Eating Dogs

Ben Wildsmith 

I’ve been ill this week, floating through the days on a river of snot and self-pity, so my customary iron grip on the political narrative might have slipped a little.

‘They’ seem to be up to their tricks again, though. Only a couple of weeks after Donald Trump revealed their habitual feasting on American pets, our own purveyor of libel-adjacent outrage, Andrew RT Davies, reckons they are banning our doggies from the outdoors.

‘They’ can be quite difficult to pin down. A shifting coalition of hostile foreigners and the university-educated, their animus is wide-ranging.

Firstly, they hate our freedom, they also hate poppies, Christmas, the late queen, and freedom of speech. They can’t stand the motorist and have a downer on aspiration, farmers, pubs, the armed forces, common sense, and hardworking families. The bastards!

If it weren’t for the monotonous regularity with which all this is proved to be fictitious, we’d be in real trouble.

Wokelord enforcement teams

As it is, though, dogs continue to enjoy the countryside without interference from hungry migrants nor wokelord enforcement teams. Perhaps, the imaginary migrants have eaten the imaginary officials, thus unwittingly saving our patriotic dogs?

It’s as plausible as anything needs to be to make the papers these days, so let’s go with that.

Dispiritingly, though, the veracity of claims like these is irrelevant to their success in gathering people around them as causes. If stories turn out not to be reliable, we find that people who want them to be true are sanguine about that.

Instead of being dismissed as worthless, these tales are refashioned as parables for the faithful. OK, so nobody is actually eating the dogs, but the fact that it’s believable tells us something about the people we are accusing of it.

We wouldn’t just accuse anyone of being a dog-eater, only wrong ‘uns could plausibly be accused of such barbarism…and so the spiral continues.

Bluesky

But let’s not kid ourselves that this is confined to the outer reaches of right-wing batshittery. During short breaks between hacking up sputum on to my tartan pyjamas, I’ve been navigating pressure to open a Bluesky account.

All my ethically minded pals are abandoning Elon Musk’s X/Twitter bear pit in favour of this more moderated platform. There, I’m told, I’ll find a community of tolerant folks who want to conduct debates according to the strictures of reason and fellow feeling.

No doubt I’ll end up there pretending to be reasonable myself, but really, what is the point? Unless unreasonable people agree to stop voting, then having a policed talking shop where nobody minds driving at 20mph seems a touch self-indulgent.

Right-wingers may have grown conspiracies and confected grievances in airless greenhouses away from scrutiny, but their opponents haven’t had to.

Despite decades of Democrat and Labour governments pouring bombs on to everything that moves whilst supervising the rich becoming the super-rich and snuffing out self-determination on their own shores, they still seem to enjoy reputations as the nice guys.

Martin Brundle

The racing driver Martin Brundle described confronting Ayrton Senna after he’s been run off the track.

Berating senna for breaking the rules, arrogance, and cheating, Brundle noticed confusion in the Brazilian’s eyes.

‘But…I am Senna!’

Ask Labour about widening inequality, unflinching support for genocide, or sabre rattling against a nuclear power and the same reaction kicks in.

‘We are Labour… we’re the moral ones…’

We are all retreating into our own fictitious worlds in which enemies are absolute, and loyalty is the highest virtue.

We’re now at the point of conducting debates on separate platforms, insulated entirely from each other’s points of view.

How do we imagine each other in such conditions? Eating dogs, I suppose.