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| Actor/artist Jim Carrey's Trump-trolling works |
Being in the resistance is an art. All those innocent British and French young people who were trained to work under Nazi noses, blowing up bridges, funneling troop movement information to the Allies--they were heroes, and they got a paycheck. Sometimes they got death, either heroically in action or horribly at the hands of the SS.
But it was an art, and they had to be good at it to get the reward; life.
Other forms of resistance to evil have been around both before and after WWII. Indeed, at this moment, the US and the UK--two nations that fought side by side against the Nazis, and won--are engaged in a very similar resistance operation, although the field of engagement is far different.
Back then, it was the fields of France, mainly.
Now, it is cyberspace and the few print media left (which are mainly fascist) and the big pots of money to buy advertising to promote falsehoods; i.e., 350 million quid a week for the National Health Service (NHS) in the UK or Make America Great Again (MAGA) by putting little brown children in cages in the US.
So, reluctantly, I have become an active member of the resistance. I live in the UK now, having found the US too vicious for me a dozen years ago and having also moved to the UK as soon after that as I could; I am mostly concerned with derailing the fascist-inspired, Putin-supported, self-harming so-called Brexit.
Brexit, shorthand for Britain exiting from EU membership, ought to be replaced by a more accurate term: Torapuk, short for Tories Raping the UK--for their own further enrichment, of course. (Pronounced Tor-ah-puke.)
They've been doing it since they were elected and had to share the spotlight with second-place LibDems. Cunning and evil, they managed to blame their depredations of the population on the LibDems, convincing the voters that the LibDems are somehow to blame for the continuing austerity in the UK.
Austerity? In what was the fifth richest world nation? Stupid, huh? Stupid it was for us to allow them to get away with it. What they meant was they had to outsource government functions (health care, public utilities, work-readiness assessments, various hospital functions) so they could reap dividends from the companies contracted to replace the government departments and in which they had a financial interest. Not so unlike Donald Trump selling off America for his own empty--recall, he has NEVER had a successful business until now, American Trumpism Inc.--pockets.
Brexit is beautiful in that regard. The Tories--with their flunkies the Brexiters and DUP, Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland, which still thinks this is 1840 or so and they are the true rulers of Ireland--convinced a great many UK voters that the European Union (EU) was responsible for their descending incomes, difficulties with health care, inadequate schooling...despite the fact that, in truly impoverished places like Cornwall, only EU grants had kept the wolf from the door for decades.
At one point, some witless fool had scribbled Brexit memes all over a sign giving the enormous amount of funding for the industrial estate it stood in front of, an industrial estate that provides jobs that Cornwall would not otherwise have had. And believe me, a county that is torn between second-homers using services and not paying taxes for them (second homes are exempt from most taxation) and a dying fishing industry (what have you done for it, Sheryll Murray, the fisherman's false friend?) needs all the help it can get.
And yet, it voted to leave the EU, to regain sovereignty (huh? did the Queen retire without heirs? I didn't know....) and so they wouldn't have to spend a few cents per person on EU dues in return for many times that amount in infrastructure investment in Cornwall by the EU. For god's sake, people, your sickening, stodgy if historic pasty--a food made to carry down into the tin mines of yore--would not have achieved world heritage status without the EU. Does that make a difference? Of course it does; visitors actually pay for the tasteless, greasy, doughy things because of that, increasing Cornish income by a bit.
So, Torapuke is ridiculous, and yet, it lives on and on, like the last mosquito of summer, apparently immune to sprays and swatters and your imprecations for the fucking insect to get the hell out of your house and leave you in peace.
And so, I have become a member of the Resistance. I don't think I'll get shot, despite my using Twitter to tell fascist oligarch wanker Jacob Rees-Mogg how despicable he is several times a week, or positing that Tyrant Tess, the Perfidious Prime Minister has dementia.
I'm not quite sure how to use visual art for protest, despite being, by now, an old hand at verbal protest. I also make donations to protest organizations. But art...
Jim Carrey, whom I don't like as an actor but do like as an artist, has found a way. Maybe I'll emulate him. Maybe my planned series of animals in hats will actually turn out to be politicians as the animals they resemble. Many cartoonists have portrayed May as a rather weedy and sickly vulture, and that's right on target. But few have done Boris Johnson (pig? easy) or Michael Gove (help me out here; he's too wimpy for any sort of animal....)
Well, that's the gist of it. I have to turn my drawing as well as my writing to this project. Not what I had in mind for my last couple of decades on earth. Sigh. But then, we don't always choose our path; sometimes, it chooses us.
Copyright 2019, Laura Harrison McBride
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