When you turn 60, a lot happens, particularly for someone like me. On my 60th birthday, Sting left a special new version of his song Every Breath You Take on my voicemail*, the Mayor of London gave me my free bus pass, and I got a letter from the NHS asking me to send a sample of my poo through the post. They even included a little kit to do it with.
To me, it seemed ungenerous to send the tiny amount they asked for, so I posted them about a kilo and a half. Then I noticed at the last minute that the return address for the poo wasn’t some NHS laboratory as I’d first thought but was, in fact, Jacob Rees-Mogg’s house. What, I wondered, did Jacob Rees Mogg want with so much old man poo?
Well, in Jewish mystical mythology there exists the tale of ‘The Golem’. The most famous account of The Golem comes from the late 16th century and concerns the Rabbi of Prague, Judah Loew ben Bezalel, who reportedly made a creature out of clay from the river banks and brought it to life through the use of spells, rituals, and incantations.
Explanations for why he did this vary. Some say he wanted to defend the Prague ghetto from antisemitic pogroms; others that he simply wished for a slave to do his bidding. Whatever the rabbi’s motives, in nearly all versions of the story he loses control of his creation, and the Golem eventually goes on a murderous rampage destroying all before him.
That’s what I think Jacob Rees-Mogg and his right-wing friends – the billionaire paper owners, the rapacious bankers, the weapons manufacturers, and the cowardly TV and radio pundits – have done: they’ve created a creature using spells, rituals, and incantations out of all that elderly bloke poo, and the name of that creature is Boris Johnson. They think they can control it, but they can’t because it’s profoundly evil, and cruel, and malevolent, and if its let loose it will destroy us all.
So if you don’t want to be governed by an evil creature made entirely out of shit, Vote Labour on 12 December.
(*no he didn’t)
Featured image via Alexei Sayle and Wikimedia/Rwendland
