Month: April 2018

The Apprentice, eh?

The tyranny of neoliberalism in the 21st century, reimagined as ‘entertainment.’ Or, perhaps, a post-modernist take on the scraps between lions and Christians. Closer, though, to some Orwellian dystopia only not in the future but now. This is real life, baby.

You worthless piece of shit. You can’t make money? Fuck you. You can’t make me richer than I already am? Fuck you. You can’t demonstrate the necessary soullessness, the required absence of morality, the mandatory predatory greed? Fuck. You.

And you, dear viewer, if you think the gloating and mean-spirited thrills that run up and down the place where your spine ought to be are grotesque, misplaced and fucking deviant, then there’s no place for you here. Fill your fucking face with fucking food and glug the fucking wine as you thrill to someone losing their job. Cultural values reinforced. The consensus cemented. Tomorrow you can sniff disdainfully as nurses cry in the face of poverty. Get a better fucking job! Start your own business! I did! I hauled myself up and made a success of myself! Look at my fucking wad! Look at my fucking car! Look at my fucking house! Look at me!

If you ever worried, deep into the night, about how the roof over your children’s heads was gonna stay in place, fuck you. If you sweated out the money, only to find too much month left at the end of it, fuck you. The only thing worse than having a job is not having one, right?

Like Charlie said, “How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?” And they sell that you as a dream! Via your TV. The only thing worthwhile to which humanity should aspire.

Fuck your dreams, fuck your hopes, fuck your humanity. If you’ve got any left. The only measure of success, the only barometer of worth, the only gauge of merit is money. It’s all about the money, money, money.

A third-rate fucking spiv, a smug obscenity, more walnut than human, mostly famous for giving the world the worst fucking stereos ever invented, a Lord, no less, will sit in judgment and tell you what’s what. He’ll rubbish a man who spent his entire life trying to better the lives of others while he spent his exploiting, sneering, oppressing. But you know what’s what, don’t you? – money, motherfucker. That’s all the motherfucker cares about. More money, motherfucker. More motherfucking money, motherfuckers.

Fuck you, you fucking fuck. You’re fired.

I try, wherever possible, to avoid Julia Hartley-Brewer. Dubbed the Waitrose Katie Hopkins by Stevie Chick, she – like Andrew Pierce – arouses in me a disgust and loathing that is nothing less than pathological.

I recall watching her on Sky News, discussing Trump and Jerusalem last December. The woman’s grasp of the complexities, her insight into the motivations of the key players and her understanding of the historical processes didn’t even rise to the status of non-existent.

A vacuous posho with the requisite fake expression of concern, she couldn’t disguise the gaping chasm where empathy should live. If a genuinely perceptive thought ever found its way into the limitless abyss between her ears, it’d die of loneliness.

Then there was the time she compared the liberal left’s Milky Bar Kid, Owen Jones, to Islamic State.

And so to her latest noxious emission, on Talk Radio, where she blames parents for child poverty. “There are millions of people living on very low incomes and we haven’t got millions of children going hungry without proper shoes or uniform and the like, does it not suggest this is more a failure of parenting? If you’ve got two families both on the same low income… if one family has managed to send their child to school with a bowl of cereal or piece of toast in them and in clean laundered clothes and the other family isn’t, it can’t be about the money can it?”

Julia, you privileged pontificator, you are so far removed from the grinding misery and shame of poverty-blighted parents you can afford to sneer in their faces from the comfort of your media platform. Millions of working-class women who, overwhelmingly, bear the brunt of the Tories’ vicious class spite, are making themselves ill; physically and mentally, to shield their children from the deprivation thrust upon them. You are unfit to even speak of these heroic, determined and infinitely selfless women. They are amongst the best humankind has to offer. You, by contrast, are devoid of all moral worth.

You are reduced to excusing a vicious anti-working class government. Your contempt, your disdain, your utter disinterest where the victims of your beloved Tories are concerned is nauseating. Thick and pitiless; a combo as dangerous as it is contemptible.

If I were you, I’d tell your mam you’re the piano player in a brothel; it’s an occupation with more dignity, more integrity and certainly more humanity than being Julia Hartley-Brewer.