Bear-baiting is officially banned by the bear-loving, politically correct, snowflake brigade. Go and marry a bear and live in a wood eating worms if you love bears so much! And I think you’ll find it was Adam and Eve!! Not Adam and Rupert!!! But after bear-baiting, Thomas Markle Teasing is the next best thing.
The least I expect for my tax contribution to the royal coffers is to see a future princess’s confused elderly father thrown to the dogs by Buckingham Palace and hounded and manipulated by newspapers whose tenacity and cynicism he could never have predicted. That’s entertainment!
Thank heavens our politicians are seeing some sense, as they peep out from the pockets of the press barons, by attempting to kick the Leveson report into the long grass where it belongs, along with some Fanta cans and an old, torn-up Razzle.
This week, I wanted to write about the beautiful synchronicity of the Leveson recommendations being declared as unnecessary at the same time as Thomas Markle gets pulverised by the press, the paparazzi’s piss-tears over Princess Diana’s death a distant memory.
But I have to file these columns on Thursday and you, reading this, now know more about what actually happened after Thomas Markle’s heart scare than I do. Perhaps things have already ended tragically and a beatified Thomas Markle is being declared The King of Hearts, The People’s Award-Winning 73-Year-Old Television Lighting Cameraman, by the same tabloids that ran apparently staged photos of him buying a toilet at a DIY centre last week. I can’t write this. I’m not Psychic Sally. But Doris says look after your feet. And Betty’s ring is in the budgie’s cloaca.
So, in other world news, an unpopular politician has made an alliance with dangerous religious fundamentalists and inflamed passions on both sides of a contentious border in a desperate bid to maintain power. No! I don’t mean Mr Trump in Israel!! I mean Mrs May in Northern Ireland!!!
There! That’s how satire works! But satire isn’t as easy as I make it look, week after week, especially when the actual real news reads increasingly like a poorly plotted dystopian science-fiction novel written as badly as possible by a disillusioned Dan Brown in an attempt to sabotage his own career.
The opening of Trump’s new Israel embassy, for example, suggests he is courting the support of millions of American Christian fundamentalists, who believe that when the Jews reclaim Jerusalem the Apocalypse will begin, and with it Christ’s second coming, which American Christian fundamentalists want even more than an end to abortion rights.
To suggest that the Jerusalem embassy isn’t opening for the benefit of the Israelis isn’t to legitimise or delegitimise the notion of a Jewish homeland, but to ask if it has been opened instead for the benefit of the American fundamentalist Christian hate preachers Robert Jeffress and John Hagee. The Christian Chuckle Brothers led prayers at the ceremony and have said, respectively, that all Jews were going to hell and that Hurricane Katrina was an overzealous divine attempt to squash a gay parade.
To Palestinians, Trump’s Jerusalem embassy is a provocation. To American Christian fundamentalists, it is a kind of giant mousetrap for a giant mouse Christ, designed to lure him back to Earth a little earlier than he was perhaps planning. But thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God, not even with cheese.
Mrs May’s latest plan for the Northern Irish border is similarly fraught. Work has already begun on a series of giant watchtowers, named The Pillars of Democracy, each some hundred feet high and electronically equipped to read the details of people and products crossing the border.
But in an error of judgment as catastrophic as Trump’s Christ-baiting embassy, each tower will be made to look like a massive Oliver Cromwell who, while honoured here in mainland Britain as the founder of the democratic process that delivered the electorate’s beloved Brexit, is viewed by Catholics on both sides of the Irish border as a genocidal war criminal.
Similarly, the folly of Trump’s Jerusalem Christ trap is obvious. We don’t need to shoot protesters to bring Jesus back to Earth for the benefit of American Christian Fundamentalists. If I were a religious person, here in London, I would see Christ every day.
Last year, he meandered, in shawl and slippers and female form, along my tube carriage, singing polyphonic clicks and buzzes, holding out an empty cup. I put in some coins and the woman opposite me, who was wearing a silver crucifix, made a disapproving face. I leaned forward, gestured towards her jewellery and the departing beggar, and whispered: “That was Christ. Just there. And you missed him.”
Sometimes I see him in Kentish Town, a man I vaguely knew in south London a quarter of a century ago, now street-sleeping, and I buy a bag of toiletries from Boots and leave them at his feet. He is Christ. And so am I, I suppose, for buying those toiletries. Greater love hath no man than to lay down his Lynx.
If I were faithful, I would see Christ everywhere, on buses and at borders, both pulling the trigger and taking the bullet, and I would not be able to bear the sorrow of it. But I don’t think I would have seen him in the triumphal hate-filled benedictions of Trump’s surrogate Jerusalem speakers.
Christ was at the bus stop outside the house this morning, where I waited with the kids; Christ manifest as two street prostitutes, crazy and angry from a long night of low earnings, their curses the blood of Christ, their kicks the body of Christ; and Christ was in the newspaper just now, contemplating his toilet purchase and the loss of his privacy, preparing for surgery.
Stewart Lee appears in a benefit show for South London Cares and North London Cares, at the Leicester Square Theatre on 13 June, with Carl Donnelly, Athena Kugblenu, Arnold Brown and Bridget Christie
