37. Egomaniac

... being a few further thoughts on Tupac Shakur, and a consideration of politics in a post-truth society.

We are in the middle of an election campaign in the UK and the leaders of the two main parties are openly calling each other liars. Maybe I wasn’t paying enough attention in the past, but I can’t recall the word ‘liar” being employed so feely. Politicians used to dismiss each other as incompetent, as presiding over a shambles, as not being up to the job, as being dangerous and as being ideologically unsound. I don’t recall the suggestion that an opponent was a downright liar being a thing at all. 

Personally, I always believed that people in government never really lied, I understood that they might be manipulative, or emphasise the most positive sides of their arguments and downplay the negative, but not lie. Maybe I am naïve. But surely we didn’t have politicians like this before Donald Trump became the President of America, and Boris Johnson became the Prime Minister in the UK?

Maybe I’m wrong. I suppose that in America, Nixon lied to cover up the fact that he was involved in a plot to wire-tap the headquarters of his opposition. He was only saved from jail because his successor granted him a presidential pardon (and the prospect of a presidential pardon’s very much with us again today) . But then surely Nixon was an aberration, whose lies were to cover up his criminal activity rather than about policy. 

I’m not sure that we had a downright liar in charge of the UK before Johnson. I always saw Margaret Thatcher as  a brutal, unfeeling, despotic sort of a leader, but I imagined that she was ideologically unsound rather than someone who deliberately told untruths.¹

Politicians make me angry, at least the ones that I really don’t agree with do. I have written a handful of political songs and poems, but I have never felt that they have been particularly good ones. I tend to fall into the trap of being too preachy, too obvious, or too flippant, I feel that I should stay away from that genre and stick with my usual stuff about sex, death and foul language, laced with childhood memories and stuff about my dad. I am on much safer ground there.

However, after looking at my poem about Tupac Shakur last week, I recalled a piece that I had written during lockdown, on the subject of Boris Johnson.

I had offered to run an online session for the read to write group, to help keep things running when we were all stuck at home. I originally thought that I might prepare something on Larkin or Betjeman or AE Houseman, but then I rebelled, and decided that there were too many poetry workshops in the world dealing with those (admittedly fine) poets, and perhaps I ought to shake things up a bit by doing one about Tupac. I still have my notes, appended with the lyrics of Changes, the piece which probably cemented him in my mind as a fine protest poet and a Byronic figure.

Changes is an angry piece of writing, centred on Tupac’s personal story. It draws on the experiences of people like him in America, who feel that the mainstream of society don’t care about them, mainly because they are black and come from deprived backgrounds. 

And still I see no changes, can't a brother get a little peace?
It's war on the streets and a war in the Middle East
Instead of war on poverty
They got a war on drugs so the police can bother me
And I ain't never did a crime I ain't have to do
But now I'm back with the facts giving it back to you

He suggests that these people are under-represented by government and that they are both manipulated and controlled. He suggests that people like him are set one against another and distracted from seeing the bigger picture. He comments on all of this in his angry swaggering style. He paints the bigger picture, but doesn’t necessarily offer any solutions.

At the Read to Write group, after a reading and some discussion of a poet and their poetry, it is traditional for members to have a go at creating something of their own. In order to prepare for this, we explored the relevance that Tupac’s work might have to a to largely comfortably off group of white poets.

We had questions about how much our government really represents us and if our ideas really counted when big decisions are made. We thought about how people in this country are often manipulated into voting in a particular way. Would it be possible to express our feelings about this in Tupac style perhaps, like him, using internal rhymes and trying to look at the bigger picture?

At the time, I was angry about the Brexit referendum and its aftermath, throughout which Boris Johnson had appealed to people’s emotions, suggesting that Britain could return to a glorious golden age in which everyone was happy and free. It could be argued that he was preying not only on our emotions, but also on a particular trait of the English, a distrust of intelligence and reason. As another prominent Brexiteer said in the run up to the referendum “I think the people of this country have had enough of experts²” This trait was noted as early as 1919 by an American academic, John Erskine

“The disposition to consider Intelligence a peril is an old Anglo Saxon inheritance. Our ancestors have celebrated this disposition in verse and prose. Splendid as our literature is, it has not voiced all the aspirations of humanity, nor could it be expected to voice an aspiration that has not characteristically belonged to the English race. The praise of intelligence is not one of its characteristic glories.”³ 

I was also uncomfortable with the way we were being led through the pandemic. Johnson was our pandemic Prime Minister, and had seemed very slow in appreciating the scale of the problem we faced, and slow to take the advice of scientists, again, using emotional appeal to “British pluck and resourcefulness” before a rational approach to the problem.

Long afterwards Johnson was removed from office because of his behaviour during the pandemic (the part where he threw illegal parties at 10 Downing Street) and his subsequent lies about it. A lot of questions remain about other behaviours, including preferential treatment given to friends and donors when lucrative contracts for medical equipment were being handed out at the height of the crisis. Most (but not all) people now accept that he was unfit for office, and should never have progressed so far in politics. 

Even before he was elected it was reasonably well known that Johnson could be untruthful when it suited him to be so. He had been sacked from positions both inside and outside of politics for that very reason but, amazingly enough, this was seen by many as a part of his charm. He was one of us, a bit of a lad, a rascal who got things done and was just what the country needed.

Over in America, similar sorts of excuses were being made for Donald Trump. Yes he was a foul mouthed abuser of women, who often disregarded the difference between truth and falsehood but many saw this as refreshing. He was hailed by many as a regular guy who would cut through the nonsense and could get things done. He too has now been exposed in court as a liar, but it is still possible that he will succeed in getting a second period in charge of his country (and use that presidential pardon loophole to exonerate himself).

It is said that we now live in a post-truth society.  Johnson and Trump are seen as perhaps the biggest examples of what is possible in a situation where truth does not matter so much as a larger than life character who can appeal to the emotions rather than the intellect. It is claimed that many of us have lost the ability to concentrate on detailed information, due to the instant gratification offered by social media. We are no longer interested in reasoned arguments but in quick soundbites, the truth of which is much less important than their memorability. We English are living up to our distrust of experts. 

The Brexit campaign was fuelled by the idea that “we want our country back” that we would save vast amounts of money that would fund the NHS, and even that we would be able to put bendy cucumbers and bigger bunches of bananas in our shops once we were freed of the shackles of European red tape (both of these were nonsense ideas designed by Johnson to stir up anti European feelings, as was the claim that the Italians wanted to use European law decrease the minimum width of condoms on sale in the community. 

On the other side of the Atlantic “Make America Great Again” still resonates as something that fires people up, although there is little indication of what it means. Anyone stating facts in contradiction to Tump was accused of peddling “Fake News” and, like Johnson, the force of his larger than life personality was seen as sufficient to compensate for any real substance to his policies and ideas. 

This poem is around four years old - Back then perhaps we were all a bit more naïve than we are today. But many of us were concerned about Johnson and didn’t like the cult that seemed to grow around him, and the presentational style that seemed to have made his path to success easier. We didn’t know then what we know now, back in those early lockdown days. Yet even now the grim spectre of Nigel Farage is still here to prey upon those of us who prefer manipulative appeals to the emotions to truth and reasoned argument.

Anyway, here is a poem about Boris Johnson, written by a white middle class English poet. (It was Tupac who made me do it).

Egomaniac

You Egomaniac
You made us want our country back 
Even though it had never been taken
You snake in the grass, 
You godforsaken
Privileged prince of prevarication
Caring only for the cash you rake in
Riding the gravy train for personal gain
You told nothing but lies in every campaign

Regarding us all as vacuous suckers
Gullible mugs and ignorant fuckers
To be milked like cows, To be fleeced like sheep,
Then left to rot on the discard heap
Chewed up and spat at 
By you and your fat cat 
Aristocrat friends
You twat

Laughing all the way to the bank
While those you deceived stand grim at food banks
Wondering why their wealth has decreased
Well, you gave us our country back at least
A country built on boasting and lying
A country we can all be proud to die in.

1. Perhaps I am really naïve. If you believe that any of my views on the history of lying in politics are wrong, please feel free to engage with me in the comments or by email, educate me, change my mind as they say, so that I can be more precise in future versions of this post and ones like it.

2. Michael Gove - who thankfully decided not to stand at the next election.

3. “The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent” - John Erskine 1919. It is worth reading, as it is just a short essay which is available free in Google books, and he develops the theme of the suspicion of intelligent characters prevalent in English literature.