Electile Dysfunction

Or how I lost my wide-on.

I have a confession: Politics used to give me a wide-on. I had a thing for the salt-and-pepper-haired men in dark blue suits; debating the big issues of the day. There was something naughty about the polished black loafers and cigar-smoking, oak-panelled scrum that made me curious.

In my 20s I briefly ‘dated’ someone who is now a backbench MP, and I lost my wide-on really quickly. Curly-haired, husky-voiced, big-breasted women, who ask too many difficult questions, aren’t really the thing at political cocktail parties. I knew I was never going to be a coquettish, softly spoken, bulimic line-toer.

Thank Christ.

Growing up, we were always taught that Western democracies were the best. Something to do with Greeks and Demos. Or something. It felt good, and safe. We repeated phrases passed down to us like ‘Tried and Tested’ and ‘Checks and Balances’. Russia and China were the enemy and America was our best pal, and trusted ally. They’d joined us in the war against the Nazis, and they’d given us Levis, Elvis, Jaws, and Big Pharma. Gee, honey, isn’t liberty and the pursuit of happiness swell.

You’ve probably got things to do, so I’m going to fast forward to the last four years, when America seized every opportunity to take liberty and happiness away from her citizens; using fear, vilification, bribery and coercion. They quickly became the very things they had supposedly despised in their ‘undemocratic’ enemies. I have said on my podcast that my late husband would often tell me that, at its heart, America was certainly not the libertarian, sexy cowboy, Marlboro country it appeared to be. He cited the smoking ban that Clinton had introduced in 1997, (the year Blair came to power in the UK), and the crime of jaywalking as two examples.

Safe and effective.

You may have noticed that I don’t focus very much on 9/11. For some time my view has been that whether it was controlled explosions, planes, (or both), is largely irrelevant. Whoever the paymasters were, it was designed to be a casus belli, and thousands of innocent people were burnt alive or jumped to their deaths from the towers. The gut-twisting truth is that world governments and their agencies have been ‘getting away’ with these sorts of things for decades; way before September 11th 2001. The only difference is that, unlike the revolution, everything was definitely televised.

I hope it’s understood that I don’t minimise its historical significance for a second; particularly as it enabled the subsequent murder of so many in New York, Iraq and elsewhere. But, I know in my bones that my energy is better spent on navigating through the time we’re now living in. As I’ve said previously: if the awake are constantly luxuriating down rabbit holes, where are the strong-limbed hares ready to box the threats above ground?

In case you’re thinking ‘ooh, Abs has become a bit fucking earnest’, I had a long bit in my standup about how boring jazz is - I did all the instruments vocally to Fly me to the Moon. At the end of the routine, I said that one of the reasons people jumped out of the Twin Towers is because they were piping jazz into the buildings. It got laughs and gasps in equal measure.

Jazz and state-sanctioned murder; that’s just how I roll, man.

Segueing back to the present: One of the main reasons I had to escape from the website formerly known as Twitter is because of the wall-to-wall electioneering. In the ‘before times’ it would certainly have irked me, but now I feel pure hostile repulsion watching the very people responsible for overseeing the barbarity of the last four years being fawned over; as if none of it happened. As Graham Hancock has said, the human condition seems to be a propensity for collective amnesia.

As long as I can get SKY and crisps then it doesn’t really matter that the state is killing people.

Because, what’s that got to do with me?

The state’s control of the individual using increasingly dystopian methods under the umbrella of ‘inclusivity and the greater good’ is both terrifying and fascinating to watch. I feel like I’ve got a ringside seat at a really fucked-up circus, and the circus acts include the people in my world who have become just like the bootlickers of every authoritarian regime in history. Do they know this? Perhaps not. Don’t worry though, because they’ll all say they’re voting for Labour or the Greens and it’ll all be OK. Never underestimate the venal, cowardly, short-sighted, group-thinking cunts who walk the grimy halls of show business.

Just as the powerful-politicians-in-dark-blue-suits was my youthful sexual fantasy, so, it turns out, is the idea of democracy. It was a pup, sold to us like a cure-all experimental vaccine. Aside from creating beautiful lily pads of free-thinking, hopeful resistance to jump on across the crazy river, I don’t really have the answer. One thing I know is that I don’t want any politician who stood by or encouraged the ideological tyranny that has been unleashed, anywhere near me, or my life.

As Forrest Gump said: “And that’s all I have to say about that.”

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