STUPID PEOPLE
On the eve of the 2016 election my brother John said in an email to me, “If Trump loses tomorrow, the collective IQ of the US will exceed the collective IQ of the UK for the first time in living memory.” Alas he was wrong. But he only had to wait three years for the collective IQs of the two nations to become equivalent. When Boris Johnson “won” by a landslide Thursday, Britain demonstrated what it always demonstrates, that for all qualities good and bad Britain is a mere X years behind the United States, where X in this instance equals 3.
I put the word “won” in quotes above because no one exactly voted for Boris Johnson per se unless they lived in Uxbridge and South Ruislip, which is his constituency. Boris is prime minister – although emphatically not my prime minister – by dint of his being the leader of the Conservative Party and because that party has a majority in Parliament. Thus prime ministers are not elected, at least not the way presidents are.
So we in Britain awoke to a Friday the thirteenth much the way three years ago you in America awoke to a 9/11 (keeping in mind that 9/11 in Europe means 9 November) – in a kind of horrified shock. We awoke to the idea that there are a lot more bad and stupid people in the country than we thought, that they would fall for the lie that the rich and privileged want what’s best for them, that they would sell their souls for the sake of a bigoted agenda. Stupid people. That Boris Johnson is rotund, blonde and a shamelessly pathological liar is a nice touch. It makes Britain look like America in a sad, Star Trek sort of way, like nightmare parallel universes.
It goes without saying that Boris Johnson has big plans for this country and he is going to do his utmost to conceal them so we don’t find out what they are until it’s much too late. But I have a pretty good idea anyway. For one thing, Boris desperately wants to privatize Britain’s National Health Service so he can collectively make himself and his cronies into history’s first trillionaires. It must really piss them off to think about all that free medication being distributed to Britain’s sick and needy for free when they could have been jolly well charging them for it straight through the nose all those wasted years. Naturally Boris is going to need Donald Trump’s help with all this.
America is the only nation on earth where people go bankrupt and lose their homes and sometimes wind up on the streets because they can’t pay their medical bills. And while that is a tragedy, one can’t help but think about all that bankruptcy money. That is one huge pile of cash. Too bad a lot of people are going to have to get sick and die in order to collect it but, hey, business is business.
First, of course, Boris has to get Britain out of Europe, another thing Donald Trump is very much in favor of, in order to make damn sure that Britain is too frail to resist Russia. The united power of Europe was simply too much for poor old Vladimir Putin. Breaking up the European Union into smaller and more manageable chunks will make it easier to chew and swallow. Putin isn’t a young man any more, after all.
Since the morons who Boris tricked into voting Conservative are going to want something in exchange for all this screwing of the electorate that Boris and his fat cat cronies have up their sleeves, Boris is giving them something straight out of Donald Trump’s playbook. By touting Britain’s isolation from Europe Boris can blame everything bad on the real culprits, those awful rapists and murderers and drug dealers from Eastern Europe coming here illegally to steal our jobs so they can live on the dole. I mean, it worked for Donald Trump, right?
Yes, the fascist takeover of the world is moving ahead right on schedule. While I won’t sleep as easy as the idiots who were too stupid to understand the con artists who tricked them, at least I get to sleep with a clear conscience and the unshakable resolve to fight them every inch of the way.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.