Dear —

Pres(id)ent Discontents

Dear —

First I should thank you very sincerely for your invitation. To be asked to speak at —’s memorial and to celebrate their wonderful, incomparable work is a great honour and I appreciate it. I like to think, and thus delight that the honour has been bestowed upon me as my alter ego rather than my ‘proper’ name, the origin of which, given my (lack of) history, I have never had any real idea. I asked and no-one seemed to know: presumably some border guard - maybe in Hull or Grimsby around 1890 - found it easiest to bestow on my immigrant grandparents one of the few words he (and it would have been he) actually knew. I am, I repeat, delighted: how many of us get to choose what we are called.

I write on July 7 2025. Your invitation is for 2026. The grotesque, half-mad, traitorous, mendacious panjandrum, all the world’s obscenities made sagging, painted flesh, driven by shadowed puppeteers, girdled by paid-off sycophants and the ranks of those who through no more than gullibility and spite have been sub-contracted in their turn, squats upon a once-great country, but that country seems no longer to exist. And if vestiges do remain, by the time I disembark my plane and queue to await my interrogation, the inescapable urgencies of my ageing bladder hopefully suppressed by some sympathetic pill, it is hard to believe that they will not be even further reduced. We shudder at the speed with which the great edifice has been smashed in a brief six months, how can another year not show us infinitely worse.

Americanophilia? Is that a word? I grew up in thrall to America. It’s the Fifties, how not? A master at my prep school (pre-‘public’, you boarded and for me that was from 10-13) had visited Texas and his classroom wall held a souvenired menu, showcasing a vast steak and fries (and all, yes, for a single buck); far beyond our experience but an object of almost erotic imagining in that place of inedible scraps, which gazed down on us as ‘sir’ droned on. Each back cover of the library’s collection of National Geographics bore a full-page ad for Coca-Cola: a bright-red fridge, dripping condensation, its contents a quack remedy, once cut with cocaine, now reborn as bottled zeitgeist.

But that was whitebread WASP America. Flyover people, deplorables (I know, such terms - condescending, apposite - were yet to come). For me, who all too likely came ultimately from some muddy, fearful shtetl but who, since ignorance permits invention, identified not with superstitious peasants but with Judaism’s pre-Shoah urban centres of intellect and commerce - Berlin, Frankfurt, Vienna, Prague - that meant we’re talking New York. (London, with its own large Jewish history, never crossed my mind). So feted in still and moving pictures, the only thing that shocked me when finally I visited was that it came in colour.

What would grow in importance was popular culture: the product of its Black people - rock’n’roll which had finally reached the UK while I trudged through my lessons - and of my lot - which, my sons the doctor and lawyer aside, was all about the movies. Not just the plots and stars, but for me as bonus, the simple nature of the names. I loved the credits, even the lowly. These -ovs and -itches and -witzes.¹ The true promised land, not the one at the arse-end of the Med. To find as a bonus that Kirk Douglas started off as Issur Danielovitch, Edward G. Robinson as Emanuel Goldenberg, Tony Curtis as Bernie Schwartz. And most wondrous of all Lauren Bacall: Betty Joan Perske.² It’s to khalish.

Truth is I was always mostly a bookworm. Movies, tick, jukebox treasures, tick, but books: there are, I am tempted to say, no words. It’s a Jew thing. My first independent purchase at London’s old Foyles Paperback Shop was Norman Mailer’s Advertisements for Myself. We know much more of Norman now (though I would buy him for at least 20 years more) but its collection of philosophizing, reviews and wide-range pontification held a great set of signposts. I followed. Though Mailer (sensing a greater wit) never mentioned, as I recall, he who would become, when finally I found him, my only avowed hero: Lenny Bruce. Now I can see that Mailer would have included him among those he termed ‘white negros’ (think beats and their acolytes, jazz and junkies) but for me he was the way, the truth and whatever else came along the road. Still is, really.

That America (and there is so much more on which I could comment) looks like it’s gone. The movies churn out recycled comics, publishers, terrified of unsanctioned thought, duck and dive and devote themselves to what I too regularly find drivel. My current favourite writers, once All-Americans, don’t even write in English and I tap my fingers, as once I did for US titles to cross the Atlantic, and wait for translations.

But dear — , I’m sorry, I’m wanking on. (Yup, that contact-free variety I can still manage). An old man trying to remember, and what passes for my cultural beliefs is not why I’m writing.

My life - born in 1948, the twig ever-less supportive these days - seems to me to have been a form of arc. From fascism’s seeming death to its certain resurgence. As is its way, the scum has risen yet again, though it has yet to reach any sort of ultimate tide-mark, and the same turds, human and ideological, are bobbing within it.

So what have we always said? Yes: never again. That noble promise, that undoubtedly sincere pledge that this time those most wicked moments of history, whatever their immediate mutation, must not sneak back, and if by some anomaly they do, then we shall not let the the juggernaut, laden with its howling fanatics, proceed. We shall not have our liberties crushed beneath its bloody wheels.

Sorry. It is no anomaly. This is humanity’s story and thus it has always run. Maybe the places where I find slang are painted over-brightly, but such are those to which my eyes are best calibrated. Perhaps they have blinded me to better things, but I score low on hope. It would seem that ‘never again’ is fine, as long as ‘never’ is when it arrives at our door.

My job is to track down and make clear as best I can what is, not what should be. That’s what I do and if I am lucky, it is what I shall still be doing when my head smashes into the keyboard and that, quite literally, will be all he wrote. There is no what should be, said Bruce, only what is. I am incapable of saying him ‘no’. So while ‘never again’ may rank among the most treasured examples of ‘what should be’, it has no access to ‘what is’. We are poor, pitiful creatures, the most of us, and those who take advantage of our weakness know it all too well. Bread and circuses, whips and chains, whatever works.

So when I hear ‘never again’ the line that jumps out at me isn’t that of the freed concentration camp prisoners who according to Wikipedia³ brought it into the world, but The Who’s 1971 anthem ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’. Townshend leaps, Daltry screams, Moon smashes drums (seven years later it would be the last song he played on-stage) and Entwhistle plays anchor. And we extrapolate: our disturbingly real-life Jabba clone may not be Hitler, nor have we yet arrived in 1938, but to steal from their lyrics, surely the ‘new boss’ serves well as a facsimile of the worst of ‘old’ ones.

There is, night continuing to follow day, a question. Never again? OK, to stick with my old-school playlist and borrow from the Small Faces’ debut chart challenger of 1965: whatcha gonna do about it?

Which, my friend, you will be relieved to hear after so long an anabasis, finally brings me within sight of a point.

What I am going to do about it: I fear, I am so deeply ashamed but are you remotely surprised? is that if things stay as they are, let alone become what they undeniably have the protential of being, I must stay this side of the Ditch. A camp is unlikely, but is anything truly unlikely any more? The demons pour from hell, pushing to pass through its portal and each has their own hatred to expedite. There are excuses: my wife’s poor health which means that she needs my help in many ways. There is our dog. She too cannot survive unaided. For what it’s worth my own health is not all it might be and I have no doubt that the masked morons would toss my meds, but I will try neither to lie nor bullshit so enough ‘what should be’, let us return to ‘what is’.

As I wrote a decade ago in my argotico-lexico-memoir Odd Job Man:

I am not a team player. Such seems to have been the characteristic of those who amass slang. We are all solo artistes. No patrons, no academic tenure, no post-graduate slaves.⁴ Some might label this reluctance to take part, this desire to follow one’s self-determined road as cowardice, some might call it courage, but either way I am a volunteer out, far too much influenced by what the author Duncan Fallowell, writing of the real-life original of Waugh’s Sebastian Flyte, terms ‘The failures of nerve in the face of life’s demands and opportunities.’ A therapist would call it masturbatory. An ironist, punning, self-abuse. I hide behind my three gross volumes as once I hid behind my multi-volumed Children’s Encyclopedia with which I built forts as a child and used both for knowledge and entertainment. I am bad at games. Real and figurative. Having discovered that I could never win, never impose my own rules, I abandoned them. This is known in the UK as ‘bad sportsmanship’. I have also regarded it, thus disturbing another British shibboleth, as intelligence. Which tells me in turn that the nature of ‘the game’ is extensive. There are so many things which one cannot win. I choose the one at which I can, even if that is only because so few others wish to play.

But, as ever, that’s no more than words, jawbone, all piss and wind like the barber’s dog. Typical. Hold the bullshit because the answer is so simple: I am a coward.

The heroes of the stories I read at that same school - Bulldog Drummond, Richard Hannay, those kinda two-fisted guys - delighted me but I knew better and cursed myself in the dormitory’s darkness: you’re a weed and a worm and it’s for you that showing the torture implements, maybe just the chamber door, was invented. No need for the maiden or the rack. Your every quaking molecule proves Shakespeare’s comments on cowards dying a thousand times when the heroic, knowing that death is inevitable, have no such terrors. Yes, all that reading has done wonders for your imagination, but do we really care.

Cowardice has informed my life, up to and including what I call my work. If, — , you pull down a copy (I think you have one) of Odd Job Man I think you’ll find it best put there. In a chapter entitled ‘Why Do I Do It’, I state various reasons, among which are: I am a workaholic, a voyeur, a soloist, the weakest of democrats, and, both socially and morally, an escapologist. Other reasons too, more positive, but all those stated seem to me as variations on a theme: little Johnny isn’t very good with people. He doesn’t like argument (he lacks the true believer’s absolutism), he doesn’t like rules (unless he’s laying them down), he doesn’t like company (unless he chose it) and he lives in utter terror of being locked up (whatever form of locks that may require).

Little, or Not So Little Johnny is I fear a Narcissist. Albeit without the looks.

I couldn’t hack it. I couldn’t bear the lack of control. I am the person for whom prison was invented. Not just ‘the noise, my dear, and the people’ (as I say, I’ve done my time in British boarding schools) but the whole idea of suspended autonomy. I’ve never worked in an office nor any form of job. You can’t sell out, I joke defensively, if no-one’s interested in paying you.

Maybe once, and that would be just once, I would challenge an authority, however illicit. Maybe there backstage at JFK, in some squalid room stinking of fear and children’s piss I might face off with the Proud Keepers or Oath Boys, mouthing their monosyllables, too fearful to show anything but their dead eyes, but truly I fear not. The great dread: I know myself too well. ‘If you can take the hot lead enema,’ Lenny Bruce again, ‘then you can cast the first stone.’ As for such enemas, I fear, fuck that, I am absolutely certain, that I am not among those who embrace such painful tests. But first stone? That I can cast, and as it must, it comes straight back at me.

So — , I think I have to say no. I can only apologize for letting you down. There are those I would dearly love to see, to offer them up my stock-in-trade, my words, but you’ll be unsurprised to learn I’ve never gambled and this isn’t the moment to begin. Perhaps things will change, but even were a benificent deity to bring The Bloatentate to his much-deserved climacteric, would a new boss make things better? Or merely render the fascism better imposed.

Never again. Except that it is.

Whatcha gunna do about it? Well…

Brecht. The last time round. I like his poem, but do I qualify, even remotely. If I am ‘banished’, then it is at my own gutless volition, and dictionary-making is not exactly writing.

Yet I too would very much like to write something deemed worthy of being burnt.

1. It dawns on me that this suggests a level of identity, albeit interest rather than politics, that I have never considered. I am and have always been a very assimilated Jew, though who knows how long, if others make the lists, that category may last? I loathe identity politics: the exclusiveness, the self-ordained judges, the smugness and the self-righteousness, the assumption that other than as a sealed, stamped ‘one of us’ you are valueless and your ass is up for any grab. But aged, say ten, this one-boy exception to the school’s racial norms and wholly proud and likely even noisy about it, I can’t pretend that it wasn’t good to see some allies ‘over there’.

2. Many years on I found myself next to Ms Bacall at a counter in London’s great toyshop, Hamleys. A beauty, of course, the voice by which I recognised her, and an undoubtedly genuine floor-length leopard or some such skin. I was of course struck dumb. But then one did not, at least in the UK, approach a goddess. It’s the glow, I guess.

3. an overview is here:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Never_again

4. This is not to impugn those who, some paid but these days volunteers all, have and still offer me new terms and their citations, but the ultimate responsibility, the name on the cover, remains my own.