Not long ago I read, or else maybe just made up off entirely off the top of my head, some rather plausible UK headlines:
MP Sex Scandal: Cybersex Non-Mandela Selfie Embarrassment!!!
Daily Mail Moral Panic Rabble Rousers Censor Phobostratus Pig Anime!!
Extortionate Mobile Phone Deals Catch Lucrative New Labour Thinktank by Surprise… Funny, that!!!
Disneyland Paris Caught in Pincer Movement by Political Islamists and Rabid Humanitarian Liberation Supremacists!!!
Elvis Releases New Single, Radio 1 Says ‘We Refuse to Play this Mainstream Bollocks!!!’
In a short time, I managed to come up with the following rearrangements:
Phobostratus Pig Sex Scandal
Elvis Mobile Phone Deals
Disneyland MP
I can’t help thinking if there is some link between cartoon fetishes, music industry lobbying and MPs who live in some peppermint wonderland, and believe they really are doing the best for ‘every one of US(-State-Department), um, EVERY ONE OF US!’
So, am I just overthinking things?
As always! I mean, IT’S JUST SEMANTICS…
Um, METAPHYSICALLY CONTINGENT NEUROLOGICAL ELECTRICAL IMPULSES, ISN’T IT!!!
😛
This is not as pomo-flippant as it may sound. Yes, the tendencies of a proportion of MPs (albeit I hope, a very small one) to call some industry boss to arrange selling their distant, scumly-plebbish and achingly-copper-spooned cousins into abject-sub-Radio-One/one/#1-mass-cultural-musical-producing-servitude, while simultaneously dreaming of the Brave New (Bourgeois-Scientific-Newtonian-Darwinian)World-to-Be-Amid-Becoming, while cranking themselves into oblivion over a notable exemplar of Japanese cartoon livestock…
Is much to be deplored, and really is no laughing matter.
However, the point of my little word experiment just now is to illustrate how the abuse of power is something that is fundamentally heterotopic.
That is to say: it is not just a question of a Utopia (a perfectly ordered Heaven) or a Dystopia (a perfectly ordered Hell). Power is not perfectly ordered at all…
Only the illusion is.
Yes, it’s all in Michel Foucault, you know! 😉
(Oof! That last sentence always gets them, doesn’t it!)
Oh… why ‘Phobostratus Pig?’ Well there are at least a few other famous cartoon pigs in history, and quite a number of those have similar names. (Numbers, as we all know and agree, being socially constructed in accordance with neoliberal-late-capitalist-bourgeois-regulative-consensus-norms).
So, I’m not naming and shaming here, in case there exists, by any extravagantly and utterly implausible chance, a super-injunction concerning the admittedly perfectly miniscule number of dodgy politico types in the UK, and pretty much every country in the world, who like a bit of groundbreaking hipster tentacle piggery with their redtops.
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Originally published on Wallace Runnymede.