Would you mind if I digressed immediately? Thank you. I didn’t study history at school – mainly because of mother’s husband’s relentless petitioning for proper subjects like chemistry and physics (aah that’s better), but I wish I had for its dissemination of real-life lessons in advance of having to learn them by experience. One which has exercised me most recently, is when it is that what began as a proposition to undertake a benign, inclusive activity, is taken through the gears, first by gentle coercion, then by compulsion, until it finally settles as an instrument of oppression.
Heaven and North Korea, are but current examples of the sort of dangerous places that demand collective obeisance under the watchful eye of their leader’s widely distributed image, and it all, no doubt, started with good intentions. That is why the timing of last week’s events brought with them a scent of the sinister. Perhaps I am abnormally attuned to this sort of thing having lived in the same house as a little league dictator for most of my life, but I found it very odd that at the same time as announcing a new anthem by which children will be compelled to celebrate the state under the auspices of OBON, or ONOB (O = one/our, B = Britain/Brand, O = One, N = Nation, or something like that. Something a bit like Private Eye’s OBN – order of the brown nose, for sycophants who have gone beyond the call of duty) that (are you still with me after the multiple digression?)) … another MP took up the task of campaigning (sois-disant) independently for us all to be forced to have a portrait of the Queen in our homes.
I have explained the principle of the digressive derivative elsewhere: People who read Virgil and Homer create books like Middlemarch; those who studied Middlemarch, wrote things like The Great Gatsby; people who made a study of The Great Gatsby write novels like Mummy Goes (fucking) Shopping. In this context it works like this:
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Of course, I will suppress my natural iconoclastic tendencies and plead practical constraints of Wemmick, who has not an inch of free wall to devote to artwork, let alone have his inner skin punctured, and I will be excused, like a tattooed, shirtless, middle-aged man riding the Tube, who when challenged about not wearing a mask, will be able to shout at the top of his voice, ‘I will take you outside and kill you,’ although, in my case, space in Wemmick being as it is, I will already be outside, and will have to proceed directly to the kill. It is not in my nature to carry a weapon, but should any agents of the state decide to come to the Honeypot Farm Caravan and Camping Park to examine my portraiture, they’ll discover that I have fashioned a stick like the one Gabriel Oak used to cure abdominal bloating in sheep. Mine is also for medicinal purposes too, the camp shop being out of traditional remedies, but they need not know that.
But iconoclast is what I am, if not a fully fledged seditionist. It began at school one day in RE, when we were asked to tear a rectangle from a page in our exercise books measuring an inch by half an inch, for that is how we spoke then, and onto that piece of paper we had to describe what we were and what we stood for. I was so incensed by the impertinence of the question that I chewed it up and stuck it with the dried snot under the desk. Others wrote things like: Punk; Soul-Boy; Disco Dancer; Electro-pop Tart; Indie-pendent minded-like; House (with integral garage); Jungle Rock; Fridge Magnet; Girl Power-ranger. For many of us, it does not take anything quite so momentous as Brexit, let alone an international football tournament, to object to being described by so much as our nationality, let alone something smaller than that. Names are constraining and diminishing, and only useful in that they serve to identify drones and cannon fodder to the rest of us.
At school it was easy to identify those who were so lacking that any passing fad could draw them in, less easy to notice were the humourless creeps and nonentities who had nothing at all interesting to say. They were the ones who grew into politicians, making an art of their charmless misanthropy. That is why, despite their learning, and practised powers of oratory, they cannot tell a joke, and it is especially why they so often spectacularly misjudge the rest of us, who are made to wince by communal acts of forced joy, whether they are sinister in origin or not.
And it is of course why, only Odious Brain-dead Oafs and Nobs will be queuing up to participate on OBN day.
Due acknowledgements to Dr. Stephen Carver – the Biker Professor, who, amongst many other brilliant original thoughts and ideas was the first to link Tomorrow Belongs to Me with the #OBONDAY song – http://stephenjcarver.com/
Many thanks to Artem Beliaikin, photographer and filmaker, for the image.
Dickie White's Diary 
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