Professional Scapegoats
WE are expected to believe that whenever the popularity of a certain politician begins to wane, he or she has to endure moments of terrible suffering. Forced to fulfil their endless litany of dreary engagements amid a frothing tsunami of inconvenient questioning and paparazzi jostling, these sour-faced frauds are designed to epitomise the very worst in personal and public crises.
Some of the real 'fall guys' of the last decade, at least in the British Isles, have included Theresa May, Ed Milliband, Gordon Brown and Rishi Sunak, their limp personalities lampooned and scapegoated by the mass media in an attempt to conceal something of a far more serious and insidious nature. In reality, politicians are just puppets for the ruling class and whenever the governmental corpse-paint is applied in times of woe (Theresa May provides her own) the inevitable bell begins to toll and the general public - whipped into an uncontrollable fury - demands their immediate removal. Indeed, things only settle down once the political curtain officially descends on what most people agree to have been a thoroughly damning and ignominious career.
Whilst we're on the subject of 'whipping,' the fact that some politicians are handsomely paid to endure what Hamlet described as 'the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune' reminds me of the sixteenth-century flagellants who, scourging themselves to the very limits of self-mutilation, were paid by the wealthy nobility to undergo the masochistic agonies of repentance on their behalf. I am not not suggesting that modern politicians are expressing the guilt of their corporate masters, of course, only that certain financial epochs demand that someone has to be seen to carry the can. Capitalism is a jagged maze of peaks and troughs, so whenever the intermittent excesses of the few has an unusually detrimental impact on the many, it must be accounted for. We are led to believe that it is never the system itself, simply 'mismanagement' of the economy. This, naturally, is why the emphasis has been switched from ideologies to personalities, because it is far safer to replace one individual with another than risk the overthrow of capitalism itself.
May's indecisiveness, Trump's misogyny, Hillary's hypocrisy, Merkel's migrants, Johnson’s buffoonery... none of it really matters. Politicians come and go and yet the system always stays the same.