Wimmin

OK, so here’s a warning.  The following will be the complete antithesis of what’s supposed to be posted on a website.  It contains no emojis, no LOLs, and although it’s not finished yet, there’s a pretty strong possibility there won’t be a single exclamation mark, let alone three in a row.  So you can go wash the dishes instead safe in the knowledge there’s nothing here of interest or value.  And that’s just fine.

Have you noticed how many of the countries that have handled the virus reasonably well – New Zealand, Germany, Iceland, Taiwan, Denmark, Finland, Norway as examples, have women leaders?  Conversely, two of the worst performers, the US and the UK, have men with a hugely inflated sense of their own self importance but very little else.

So why do the wimmin make a better job of something that calls for tough leadership than all those alpha males with their BSDs?  Let’s posit some ideas.

When god created man she made a huge mistake in the blueprint and incorporated a really bad design fault.  She saddled us males with an ego.  Can you think of a single woman in public service that suffers from it?  No, me either.  Possibly Priti Patel, but that’s more of a nasty streak than ego.  Margaret Thatcher, you’ll scream.  Whether you agreed with her or not, she was a titan of the late 20^th century, but she wasn’t egotistical.  Adamant her ideas were correct.  Yes.  Disdainful of lesser mortals.  Yes.  Uncaring of others’ suffering.  Yes.  But egotistical.  Nah.  She didn’t care whether you liked her or not, she just wanted to get things done.  Her way.

On the other hand, Johnson and the Orange Ignoramus have nothing but ego.  No tangible achievements from many decades of living that indicate they are well suited to the exalted positions their egos demand they deserve.  Johnson completed a classics degree and wrote some newspaper columns. Not exactly Bill Gates or Steve Jobs territory is it?  Or even Alan Sugar come to that.  Not so much as a note in the margins that he’d managed the proverbial whelk stall. Yet in his head he’s just the man to see us through a global crisis. 

Trump?  Self made billionaire right?  Hardly.  Given a fortune by his dad, he is famously the only man to bankrupt himself running a casino. But hey, Dad bailed him out again, so that’s OK and never mind all the people he stiffed in the process.  Now? We don’t know exactly what he’s worth because he’s afraid to show us his tax returns, but I’d offer you 50-1 that he is actually worth the square root of bugger all.  All his ‘wealth’ is money borrowed from Russian oligarchs. No wonder he sucks up to Putin – if the loans get called in Trump goes back to being a nobody facing jail time.  Again, absolutely no record to indicate he’s up to the job.  As indeed his rambling, incoherent and rabid covid briefings have demonstrated very well.

But the women.  Do you remember that wonderful song by the late and much lamented (here, anyway) Ian Dury called ‘There ain’t ‘alf been some clever bastards’?  In it the Bard of Upminster serenades some great achievers – Noel Coward, Einstein, Van Gogh, yet adds the insight that these great geniuses probably all had help from their mum.

And there’s the rub.  Your dad might have worn the trousers and been full of manly bluster, but it was your mum who got things done.

So the Johnson apologists will argue that he’s doing a jolly good job in the circumstances.  Here’s a not very well kept secret – look at deaths per capita – he’s not, he’s doing terribly.  On the rare occasions he bothers to show up for work it’s all “er, um, waffle, um, Blitz spirit, er, waffle, Dunkirk, um, common sense.”. And would that be the same common sense that put him in intensive care?  Why does 50% of the UK population think this is acceptable from their so called leader? Out of his depth in a puddle.

And when you’re awake at 3:00am worrying about your future, look into your soul and ask yourself, honestly, would you not feel just a little better if it was boring old Auntie Angela Merkel in charge of it?

Still, she’d probably be crap on Have I got News For You so has no chance of being elected in the UK.

Elections have consequences, and if we continue to vote for incompetent populist charlatans of either party just because they are characters, we shouldn’t be surprised when they screw up the difficult stuff.  BC, Before Covid, it was just our money they were spaffing away with their ineptitude.  But now our mums and dads, indeed us, could actually die from their incompetence.

And on that happy note. 

Anon, Edgers.