McCann: The DUP’s lamentable performance during Covid has again been rammed home.

I suspect that one of the reasons it’s proving difficult to drive down the rate of Covid infection more quickly is that thousands of mild-mannered citizens cannot restrain themselves from running into the streets roaring E in anger at the latest warning from some po-faced politician that we’d all better behave ourselves if we don’t want to be blamed for personally instigating the global pandemic.

There have been no major covid scandals that we know of in the South since that Supreme Court justice whose name everybody has forgotten and a mob of his fellow no-goods were rumbled for involvement in a Saturnalian bacchanalia at a golf club in Galway.

Meanwhile, the patience of prim Northerners has been sorely tested by the spectacle of Michelle O’Neill and Arlene Foster wagging their fingers at the Plain People for behaving as if they were members of parties led by Michelle O’Neill or Arlene Foster. From funeral processions to rowdy refusals of face-saving masks, it’s do as we say, don’t mention what we do.

Foster’s crowd are by far the worse.

As may previously have been touched on in these parts, the DUP at Westminster comprises a gaggle of toxic eejits, soiled tramps and beetroot-faced corner-boys spraying clouds of viral droplets in all directions as they swagger and stagger around London, putting decent cockneys at imminent risk. At least the rabble which descended on the Capitol in Washington looked interesting.

One of the reasons DUPers keep inflicting themselves on London is so they can ponce off British taxpayers under the deceit of “expenses.” They could all work from home via the magic of Zoom. But then they wouldn’t be able to stuff public money into the back pockets of their shiny-arsed trousers.

The only thing anybody knows about Strangford MP Jim Shannon is that he topped the MPs’ expenses list in two of the last four years. There’s 650 MPs at Westminster, but none to match Jim when it comes to scrabbling for dosh. It’s rumoured he once asked a Parliamentary Question. Probably to do with a delay in his meal allowance coming through.

Sammy Wilson never misses a chance to sneer at people who wear masks. But he claimed £48.50 last May for a mask which he chortled he needed for “face-to-face meetings.” Sammy leaves a trail of infection in his wake everywhere he goes, like the silvery track of a slug on a kitchen floor in the morning.

When the leader of the Scottish Nationalists at Westminster, Ian Blackford, cautioned MPs that the Tories’ botched Brexit could lead to food shortages, Sammy cackled, “Go down the chippie, then,” before collapsing from mirth in a puddle of his own fat.

“What have we done to you?” moaned woebegone Paisley to the pokerfaced Tory benches, after all the lives Unionist leaders had cheered their followers into giving in service of Empire.

“Pro tanto quid retribuamus,” runs the motto of Belfast. For so much, what shall we be given in return? And there’s the essence. The ferocious loyalty of the unionist people has never been reciprocated by the Brit ruling class. Same as anywhere they press-ganged people into following the flag to pitiless doom. Blood spilt and treasure spent, they are left to wander in the desert of their own aspirations.

Well may they rage at the way they’ve been codded. Not unlike the Trump irreconcilables howling that their patriotism has accounted for nothing, abandoned on the battlefield by commanders who turn out no better than yellow-belly Yanks.

Trump suffered the humiliation of being dropped by a slew of rock superstars at the end. Prince, Tom Petty, Ozzie Osbourne arose from the dead (I know) to demand he stop mishandling their tunes. He should have chosen a more appropriate theme-song, such as Alan Jay Lerner’s 1961 smash, ‘How Could You Believe Me When I Told You That I Loved You When You Know I’ve Been A Liar All My Life?’

Eartha Kitt had a great version of the Lerner classic. Way back in January 1968, she was invited to a lunch at the White House for women who’d made their mark. Afterwards, the woman President Johnston was married to, Lady Bird, asked if anyone wanted to say a few words about how to end “juvenile delinquency.”

Eartha immediately suggested that some young men wanted criminal records so they’d be excluded from the draft.
“Boys I know across the nation feel it doesn’t pay to be a good guy. They figure with a record they don’t have to go off to Vietnam. You send the best of this country off to be shot and maimed. They rebel in the street. They will take drugs and they will get high. They don’t want to go to school because they’re going to be snatched off from their mothers to be shot in Vietnam.

“I am a mother and I know the feeling of having a baby come out of my guts. I have a baby and then you send him off to war. No wonder the kids rebel…”

This was a few months after Muhammed Ali had refused the draft - “No Viet Cong ever called me a n-----.”
Eartha, a black woman from a Carolina plantation, made her statement in the White House itself. It should be better remembered, as indeed should Eartha Kitt.