Exercising Mr Invective [Explicit]

It’s a warm lazy Saturday so I thought I’d give my brain a bit of a workout and paddle it around that husk of nothingness floating in a sea of irrelevance that is Nigel Farage.

I drew a cartoon yesterday in a fit of… well, “pique” isn’t the right word. It makes it sound too small and hesitant. This was a great bouldering outburst of anger aimed towards a man so filled with self-importance that he is only happy when pleasuring himself over the plight of the most vulnerable or levelling grief towards the police during a national emergency. What follows is my version of a brisk run around the park. Nothing exercises the writing muscles like a quality rant about a bully, but I do use some fruity language including a few f-bombs. You have been warned.

So, to begin, I want you to ignore Brexit. I’m not talking about Brexit. I’m not even going to talk about patriotism or English nationalism or anything else this dope might claim for a ruling thought. I just want to talk about the man that is Nigel Paul Farage.

But first I should make clear that my loathing isn’t ad hominem. Nor is it post hoc, finding some reason to confirm an earlier bias. I don’t simply dislike him because of his politics – though, yes, that whole sack of pre-strangulated kittens offends me in so many ways. My loathing goes much further than that. This is about a deeper moral essence. I can’t abide him because he is constructed from material harvested from the wrong half of the universe. He is pure anti-matter or, I as like to think of it, shouldn’t fucking matter…

This man is 56 years old, younger than Brad Pitt, yet has prejudices that are so antiquated they creak like the plot to a Robert De Niro / Meryl Streep rom-com, and that is to insult both De Niro and Streep, both of whom are still more relevant than this wrapped Macintosh. And what is it with the cravats he wears? Who the hell wears a cravat in the twenty first century? Is he even aware that his narrow head, absent chin, and playdough neck protruding from a wrapped cravat and purple (purple!) sweater make him look so priapic that it’s a miracle Google’s search algorithms don’t label him as “obscene throbbing” emanating from Russia?

Then there are his ar-gyle-goyle golfing sweaters, shambolic Farmer Giles corduroys, and I could write a thesis around his shoes, including those pig-stitched moccasins that he clearly bought from a catalogue aimed at the geriatric shopper. I wouldn’t be surprised if they didn’t arrive with a free gift that scrapes the mildew from around his taps. And, no, that isn’t a euphemism but perhaps it is… for some ancient yellowing medical implement that allows him to clean the grime from the stretched corpse of his hangman plums, a mere 56 years old on the cock but already down around his knees.

I might not be a fashion god but at least I accept the existence of the twentieth century. This is a man lacking any aesthetic sense beyond what it takes to polish his brass blazer buttons every morning; a face stuck with the startled grimace you only earn after a lifetime of inspecting your Rotary Club cufflinks for errant specks of the poor. Absolutely self-absorbed with his own significance, he is incapable of realising how utterly banal he is. Even his stationary is a crime against paper. What kind of person has “The office of Nigel Farage” at the head of every letter he sends? And, yes, I know the answer to that question is “Nigel Farage” but I’m only just getting warmed up…

The man would be a parody of a simpleton if this simpleton hadn’t burrowed his way into our politics like some brain parasite. A significant addition, yes. Can’t be ignored, certainly. But still a fucking brain parasite.

Every golf club has their idiot, but did somebody really need to take the very worst bits from every nineteenth hole across the land and staple them together inside a Crombie covert overcoat? This is “Being There” with Peter Sellers but without Peter Sellers.

And all of that is before he even opens his mouth.

I realise the irony of a worthless nobody venting meaningless opinion to an indifferent world but there’s a difference between sticking it in a blog post and launching a political career off the back of random grievances that have passed within ten feet of your cerebellum. Every bloody sentence he utters begins with an exasperated “Now look here” as though he’s going to repeat himself for the thousandth time – which, of course, he is – and he’s ever so tired of us dim folk who don’t realise that only he speaks sense.

And he never shuts up.

“Let’s go and search for immigrants arriving in Dover…”

“Ooh, Talk Radio will be interested in my opinions about Imperial tonnage…”

“Hello, BBC? I’ve got some interesting facts about veal. You need to get me on air immediately…”

He blows more holes in the atmosphere than the flatulence produced by the entire audience he lectures during his tedious 6pm shows.

“John in Uxbridge. Hello John. Spotted any strangers lurking in your neighbourhood?”

“Next it’s Sally from Coddington. Hello. You’re speaking to… Nigel Farage!”

His lung capacity exceeds that of your normal opinionated gobshite thanks to the remarkable engineering of his upper airways which constantly circulate oxygen thanks to the enormous outward flanges of his nasal Chunnel. Even when he’s at rest he looks like his gasping for air because there is never quite enough nitrous to feed his need for publicity. His entire life is spent in an elevated state of sleep apnoea and when he snores it’s in the form of “When will this government realise that people are sick and tired of being talked down to by a Westminster elite… blah blah blah…”

And I’ve already wasted 960 words of the 1000 word limit I set myself and I still haven’t scratched more than an inch into my loathing. There are such thick seams waiting to be mined, vast dead oceans of the stuff…

I despise the way he claims that everything is “simple” in the same way he clearly thinks that we should give him unlimited power to restore everything back to how they were on 3rd April 1963. He is the genetic equivalent to those poor buggers who are incapable of aging except with Farage his physical body ages rapidly but mentally he’s pre-Beatles and the sexual revolution has still has not happened.

Yet even as his relevance diminishes, he never does us the courtesy of buggering off because there are always those who would still call him a “patriot”. He is a siren to those humbled by life. They are the countless of Essex with unsatisfied dreams, marginalised by managerial bullshit, and careers that have hammered them into the shape of corporate shills. He is the patron saint of the comfortably yobbed, the low brow and the no brow, and for grey-haired twats who dream of driving young women (who they still call “skirt” or “totty”) in ugly sports cars with names like Bulldog, Spitfire, and Halitosis. He is the Cicero for the blameless, a martyr from anybody who would disconnect their ego from their humanity, a role model for every reactionary Englishman who believes that yesterday was better than tomorrow. He is a shadow of what England never was and a terrifying vision of what it would become if we would only give him half a chance.

@DavidWaywell

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Why Dunciad.com?

It’s a cool domain name and it was available. Yes, I know. Available. Crazy, isn’t it?

Really?

Yes. It also helps that it’s also my favourite satire written by Alexander Pope, one of the most metrically pure English poets who also knew his way around a crude insult or two. If you’ve not read it, you should give it a try.

So this is satire, right?

Can’t deny it. There will be some. But it’s also an experiment in writing and drawing, giving work away for free in order to see how many people are willing to support a writer doing his thing. It’s the weird stuff that I wouldn’t get published elsewhere in this word of diminishing demands and cookie-cutter tastes.