Monday 28 June 2010

Does Dave Exist?

Busy weekend, so only picked up my New Statesman half an hour ago to find a gem of an article by George Walden, ex-Tory MP and diplomat. Mr Walden does a fabulous filleting job on our very own Tory PM, David Cameron.

In George Waldon's view,  Mr Cameron is not real personality at all, but a "simulacrum", an imperfect image of reality. Exactly how imperfect, Mr Waldon is keen to show us.

Prize quotes
"...watching David Cameron in the leaders' TV debates, Cameron posing in front of No 10, Cameron impersonating a commoner in Whitehall, a spectre among the masses, who has not experienced a hallucinatory feeling, a sense of insubstantiality?" 
"....Churchill wrote history, Harold Macmillan published books, Margaret Thatcher was a lawyer and a chemist. Cameron shovelled TV trash into the maw of the masses. His way of making a crust, and why not? Ethically it is fine, in the way running an escort agency or a pole-dancing club is fine: the mugs are there to be conned and someone's going to do it. Just don't moralise at us when you have." 
In two pages of incisive and splenetic prose, Mr Walden skewers Cameron's insincerity and lack of substance in some  of the best written journalism I have encountered in many a year....

Read it and weep, tears of laughter and tears of frustration.

2 comments:

  1. A very interesting article, Alec. See the theory of hyperreality for an interesting point of comparison. This guy seems to be adopting a fairly straightforward interpretation of literary post modernism and people like BAudillard did indeed predict this state of affairs - surface over all else - quite some time ago. Cameron is a really good example of this because he seems like a cipher rather than a human being, which is just the way the Party like it, I suspect.

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  2. Philosophy is not my forte. I always think that cheery philosophers produce a cheery world view and a sanguine outlook.

    "It'll be all right in this the best of all possible worlds"

    Morose philosophers produce a gloomy world view and a downbeat prognosis.

    "We're all doomed! Doomed ah tell ye!".

    I also think that a thousand different philosophers offering a thousand different cures for our ills can't all be right....

    As my dad, who was a bit of a philosopher himself, used to say "You pays your money and you takes your choice.."

    But Walden certainly pinned Dave down, good and proper.....

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