Monday, May the 2nd, 2011

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Farmers In The Coalition

According to J Edgar Hoover in his 1958 book Masters Of Deceit, “Farmers In The Coalition” is a “typical” title of the kind of Mimeographed pamphlet issued to Communist study groups in the United States during the 1950s. “Written in a simple style and slanted to the average reader”, these publications were used in the “slow and gradual” process of indoctrination that turned previously patriotic Americans into slavish devotees of a Godless ideology.

“Farmers In The Coalition” is also the title of a pamphlet issued by Old Farmer Frack last year, shortly after Cameron ‘n’ Clegg's sun-splattered appearance in the Downing Street garden to announce the formation of the coalition government. Though it is Gestetnered rather than Mimeographed—a small yet important distinction—the mad old farmer's tract is as doctrinaire and as sinister as any screed aimed at the malleable brains of American fellow-travellers half a century ago.

Written in an incoherent style and slanted to the deranged reader, the 2010 edition of “Farmers In The Coalition” ought more accurately be called “Cows In The Coalition”, for Old Farmer Frack presents the case for a number of his bellowing herd to be granted senior positions in the new regime.

“At this critical juncture in our national story,” he writes, in one of his few coherent passages, “Nothing can be more important than that my cows are installed in the great offices of state, from Home Secretary to Foreign Secretary, from Postmaster General to Keeper of the Privy Purse.”

Cynics and conspiracy theorists will suspect that the cows thus empowered would be mere puppets, put in place to further the nefarious, if befuddled, aims of Old Farmer Frack himself. Not so, he argues.

Those who claim that the cows thus empowered would be mere puppets, put in place to further the nefarious, if befuddled, aims I myself harbour within my curdled black worm-riddled heart could not be more wrong! Caligula, who made his horse a consul, is a much-misunderstood Roman Emperor, and one for whom I have a soft spot in my curdled black worm-riddled heart. I will be proud to follow in his wake. I will do all in my power to make sure that when my cow Binky is made Postmaster General, she will lick all the stamps in the land herself, with her rough tongue and copious cow-spittle. Then you shall see real change, of the kind these politicians are always prattling on about.

Old Farmer Frack is less forthcoming about the changes to be ushered in by his other cows, in other ministries. But it hardly matters. In time-honoured fashion, the evil Tories and the hapless Liberal Democrats have crushed beneath their boots the inspiring revolutionary vanguard represented by the mad old farmer and his bellowing cows. Undaunted, he is thought to be working on a new pamphlet, entitled “Other Farmers With Other Cows In Other Coalitions, A Sweeping Historical Perspective”.