Empty Gesture

That uniquely commercial synthesis of boorishness and squeamishness which characterises the classical British moral panic is visible to full, voluptuous advantage, with just a naughty touch of daring Situationist provocation, in a stunt by Manchester Art Gallery. An icky Pre-Raphaelite painting by John William Waterhouse, apparently the David Hamilton of the Victorian era, has been removed from display, and postcards reproducing the image will no longer be sold in the shop. The idea is to "prompt conversations about how we display and interpret artworks" by allowing the public to put Post-It notes in the empty space; which is unquestionably what Art should be all about. It is certainly a gesture worthy of a nation of entrepreneurs: there can be few more economical ways of stimulating discussion about paintings than by not displaying them.

Khan's Calamitous Communistic Clean-Air Caliphate

Everything slows down under Labour, and London under the yoke of the Islamo-Stalinoid Sadiq Khan is no exception. It has taken the capital thirty days to breach the legal limit for air pollution: something which, under the exhilarating rah-and-blah of the Imperial Haystack, never once took so much as a week. Strangely enough, given the issues involved, the opinion of the famously green anti-terrorist Zac Goldsmith does not appear to have been solicited. In any case, Khan's perfidious programme of respiratory cleansing has still not reached its fiendish climax, having been stalled by the devastating Britishness of environmental policy at national level. Not only do we have a jabbering homunculus instead of a secretary of state for the environment, but the dead-eyed warden herself is obliged to believe that climate change is a hoax by the Heathen Chinee. To maintain otherwise would be to risk alienating the big orange man-baby and his psychopathic head-tribble, with unfortunate results for the post-Brexit economy.

We Don't Need Your Kind Around Here

Britain's plucky little crusade against health tourists has notched up a new and glorious victory thanks to the Ministry for Wog Control, which has refused an NHS doctor permission to bring her three-year-old child into the country. Despite the millions of hard-working British families queueing up to work their way out of poverty by becoming junior doctors, Amany Abdelmeguid took advantage of an NHS recruitment drive and left her daughter in Egypt. Abdelmeguid's in-laws, who are looking after the girl, have been careless enough to let their health decline, and her husband is working near the Saudi-Yemeni border, which he claims is no place for a child despite the sterling efforts of Britain's weapons salesmen and the Ministry for Wog-Bombing. Abdelmeguid applied for the child's visa, was turned down, appealed, was turned down again, was invited by email to apply again on the grounds of exceptional circumstances, applied again and was turned down again on the same grounds as before. It would be difficult to imagine a clearer demonstration, either of Her Majesty's Government's determination to protect our newly global Britain from dusky foreign females, or of the precise degree of esteem in which Her Majesty's Government holds NHS doctors.

Bad Theology

Text for today: John 8 iii-xi

This incident is one of the most famous in Jesus' ministry; and not without reason, as it constitutes a rare example of a moral precept laid down by the Saviour which the majority of His followers have obeyed to the letter.

The Pharisees attempt to trap Jesus by bringing before Him a woman caught in the act of adultery, and asking Him whether she should be stoned to death in accordance with the law of Moses. Jesus at first pretends not to hear them and sits writing in the dust with his finger; regrettably, whether by human error or divine censorship, the substance of what He wrote has not come down to us. After repeated questioning, Jesus at last states that whoever is without sin should throw the first stone. By order of age and hence, presumably, experience and wisdom, the Pharisees leave, and Jesus tells the woman that He will not condemn her either.

According to Jesus, sadistic capital punishment is justifiable when carried out by those who consider themselves to be without sin. Fortunately for enthusiasts of divine chastisement, generations of the Saviour's followers have had more mercy from their consciences than either the vengeful Jesus or the legalistic Pharisees had from theirs. By contrast, once reminded of their own imperfections, the Pharisees show mercy to the woman despite the lack of any stipulation in the law of Moses as to the sinlessness or otherwise of earthly judges and executioners. As one who excoriated hypocrites almost as much as He did unbelievers, Jesus could hardly ignore His own blatant sins of wrath, pride and false prophecy, and therefore could do no other than follow the example of His honest and courageous enemies.

Mature Debate

Among the many complex managerial issues raised by the Holocaust, one of the most challenging is, of course, how to get across the all-important distinction between the despicable racist authoritarianism of the Nazis and the desirable racist authoritarianism of the merely strong, stable and patriotic. In less advanced societies, the means of keeping the record straight must necessarily be a little clumsy; hence the Polish government is seeking to make any use of the phrase Polish death camps a criminal offence, thereby implicitly admitting the Nazi claim that Upper Silesia with its pleasant town of Oświęcim is really part of Greater Germany. In highly developed democracies such as our own, this sort of conundrum is easily solved, because the rules of civilised discourse are more thoroughly internalised. What civilised English people have against the Nazis is that they were foreign, and what they have against the Holocaust is that its most mentionable victims were non-Communistic white Europeans: the British Empire's systematic use of slave labour, mass starvation and concentration camps elicited barely a squeak of protest when used for the moral improvement of Asians and Africans (although it did earn Hitler's enduring respect) and is even now simply ignored or shrugged off among the more urbane types of patriot.

In the Beginning

The discovery of a fossilised jawbone belonging to the world's oldest known Zionist will undoubtedly prompt much moral rejoicing among all true friends and allies of the Righteous State. Not only does the fossil's age prove that deeds to the Holy Land were granted by the reputable estate agent Yahweh, Inc. some two hundred thousand years ago, but the likely sins of its contemporaries tend to vindicate the Righteous State in more contemporary matters. According to scientists, the fossil's presence suggests that Homo sapiens ipsedixit was mingling and mating with other human species in the Middle East, anticipating the sins of Solomon over a period of several millennia. As a result, God ensured that they left no direct descendants behind, thereby providing both moral and genetic justification for the Righteous State's present alt-British attitude to African migrants.

Trumpnado

Despite the dead-eyed warden's attempts to smooth the ruffled head-tribble with a quick knee-trembler in Davos and a rescheduled rah-rah "later this year", it seems there are still a few malcontents in the world who remain obstinately unreceptive to the Trumpster's urbane charisma. Allegations by Stephanie Clifford that the Trumpster is terrified of sharks along with everything else have led to a sudden increase in donations to charities for selachimorphic elasmobranches of the cartilaginous persuasion. The Trumpster tweeted his dislike some years ago, proclaiming that sharks were "last on my list - other than perhaps the losers and haters of the world!" It is doubtful that he was referring to me personally, rather than to the Kenyan Muslim or that woman with the emails; but should you wish to contribute to the wellbeing of a species which may be even more last on the Trumpster's list than sharks, my backlist is as available as ever.

Me at Poetry24:
Comfort Zone

Bergoglio's Beam

To what shall one compare this generation, in which even Jesuitical casuistry is not what it once was? The chief salesman for one of the world's most venerable fake-news outlets has denounced fake news, comparing it to the "false and alluring arguments" of the serpent in Eden; from which it is sadly apparent that the Pope, like so many true believers, has an embarrassing tendency to skim his Bible. In tempting Eve, the serpent makes two statements: that eating the forbidden fruit will not cause Eve to die, and that it will give her the divine attribute of knowing good and evil. Both statements are perfectly true; the liar in the story is God, who told Adam that he would die on the very day he ate the fruit. Having eaten the fruit and survived the tyrant's hissy-fit, Adam lived some nine hundred years; and being omniscient, God must have known when He warned Adam that His warning was false. Given the degrees of responsibility involved, the slanders of a pack of unscrupulous journalists and social-media mobsters are by comparison a mere mote in society's eye.

Prevention is Better Than Deportation

Patients stuck on waiting lists and corridor trolleys will doubtless be comforted to learn that the Ministry for Wog Control is doing all it can to protect them from the hideous possibility of being treated by an immigrant doctor who is earning a moderate salary. The Government has been greatly concerned to create a properly hostile environment for wogs who earn less than £55,000 a year, especially now that so much progress has been made in driving away the Euro-wogs who earn rather less. In a typically underhanded bit of politically-correct posturing, the NHS has gone so far as to recruit actual darkies from the Caribbean, India and Pakistan. Fortunately for the cultural health of the nation, the salaries of these swarming hordes are somewhat below the Ministry's threshold, and they are being forced to leave their positions vacant for the millions of underemployed white Britons who are panting and straining to relieve the winter crisis.

Who Needs Green When it's Red, White and Blue?

Pessimists, nay-sayers and citizens of nowhere are making predictable grumbling noises over the prospects for environmental progress once the Recrudescent Imperium's independence from the ghastly Euro-wogs is finally finalised. Reassurances from the dead-eyed warden, to say nothing of endless chirrups of rah-rah from the jabbering homunculus Michael Gove, have not been enough to silence those malcontents who seem to think that a department's ability to take on vast amounts of complicated new work may possibly be compromised by its budget and staff being repeatedly cut to ribbons. The fact that the department in question is run by the very same Michael Gove somehow provides only limited reassurance. Indeed, so far has the moral rot spread that one of the malcontents is a Conservative MEP, who presumably gets out a bit more than her colleagues in the Imperial Brexit-bunker at Westminster, and has thus had the party whip withdrawn for not being sufficiently on board the David Davis Tin-Pot Express to the sunlit uplands.