Thursday 4 June 2009

Owned

I hate the term 'owned' because I'm too old to appreciate it and because I'm a snob. It's just too bloody YouTube for a cricket and rugger man like me. But there's simply no pithier term in current linguistic circulation to describe the total annihilation of Gordon-sodding-Brown and his royally pathetic journey to political Coventry by Matthew Norman in today's Independent.

Click through and enjoy it, I do implore you. But if you can't be arsed, here's some top tasters.

On Blears' damp failure to oust Brown:
Rats are smart and terrifying little vermin, however, while the only fear you'd feel on finding yourself in Room 101 separated by a flimsy wire mesh from Hazel Blears' gob is that she'd use it not to gore or gnaw, but to bore you to death with her cretinous "sunny optimism". The self-righteousness in yesterday's crude assassination attempt (technically, letter of resignation) suggested an excommunication order issued against his useless, dithery bishop by a cleric about to be unfrocked for choirboy interference.
On the causal connection between Brown's woes and Cherie Blair's shopping habits:
Onto even the most joyous of vistas the odd drop of sadness must fall, the one here being that no one will be loving Gordon's torment more than Cherie Blair – the half woman-half supermarket trolley mythological hybrid whose fill-your-boots avarice did so much to create the culture of greed that has all but destroyed him. The lone shard of poignancy flying forth from his shattered administration, meanwhile, is that the PM is so uniquely ill-suited to take what comfort the vaguely normal would extract by way of gallows humour.
On why Gordon is no tragic hero:
The days when pretentious gits like me invoked tragedy in a Gordonian context have long since passed. Tragic heroism relies upon a certain largeness of spirit, or at the very least a sudden moment of self-knowledge so acute that it induces intolerable psychic anguish. Ajax slaughtered his sheep when made aware of his fatal flaw, Oedipus put out his eyes when faced with his. Despite his ocular head start in that direction, Gordon is as nugatory a figure as Nero, fiddling with ritualistic lines at yesterday's PMQs while his government self-immolates.
On why Brown deserves his inescapable fate:
It's the smallness of the man, the lack of grandeur in his dreams, the pathetic dressing-up of rank self-interest in the translucent cloak of dutifulness, that makes guilt-free schaudenfraude less a temptation than a moral obligation. For this has become a morality play – specifically, the first morality high farce in politico-theatrical history - about a system so deranged in its complacency that it gifts such power to one whose personal ambition is surpassed only by his lack of talent, without any mechanism to remove him once that power has drained away.
There's quite a bit more of this rich ore seam of an article even though it might seem to some that my barefaced, copyright-busting comprehensive lifting dressed-up as quotation suggests otherwise. Well, you know, there's a little bit more.

But in my defence I've done this not just because I'm utterly lazy and devoid of original thought, but because in its own way, it's one of the best, most entertaining and most damning pieces on Brown's total unsuitability for the power and office he grabbed I've ever read.

I guess the 21st Century junk-thought but totally apt term would be: "epic pwnage". Or something. Today's elections will reveal just how deeply that reality has seeped into the popular imagination. "Totally", I would hazard.

3 comments:

  1. I prefer that other common internet parlance of our time. One brutal word...FAIL. It should be stamped on his head as he is slung onto the street outside 10 Downing Street.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Nice to meet you, too, Hsinchu. I look forward to checking-out your blog :)

    ReplyDelete

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