Paul Staines, Jeremy Hardy, Brett Easton Ellis, Helder Camara

                                          People

We’ve had nearly a century of universal suffrage now and what happens is capital finds ways to protect itself from – you know – the voters.

(Paul Staines, blogger and columnist in The Establishment)

A Bull (after Giambologna)

 Antonio Susini (1572-1624)

The Henry Barber Trust, The Barber Institute of Fine Arts,
University of Birmingham [CC BY-NC-ND]

*Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about.

(Harry Frankfurt, philosopher.) 

Then it must be universal?

*The comedian, Jeremy Hardy, who died in February 2019 used to joke that he wasn’t all that left wing. It was just that everyone else kept moving to the right. He told Jack Dee.

“I’ve always been an old fashioned leftist-liberal but the country had moved so far to the right that I’ve ended up the most left wing person in the country.”


*Elton John has joined George Clooney in calling for a boycott of nine Brunei owned luxury hotels – including The Dorchester, London and the Beverly Hills hotel in Los Angeles – over the sultanate’s new anti – LGBT laws.

…Whether or not to stay at the Dorchester is not a dilemma many of us face, but the problem off whether to avoid companies with questionable practices is a growing one. Amazon has been shunned by some shoppers over its tax avoidance, while Waterstones is now in the press for not paying staff a living wage.

Spending is not just about the product on offer but whom – and what – we are supporting.

(Frances Ryan, The Guardian, 2019)

               The Moral Maze?

*Brett Easton Ellis, the author of American Psycho, has a new book called White. 

94 Degrees in the Shade,

Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836-1912)

Photo Credit: The Fitzwilliam Museum [CC BY-NC-ND]

…Yes, there’s lots of goading about why he hates snowflaky millennials (“Generation Wuss”, as he has dubbed them.) It attacks what he regards as the narcissism of the young, roundly dismisses the rush to offence and the cult of victimisation, and chases down the self-dramatising of those Liberal Americans who must be passed the smelling salts at the mere mention of Donald Trump. Although he thinks the MeToo movement had real meaning when it began, Ellis dislikes the way it has since extended to include, most recently, such supposed crimes as what some might call the overfriendliness of the former vice-president Joe Biden.

He is largely dismissive of identity politics and despises the way that people can be “cancelled” (erased from public life) over some relatively small but dumb thing they may have said in the past. Like I said, the book is a provocation – and it’s up to you, the reader, to choose to what degree you are prepared to allow yourself to be riled.

“What I’ve noticed is a kind of helplessness in millennials …I had to figure things out for myself. I had some help. I’m not saying that I didn’t. But certainly, there wasn’t the overprotective bubble that so many of my friends raised their children in. Growing up, I didn’t know a single person on medication. None. On my boyfriend’s side of the aisle, though, there wasn’t anyone who wasn’t on something, including him. Growing up, I didn’t know anyone who wanted to be victimised either; we wanted to be affected by stuff. “

… “I don’t care if I sound old any more. I haven’t changed at all. I was the old man at 15.” He then launches into a brief and somewhat practised riff about the emotional support animals that people are now allowed to take on planes, should a medical professional have decreed such a creature beneficial to their mental health: “I can’t go anywhere without my chihuahua! Are you kidding me?”

It’s this mollycoddling, he believes, that accounts, in part for what he regards as the total inability of his boyfriend’s generation to understand not only that others may have a different viewpoint to their own, but that it’s totally acceptable for them to do so.

…Did fame screw him [Ellis] up? “A little bit, but it wasn’t something I was chasing, and it didn’t mean anything to me. The first year – ’85 to ’86 – it was fun. The first year of fame is always fun, then you spend the rest of your life trying not to be humiliated. People are suspicious of you for ever.”

…Is he happy? “I’m… mellow. Are you ever really happy? No. But I’m not miserable. There’s no point. I’m getting older. You realise: why am I so uptight about things. Why do I care? Everything matters a lot less.”

(Rachel Cooke, The Observer, 2019)

*When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.

(Dom Helder Camara, late Brazilian Archbishop)