Advertisement
Advertisement
He is depicted, in the various short stories, telling a captive audience about pisses he has taken as a youth and onanistically humping his mattress as he pisses his bed. In these stories Cameron is pissing merely for the love of piss. But piss is also associated, in Piss Cameron, with political power: Cameron's preternatural pissing abilities not only help make him a hero amongst his bragging posho buddies, they also, by his own account, make him the person most qualified to run the country.In 'Doctor', the vignette that constitutes the stylistic high point of the collection, Cameron is seen bursting at the skin from holding his piss for so long, his organs sodden and turned black, his gums yellow with urea that has been forced up from his oesophagus. When his doctor quizzes him on this, Cameron declares that, as he continues to fill up more and more with piss, "I can feel my powers rising… And my frayed nation begins to twine back together." He is holding his piss, Cameron says, precisely for the good of the British people (Cameron does not, of course, succeed in solving all the nation's problems by holding in his piss – during an operation to help alleviate his pain the doctor accidentally ends up bursting Cameron, and all the piss gushes out of him like a ruptured oil tanker.)This might all sound rather bizarre (it certainly seems clear why it had to be self-published). But as well as being funny, Leuning is able to communicate to us a sense of Cameron's real strangeness – his peculiar apartness from ordinary people and their concerns. This is something that mainstream satire, or even serious political commentary, never seemed able to grasp at all. Cameron was always capable, through his social policies, of doing great violence to the lives of ordinary Britons – without ever really seeming to care. In this way, he gave the sense of being motivated by something beyond us, some hidden, transcendent value-order which we do not generally share in.Of course we might want to say that this order was really "money" or "capitalism", but even then – at least in capitalism's own understanding of itself – some sort of benefit ought to accrue to regular folk as well; the prosperity of the rich, so the story goes, ought to "trickle down" to us poor suckers. Under Thatcher, under Blair, this trickle-down effect was experienced by enough for these leaders' relative popularity to make, despite all the concomitant injustices, a certain sort of sense; under Cameron, no one seemed to benefit in any way at all. The way that Cameron government behaved, it was as if the ruling class's interest in money had been transmuted into something like an interest in piss: an interest that was weird, foul, and ultimately did trickle down on us all.Follow Tom Whyman on TwitterCameron is seen bursting at the skin from holding his piss for so long, his organs sodden and turned black, his gums yellow with urea that has been forced up from his oesophagus