Taking the Mickey
I’ve lived so long away from the country of my birth, the United States, that I’m unsure whether or not the Briticism “Taking the Mickey” has made it over there yet. I learned that expression when I first came to England 20 years ago. I thought it meant to poke fun at or pull the leg of someone. In time I realised it’s subtler than that. I eventually realised there is no American English equivalent, or equivalent in any language.
Taking the Mickey (or “taking the Mick” or “taking the piss”) can mean to poke fun, certainly, but it also can mean to take advantage of someone, often in a contemptuous and overtly impolite way. For example, someone who is napping when they’re supposed to be working is said to be taking the Mickey.
Here’s an example from real life. When you want to stage a world conference on climate change and you invite the world’s leaders to attend, but one year you assign the role of master of ceremonies to an Arab sheikh who is an oil executive, and the following year you assign the honour to an Azerbaijani oil oligarch, then I think it’s safe to say you’re taking the Mickey. Yeah, you’re taking the Mick all right. You’re taking the bloody piss.
And that’s exactly what’s happened. COP29, the next round of UN talks intended to “tackle the climate crisis,” will be led by yet another veteran of the oil and gas industry. Mukhtar Babayev is Azerbaijan’s ecology and natural resources minister. He also has been appointed the president-in-waiting for the COP29 coming up in November of 2024.
Before he entered politics, Babayev spent 26 years working for SOCAR, the State Oil Company for the Azerbaijan Republic. He’s sort of the Rex Tillerson of COP29. Remember Rex? He was the wholly unqualified idiot appointed by Donald Trump as the 45th president’s first Secretary of State. Before that Tillerson was the CEO of Exxon Mobil. Tillerson was a great friend of Vladimir Putin. Yeah, Trump was taking the Mickey all right.
Lobbyists are yet another example of Mickey taking. The idea that we need a fleet of people flooding the clubs and restaurants of Washington, representing the fossil fuel industry or the NRA, always ready to buy a member of the House or Senate a meal, is yet another absurd example of a Mickeyectomy. To top off the piss-taking, political lobbyists have also been coming in private planes to COP meetings for the last half dozen or so years.
If I were cynical I’d think something corrupt is going on. Well, I AM cynical and something objectively corrupt is going on. The annual COP programs have been hijacked right out in the open by the special interest groups so they can subtly control the climate science narrative.
It’s all a clear and unobstructed instance of Mickey taking, and we and our descendants will have to pay for it. The greed and corruption of these people is simply beyond belief.
Well, we don’t have to stand for it. We can rise up with a single voice and roar like a lion. But first we must train ourselves to become climate warriors. We must recognise that, shameful though it may be, nobody is going to do it for us. Our governments and corporations will make token adjustments, but the only thing that’s going to work is a massive consensus of voting and in-the-streets activism by people like us. We must make climate change our number one priority.
That may sound like an extreme overreaction to some of you. I can assure you it is not. Ten or fifteen years from now, when your house is on fire or underwater, when it’s so hot you wonder how you or your family will survive, it will seem by comparison a small thing, an obvious thing.
It’s becoming increasingly clear to me that world governments have been largely greenwashing the climate crisis. They talk a good talk and make pretty speeches but when it comes right down to it they’re just taking the Mickey.
While they take the Mickey, we the people must do something. We must do the work. If we don’t, no one else will. While they’re taking the piss it’s up to us to take control. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.