Every fortnight, the Dark Side of The Dabbler
Disappointed Balls
As the walrus wallows and flops in its salty seaweed bed, so Mr Balls sploshed in his bath, luxurious rolls of bellyblubber ripening red in the tub. His tummy was a humpy lump island in a bubbly green sea. Gravely he raised his right arm to snatch his buzzing wireless device from its ledge, allowing a warm waterfall to slop onto his middle. “Humph!” he harrumphed. “Fuggit!” His eyedots and snout scrunched closer. The device bore a message from Pamela, his Permanent Dogsbody. It revealed that the notorious Spectator hack Roderick Lidl’s Most Irritating Politicians of the Last 50 Years poll had ranked Mr Balls a pitiful sixth, behind Brown, the fugger Blair, Galloway, the fugger Mandelson and Harman, in that order.
What the fug use is 6th? Do something about my fugging profile Balls stabbed with flabby fingers into the device’s message-sending facility, then flung it across the bathroom where it nestled safely in a pile of potato-peelings and Twix wrappers. He heaved himself out of the parping tub and fugged weepily into a fresh towel.
All this Noseybonk saw through the cold glassy eye pressed against the bath overflow hole. I had followed Mr Balls home from a lecture by deranged academic Slavoj Zizek, and crept silently up his pipes.
Award-winning activist announces his arrival
By coincidence the attending of a seminar by deranged academic Slavoj Zizek is just one of the qualifications proudly listed on the CV of ‘award-winning activist’ Micah White. Those amongst you who fear for the future of a “passionate, ideological and total critique of consumer society” in our bloodless age will be pleased to note the coming of this humble Messiah.
Messiah White has taken full advantage of the commendably laissez-faire editorial attitude to coherence of the Guardian’s Comment Is Free (No Really, You Can Say Absolutely Anything) pages, with a manifesto entitled Clicktivism is Ruining Leftist Activism. The thesis of this fearless drivel is that internet campaigning is “exchanging the substance of activism for reformist platitudes that do well in market tests” and thus hindering the Left’s noble goal of the destruction of western civilization.
Fortunately, “against the progressive technocracy of clicktivism, a new breed of activists will arise”, led, we unavoidably surmise, by Messiah White himself, whose CV reveals that in addition to the Slavoj Zizek gig he has attended seminars by deranged academics “Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Judith Butler, Michael Hardt, Jacques Rancière and Avital Ronell”, no less. White is too bashful, too shrinking a sage to reveal whether he has also read lots of difficult books, but who could doubt that he has? Certainly he’s not on Facebook or Twitter, those social networking sites being agents of the Consumer Society, but instead you can join his online Fan Brigade and prepare for The End of All Things here.
Unctious self-congratulation
But of course there are no coincidences, only conspiracies unfathomable to puny minds. Mr Balls, Roderick Lidl and deranged academic Slavoj Zizek are amongst the most prolific members of The Spiked Armadillo, that society devoted to the study, promotion and promulgation of the works of elusive poet Grayson Ellis. Indeed, so frequent, lengthy and deranged are the unconvincingly-pseudonymous submissions by Zizek to Badgers, Owls and Bacon Grill, the illustrated Ellis monthly, that its editor Janice Moor has been forced to hire a Permanent Dogsbody merely to destroy them.
In a tiresome charade at every gig Zizek is wont to claim that Ellis is amongst the attendees, waving vaguely at a denser part of the auditorium and thanking “his friend Grayson for coming along once again.” If the audience is so small that Ellis could obviously not be hiding unnoticed within it, Zizek will relay phoney apologies “on behalf of my friend Grayson, who due to unforeseen circumstances could not attend.”
In fact, Ellis never attends anything on purpose and not one of the unholy Balls/Lidl/Zizek trio has ever set eyes on him. Here, as always, his poetry provides the apt quotation.
“Pollination of the flame breasted candles/ Running with unctuous self-congratulation”
– a truth our unholy trio has never grasped.
So The Dabbler thinks we should pay attention to the opinions of career pub bore Rod Liddle, a man with no moral authority and no quality of thought? For shame.
The opinions of Noseybonk are his own and in no way represent those of The Dabbler, Jeremy Raisin
Isn’t that why he is referred to in the piece as the ‘unholy’ Rod Lidl?
Always pay attention to your enemies, Jeremies.
Fair enough, points taken. I do enjoy the blog, so enough of my jeremiad (sorry). I merely hope The Dabbler manages to eschew the studied obnoxiousness of RL and his ilk. The very name suggests a lighter touch
Indeed Jeremy, but let’s face it, a drunken gorilla with a sledgehammer has a lighter touch than Rod Liddle.