Two men my age but twice my weight stand in the evening sun outside The Golden Cannon talking about lefties. One of them passes their reticent pale eyes over me as I pass. “He’s a leftie,” he concludes at me. They stub out their cigarettes and go back into the pub, turning their backs on me as I pass. The Cannon is usually like that so I don’t think much of it. I’m in a pink jumper. I have my hat on.
A bit further down someone is driving his bright yellow BMW with the top down. He’s blasting out Bob Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues and eyeballing people walking by. “Don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” He’s silver fox. Nicely dressed. Looks like he’s pretty happy with himself. His mouth moves with the words like he wants us to absorb them.
I’m on my evening constitutional in Brighton. I’ve inadvertently stumbled into politics. As I carry on walking I see more evidence of noisy opinion. The official noisemaking is done and now it’s go home with the placards time, or get drunk time, or both. T-Shirts. Face coverings. Little groups a-wandering hither and yon. Mostly “Choose Love” or “Refugees are welcome here”. The um the er the … The”patriots”? came on the train. They’re not from round ‘ere that’s for sure.
It doesn’t take me long to work out what’s been going on here. A protest and a counter-protest. “Save are women and kids with violence” vs “oh for crying out loud, you lot again?”.
A small group of frightened semi-literate ogres have been galvanised out of bed to come to Brighton today to get drunk and shout about brown people. The intention of the organisers was to get some videos of them being completely outnumbered by Brightonians to further push the narrative that “right thinking British Englanders from English England are the oppressed minority.” “VIOLENCE,” shouts one man hopefully into his phone camera on my Facebook. “Antifa have MISSILES,” he carries on. It’s genuinely like being back in a mudfight aged 12 where we’re pretending its the Vietnam War. “Peow peow! Napalm!! DUCK. This twig is a HELICOPTER whupwhupwhup”. Another commentator screams into a megaphone about how Brighton is “the lion’s den”. He of course means the lion from The Wizard of Oz. He has imported the American myth that “antifa” is an organisation rather than just a large number of intelligent people that know he’s a prat.
“The thing is though,” says the homeless busker I’m walking by right now “These idiots who showed up today calling themselves patriots, they don’t even know what this country is. The music. The food. The culture. The art. I’m more of a patriot than any of them.” He’s skinny and stoned, playing ragga beats and talking in rhythm. He’s got a fair point.
We mustn’t polarise. We mustn’t be divided. It’s the billionaires. We know all this. But maybe the guy outside the pub was right about me being a leftie with my hat and pink jumper and my curiosity about the unfamiliar. If you have an opinion that I might disagree with and you feel you’ve thought it through I’m happy to examine the unfamiliar and make my own mind up. My mind changes on things all the time. Extremists on both sides annoy me, but the high handed and patronising tone of extreme left annoys me less than the protective self-adoring shouting of the extreme right. And the way they are trying to colonise every form of protest and argument. To paint themselves as victims. To take the knee for fucks sake. It’s immature and so self involved. They take themselves so seriously that at some point it is going to tip from ridiculous into scary.
This wave of rightyboys and girls annoys me because every single one of them seems to be willfully dumb, purposely stupid, cut off from logic and empathy. This level of stupid is worrying. At some point early in life they’ve run into something they can’t understand alongside other people who have understood it. They’ve reacted by retreating into themselves rather than trying to expand into a revelation. “I’m not stupid, I just have a special understanding”. And that has been the end for curiosity, for critical thinking, for anything other than to become big vessels for the noise of anyone that strokes their ego. That small mindedness has been amplified now – they’ve found millions of other cabbages online. And the guys at the top know they are empty and pour vitriol into them.
So yes, they were massively outnumbered in Brighton here today. But that’s what they wanted. “Brighton is fallen. London is fallen”. All that noise. It’s just so fucking sad, and I don’t see the exit right now. I’m glad I didn’t go when it was happening. I wonder what the way out of this is? Do we have to wait for the transatlantic manchild to finally catch fire?
I’m gonna walk it off. It’ll be light late, and still a week until solstice!
