TRASHFUTURE - What Boris Johnson Thinks Of You feat. Aidan 'Taco' Jones

Episode Date: October 11, 2019

In this preview of this week's bonus episode, our review of Boris Johnson's terrible novel 72 VIRGINS continues — this time featuring Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Alice (@AliceAvizandum) and returning guest Aidan 'Taco' Jones (@AJ_Taco). The story continues to get worse, because the current Prime Minister of the UK wrote racist fanfic for bitter British dads. Brace yourself for the horror! If you want to hear the whole thing, get it on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/30634549 If you want to buy one of our recent special-edition phone-cops shirt, shoot us an email at trashfuturepodcast[at]gmail[dot]com and we can post it to you. (£20 for non-patrons, £15 for patrons). We still have medium and 2XL available! Do you want a mug to hold your soup? Perhaps you want one with the Trashfuture logo, which is available here: https://teespring.com/what-if-phone-cops#pid=659&cid=102968&sid=front

Yes, so this is this is this is Boris Johnson's theory of change because he has smuggled in his most like psychotic ideas into this allegedly lighthearted romp of a novel. So here is Boris Johnson's backstory for Dean. This is being re remembered as they're sneaking into parliament to blow some stuff up. Also, since there have ever been a Caribbean Islamic terrorist, well, that kind of defeatism is not going to be like, again, Milo, that's that's the kind of thing that Boris Johnson came up with on vacation because he wrote this over the space of a single holiday and said, I'll make the jihadist terrorist Anglo-Anglo-Caribbean. Everyone's going to get a kick out of that.

Don't laugh at the things he wants you to laugh at. That's the trap. I'll be back or Al Sean poorly. So life had been tough for Dean ever since that fit. By the way, it's awfully written. Terrible. I'm trying to make as much sense of it as I can. Did you say he remembers this while they're trying to break in somewhere? What he has like a little like a soliloquy. Yeah, it's like a proof thing, but written by someone who is way worse. The first sniff of like fucking fertilizer sends him back.

So life had been tough for Dean ever since that dreadful night in Wensbury. The magistrates had grasped pretty clearly what had happened and in some ways were even sympathetic, but he was still convicted in a juvenile court of arson and sentenced to 400 hours of community service. It was claimed that Dean had destroyed prices cheese lab, which was on the verge of making a new kind of hard cheese, dense, nutty and fissile as Parmesan. Haven't we done that on the podcast? Yes. We've destroyed a cheese lab. No, no, I mean, I didn't have it. We reviewed them.

The cheese lab was shut down very quickly. Yeah. The cheese lab was given an evaluation of $47 billion by SoftBank. Only later did they realize they just leased all of their rennet. That all their money was anonymous donations from 1J Epstein. Dean then left school as record completely unblemished by achievement and fell in with a bad crowd while performing his community service. I bet he thought there was such a fucking clever line, unblemished with achievement. Yeah, unblemished by, absolutely. I was just thinking that.

That's such fucking hard, like Churchillian. Record completely unblemished by achievement. Yeah, yeah. And that was like his one thing to hold up the rest of the chapter. He was like, that chapter's great. That's such a tent whole thing. Yeah, that's a tent. We ate it. But then he fell in with a bad crowd while performing his community service. It was a soft job, just scraping graffiti off of gravestones. But every night when this...

Graffiti and gravestones. Well, we find out. Every night when the cemetery was locked, Dean and his fellow community service convicts, Wayne and Pauley. He's never been to the East End. He's trying to write East End characters. They're from Birmingham. Oh, okay, there we go. Wayne and Pauley would shimmy over the gate, have some drugs. Allotting it. One drug, please.

A time when you could just name a character something like Wayne Crimes, right? Yes. Shimmy over the gate, have some drugs, and then like Penelope on her loom, they would busily undo the work of the day. Oh, fuck off. It's a break from mythology reference. It's not even relevant. No, because Boris Johnson, when he's writing working class characters

who are invariably criminal, or just making sort of side bets on one another about how many karans are in ambulances around the UK, which again, they do in heavily overwritten, accented English. Amazing. That he always has to. Like a fucking McKinsey interview question. Like, how many karans do you think are in ambulances? But when the UK, what Boris Johnson always has to do

is insert a classical reference or some Latin or whatever. So you remember that he's not a dumb dumb. It's, I believe that the Greek's had a word for this called pathos. No, it's a Raffinadoe. Raffinadoe, when you insert a gravestone into another man's anus. Well, also, I mean, when Woodhouse inserted like French words, italicized into his books, it was like making fun of that shit. Yes.

Rather than actually doing it. Because he was like, I don't know, Savoir Faire, not having any. Yeah. So in effect, Boris Johnson in attempting to imitate the style of P.G. Woodhouse accidentally imitated the style of Bertie Wooster. He's fascist Bertie Wooster. We've got it. I mean, he does have one thing in common with Woodhouse,

which is that they both have done Nazi propaganda. Boris Johnson watches Al Murray, the pub landlord, and is like, how does he find the time to run that pub? How does he do all this? So he says they would shimmy over the gate, have some drugs, and then like Penelope with her loom, they would busily undo the work of the day because they did not want to be moved onto something harder,

like scraping the gum. Like a hundred suitors. So he's saying they graffitied all the gravestones, and you're supposed to sympathize with his characters. Well, hang on. Here was the mossy tomb of Hannah, the beloved wife of Tobias Horton, departed this world in the year of grace, 1869. SCMU wrote Dean, he meant to write scum,

but he was too stoned on drugs that dyslexia was added to his rubbles. Oh my God. He was too blazed on heroin. Oh, I don't know. I like this character now. He has more troubles. I want to know who this Dean is and what his other troubles are. Saying SCM, that's like a typo.

That's not something you would do if you were physically writing something. It's not possible. Look, Boris, look, the thing is about, the thing you have to remember about Boris Johnson is this is revealing his utter contempt for most people who live in the country. Well, I was in the Bollington Club, all of our graffiti was exquisite.

He thinks when he goes down a train line and sees like the acronyms that people write, he's like, oh, poor things that have misspelled your rippities. He's actually spelled skeptic. After a year of drifting around and rejecting every solution that his adoptive father, Dennis, could offer, Dean was, as some politicians like to put it, fuck you, Boris.

I hate you writing yourself into this. As some politicians like to put it, on the conveyor belt to crime. But you could not really say that the state had failed young Dean for a lack of resources. Here's where. They've given him this fantastic educational job, cleaning graffiti off of gravestones,

enabling him to become Graveyard Banksy. He was painting like snogging policemen on the gravestones. That's how he got started. Here's the next paragraph. Is this meant to be entertainment, though? Yes, it is. And here's the next paragraph is basically all big laugh lines. So do let me get through it.

Sick. If a heartless politician were to engage in gratuitous political point scoring, he might note that Dean was cared for by a substance abuse outreach worker at 25,000 pounds per year, a crime prevention detached youth project worker at 31,000 pounds per year, a burglary reduction worker at 23,000 pounds per year, a probation officer at 26,000 pounds per year,

a vehicle theft reduction worker at 28,000 pounds per year plus cars, and a representative of Dispel, a state funded body that sees to the needs of dyslexic young offenders at 36,000 pounds. Aren't burglary and vehicle theft reduction officers just the police? Isn't that what the police are for? That too, but like all of the social work phantoms that he's invented, my partner actually does one of those,

not the probation officer one I hasten to add, makes considerably less than 36 grand a year, and also the entire project just got shut down by Glasgow City Council. Because there's too much claim, there's nothing to be done. Because all it did was invest money in that kid who kept vandalizing the gravestones and misspelling the victims. He didn't even teach them to spell better on the graffiti. And also, it's acting like all of those people are just focused on,

like this kid's costing the state 300,000 pounds a year. It's like, no, those people all have full-time jobs with portfolios and fucking people. It's in an action comedy book that's supposed to be reminiscent of PG Woodhouse. The houses of Parliament at this point. We spent hundreds of guineas sending all of these criminals on a free holiday to Australia. And what have they done but beat us up crooked? How we should have hung them all.

The fucking didactic excursion in the text, like he's the fucking Emile Zola, Jesus Christ. It's the catalogue of ships, but instead it's the catalogue of the nanny state. This actually is prose below the level of something Jan Franco Zola could write. I can't believe he didn't have a little, like a small little one here with a thing to a suffix at the back of the book about how like reading material can be obtained from the UK government website. So no single person really took an intelligent interest in Dean until one day,

some liberal genius in the home office. Oh my god. Here's what it is. Came up with the fresh start scheme. So sick. This is where Boris Johnson actually anticipates arguments about universal basic income and counters them with the following. The fresh start scheme was a move evoking the excesses of 1970s Sweden.

The idea was that they should all be given. Famously excessive. Like what did Boris, what decadence did they bring us other than Abba? And like this point we had Psalms. So there is nothing. They would have stopped up nothing. They were eating a raw fish from a can. They must be stooped.

The idea was that all three of them should be given a 10,000 pound fresh start fund at the expense of the taxpayer. Wayne Pauley and Dean could hardly believe their luck. They immediately rented a large house where they lived in scenes of unremitting squalor. They relieved the sudden tedium of affluence with drink and drugs, bought an orange voxel Astra, which they ineffectively souped up and ran through the window of right price in Bilston. Like this is supposed to be a fun little romp through some daring do of a blastery.

Yeah, because home counties dads are supposed to like nod at this and think, well, it does be like that, as the kids say. Well, you know, it says a lot about his, because I don't think you can buy an orange voxel Astra. I don't think they sell them in orange. I think you'd have to literally paint it yourself if you wanted an orange voxel Astra. Who the fuck is renting a house to these people with their such scumbags? Is it while that he's trying so hard to meet my landlord and like pretend to be like a minor

nobility? I was just in like a like a shimmering ball gown just being like, oh, I was ever so in love with the bedside. He's trying so hard to like describe what's wrong with his people's lives and when he goes, what did he say something about the boredom of affluence? Yes, they relieve the sudden tedium of affluence with drink and drugs. It's like he's clearly making absolutely no effort to understand why he's just going, oh, well, they don't like being rich because they're bored of it.

It's like, no, surely there's a different reason why people do those things that you don't understand. No, and he's making no fucking effort whatsoever to understand why someone might do that. Boris Johnson's worldview is that there is a group of people who are like the leisure class, the aristocracy or the wealthy who are responsible guardians of wealth and that everyone else basically needs to be kept busy with a job or they're just going to cause chaos. Yeah. Yeah.

Otherwise, they just, if you don't keep the working class employed, if you make sure you don't force them to work as much as possible, then what they're going to do is they're just going to sort of, their eyes are going to unfocus and then they're going to start thinking of like all the different. Huge bazongas. They're going to inject cocaine into their eyes and then crash a car into your night's house. I wonder what he would say though, if you put that to him, if you put that line to him

and said, look at how cynical this description of someone is that people do crimes because they just can't handle being rich. That's what that line literally lays out in front of you. And if you put that, what the fuck could he say to that? Like, what could you fucking say to that? You wrote this fucking bookie piece of shit. Yeah. He'd mutter probably and then try to make another sort of wrong Latin analogy.

Yeah. Make some like cartoonish lie, like something really outlandish. Oh, Tempro, mores, what you have to understand is you do the working class when they get rich. They suffer from boredom. It's very dangerous because the upper class when we are rich, which is all the time, we suffer from ennui, which makes you do things like, you know, go to, go to Bermond, you know, get a local girl pregnant or something, you know, write a, write a book of poetry about,

you know, Phoenician princes who fondle young boys and then die of sepsis on a, on a boat on your way to fight in some sort of Greek civil war. That's the sort of thing that being rich is upper class does with the young people. You know, they just buy these, these vehicles that are in silly colors and they, they crash them into the pound shops.