Right Wing Party Games

Games of misery and imagination to while away any spare moments before we rise up and destroy them all…

Fantasy Leftie Lab Rats.

Just take two elements of the theory, practice or personnel of the United Left as they experiment willy-nilly with all of Mankind and now with the whole planet - and see how they like it.

1. Place an ordinary, thirteen-year-old girl who has been plied with drink and drugs, (such as a young Whoopi Goldberg perhaps) in a bed with a middle-aged Left-wing celebrity such as Roman Polanski and discover what (if not rape) the following activities might be defined as.

2. Take a carbon-neutral form of sustainable transport, such as a long ship or a tea clipper, and invite anti-carbon dioxide campaigners such as Al Gore and IPCC director Rajendra K Pachuri and see how long it takes to get to Copenhagen from, say, Hollywood.

3. Place an ordinary gang of violent repeat criminals in the house of a liberal judge. Let them be armed and threaten the judge’s family with their weapons. Let the judge and one companion pursue the fleeing miscreants and see what sort of sentence the judge might receive.

Pass the parcel (in a Belfast pub.)

A competitive and yet consensual game.

Going round the group, person A names a Leftie with a surname beginning with a randomly-chosen letter. Player B names a Leftie whose name begins with the next letter in the alphabet after that one. If Leftie Two is held by the group to be more loathsome than Leftie One, then player B stays in and Player A leaves. But if Leftie Number Two is an improvement on Leftie Number One, then Player B leaves and Player A stays in.

Best not start with ‘T’ too often, because nobody will stay in long after ‘Toynbee’.

Every player only has one life because the Buddhists and druids are wrong, okay?

Sound: Unsound.

Back when the world was young we used to play this other game.

I’m referring of course to 1979 and the next few years when a whole new generation of conservatives, classical liberals, libertarians and all-purpose Swiss Army Right-wingers were called to the flag of Thatcherism in Britain and Reaganism in the States to support what we felt was necessary to make the world a better place.

Exactly.

And we had fun doing it – and as we did so, we made it safe for people to discuss the virtues of private property and a world after the death of Soviet Communism and a computer in every house and office and power companies competing for our business…without the world being destroyed.

We were right (mostly, but not all the time) and everyone else was wrong (mostly, but not all the time)…but we had fun. The game was Sound: Unsound.

In it, each player in turn speaks of a pair of opposing but similar concepts, names or experiences in the same rough area (such as Leeds) in order to win laughs of recognition and pride for our own pleasures and prejudices and to sneer in derision at the weedy, idiotic and sometimes brutal things that the other folk go in for instead. It is just like blogging; but an oral pleasure rather than a digital one.

To be Sound was to be into strong military defence of the West and no messing with soppy détente: it was to support free enterprise and privatization and low taxation and a small, lawful state. To be Unsound was to be Red Hot instead of True Blue in Britain (it’s the other way round these days in the States, I suppose); to be wet and soppy instead of brave and forthright; to be pacifist instead of irenic; to care without ever considering paying one’s dues personally. Soundness was about fun and profit and unashamed patriotism and slaughtering the Left’s sacred cows and making MacDonald’s burgers out of them. It wasn’t all about politics – there was a laddish feel to it, and so some of our pleasures were puerile and not always chivalrous alas; but still and all there was a good team feeling and joint strength grew from it for the activism that we undertook back in The World.

So, in no particular order, latter-day examples of our little game might be:

Habitats. Jungle; sound. Tropical rainforest; unsound.

(Because no-one ever sang a song that begins: Down in the tropical rainforest where nobody goes…)

And I hate the bloody rainforest.

History. A ’45; sound. The ’45; unsound.

Sci-Fi films. Aliens; sound. ET; unsound.

Political books; The Road to Serfdom sound. The Road to Wigan Pier; unsound.

Supernatural romance. Ghost; sound (shooting and money). Truly, Madly Deeply; (Guardian readers and 'political refugees') unsound.

Military aviation movies. The Great Escape; sound. The Great Waldo Pepper; unsound.

And you can do it the other way round for surprise value.

Rivers of Babylon; unsound. Rivers of Blood; sound.

‘Do you want to drink decaff, organic or Fair Trade?’; unsound. ‘Let’s face it, you didn’t really come back here tonight for a cup of coffee, did you?’; sound.

Well, that just about wraps it up for 2009 on TJ.AT?

I want to thank you all for reading it and not taking out a contract on me, and as for those of you who ‘follow’ my blog, I hope that you got some traffic from it as well as any laughs I might have provided along the way.

I’m especially grateful to those wise and knowledgeable bloggers who’ve put me on the right track this past year, and by whose detailed and incisive posting about those malign and stupid forces that assail us all I have begun to realise just how deep we are in it.

Many thanks also to those kind and great bloggers amongst you who linked to some of my posts: it’s wonderful to receive recommendations and help in spreading my gospel of suburban suspicion, narrow-mindedness and the rule of law in ever-greater circles around the world.

Yet still furthermore extra additional thanks to those who took part once, twice, Three Times A Lady in the Culture Wars – The Culture season (whether I spelled their names correctly or not), and to [almost all] the commentators who took time to write something about my posts, of which some were admittedly in very poor taste or otherwise unwise. I am truly sorry for the hurt caused to some visitors by one post about a particularly vile crime that seems to have attracted a great deal of attention – even if the detractors still don’t seem to recognise my complete condemnation of that very crime. Please note: abusive insistence that I remove or change a post will probably not result in anything like what such people want.

And as for those very few who were entirely abusive or who merely said that I was wrong just because they disagreed with my beliefs but who didn’t provide any counter argument at all …Well, if they look really, really closely then they’ll just about be able to notice me not giving a shit. And so on to 2010.

I hope that 2010 is a good year for you all and yours in your private, health and working lives.

And as for politics?

My friends, in 2010 we have an appointment to keep, haven’t we?

Happy New Year.

North Northwester.