FEAR AND LOATHING IN GLASGOW

We were somewhere around George Square, on the edge of the madness, when the fear began to take hold…

The man in the video stands jut-jawed, silent, poised and posing, contemplating a brave new golden political dawn. He then breaks into a jubilant wee half-sung half-song, comprising equal parts Rule Britannia, I Fought The Law, and childish jingoistic gibberish:

“Rule Britannia! Get Brexit done! We voted Leave and…Leave won!”

He gives a smug, self-satisfied grin to the camera, and finger-flashes the Victory Vs. He is clearly a graduate of the George Galloway School For Carefully Over-Enunciating Each Word. In a strange, squealing, faux-received-pronunciation accent, he tells the excited viewer to celebrate the UK leaving the EU with him on January 31^st in George Square in Glasgow at “11 p.m. – at night.” He adds when 11 p.m. is for those suspicious of commie EU plots like the 24-hour clock. "We're coming out - we're leaving," he also notes, in case the phrase 'coming out' was too difficult for his tiny audience to grasp.

The man is, of course, Alistair McConnachie, the self-styled leader of A Force For Good, the online unionist SNP-fight club that takes great pride in protesting pro-independence marches. He’s been kicked out of Ukip for being a Holocaust denier, been a puppet, a pirate, a poet, a pawn and a King Billy-worshipper. He got asked why he cares about the United Kingdom so much and his reply was for the ages: “I just like it.” No arguing with that logic.

His more informal name online, as well as the raft of pejoratives his net presence tends to draw from dismissive independence supporters, is ‘Manky Jayket.’ He has earned this fond nickname because of the union flag jacket he wears when howling at marching independence supporters through a small PA system from a small gathering of tens of unionists. These gatherings always mysteriously get inflated to hundreds or thousands in the cropped photos of the mass media. He is the Roaster’s Roaster, a legend in his own mind, and he has become a comedy fave of my own over the last few months.

Like many people, I almost find it very difficult to believe that this guy is not some Ali G-like performance artist, pulling the red-white-blue knitted-tammy wool over the eyes of his supporters. I have gotten many laughs out of his utterly-un-self-aware videos, as have many others, and I decided I wanted to go and see him in the flesh. I wanted to see if he was real, and not just some summoned-up Scottish unionist ghost fantasy, a Holocaust-havering hologram. So I motorvated through to Glasgow from Falkirk last night, a 60-mile round trip on the train in the rain I would not have normally made.

I decided to kill two birds with one stone and went to a pleasant poetry evening at Tell It Slant, a poetry bookshop in Renfew Street. I got talking to a young American student named Meghan there, and I reminisced about my time in America. I found out she was going to attend a pro-EU event taking place just down near George Square I did not know was happening, so I chummed her down there in the pouring rain, swapping reminisces and transatlantic political observations. We made our way down to the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall to the pro-indy event that had apparently been on since 8 p.m., though by the time we got there it was around 10.30 p.m., as the poetry event had overrun. It still hadn’t finished by the time we left.

There were around 60-70 people still there, drookit and drenched in the weary dreich weather, and the wind chill factor could cut you a new bahookiehole. Some idiots walked past shouting antagonistic gutterslut propaganda. Nobody cared. I don’t know how many people had been there since the thing kicked off, or how long those who were still here had been there, but it was a poignant sight. EU flags and saltires and dripping cagoules and ponchos abounded, a dark soaked sea of protesting patriot energy, approving halogen light shining off wet hoods and anoraks, and a slightly tired-but-defiant chorus of Flower of Scotland broke out. I couldn’t even think about the whole mess it was protesting. Three-and-a-half years of hearing about it had numbed me, just like it had everybody else.

Except in one single, simple respect. There was a disabled man there on a motability scooter, well covered in waterproofs, out and about, being there, showing solidarity. Instantly the memory of the vile, evil Aktion T4-like slow-motion pogrom the Tory scum have undertaken against the disabled came to mind. I have worked with the disabled and loved it, and love them – love them better than most able-bodied people, and I am not being condescending by saying that. I choked up a bit as I talked to Meghan about it. She had been a carer, too, and empathised, got it completely.

This man – and his type – are the reason why we must never stop fighting to be independent. If we allow ourselves to be run by people who have murdered disabled people to save a few quid, we allow ourselves to become as bad as them, not fighting for the vulnerable anymore, and we might as well renounce our humanity and pack up and become the braindead wannabe-American corporate consumers we are halfway to becoming anyway. We will be less than worthless, and would not be missed from the planet.

(Lighter note: there was a Captain America umbrella in amongst the saltire waterfall-drip-droppers. Solidarity, Cap’n!)

I asked Meghan if she wanted to come with me to flip the whole thing on its head, from light to dark, and nip down to George Square with me. She agreed and we walked down there. I confess I was a wee bit trepidatious, cos I remembered reading about the George Square violence on September 19^th, 2014, when I was in America. Getting a kickin was not a pleasant thought, but I thought well, they wouldn’t know whit fit ah kick wi, as my hoodie was grey (no identifying marks, serving the dual purpose of covering my head from the rain, and making my face indistinct in any photos from concerned law enforcement departments, in case they thought I was a right wing fud!) and they would think I was one of them.

Still, it was thankfully anticlimactic. The rain was dampening spirit squibs and keeping the potential chaos at bay. The centre of Glasgow at that time on a weekend night is not really someplace I would ever normally want to be anyway, because of the potential for drunken madness. In the event, there was no trouble. We walked over to the Walter Scott statue where the quietly drenched ‘crowd’ of around 35-40 flagwaving people of all ages were listlessly milling in dreary ecstasy. Meghan went down on bended knee and took a few photos from a pro-looking camera, bolder than me. I took a couple of crappy soaked, windswept photos of the huddled ‘masses’ yearning to breathe free of their demonised draconian EU masters. And they had gotten what they wanted. “We voted Leave, and Leave won,” as Manky Jayket had put it, indeed. Nice to be so happy to be on the winning side.

I couldn’t feel any real anger or vitriol towards these people. They were just working class, poor, uneducated, duped by duplicitous scheming corporate fascists into voting against their own interests. They didn’t know any better: poor, angry, hungry, bevvied, looking for ways to understand the terminal decline of their lives, and blaming it all on the abstract dark ‘foreigners’ menace instead of the governmental and corporate manipulators who had ground them down in the first place.

The men were cannon fodder who had missed their turn on some illegal imperialist global battlefield, the women minimum-wage-or-under cleaning women and carers and brood mares. Just people: nothing more, nothing less. Some of them might even have been a laugh under the right circumstances, dazzling with that razor-sharp Glaswegian wit. But there really isn’t much to laugh about these days, of course. I’ll tell you something: I dislike these people a lot less than the sneering, vitriolic, down-nose-peering leftist ‘educated’ people who would deride them as being useless useful idiots, because the leftists know better. Quite a few of these type of educated-beyond-their-intelligence-level entryists clogging up the bottom rungs of the SNP now. They sniff at the working class, waving their rainbow flags and self-righteous faux-American identity politics credentials, completely clueless about the conditions of lifestyles that would make the poor cling to moribund, restrictive, self-destructive ideologies.

As I write this, it’s February 1^st. Twitter is awash with videos of average Brexiteers being interviewed and giving clueless-but-earnest answers. These videos are being posted in a kind of bitter, vengeful schadenfreude by we’re-so-much-better Remainers, pissing on their ‘underlings’ from a great intellectual height. And then they wonder why they’re hated, and why right-wing populist movements like Brexit gain traction. Both sides are full of idiots, and great people. Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, here I am, stuck in the middle with nothing but volatile isolation all around.

You know, personally, I don’t have the energy to be angry anymore, I really don’t. All the Western world has been for the last couple of decades has been people screaming emptily at each other over the net, trying to score winning ‘intelligence’ points, nobody hearing a word the other side says. “Guess who’s laughing/while the world explodes/while we’re all crybabies/who fight best among ourselves?” as the Dead Kennedys put it. It’s a joke. I can’t stomach any more from either side anymore. It all just nauseates me to my core. I mean, did anybody ever change anybody else’s mind about anything on the net by supercilious sneering and sniping? Rhetorical question, of course. 

On a brief, related sidestep: I am reading the new book Hate Inc. by Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi right now. He provides a precise, concise overview of how the Western media (everyplace just really copies America now) got into this dichotomous divisive pandemonium pandemic, and I would advise you to read it. I’m certainly learning a lot, and, if we don’t want people like Trump and Johnson to keep getting elected, we’re going to have to change our whole online (and offline) political dynamic. Cos it sure as Hell isn’t working, and the evidence is clear as the nose on your face you don’t want to cut off to spite it. For further reading, there’s a good article here about this whole divide-and-conquer phenomenon; it’s about America, but, as I said, it applies here, cos we’re all part-American now:

https://www.vox.com/2016/4/21/11451378/smug-american-liberalism

Let’s face it, even though Scotland voted to stay in the EU, and we have an unusually politically engaged populace, not all Remain votes were cast with full knowledge of what they were being cast for. The whole Brexit thing is a hotel fire run by spivs and conmen and lunatics, a mass tragic hypnosis deception of the gullible and poor and illiterate and those frightened for their horribly underpaid minimum wage jobs. How are people who do not have a vastly complex subject explained to them going to understand it? And yes, we can sneer at the xenophobia and racism and sexism and whateverism you care to cluck and tut at unleashed in the wake of this sell-us-to-America tsunami, but never, ever lose sight of who to blame for it all. It isn’t wet, sad, poor people in the rain waving cheap flags probably made in China. England is undergoing a mass nervous breakdown, a psychotic episode, a lack-of-identity crisis, and it wasn’t neo-Nazi skins and toothless angry old ladies who made it happen. The union? They just like it. Shrug.

As the assembled deluded unionists stood in the rain, there gently echoed through the Square music from a cheap, tinny, tarpaulin-covered PA. The music was rubbish, noodling guitar metal (per)versions of classic songs, just melding seamlessly and craply into one another. It absolutely reminded me of the kind of river-of-sonic-mush music I used to hear as a teen going to the Tryst in Stenhousemuir, round the shows, background white noise, no vocals, each song disappearing just before you could quite grasp what it was. All it needed was somebody shouting “SCREAM IF YOU WANNA GO FASTER!” and the fairground tableau would have been completely complete. I mused on what a song we were listening to was to Meghan. We came to the conclusion it was Smoke on the Water by Deep Purple, done really badly, like somebody drunk playing it on Guitar Hero. But it was followed by…nah…no way…was I hearing things?

“Is that…is that…Hava Nagila?” I asked Meghan incredulously. She listened for a moment, then nodded in affirmation. I laughed in amazement. The idea of xenophobic, probably anti-Semitic people celebrating an insular event run by a Holocaust denier being serenaded by an Israeli folk song…was beautifully, deliciously ironic. Of course, they never even noticed, let alone got annoyed or took offence, but those with the right set of ears could hear the irony bells clanging long before the Brexit ones did.

10.55 p.m. We didn’t see Manky Jayket, whose sterling contribution to nothing in the history of humanity I had explained to Meghan. She countered with tales of his American counterparts. We were soaked through, tired, my feet were wet, and there was nothing much to be learned from this circus of horrors. I didn’t have to see Manky Jayket. He was just a self-aggrandising attention whore, a symbolic white whale of deception and crap fairground callouts, and his idiot spirit was everywhere. Time to go.

We hit the wet squishy-step road and walked over to Queen Street, where we made our goodbyes and went our separate ways. It had been good to get a bemused outsider-perceptive perspective on the whole sorry, soggy, bloated atrocity exhibition. I read an unconfirmed report that the BBC had been claiming there were ‘thousands’ at the (non) event, but as I couldn’t find corroboration for that I will remain sceptical. Not too sceptical, of course, because I am sure Manky Jayket will claim the whole Square was packed out. But as he’s a fantasist (he claimed the video that I mentioned at the start of this piece got 100,000 views! 40 attendees is a pretty bloody cruddy signal-to-noise ratio if that’s the case!), nothing he says ever really corresponds to any kind of consensus reality whatsoever anyway.

Ultimately, the whole thing was really just a waste of time and train fare. It didn’t feel important, or historical, or interesting, or insightful. It just felt wet and bloody freezing and slightly depressing. However, as that’s Scotland on a good day or night anyway, that doesn’t exactly mean much, make much of a difference. As for what difference Brexit and attendant corporate madness will bring, on top of what it has already brought, well…

…that all remains to be seen, for many years to come.

THE (NEVER) END