Cummings and goings

THANK GOD IT'S FRIDAY

BC PIRES

BY THE topee-tambo standards of covid and Trumpworld, it was a good week for liberal democracy and a bad one for the two dunce frontrunners leading the western race to totalitarianism. On one side of the pond, a grand jury took the first steps towards criminal charges being laid against the Fat Nixon Group of Charlatans and, on the other, Dominic Cummings, the master-moron of Brexit, turned like the snake he is and bit his former charmer in the asp.

And, in the vast Atlantic Ocean that reflects the gulf between Boris Johnson and Donald J for Jacka-- Trump on the one hand and the future of democracy on the other, those two developments constitute a little good news.

For the handful of people left on these rocks who remember what freedom and responsibility really are.

Rupert Murdoch – possibly the most evil man in the world, until Mitch McConnell wakes up – and his Who-Gives-a-Fox News will package the New York Grand Jury and Cummings-Gone-Wild as liberal conspiracies. Fox Facts-Free News talking fatheads will rant about “woke-ness” and “owning the Libs” and present a fat fraud and a marginally-less-fat-and-fraudlent upper class twit as being unfairly treated.

And their moronic viewers will fall for it.

Ah-gain!

There’s nothing new about poor, stupid, disadvantaged people accepting “woke-ness” as this year’s model of “political correctness gone wild.” And being persuaded to jeer the people who seek to protect them.

It’s the same old-same old weapon in the only forever-war that has ever been fought: rich people v poor people. And the best weapon the rich have always had is fooling poor people into acting against their own interests.

If wealth hadn’t figured out, millennia ago, how to get workers to underwrite their own exploitation, the compensation paid on abolition would have been paid to the workers, not the wealth; to the enslaved, not their masters; to the people, not the venture capitalist entrepreneurs who reduced human beings to property.

For as long as we’ve lived together, a handful of people at the top have tricked the underclass below them that “conservatism” and/or “family values” matter more than bread and medicine. Once or twice a century or so, the rich ride out a French or a slave revolution. For the rest of all time, they sit pretty, spread out massive on top of the massive.

In the last 30 years, the rich have persuaded the poor that jobs for life were really bad and zero hours contracts, really good. In England, they got the people who benefitted most from European Union membership to vote most enthusiastically (and blindly) to leave it. In the US, they got 75 million people to vote for an open racist aspirant dictator who attempted a coup by showing them, every night, over and over, the same half-dozen videos of black people burning buildings.

Once you divide people and persuade one subgroup to act against its own interests, your work is done. No matter what you do to them, they go along with you, doffing caps, tugging forelocks and singing joyfully in church on Sunday.

In a divided world that don’t need islands no more, what’s happening to the forces represented by Fat Abu Bakr in the US and Pound Shop Hugh Grant in the UK is critically important to what happens to us on these little rocks.

But Trini dunces will denounce Cummings and grand jury in the same breath.

The choice will be presented as a binary one, like all the others rich people like, between cheap food and clothes on the one hand and “woke liberal identity politics” on the other.

The choice is really between the America of Joe Biden and the China of Chairman Xi. Both will kill poor people in the end. But only one will send the dead man’s family a bill for the bullet.

We have democracy, if we can keep it. But, in the age of Trump and Johnson, we may sell it for a mess of KFC.

BC Pires is watching Sean Hann-in-he-panties like a month in jail. Read the full version of this column on Saturday at www.BCPires.com