Sunday Morning Contentious Rant Show

The BBC have a Sunday morning slot devoted to the Cereal Guy from Memebase.



Cereal Guy has become the apparent mascot of every armchair pundit and loudmouthed "You know what we should do? We ought to ..." windbag going. The type for whom answers always come easily, even though to his consternation nobody ever thanks him for his genius because every single one of those ideas is bigoted, stupid and usually backwards.

In the UK, this man's chosen newspaper would be the Daily Mail, if not The Times. An avid follower of the populist agendas of Rupert Murdoch and Paul Dacre, Cereal Guy lives for such dreadful breakfast cereal shows.

Only recently the show was called "The Big Question," and the themes were all religious with local religious leaders brought in to spout their hateful vomit on the air, the only place they would ever get the chance to grab at ten seconds of faux legitimacy.

The new version is now a lot more secular, by what I saw, but still it's the Two Minutes' Hate stretched out to fill a full programme slot.

The big question I saw them ask this morning was "Should we all spy on each other?" and inevitably they went for the easy targets, "the Muslims" (which they apparently could not separate from the word "terrorists" any more than they can separate the words "homosexual" and "paedophile," "disabled" and "dole scrounger," "child" and "feral monster" and so on).

I could not watch the show for more than five minutes. Some things invite me to put my foot through the screen: Justin Bieber and Rebecca Black, The X Factor, David Camerwrong and George Osborne, and this kind of show.

Oh. I didn't know you wanted my opinion on the big question above, "Should we spy on each other?" Very well, since you asked politely.

HELL NO!

Some reasons, from a not exhaustive list.

1. La Terreur in France.

2. McCarthyist America.

3. The Gestapo in nazi Germany, encouraging German citizens to rat out Jews in hiding.

4. The USSR under Stalin's regime.

5. The Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot's campaign on intellectuals during their reign of terror in Cambodia.

6. The East German Stasi.

7. J Edgar "The Crossdresser" Hoover and his FBI, and his boast "We have a file on everybody."

Some other reasons.

a. People are unreliable witnesses.

b. People can be petty little douchebags.

c. People lie.

d. Even people who, more fool them, trust the police might have some other motive for reporting on "suspicious activity," such as ooh, I dunno, easy reward money.

e. Mission creep.

Sounds like a good idea, doesn't it, reporting on someone that you suspect of molesting children, or who might be preparing for an act of terrorism. Lives will be saved if they're caught before they can commit a crime, right?

Keep telling yourself that, when all you're doing is becoming complicit in a horrid little fascist state, everybody afraid of everything and greedy for a little reward money, all the petty little Winstons betraying their Julias and loving Big Brother.

That boot stamping on a human face forever that Orwell spoke of? That's not your boot. That is your face, though.

And therein ends my contentious cereal guy rant for today.