Bugle 4156 - Statuesque

Imagine the world wasn't like it is.

Well, I mean, there'd still be that guy, and that guy, and the one who needs the eye test.

But there's also sexy literature.

It's not until her shirt is coincidentally ripped open during a fight with the winged wivens of the northern wastes, revealing her creamy breasts, that Dermian realises the archer he has been befriending is his left-behind love.

Water.

Cravings, hunger, a deep aching longing.

Try half a glass of water.

It won't fix everything, but it'll help a bit.

Jim's Gym and Gymnasium.

Have you been pumping your booty?

Booties are in.

They used to be out, but now they're in, by which I mean to say they should stick out.

That's good now.

Join me, Alice Fraser, on The Last Post.

It's like the bugle, but shorter, hornier, weirder, and dailier.

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello, Buglers.

It's Friday, the 12th of June, 2020.

Britain is in a record-breaking slump.

Donald Trump is treating America like a spoiled child's unwanted Christmas Lego set.

Everyone is arguing with everyone else about everything.

And I think the virus now is getting close to complacency, which I think has been our government strategy all along in Britain.

Just wait until it can't be asked anymore because there's no challenge.

But the bugle is still here.

The bugle is here.

I am Andy Zoltson.

This is issue 4156 of the world's leading and only audio newspaper for a visual world.

Don't forget, if you're listening immediately, by which I mean on Saturday the 13th of June,

tonight at 8pm UK time is the inaugural Bugle Live live-streamed live quiz.

It's a genuine quiz with genuine factual answers.

That's a fact, even if some of those answers are about fictional things.

It will be live on YouTube, Twitch, Facebook.

Anything else, Chris?

That depends how well my planning goes between this record and that time.

Right, okay.

So, I mean, let's assume that it is going to happen and it's going to work.

It will also be available, not live, afterwards.

Quite how you're going to submit your answers.

That's still slightly up in the air.

But anyway, do tune in either live or retrospectively, depending on when you listen to this.

This is, as I said, issue 4156.

Coincidentally, the number of separate reasons for taking down the statue of Robert Clive, which currently stands outside the Foreign Office in London and also the predicted number of times 4156 that two people can say the lines but it's erasing our history and no it's obviously not doing that before they have to end a conversation and have a snack more of which later in the show and joining me this week are Nish Kumar

from from London now Nish you have just been the recipient of some science yeah Andy I'm I'm committing to satire by living out a news story.

I had a COVID test right up my nose.

They take a very long, thin, cotton bud q-tip for American listeners,

and then they shove it down your throat.

For British listeners, you're gob.

And yeah, so it goes down the throat

and then they shove it up your nose.

Now,

a lot of people have been saying, you know, a lot of people are saying it's incredibly uncomfortable and it hurts a lot.

What I would say is, you know,

it feels fine.

And then there's a point where it goes a bit further than anything has ever really gone in your life.

And you start to feel it in your eye.

Now, it was mild discomfort for me.

And a lot of people have complained of quite heavy discomfort.

And I didn't really feel it.

And what I now realise is there's quite a bit more of my nose.

to go up than most people's nose.

There's quite a lot.

There's quite a lot.

There's quite further, it's got further to travel and so that may be why I've not

had to

experience it.

It was also part of a regularly scheduled

appointment that I have with the doctors and what that means, Andy, is I have looked a man in the eye and handed him a bottle of my own piss today.

And nothing makes me feel more alive than passing urine to a stranger.

Nothing makes me feel more in control of my destiny than handing over a vial of my own urine to a medical professional and say, have a look at that, do your worst.

A moving story in these troubled times.

And joining us from the west coast of the world's silliest country, it's NATO Green.

Hello, Andy.

Sorry, what's that?

I can't hear you.

There are helicopters everywhere.

It's mayhem here.

I'm about to chuck a Mozotov cocktail into a police van.

Take that, you coppers!

Protesters and police seem to be.

What are they doing right now?

It's a breakoff.

There's a break dancing battle on the roof of a burning bus right now.

A patrol officer just brought out his own linoleum for a snappy knee spin.

The social, it turns out that Sergeant McGillicuddy is not as good as break dancing as a group of young black people and socialists.

They are doing synchronized popping and locking.

I think they will prevail.

Oh, I love a bit of popping and locking.

That was easily

my favourite TV comedy double act of the 1970s.

But obviously, some of their work is a little dated.

Now,

we're recording on the 12th of June.

On this day in the year 1381, the peasants' revolts in England reached Blackheath, now in south east London,

before then storming the city over the the following couple of days.

The revolt, the Peasants' Revolt, was provoked, if I may oversimplify for a moment, by a combination of disease, economic inequality, poor leadership, tension with Europe and anger about exploitation.

Isn't history a smug repetitive bastard?

On this day in 1817, the earliest form of bicycle known as the dandy horse was driven by its inventor Carl von Dreys.

Years later, von Dreys admitted to systematic use of steroids and blood doping products when inventing the bicycle and the dandy horse was retrospectively banned.

Also, on this...

Chris, you're nodding there

as a cycling fan.

Have you ever ridden a dandy horse?

I mean, yes.

I mean, I ride a dandy horse every day.

I am a dandy horse.

Also, on this day in history, lots of people did lots of really awful things, but you wouldn't know it to look at the sculptures of them.

Geez, something.

As always the section of the bugle is going straight in the bin this week.

We've had the launch of the PlayStation 5 games console.

We review some of the

new hots and some very topical games that have been launched alongside the new console including EA Protest Statue Toppler 2021, Steve Bannon's Bile Blaster 14 and Dominic Cummings Bareface Bullshit 6.1.

Some terrific games for your new console so look out for Scluton Malvain's Angry Chef 3.

Those cleavers are more realistic than ever.

And also, we look at some of the rival consoles to the PlayStation to help keep you and your loved ones and your brain distracted from the harrowing realities of lockdown reality, including the Flunky Tech Brain Squelcher, the Myth Muddler Deludax 6G, and the Vega MegaWap, all excellent at cocooning your children from reality for those crucial developmental years.

That section in the bin.

Top story this week, America still angry.

NATO, you are quite literally in America as we speak.

You've described the scenes of mayhem.

How is the break dance off going?

The officers are doing the worb now.

All right.

So

there's been some progress.

Look, Andy,

last month I was on and we had some fun jokes about the 10 plagues.

We have a pandemic, we have an economic crisis.

Remember our amusing chat about murder hornets?

Oh, you get it.

Now we have nationwide martial law, police riots, and a worldwide insurrection against racism.

What else you got, 2020?

Bring it on.

Oh, wildfires too?

That's it.

F you.

We're leaving it all on the field this year.

We're getting done.

We're doing all of the history this year, and then we're done.

So,

it's,

Andy, you and I are very similar.

We're both Jewish comics, we're both about the same age, we're both dads, we're married to people who are more educated than us, and we're both most known for our more famous friends.

The difference is that, as you said on the bugle last week, as all hell breaks loose, like you're the kind of person who seeks comfort and shelter in 50-year-old cricket sports stats and puns.

I, on the other hand, have never felt so alive.

My veins are on fire.

For a revolutionary like me, this is my time.

It makes my dick hard.

So it's amazing.

When they build a statue of you, NATO, for the future generations to topple, when they look back at what you've said on this show, that will be inscribed on it.

It makes my dick hard.

Let me tell you, like, I'm so excited.

I have so much to say.

What I'm about to say could be profound or a suicide note.

I don't know.

First of all,

in America right now, no one is in charge.

There are no adults in the room.

We are completely off the map.

Every current politician has been reduced to incoherent shivering like a hairless terrier on a trampoline.

There have been protests in all 50 states, 140 cities against racist police violence following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

Day after day of mass disruption, tens of thousands of people out, National Guard in 20 states, six people killed by police subsequently.

You may ask,

how did this come about?

Well, there are 40 million unemployed people who've been stuck at home for three months, scared and anxious.

There's no leadership, there's no sport, there's no religion, no other activity that we would normally have to distract and occupy and placate us.

We have finished the internet.

So there's no, how many more times can you watch the director's cut of Lord of the Rings before, like, we've just reached, it's either bake bread or overthrow the government.

And those are the only options now left to the other.

You can marry Antoinette territory there, isn't it?

So George Floyd was killed on May 25th by the police in Minneapolis.

Two days earlier on May 23rd, noted black power periodical The Economist

ran a story.

And the article said, whatever happened to Black Lives Matter, no one cares anymore.

Which will rank as one of the most prescient and prophetic news headlines since the Washington Post 1979 headline describing rap music as a short-lived fad.

Sorry, The Economist, life comes at you fast.

Are you familiar with the idea of the Overton window?

This is like the, it refers to the range of acceptable political discourse.

And on the issue of racist police, the Overton window has not just moved, it's packed its bag, it's moved across the country, it's gone to another house it's opened up a co-op it's making its own kombucha it's playing tuba in a marching band its old friends and family are like come back overton window we miss you we want to get back to the war on drugs and the overton window just says you you never understood me uh

i i don't know if you have i have spent time in latin america and what is happening in the united states right now reminds me of that like just no pretense that there's a functioning society like it's very refreshing actually you you arrive in a town and you're like oh my god what happened?

Why is there no clean water supply?

And people go, oh, yeah, the government sold it so they could buy the president's son a catapult.

So,

but because of my time.

Just don't say these things out loud,

you know that Boris Johnson and Donald Trump both listen to this podcast assiduously.

We can't take these risks to make these things, but say these things out loud.

Some people are afraid that we're on the verge of fascism, that Trump is about to suspend democracy, hold a coup d'etat, and install a military junta.

I think Trump will have difficulty pulling off a coup d'etat because he doesn't believe in French.

Because of my time in Latin America, no matter how bad things get in the U.S., I think, are there literal CIA trained and armed death squads disappearing entire villages?

No, then we haven't hit bottom.

Trump is so inadequate to the task of uniting a troubled nation with the cities of Burning, there's a temptation to make comparisons to Nero, but at least Nero could fiddle.

Trump raged, tweeting, complaining about female journalists he found unattractive while crouched on the toilet, trying to squeeze a jigger of urine around his cantaloupe prostate, while America Burn doesn't have quite the staying power, does it?

Trump

threatened to wear a t-shirt.

Trump threatened to deploy the military to cities whose leaders were unable to contain the violence themselves and then threatened to designate Antifa as a terrorist organization.

We now have a new frontrunner for the whitest shit in history, which is asking to speak to the manager of Antifa.

Antifa is not an organization that has like articles of incorporation and a board of directors and a postal box.

They don't have a convention in a conference room at the Radisson where they make decisions by Robert's Rules of Order, parliamentary procedure.

Sir, gentlemen, we have a resolution to punch Nazis in the face.

Can I get a second?

It's an abstract concept.

It's like designating Goths as a terrorist organization.

Just because you're not into it, doesn't mean Black Eyeliner and the Cure is Al-Qaeda.

Oh my God, what have I done?

I have like three more pages of notes here.

Keep going.

Keep going.

Trump is relaunching campaign rallies and to ensure safety in light of the COVID exposure from an indoor rally packed ass to mouth with the heaving throng of bigots and zealots, the Trump campaign is adopting additional sensible safety precautions like requiring attendees to sign a liability waiver so that you can't sue the campaign if you get coronavirus virus at the rally.

Now, you might dismiss this as a stupid idea, but think of all the ways that not suing Trump will keep people from getting COVID.

They won't have to physically go to court to file the legal complaint.

They won't have to sit in the conference room up close during a deposition.

And if you claim you have COVID in a lawsuit, you have to prove it by drooling violently on

opposing counsel until they get COVID.

And that's called habeas corpus.

So now we can avoid that hassle.

See, there's a lot of benefits.

It's quite interesting

having to sign a waiver so that they can't sue if they get COVID at a rally of the man who basically facilitated and encouraged the spread of the disease.

Is this just

peak Trumpian America?

It can't go much further up.

I mean, he couldn't really lay his cards more firmly on the table than saying, You cannot sue us if you get the disease that we have spread.

I mean, he couldn't lay his card.

I mean, the cards he's laid on the table, he's basically put his hand down and said, I've got five kings, six aces, a magic penguin, and a giant Pokemon G XXX card of me humping a naked meow stick.

I mean, that basically, and when you say you signed a waiver, by voting for Trump, basically, America just signed a waiver to fucking everything.

yeah well but then I don't think we should go down that rabbit hole Andy because that's like that's not like a bet that's a lot of America had that waiver signed for them against their explicit consent

Andy now you say that he couldn't uh that he couldn't lay his on the his cards on the table more but in fact he did

because

I don't know if you caught this detail about Trump's campaign rally, but the first campaign rally is on June 19th, which is deliberately chosen.

It is Juneteenth.

It celebrates the day that slaves found out that they were free at the end of the Civil War.

So it is as though he laid his cards on the table and then set the entire table on fire.

And then he's holding the rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which is the site of the biggest race riot in American history in 1921, when white people were so angry that a black man whistled at a white woman that they brought fighter planes to bomb a neighborhood.

So that's Trump for you.

Kamala Harris, the former Democratic presidential candidate, tweeted of this rally.

This isn't just a wink to white supremacists.

He's throwing them a welcome home party.

Now, I don't know if you have ever tussled with police or I have been arrested for protesting many times.

A lot of the conflict with police has has to do with their impatience.

Like they say, go do something, you've got to do something.

And you say no.

And then they get all macho jacked up and demand that you obey.

And then they start beating you.

Once when I got arrested during the Iraq war, we all went limp.

And so the police came and they tried to pull me up and I went limp.

And then they just took my hand so gently and they said, if you don't walk out of here, we're going to break your wrist.

And then they started to break my wrist.

Well, at least they were honest about it.

It gave you a little heads up.

And that's what's great

about.

The ultimate cop defender.

That's what's great about being white, is that you get a 10-second warning before they break your wrist.

It's only a wrist as well.

Come on.

So, what cops don't seem to want to figure out is that most of those problems can be solved by waiting.

Like, the protesters won't clear out because they're sitting in.

At some point, someone's going to have to pee.

Someone's freaking out, keep a safe distance so they don't hurt anyone else, and then they'll get to get sleepy.

So, the demand has been to defund the police.

Some people are saying abolish the police.

And,

you know, in some cities in America, the police department takes up more than 50% of the city budget.

And then, you know, people want to shift funding to social workers and mental health services and things of that nature.

And it's fascinating to

see the the kind of the debate about the nuances of the detail.

Some people believe that anything less than immediately requiring all cops to eat my entire asshole and then fire them into the sun is a sell-out position if it's not that.

And then on the other hand, we have National Democrats like Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi who are offering the big ideas the moment requires like more training.

That what they they saw the video of that cop killing George Floyd and thought, yeah, you know what that man really needs is a seminar.

The protests themselves have been bananas.

I don't know like how much you're seeing about the details of the protests.

Like, okay, March is cool.

Set a police car on fire, but oh, what's that?

A cavalry of black horsemen.

That's awesome.

Didn't even know that was on the menu.

Seattle protesters had escalating confrontations with the police until they routed police out of a neighborhood, occupied City Hall, and declared the Capitol Hill neighborhood the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, or CHAS.

Chaz is short for Charles, the Capitol Hill Autonomous Region of Lower East Seattle, of course.

Fox News is incensed.

Right-wing media and Twitter is having a field day.

President Trump is threatening to invade Seattle to restore order.

And

I went and looked at some pictures and videos from Chaz.

It's disgusting, lawless, and decadent.

People turning public parks into farms and growing food on them, drawing art on the sidewalk in chalk, teaching each other about harm reduction and self-care.

And if you can believe this they actually watched the documentary Paris is burning about the gay voguing scene in New York in the late 80s it's documentary art learning it's a slippery slope I tell you that will lead to listening and learning and empathy and this will not stand

and my favorite thing is public comment I don't know if you have this in the UK but in the states often they're at government hearings they're required to allow public comment and so you get one or two, sometimes three minutes to say your piece.

And frequently, there's like an obscure cable channel that airs the public comment.

And this was my bit.

Like I would go and do public comment at hearings.

And as a comic, it's great because you get to watch the hearing.

And then you get to roast your political adversaries to their fing faces

in a situation where no one agreed that there was going to be comedy happening.

So it's really fun.

And so, but the American people are just going off at public comment.

Like, there's public comment video after public comment video just of people screaming, f ⁇ you to police.

Like, there was a guy at L.A.

Police Commission hearing, and this video, a new American hero, called in.

I just want to read you a list of some of the things that have been said

in public comment.

In San Francisco, there was a hearing about the police budget, and there were nine hours of public comment.

that stretched to three in the morning and the police commissioners had to sit and listen the entire time to person after person.

And here are some things that people actually said to the government in the hearings.

Choke on a dick and die.

Losers, get a job, learn to code.

Could you possibly be more of a bunch of failures?

F you.

I yield my time.

These killer cops have gotten away

with murder.

And instead of life in prison, they're now getting a shorter sentence, which is choke on a dick and die.

So finally, I will will say

Trump is, the polling has on this, finally, I will say that the polling has swung dramatically.

Public support for Black Lives Matter has jumped 25% in the last two weeks.

So right now, Trump is polling at 42%.

Joe Biden is polling at 46%.

And

there is 54% support in the United States for literally burning down a police station in Minneapolis.

So burning down the police is more popular than either president candidate for president.

So which raises the obvious question that if 54% of people support burning down a police station, what are the views of the other 46%?

And I dug into it.

12% said don't burn down the police station.

And 23% said, why only burn one police station, burn them all?

5%

said stack all the police stations on top of each other and then tip them over.

And then there were 6% who said, I wanted to burn the police station and you took it away from me.

So that's the state of America right now.

Right.

So we can look forward,

if the polling continues, we can look forward to President Burning Police Station being inaugurated in January in the most incendiary inauguration speech ever seen.

The country's finally feeling the burn.

They're just feeling a different burn.

It's a very exciting time for me, personally.

White people have recently discovered that racism is bad.

Some of us learned that the hard way a few years ago, but I am really genuinely excited to bring whiteies over into the fold.

People have been observing

things like sort of Blackout Tuesday where they didn't reply to any emails because they were thinking about racism.

And that lasted for a day, which I think we can all agree is definitely enough time to grasp the historical complexities of institutionalised systems.

That is a national record niche.

Don't just bat it off.

And it was very exciting for me yesterday to see another video of some Hollywood celebrities engaging with racism.

It was a video where lots of different Hollywood celebrities said that they take responsibility for racism.

It's an odd old affair.

I mean

I would argue it was it's a I mean look this the bit where Bryce Dallas Howard personally apologizes for ignoring police brutality is very surprising because I did not know that she I mean she's responsible for some bad things.

The Jurassic World movies suck, sure, but I didn't realize she was also complicit in systematic police violence towards African Americans.

The bit where Stanley Tucci apologises for laughing at racist jokes.

How many racist jokes you've been laughing at Toochie?

What parties have you been attending, Toochi?

I've got to admit, we did not know that that was happening at all.

But the biggest relief is that earlier this week, it was promised by Ben Carson, the brain surgeon, and those words need to be restated as often as possible, especially immediately after you've heard Ben Carson say anything.

Ben Carson, the neurosurgeon, the pediatric, the man who operates on children's brains, was trotted out to say that President Trump was going to deliver a speech on racism and that speech was going to be delivered by Stephen Miller, a man who looks like the villain in an upcoming Disney film, but also the hero in a Disney film that's recently been pulled off of a streaming service.

Now,

a sweet relief about all of this is that that speech, thus far, and I'm not saying he's not going to do it, there's obviously a time difference,

thus far that speech has not materialized, which is the only piece of good news to happen in the last half decade, that Donald Trump did not give a speech about possibly the only thing that could make the situation worse is if Donald Trump delivered a speech on racism written by Stephen Miller.

They are the Lennon and McCartney of white nationalism, right?

That is not what anyone needs.

And I think at this point, we have to submit Donald Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize for the time he didn't give a speech about racism.

Martin Luther King had a dream and we heard about it and it was great.

Donald Trump Trump presumably also had a dream, but we did not hear about it, which is a relief because it was probably as racist as it was disgusting.

Well, here in Britain, we've been,

well, as you say, Dish, somewhat belatedly finally starting to examine

the influence of racism in this country, the role it still plays and our slave trading past.

Just after we recorded last week and I suggested melting down

statues from questionable historical eras and turning them into puppies, the public of Bristol took a different attitude and tore down a sculpture of Edward Colston,

a slave trader from the 17th and 18th centuries, and lobbing it into the harbour.

Since then, various statues have been removed, toppled, daubed with varying degrees of justification, some mostly very justified.

And

it's odd, isn't it?

Because as a country, we are obsessed with our own history, but only a version of it that is wrong.

So there's a famous saying that the past is a foreign country, and ironically, it's the only foreign country that we're actually positive about in Britain.

Albeit that we don't really, we only go to the touristy bits and don't actually learn what life was really is really like there.

Another famous saying, those who fail to learn the lessons of history are condemned to repeat them.

And I don't think we're failing to learn the lessons of history.

But what we do is we actively choose to ignore the lessons of history.

And then we're condemned to be a bit surprised when people tell us what actually happened in history.

The historian William Dalrymple, who's written a lot about, in particular about the East India Company and the history of Britain's relationship with India, said there is in Britain a vast ignorance of our own history.

But I don't think that's right.

I think it's not so much a vast ignorance as an active delusion about

our history,

as

we've seen played out this week.

A lot of people have been drawing a comparison between the year 2020 and the film The Joker.

And I have to agree, because I think this year is exactly like The Joker in that I think it's fing awful and it's barely halfway through and I wish this shit was fing over, right?

It's an exhausting year and at this point, Outlook, Gmail, whatever the email servers need to club together and program or do something to the algorithm that gives us a new email template that starts, hello, I hope this email finds you well, apart from all of the everything, and yours faithfully slash in hope that you're not murdered by a disease or police violence.

It's I only just realized that this year is the same year that in the movie A Quiet Place, an alien invasion happens in 2020.

That's when it happens.

And an alien invasion happens that means that people all have to hide indoors and not make any sound.

sound and I'm not saying that the actual 2020 is worse but what I am saying is that if we had to be silent all the time I wouldn't have to listen to people saying all lives matter and this lockdown is for pussies and this week I would not have had to listen repeatedly to people say I think it is a fantastic idea that we have statues of slave traders in our cities now The defense of these statues is two-pronged.

There's a lot of people saying, well, isn't this a part of our past?

And that's not the question you should be asking.

The question you should be asking is, why was there a f ⁇ ing statue of a slave trader here in the first place?

Another prong is that people say, well, the thing is,

this is how you learn about it.

This is how you learn about the past and Britain's past.

All I'm saying is, at school, I managed to learn Long Division without there being a f ⁇ ing statue of it in the middle of Croydon.

I somehow managed to wrap my mind around that concept without having a huge statue of it.

And also, the worst thing about it is that the statues are up, but I studied history all the way through secondary school up to degree level, and at no point without me doing voluntary study, did I study anything about the British Empire, right?

British history in schools is basically Henry VIII, Mr.

Darcy,

Second World War.

We are obsessed with the Second World War, and the reason we're obsessed with the Second World War is it's the only time in history where we were the good guys.

NATO, I have to tell you, Hamilton is playing in London like the fing sixth sense.

It is a huge twist ending for British people that it turns out we were the bad guys.

A lot of people have been making this point.

We learn from these statues.

Boris Johnson in a series of tweets said we cannot now try to edit or censor our past, which is a bit rich from someone who regularly tries to edit and censor our present

and not release, for example, inquiries into Russian interference in our democratic process, who puts up bullshit adverts telling massive lies to try and

influence referendums, for example.

We cannot pretend to have a different history, he said.

That is arguably the biggest lie he's ever told.

That is what we do in this country.

We pretend to have a different history.

And you mentioned these statues.

There's a couple of points about that.

You know,

why has a statue been up for so long?

The other point is, you know, when these statues were put up, Edward Colston died in 1721.

The abolition of slavery happened through the early 19th century, 1833, the sort of final full banning of slavery in this country.

The statue of Colston went up in 1895 and has stood there for 125 years.

Robert Clive died in disgrace in 1774.

Even by the standards of 18th century, Brittany was seen as beyond the pale.

They put up a statue to him in 1912.

This was the period when we were trying to airbrush our own history and brush it.

And let's talk about this.

Oh, we cut you brushing our history under the carpet.

No, you're getting it out from under the carpet.

Not just under the carpet, but under the great plints that have been put on top of the carpet.

Robert Clive is one of the biggest shysters in our illustrious national history of shysterism.

At the time, the Viceroy of India, Lord Minto, said it would be needlessly provocative to put up a statue of Clive.

This was back in the early 20th century.

And they also put a memorial tablet to him around the same time in Westminster Abbey.

I mean, Clive was not the most Christian of men.

On his Tinder dating profile at the time, his likes included slaughter, extortion, looting, prostitutes, burning down villages and bribery.

He was described by the aforementioned historian William Dalrymple as an unstable sociopath, so we can look forward to a statue of Boris Johnson outside the Department of Pensions in 150 years' time to commemorate his efforts to improve the lot of Britain's old people.

Robert Clive is more colloquially known as Clive of India, which as far as figures from Britain in the 18th century go is a bad formula of name.

Like white guy of brown country suggests that white guy did not do anything good.

I don't know what Nigel of Somalia did, and I don't want to know.

Yeah, listen, it's all it.

It's been a very spicy week to be a British Indian.

And it's been a very spicy week for me to be a British Indian pretty much since I was born, given that as a British Indian, I've spent my entire life, I was born in Britain, but my family is from India.

I've spent my entire life essentially profiting from the plundering of my own ancestors.

And that is a difficult thing to wrap your mind around.

Sort of be like, sorry, grandma.

Luckily, I got a great state school to go to.

It's very difficult to kind of intellectually

wrap your mind around those kind of ideas.

I don't know if I've ever spoken about this on the podcast before, but

my great-uncle

was

an Indian soldier, an Indian freedom fighter, who was shot in the back by British troops.

He retired on a full military pension.

And it's been a great source of pride for me to know that, to know that he was

a man who devoted his life and

risked his own personal safety for the sort of abstract idea of freedom.

That's something that I've always been very proud of.

But I've always been secretly more proud that he was shot in the back, which means that when he got there and realized they had guns he ran away because to me that's the ultimate ideal somebody who was principled but also fundamentally sensible

that just put him our way if our family had a family crest it would be a picture of a lion hiding sensibly

Robert Buckman the Justice Secretary on BBC's Question Time said you cannot escape history and it would be fundamentally dishonest of us through removing our statues and airbrushing our history to pretend that all was well.

You know, totalitarian regimes do that.

And when he said you cannot escape history, surely this week has proved that more than any other.

This is history coming back for us.

We've been trying to escape it for hundreds of years.

Fundamental dishonesty is, for example, putting up a statue of Edward Colston without saying what he actually did.

And, you know, totalitarian regimes do that.

I guess totalitarian regimes might, for example, put up a statue of Robert Clive 150 years after he was was active.

The circumstances of Robert Clive's death are still shrouded in some mystery, but there are a lot of people who believe that he killed himself.

And he didn't, but there was no suicide note.

I'm not quite sure what the derivation of the theory is.

But at the time, Samuel Johnson reflected the sort of view as to why he thought Robert Clive might have killed himself.

And this is a direct quote from Samuel Johnson.

He said that Clive had acquired his fortune by such crimes that his consciousness of them impelled him to cut his own throat.

Now, why are we building statues of him?

Even he thought he sucked.

I would be into a statue of him cutting his own throat.

Maybe we need...

I propose a campaign to have a statue of me tea-bagging Robert Clive's corpse.

Well, you know, if you're going to have your statue of Colston, you also have to have a statue of, you know, 100,000 Africans that he trafficked to the Caribbean.

I mean, but if we do that in all our cities, it's going to make the traffic an absolute nightmare.

And this idea that it's erasing the past as suggested in various newspaper editorials and political speeches but it's not erasing them.

You don't go to an archaeological dig do you and someone says oh I've got something and you say oh what have you erased there with your shovel?

What have you erased out of the ground?

Oh and some artefacts that tell us all about the past.

Lovely bit of erasing but we really want to learn from them and educate people about them so why don't you bury them again, but even f ⁇ ing deeper this time that is the best way to learn.

The only thing that's making me feel better this week is that America has also succumbed to the statues-based discourse.

Tom Cotton, who's a senator who recently caused controversy by writing an op-ed in the New York Times,

which he could have saved himself a lot of time in regards to simply by writing the words, I am a c, such a big c.

La la la la la.

I'm a big old c.

Everybody hates me because I am a c.

Who's a c?

I'm a c.

A big old f ⁇ ing c.

The end.

P.S.

I'm a c ⁇ .

Tom Cotton, that guy, suggested that the Washington Monument, if things continue the way that they're going, will be replaced with something called the Obelisk of Wokeness,

which is what I recall my Pedis.

Although, full disclosure, it is less an obelisk and more a poorly maintained, crumbling relic of wokeness.

There's another thing, the idea, I mean, these Trafalgar Square statues, the idea that most people don't know who is on these statues, so so what does it what does it even matter?

Well, yeah, sure, most people don't know because most people don't care about history.

Some of us do know what is on these plints because we recorded a radio show a couple of years ago about the physical legacy of the Empire with Annie Van Powell and have to do some research, having never given it a moment's fing thought before, and then we have to look it up again when writing this bit to remind ourselves because we'd forgotten.

So, but I'm British, history is what I decide history is.

What's weird about the statue thing is like these, some of these people, like Churchill, I sort of Churchill was a a head of state I get it but Colston was just a businessman of his age like and so like what

how did we decide that those people should get st I mean

if we to uh the way I what I'm trying to think about is like if we were to do it now

if someone said look we want to put a statue in the middle of the town plaza of our great captains of industry, we have a statue of Mark Zuckerberg ready to go.

Would that be a good idea?

It would be a great idea because the speed at which that would be the first statue to be defaced as it was being put up.

It would be defaced by the men installing it

while they were putting it up.

And one final point, well, two final points.

One, I think we've learned also this week that nuance is fed.

It's totally fed.

No 12 ways about it.

It's 110% dead.

And if I can rework my own words here, I think maybe one of the questions we have to ask is this.

Is reducing massively complex issues of politics, history and society to oversimplified binary viewpoints right or wrong?

And

until I get an answer to that question, I'm not sure we can move on.

Mandy, you've just elegantly summarized the inherent problem in the way the news has been presented for the entirety entirety of the 21st century.

Well played.

Well played.

Get

something off my chest.

I have sort of

you know this in British comedy at the moment there's been a bit of a schism because on both sides of the Atlantic it isn't just statues that are coming down it's sort of arcane pieces of culture that are being taken off streaming platforms because they're now deemed to be offensive.

You know, I sort of think a couple of things here.

Firstly, I think that whilst it's always important, and culture is an ongoing conversation, and it's always important to update your cultural references depending on the morality of the day.

That's just the way that things work.

But at this time, I do think this is sort of a distraction tactic,

you know, and it's slightly taking the focus off the cultural moment that is going on right now and you know there are slightly more important issues, and you know, there's a part of me that thinks, or maybe talking about television programs and sitcoms is maybe a bit of a distraction.

I don't really know where I land on this, but what I do know is, guys, come on, it was ages ago.

Gone with the wind has been taken off HBO Max because attitudes to slavery have changed since the 1930s.

And in Britain, the sketch of Come Fly With Me has been removed from the streaming service Britbox because it featured blackface.

And guys, attitude to blackface has changed so much since Come Fly With Me first aired in 2010.

It was a different time.

It was 2010.

We'd only just recently got iPads.

We had all sorts of questions like, is this a big iPhone?

And should we do Blackface?

It was very confusing.

That brings us to the end of

this week's bugle.

I hope you've enjoyed it.

If you can, enjoyed, enjoy doesn't seem the right word, to be honest, but

it's if you're moved to if you listen to the podcast and

are so moved, go ahead and set a police car on fire.

Yeah, alternatively, you can join our voluntary subscription service.

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Again, we're not telling you how to live your life, just giving you the options.

Not saying either one is right or wrong, just as long as you've got all the facts to make your own decisions uh don't forget to join us either uh on time or afterwards for the bugle live live streamed live quiz uh saturday tomorrow night saturday the 13th of june uh chris's head is uh going to explode with the technological marvels that he is going to achieve and there will be a lot of ridiculous questions and genuine factual answers um thank you very much for listening nato uh you just said you started a new uh new podcast you tell us tell on that?

Yeah,

I started a new podcast, Stroke relaunched an old podcast.

It is called The Bituation Room.

And I am the sidekick to my friend Francesca Fiorentini, comedian, journalist, and host.

And we live stream Sunday nights at 6 p.m.

California time.

And then the video stays up and the podcast c usually comes out on Monday.

And it's a mix of comedy and then chat with

political smart people.

Nish, anything to plug?

Just

plugging

good vibes.

Just

want to have some good vibes.

Yeah.

How much do you pay to do that, Nish?

Well, you know, I've been in the pocket of big vibe for many a decade, Andrew.

If you fancied kicking some money

towards the Stephen Lawrence Trust, I had a bit of a slightly lost my temper this afternoon with some tweets the British Prime Minister had done,

and so as a kind of ultimately futile but made me feel better for five minutes gesture of protest, I've donated some money

off his back to the Stephen Lawrence Trust who do lots of very good work in helping people with disadvantaged backgrounds.

So you could do that if that's something you feel like doing.

But I'm not telling you how to live your life.

Thank you for listening, Buglers.

We'll be back next week.

Goodbye.

Hi, Buglers.

It's producer Chris here.

I just wanted to very quickly tell you about my new podcast, Mildly Informed, which is in podcast feeds and YouTube right now.

Quite simply, it's a show where me and my friend Richie review literally anything.

So please come join us wherever you get your podcasts right now.