They have a right to peaceful protest, and I have a right to mock them relentlessly, and point out the rank dishonesty.
It must be a fun week out for the protestors, like Glasto in the West End. Soon the holiday will end and school-teachers and students must return, but for now it is the Extinction Rebellion free festival.
That’s not a Lambeg drum I have heard banging all day: too tuneless. Whoever have been bashing it must be having a great time: he hasn’t been able to dress in a funny costume and bang a big drum in the street since his primary school days. How could he resist? They built a giant table in the middle of the busiest junction in London! Who hasn’t dreamed of that?
Be honest, lads and lasses, it’s not to do with the environment is it? It never was. It is just having a fun time and doing all those forbidden things before someone forces you to be responsible. Beware though: it can get very dark, as I observed once before:
The sun is out, and that’s not all that’s out, is it miss? I’ll bet you’ve been wanting to do that in public for years, cheeky girl, and it brought the cameras to you, which is what it was all about.
All around the noise and the flags (all the same – so conformist of you). You have cameras coming to look at what little Jack did at playtime, just like the old, innocent days. There has been a helicopter overhead all day, spewing carbon dioxide just for you. Doesn’t it make you feel important? Rather that than realise how ordinary you are, as we all are, and drip back into mediocre anonymity. That’s next week.
We all laughed when we found out that your founder drives a car that spews diesel smoke, just as we chuckled at the academics forming your intellectual respectability when they spluttered and showed themselves dimmer than the remedial class they somehow escaped.
(Do you not have bins? Dropping your rubbish all over the place like animals! Pick it up, please – some of us care for the environment, you know.)
The term begins soon, and back to class you must go, to do no good maybe but to slot you back into the order of life.
For now though, in the sunshine the festival can go on.
See also
- Eschatological Rebellion
- Who are hypocrites?
- We are going green
- Between two fires
- 4IR: understanding and fear
Books
- Hard Green: Saving The Environment From The Environmentalists A Conservative Manifesto by Peter Huber
- Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth by James Lovelock
The Revenge of Gaia by James Lovelock - Green States and Social Movements by John S. Dryzek, David Downes, Christian Hunold, David Schlosberg, Hans-Kristian Hernes
- Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
- The Elements of Law Natural and Politic, Parts I & II by Thomas Hobbes
- Behemoth: The History of the Causes of the Civil Wars of England, and the Councils and Artifices by Which They Were Carried on from the Year 1640 to the Year 1660 by Thomas Hobbes
- Thomas Hobbes – Behemoth (Clarendon edition)
- By others:
- Philosophy, Rhetoric, and Thomas Hobbes by Timothy Raylor
- Thomas Hobbes: Political Ideas in Historical Context by J P Sommerville
