No matter what you and I think of the rest of Boris Johnson, whose personality embraces bits of both the diabolic Joker (Jack Nicholson or Heath Ledger playing him) and “akratic” (his description, in his only novel, of a character much like him), his United Nations General Assembly speech made history (of sorts), and the rest of his Prime Ministership is just a footnote. (I hope it will be a short one).
I speak only of the literary, imaginative, and comic merits of his speech, and its being sui generis, a speech so different from every non-Borisy political speech that has preceded it in U.N. historry that it deserves an award. Boris may have lied to the Queen and to the public, and may be an undemocratic despot, and a spoilt rich kid who went to the right schools, but he is also a kind of artist, a craftsman of words, unlike his hero Donald Trump. If the U.N. speech was a rant, it was a rant after my own heart, and which reminds me of rants in the novel All About H. Hatterr (a truly astounding novel full of cunning verbal stunts, though I read it well after completing my novel, The Revised Kama Sutra: in the last two years, 2017 and 2018, in fact. Here are some random bits from Johnson’s prophetic as well as droll speech:
“Takes real effort to conceal your thoughts from Google, ”
[Well, you could always tell Google the opposite of what you’re thinking, and maybe thus, confuse it. You could watch, or at least turn on and pretend to watch transvestite porn, when in fact you prefer straight porn. Also, if you’re writer meaning to express your thoughts, what if Google deliberately conceals them from the public?]
“With the grim finality of an emperor in the arena”
“A future Alexa will pretend to take orders.
But this Alexa will be watching you,
Clucking her tongue and stamping her foot.”
“Are we doomed to a cold and heartless future ….”
“Or will it bring terrifying limbless chickens to our tables.”
Here, I pause to imagine a future without chicken feet and drumsticks and think, why not, I don’t like drumsticks too much anyway. And why be terrified of birds that have been cooked and brought to our tables?
But it’s not that Boris Johnson really spends his nights having nightmares about limbless chickens. This is just Boris Johnson the comedian launching into hyperbole and having fun for himself and the his audience, the “in” crowd and the privileged elite, while also telling the world and history: “See what I can make of a UN speech? See how I can make the world take notice of me as a standup comedian at possibly the most august podium on the planet?”
His speech exhibits the freedom and playfulness that I so admire in American novelist Thomas Pynchon. And in certain chapters of Joyce’s Ulysses.
And so, I award him The Revised Kama Sutra award for the most tongue-in-cheek speech ever delivered to a solemn and pompous, but temporarily baffled audience.
I wish the Prime Minister, for our sake and his sake, be promoted to a newly created post such as Lord Chief Debater, Speechmaker, and Highbrow Joker. Because his passionate enthusisasm for Brexit is no joke, but is putting lives at risk–just as Trump’s rather crude jokes put other lives at risk. Whereas as Lord Chief Speechmaker of the Universe, all he can do is entertain–or not.