worse.

Being a chip off the old block when it comes to infidelity, finances, and morality (though at least not wife beating) is not an excuse. It doesn't cut it. It didn't cut it with Trump (who famously played out his own daddy issues to the detriment of his own country and the entire planet) and it doesn't cut it with Johnson. 

It'll be years before I can celebrate Johnson's downfall (and, hopefully, pubs will be open then and I'll be able to do so with friends) but at least I could celebrate Trump's downfall with friends on WhatsApp and social media and with television shows like Have I Got News For You and The Last Leg. Despite my belief that this second lockdown is a lockdown in name only (schools, universities, and businesses continues as normal while almost all social life, anything that enriches the soul rather than the coffers is on standstill) and will only make the most minimal of dents in the grim Covid death tally there are reasons to be positive.

Although such is the impression Covid has made on the world and the way we see it even the word 'positive' has negative connotations now. The news from Pfizer/BioNtech, despite causing predictable backlash from anti-vaxxers and an ignorant colleague of mine who suggested she'd not really want to take a foreign vaccine - I work in Brexitland these days, has to be taken as good news though, and it pains me to agree with Matt Hancock on anything, we certainly shouldn't start acting as if we've got the silver bullet.

Other reasons for positivity in my life have, as ever, come within the sphere of personal relationships and cultural activities. Since I wrote my last Kakistoracy blog nearly a month ago I've been out for pizza with my nephew Daniel to celebrate his 22nd birthday (with my brother, sister-in-law, and younger nephew Alex), been for a curry at the Tadley Tandoori for Tina's 50th (with Neil, Shep, Adam, and Teresa), and been to the Among the Trees exhibition at the Hayward Gallery with Valia (followed by a debrief and lunch at The Old Thameside Inn). I've chatted to many other friends on the phone, on WhatsApp video calls, and on the still great fun Zoom quiz nights (thanks to Dad, Matt and Nat, and Ian for setting them) and I've attended an LFS talk about seances and a SELFS evening about the Gaelic god of wild beasts, Cernunnos (which I'll write about soon enough).

It's kept me sane, and making sure I walk at least ten thousand steps each day - usually back from work through the haunted memory landscape of Baughurst and Tadley - has helped me too, and though I still miss being able to pop in a book shop, stop for a cheeky pint on the way home, get together with large groups of friends for walks, and even just eat crisps, drink Coke, and read The Guardian on the bus or train like I used to I understand that this is the way things have to be for now, throughout Xmas, and into the new year. Maybe in the spring things will change. I don't know any more than any of the rest of you but America has shown us it is possible, gradually, to start pulling ourselves out of this mess of our own making. 

Hope springs eternal. We don't need to follow America and we don't need to lead the world but we do need to, quite quickly, remove from power people who are doing so much to damage both our country and the people that live in it. I looked across the Atlantic last week and, for the first time in four years, I felt there was hope. In 2024 I want to be able to look at my own country and feel the same. Do you? Or are you happy with how things are?