PC vs REALITY: the terrifying decline of empiricism, & the growing size of Room 101
During a Twitter conversation with a wise chap last night, I was reminded of the wonderful Peter Cook/Dudley Moore sketch, in which Dud played a one-legged bloke auditioning for the role of Tarzan. In a spookily prescient dig at what pc ‘sensitivity’ has become since it ran, Cook played an agent patiently explaining to Moore – ‘Mr Spigot’ – that being “of a unipedal nature”, he was unlikely to get the part.
Dud isn’t in denial about only having one leg, he just refuses to see his leg total as a drawback. Raising the issue, Cook starts a riff as follows:
Pete: Now then Mr Spigot, I couldn’t help noticing as you hopped into the room….
Dud: Ah right – you noticed that, did you?
Pete: Mr Spigot, when you’ve been in this business for as long as I have, you get to spot that sort of thing….
Still hopping about hilariously, Dudley says he likes a challenge and so forth. Cookie reaffirms his position as follows:
Pete: Mr Spigot, I have to tell you that it is a longstanding theatrical tradition that the role of Tarzan is played by a person with two legs, and it is my observation that you are in fact 50% deficient in that area.
What does this have to do with contemporary life? Fast reverse to yesterday.
I had several debates on Twitter from mid-afternoon onwards about the nature of photographs circulating in the media of ‘children’ allowed into the UK from Calais. Myself and dozens of others were a bit heavy-handed on the irony pedal, I accept that: but the shots featured were of blokes aged 16-25ish, not little boys and girls. And further, up until then the media – especially the Left – had featured the diminutive pre-pubertal image of little waifs we’ve come to expect in the presence of such ‘humanitarian’ issues. The expectations mismatch was blindingly obvious.
But not to those in the Yvette Cooper/Lily Allen camp. My observation was ‘based on a narrow view of childhood’ said one woman – to whom I replied, asking how many ten year olds she knew who shaved every day. Another person asked what made me ‘so confident’ that these were adults. Another still that they seemed ‘borderline, and could be seen either way’. No they couldn’t, I thought….but retreated from the stage: experience has taught me that to do otherwise is pointless.
A man I follow (and always see as entirely reasonable) asked pointedly why these shots had been used, and were they typical? A very good point, so I tweeted back to say fine, let’s find out the age range of every entrant…if some Daily Mail snapper has biased the shoot, then let’s establish that, and splash it. But I still thought to myself why have any of them this old been let in?
Knowing my regular follow’s common sense, I bet he went off to find out what the age balance was.It wasn’t good news: by yesterday evening, the Home Office was confirming that in the year to September 2015, 65% of child refugees who had their age disputed were found to be over 18.
The remainder of the mob hounded me for the rest of the day: I was a racist, why shouldn’t they all come in, my age point was just ‘a pathetic disguise’ behind which I could strip these poor souls of all dignity. I was, of course, scum. Above all, I was a bigot.
People aware of how my mind works will quickly work out that bigot and Spigot rang a bell in my brain. I made a note of the comparison.
OK, let’s talk dignity for a minute.
I first raised the issue of Calais migrant behaviour at The Slog last February. I live in France, speak the language fairly well and watch French news regularly. I also have a lot of expat and French readers. And being an odd sort of cove, I also engage in ‘news gossip’ in the boulangerie and épicerie, because that’s what one does: when in Rome, and all that.
It’s clear to most citizens and residents of France – especially in Calais – that there is a core group of aggressive migrant males aged 16-30 running wild there.
Watching some of the news film on telly – plus several genuine videos taken by the long-suffering people of Calais – my immediate reaction has always been that the behaviour of these migrants is a carbon copy of those who force-boarded the train at Budapest station last year, and demanded a non-stop trip to Germany….having thrown the guard overboard. Further, the demographic make-up of those present was exactly the same: aggressive males, mid teens to early thirties.
Every last bit of footage I’ve seen depicts the same intimidatory behaviour in Calais. Dignity was absent from the scene.
I have a tremendous sense of déjà-vu about this issue, because just over a year ago I postulated something almost universally poo-poohed at the time: that a ‘second wave’ of migrants – with little or no resemblance to the original Syrian families drowning thanks to the false promises of ruthless pirates – was at work in the EU.
Since earlier this year, I have become increasingly convinced of two things about ‘refugee’ migrants:
- The overwhelming majority landing beyond Greece are not Syrian….and most definitely not families.
- Very few are refugees….but a disturbing proportion came from a point of departure in Turkey.
A lot of routes taken, starting points and rabid demands point to Islamism in general and Recep Erdogan in particular.
Meanwhile, back in the present, Cooke and Moore have been reincarnated from the past. This time, Dudley Moore is an octogenarian auditioning for the part of Peter Pan in a major West End Christmas Panto.
Pete: Now Mr Spigot, you are are you not here to audition for the role of Peter Pan in the forthcoming Christmas production at the Lilyallen Theatre in Drury Lane?
Dud: Er yes, that is correct….Spigot’s the name, and flying’s my game.
Pete: Now Mr Spigot, I couldn’t help noticing as you came through my office door that you are a very old man indeed….
Dud: Ah – you spotted that then?
Pete: …..and the main – perhaps one might venture, entire – point of Peter Pan is that he is forever young….is he not?
Dud: Wull, yes…the herd have in fact reached that erroneous conclusion, but my motto is ‘Why be old when you can be young?’
Pete: If I might venture a point of information here Mr Spigot, while we can use greasepaint to make you look older as it were, we cannot apply, as yet, any known audience-hoodwinking substance to turn an 83 year old into a timeless elf…
Dud: True perhaps….but I am very small….
Pete:…although not perfectly formed, and not an Eternal Child.
Dud: It is clear to me that you are a bigot who is, like, using stereotypes in order to thinly disguise your woeful ageism. Fuck off you scumfascistracist.
Pete: And equally, it is clear to me you are a delusional spigot….
Dud: That’s not funny
Pete:….and therein lies the problem: neither are you.
I do hope that quite a few of you have noticed in the last few weeks how The Slog has turned up the spotlight glare upon Ideology as one of the major villains destroying our culture.
Over time, the others I have highlighted are Undeserved Privilege, Money in Politics, the Triumph of Big Process over Small Creative, State Surveillance, Financialised Capitalism and Tribalism.
To me, it’s obvious that none of these symptoms of civilisational sickness are mutually exclusive: on the contrary, they are headless chickens who have emerged from one egg.
And that egg is Ideology.
To believe unequivocally in an ideology is to ignore the advance of knowledge beyond that ideology.
It is thus to demand that the Sun goes round the Earth, Monarchs are divine, dialectical analysis explains history, material wellbeing brings happiness, wealth trickles down, socialisation drives gender, the Earth is flat, female hormones are an invention of misogynists, debt is of no consequence, there is no such thing as society or obscene profit, Time is absolute, all Jews are communists, there is no alternative to globalism, beyond Islam there is only evil, politics can be eternally correct, companies owe no debt to society, Crusaders were unalloyed heroes, Hitler was a unique one-off cardboard monster….and a thousand other palpably discredited ideas rightly done to death by objective science and empirical research.
Dead parrots are not “just resting”. Their claws have been nailed to the perch by all those come-lately corrupt priests who turned some good original ideas into a very bad catechism.
The entry into Britain of males from the Calais migrant camp – who are obviously not children, and represent confirmation of a Home Office policy – has brought all free thinkers face to face with the terrifying reality of George Orwell’s Room 101 prediction: that all contrarian Winston Smiths must see what Big Brother sees…and thus be cured.
The nightmare is here.
The Slog 