Plebs, prols and public apologies

“My first wish was
For an infinity of
wishes,
My second for an end
To the first…”
From Dada to Dadagiri by Bachchoo

The Parsi children of my generation, when forced to apologise would, in a half-hearted and sardonic expression of sorrow, say:
“S-o-orry,
Marghi mauri
Thharaa peytma
billaree doree!”
Which loosely translated from the bastardised Gujarati means:
“Sorry,
The saltless chicken isn’t yummy
The cat ran through your tummy”
Sure, it makes as much sense as fiddling felines or bovine moon-jumps, but its purpose was to belittle the person to whom you were apologising. It betokened an absence of sincere regret.
In the present era we have initiated a tradition of high-level institutionalised apology. Presidents of the United States apologise to the native Americans for the crimes of their forefathers in wiping out most of the aboriginal inhabitants of the continent. They apologise for slavery though I don’t know to whom. Is it to the Afro-American descendants of slaves or to the populations of Africa?
British Prime Ministers apologise to the Irish for the potato famine. The descendants of Gen. Dyer apologise for the massacre of Jallianwala Bagh. (Did this actually happen? — Ed. Er… no, but it should have — fd)
Apologising for the past in which you yourself had no hand comes easy and costs nothing. It may even, as in the case of Australian politicians apologising to the aboriginal Australians for genocide, garner some votes. But another sort of essential apology, painful and forced,
has come to recent prominence.
It is the effect of the growth of the democratic voice of politically underprivileged groups. Though I don’t know whether Harun al-Rashid, who executed a wife a day until Sheherezade came along and told him tall stories, ever apologised to womanhood for the wasteful slaughter, I am sure that people like Aurangzeb never apologised to the collectivity of Sikhs for his offences.
That was then. Last week India’s Union minister Sriprakash Jaiswal apologised, perhaps to his wife (Is he married?) or to all womankind, for his remark that “with time, wives lose their charm; there’s no enjoyment.” Women’s groups protested and the BJP even demanded his resignation. He said sorry, though there is no report of what happened in the Jaiswal household.
The episode brought to mind the comments of the maverick British politician, George Galloway, who, in support of Julian Assange — accused of rape in Sweden — said that a man does not have to ask for permission each time he penetrates a consenting woman who is in bed with him. There was an outcry from women’s groups. Mr Galloway was unrepentant. He is the author of the slogan “No permission for repenetration” whose legality will perhaps be tested in Swedish courts.
Two weeks ago, Andrew Mitchell, the Chief Whip of the British government, entered the public apology stakes. This week the Tory party holds its annual conference in Birmingham and such is the embarrassment Mr Mitchell has caused the party that he has backed out of the conference. It’s highly unusual for a member of the Cabinet and a Chief Whip not to attend the function.
Mr Mitchell’s misdemeanour has been publicised all over the world. As the reader must have read, Mr Mitchell was on an official visit to the Prime Minister’s 10 Downing Street residence. He had arrived on his bicycle which was secure behind iron gates and metal barriers that close the street off from potential terrorists, the public and pests. In addition, there are two or three armed policemen or women outside the house, stationed within the enclosed dead-end street.
Mr Mitchell, his meeting concluded, tried to wheel his bike through the main carriage-sized gate. The policewoman in charge directed him to the smaller-side gate, telling him that all bicycles should, by order, go through there. For some reason, Mr Mitchell insisted on going through the main gate and got into an argy-bargy with the cops telling them that he, not they, ran the government, using foul language, throwing the “F” word about and calling them “f***ing plebs”.
It was this last word and not the “F” one which lit the fuse. The cops wrote a report of the altercation in their note books which were then passed to the Sun newspaper, published and picked up by all the media.
The Labour Party called for Mr Mitchell’s resignation. His outburst proved that the current government, made up of rich boys educated at elite schools and Oxbridge, was not simply out of touch with the general British public but held them in complete contempt. This was demonstrated not by someone swearing at the police — all classes swear at the police — but by the use of the “P” word — Pleb! It’s short for Plebeian, a Latin word meaning the common folk, the hoi polloi, the labouring masses, the peasantry of old times.
At university in the late Sixties, it was a common epithet for anyone who displayed unsophisticated tendencies. I always thought there was a playful contempt to the usage — the very fact that it was abbreviated Latin was clearly a class signifier. Another word of contempt for the working classes was “prol”, short for proletarian, usually used in the plural as in “the prols are revolting.” And the word for someone being difficult was “Bolshy”, an abbreviation for Bolshevik, again with a mark of distancing contempt.
Times have changed. On becoming party leader and attempting to “detoxify” the Tory brand, British Prime Minister David Cameron told the papers that he’d rather be called “Dave”. He appeared in public, even on official occasions with an open-neck, which only means without a tie. He was proletarianising himself and his party. They were to be, henceforth, seen as plebeians.
Now, Mr Mitchell has let the cat out of the bag. He apologised publicly to the cops and even insists he never used the “P” word, but no one believes him. “Plebgate” — or should it be called “Side-gategate” seems to mark a political turning point.