Are Britain's politicians turning politics into a subject of mockery, a kind of Brechtian farce.

 

Jake Austin

I've just received the Election Booklet for the Greater Manchester Mayoral Election 2024 and I pissed myself laughing when I read this.

The Liberal Democrats have nominated a comic strip character called Jake Austin, a Stockport councillor, as their Mayoral candidate. Jake's a 29-year-old 'project manager', whatever that is. He used this picture in his election address. The caption under the photograph reads: "Jake at home with his husband Andy, and their Corgi, Ritchie." Two of Jake's pledges are "tackling the sewage dumping crisis in our rivers" and "protecting everyone in our region (minorities) against harassment." Jake says: "Greater Manchester deserves real leadership" and this clown, with his pet dog Ritchie, believes that he can offer that real leadership. He's certainly not Napoleon. Unbelievable! You couldn't make it up. I wouldn't put him in charge of running a whelk stall. He could be a character straight out of a play by Bertolt Brecht or Monty Python.

In Brecht's 'parable play', called 'The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui', Arturo, a fictional 1930s Chicago mobster, tries to take control of the cauliflower trust (I wouldn't trust Jake to run that properly). The play is a satirical allegory of Hitler's rise to power, his Nationalist Socialist state and the disintegration of democracy in Germany.  Brecht referred to Hitler, as 'der Anstreicher' ("the House painter") and Arturo is a parody of Hitler. When Arturo comes knocking on the door of Mayor Dogsborough (Paul von Hindenburg), to blackmail him, the Mayor tells him, "there's no spoon long enough to sup with you Arturo."  Unfortunately, Hindenburg did sup with Hitler and thought he could control him and so did the German army. The German Communists and Socialists who could have united to defeat Hitler, but didn't do so, seemed to see the Nazi's as a temporary aberration before it was too late to stop them.

Being a Marxist and an opponent of Hitler, and married to a Jewish woman, the Nazis would've murdered Brecht if they could've got their hands on him but he left the country the day after the Reichstag fire. Before Hitler came to power, the Nazi Brownshirts in 1930, were trying to disrupt performances of Brecht's play 'The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny' which they eventually banned in 1933. They denounced it as a Marxist play.

Today, The Alabama-Song, which comes from Mahagonny', is the probably the only thing that most people know about this play. The song was covered by the Doors and David Bowie. It was even covered by Marilyn Manson, but I prefer the version by Jim Morrison and The Doors.