Decir cosas feas

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OK, so Nigel Farage is a prat. (Just seen the interview.)

I suspect that's the best choice you're ever going to get with political candidates, at least in the UK: a zombie or a prat. I'll take the prat. Not because I wouldn't "want to live next to Romanians" (I would dearly love to: am fascinated by the language, and would happily pay for lessons) or because I think immigration is a problem (barring welfare tourism, for which there are obvious solutions, it isn't) but because pratspeak is amenable to the Socratic method in a way zombiespeak isn't. A prat can educate himself out of pratitude. A zombie, we know, cannot aspire to be anything, ever, but a zombie. Zombiehood is a dead end. I don't like dead ends.

I also think that it's useful to have ugly people saying ugly things. They function as the waste pipes of human discourse. If they didn't exist, all the sewage would accumulate somewhere, until one day, without warning - GHPHWUUUPHSHFFF. We need to know what we think about ugly things. We need something to sharpen our opinions against. So yeah, I think it's good that there's someone talking bollocks about Romanians. As a sort of proxy Romanian in Ecuador (AFAIK most Ecuadorians couldn't tell the difference between a Brit and a Romanian, or find either country on a map to within 2000 miles) I would much rather be talked bollocks about than thought bollocks about by people lousy with taboos. Talked is much safer.



Comments

  1. Endivio Roquefort IMay 26, 2014 at 1:11 PM

    Thanks for the comment. Yeah. I wonder how Farage, what with German wife an' all, would respond to "I wouldn't want to live next to one of them damn Krauts", or whether he has the wit to make the analogy, or whether he genuinely thinks all Romanians are thieves and gangsters, or whether it's just cynical populist electioneering. Most likely the latter. Anyway, congratulations on your party's Euro election results.

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