Must We Take Them Seriously ?
Monday's Scandal on Friday
Must we take our pompous, ever-errant, wind-up dolls we call politicians seriously ? Battle fatgue is setting in. The European volk have grown weary of their warnings about apocalypse ahead, whether from war, environmental obliteration, or the never-ending need to tighten our belts, about which they never really do anything except announce grand plans that go nowhere. The people are looking elsewhere for their elected officials, which is unsettling for a professional class. It ain’t easy being gray.
Here in France, rattled by Trump’s tariff reset and the VP’s moral invectives, President Macron has promised French troops in Ukraine more times than I can count. Enlistment must be down. In Great Britain, Labour wants to block the sun in order to lower carbon levels. In rainy England. Kid you not.
They obviously don’t believe their end-of-the-world, assisted dying, anti-Trump, anti-China, anti-Russia jazz or do they ? Maybe they’re just actors happy to have a part in the play.
Some video evidence of how the Big Three behave in private surfaced at the beginning of this week. Speculation immediately focused on the wad of white tissue Monsieur Macron deftly pockets and what looks like a snifter that Herr Merz makes disappear like a professional magician. But maybe that’s looking at it the wrong way.
Evidently the comedian Zelenskyy had just departed the room when the journalists burst in unannounced, video cam blazing.
Grand smiles all around. They seemed to be having a jolly time, perhaps sharing a few of the tricks of the trade. ‘And then I told them that killing old people was a compassionate, humanitarian gesture, and they fell for it!’ (Euthanasia bills are currently getting the bum’s rush through the legislatures in France and the UK.)
Not that we’d believe our dear leaders would ever indulge. How dare you even suggest it! Newspapers, television, the search engine when I open my computer have soundly disproved it. Fake News. Which brings back fond memories of a Richard Pryor routine about being caught in bed with another woman. ‘I’m not with Sheila,’ he bellowed. ‘Who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes ?’
As for me, I have my doubts…do we believe that a young Rothschild banker like Macron ever saw a line, a rail, a toot he could resist ? How could he, it’s everywhere here on the continent in the successful circles, even at a few parties I may have attended once upon a time, although there is no video evidence of bad behavior. Merz the Scarecrow looks the type and clueless Starmer I suspect would do whatever was popular in the room.
Are Gentlemen Not To Be Allowed Their Privacy At All?
I’m less interested in whether they did or didn’t than to meditate on the fact that the leaders of France Germany and the UK are laughing their heads off while Europe drifts into endless war and the puny, consensual authoritarianism of the center, intent on keeping dissenters far from elective office. No de Gaulles, Edens or Adenauers on board this train.
(Although both Marine le Pen in France and the Afd in Germany have been excluded from elections via lawfare and court decree in the last month, it won’t work. Outlaw status guarantees increased popularity.)
The more pertinent question is, If people believe it — and the European sages gathered around the livingroom table in my cramped quarters have little doubt – does it matter ? Journos bore us with an endless parade of facts and statistics, most of which are suppositions, wild guesses, inferences. But they insist they’re the serious ones while fiction writers like myself are pretty sure that drugs and much more are an every day occurrence. They have the Pulitzer Prize on their side, we have the Marquis de Sade. Touché!
The Europeans soldier on, accustomed to leaders whose sole purpose is to, in Orwell’s phrase, keep the aspidistra flying — keep the show on the road. It all started a while back (a little before 500 A.D. when the Western Empire fell), and ever since their elites rarely pay for their transgressions. People here shrug and hardly bother, saying but of course, what did you expect? although my landlady quickly goes ballistic. Macron is an incompetant and a homosexual (not that there’s anything wrong with that, she adds) but he is not stupid. No, the following clip is those terrible Americans up to their AI tricks, disinfo. (Silence when I ask her what’s the evidence that Macron is gay.)
Roll the tape. (There are many versions doctored to humorous effect but this one looks untampered. I could be wrong.)
Look closely. Is it true or isn’t it and does it matter ?
The middleweight non-entities posing as leaders have only one defense: the informed circles in charge of propaganda take them seriously. Their livelihood depends upon it. Without that, they’d stand before us like a magician out of tricks, a comedian who fudges the punchline. The second people start laughing in Ursula von der Leyen or Kaja Kallas’s face, they’re doomed. And so in the spirit of mockery, I purloin another video, a deft piece of AI fakery worth a chuckle or two. ‘This Spring tissues are full of pollen,’ the short clip says, ‘It really makes you sneeze.’ It appears to be produced in France, where the people still know how to take the piss at their leaders’ expense. Posting a video like this in England or Germany could result in a home visit from the coppers — no joke. Maybe those busy journalists are just too busy to tell you how they’re policing free expression in Europe.
(Apologies to anyone who isn’t as addicted to X as I am. The first clip is presently everywhere on-line, the second perhaps harder to find. Not on Bluesky, alas but maybe elsewhere.)
What is truth, Pilate asked. He only had to decide between the God-inspired poet and the Representatives of Order who wanted him out of the way. Our task is trickier: we must laugh these tenacious fiddlers out of the public hall. It looks like the only way; public opinion is malleable, elections can be fixed, something the technocrats have proven again and again in Germany, Roumania and France over the last month.
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From the Isle of the Dissolute
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