From Tablet Magazine, February 12:
A Tablet exclusive from the Kyiv Jewish Forum
He partied during COVID, on his birthday. He let COVID lockdowns go on too long. He let his girlfriend, now his wife, cut his hair. An expensive London barber cut his hair. The prime minister’s official barber came to his house and cut his hair. He’s sloppy in public. He’s an aristocrat. He worked as a journalist. He drinks too much (see: journalist, aristocrat). He dyes his hair, though his sister Rachel insists that the entire Johnson family are natural blondes, which is a bit too much information, maybe. Someone has something else to say about his hair. His hair is the secret to his political success, as well as the secret flaw or Achilles’ heel by which his political failure might have been foretold.
The problem with Boris is that he’s lazy. He was barely interested in being prime minister. The problem with Boris is that he won’t shut up. Boris wanted to be everywhere and do everything at once. He’s a Muppet. He’s the Brexit Muppet, who led Britain out of Europe. He’s a Muppet who thinks he’s Sir Winston Churchill. But Churchill was bald, you see. Also, he saved Europe from the Nazis.
The British people had enough of Boris. After three years, the Conservative Party, which had formerly adored him, booted him out. Bye-bye, Boris. Was it only three years? It seemed like so much longer. Goodbye, and farewell. Ernest Hemingway wrote A Farewell to Arms. Who among us will write a farewell ode to Boris’ hair?
Hear, hear. Let’s hear it for front-page conventional wisdom and social media snark masquerading as deeply significant analysis of the times that try men’s souls! Thank God that COVID is over, right, with all that jibber-jabber about jabs that turned out not to work so well and the cult of masked toddlers and mutilating teenagers and all that other public health nonsense that began to seem like the leading edge of some kind of sinister plot supported by monopoly social media platforms which turn out to be one-way mirrors for the American spy services who are spying on everyone, 24/7. Time to give Boris the boot, and try out someone who also went to Oxford but actually did their homework.
Only, on his way out of office, and actually a year before that, Boris Johnson did the most consequential thing that any British prime minister has done since botching the Suez Canal takeover, leaving India and Palestine, and winning the Second World War.
Boris Johnson stood up for Ukraine, and against Putin, when Ukraine was alone in the world, on the front lines of democracy, which no one particularly cared to defend, except for the Ukrainians, whom the rest of the world had come to understand as patsies for the Russians, and as an ATM for corrupt American politicians who partied on their yachts, fucked their hookers, and stuffed their pockets with cash from their oil and gas companies, which were as much Putin’s companies as theirs. Alone among the leaders of the West, who had benefited from Ukrainian largesse, only Boris Johnson, the Muppet who thought he was Churchill, thought they would fight.
More important, he got Washington, D.C., to go along with him, which bears some closer examination. This being the same Washington, D.C., that was hopelessly divided by partisan insanity, by the jailing of political demonstrators, the use of security services as political weapons, by brain-rotting conspiracy theories, and by the utter debasement of the American press, whose standards of objective reporting had been thoroughly trashed in the fight against racism, sexism, and fascism, after the once-grand pyramid of American magazines and newspapers had itself been defunded by the monopoly internet platforms that collectively became a giant video game for billionaires and spies to play on while properly informing readers about nothing. Tucker Carlson on the right and Glenn Greenwald on the left merged to become one person, spouting the gospel of American corruption and defeat.
Vampire Washington, aged, wealthy and corrupt, was inclined to go along with whatever Vladimir Putin wanted, feeding him Crimea, and slices of Donbas, and warm water ports in Syria, and nuclear reactor contracts in Iran like canapes to a hungry crocodile. In turn, Putin believed that Western governments were staffed by hollow sissy men who would drop their pants and bend over for him. In fact, Putin believed, in their decadence and emptiness, they yearned for it, for a taste of the good old czarist lash.
As for the Ukrainians, Putin thought, when were they ever a nation? A weird mix of Nazified peasants and servile Jews, Stalin taught them who was boss. Putin, though perhaps only a modest tyrant by comparison, was a Russian leader, and Stalin’s heir. There could be only one outcome to the fight, which would be over in a week, or two at the most. The triumphal parade of tanks through the heart of Kyiv would continue on for days. It would be the greatest sight since the Red Army entered Berlin, or Budapest, or Prague....
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