Welcome to Angus Take House – a weekly column in which I pit two of the wildest takes the world’s great thinkers have rustled up against each other. This is your one-stop shop for the meatiest verdicts and saltiest angles on the world’s happenings. Go and grab a napkin – these juicy hot takes are fresh from the griddle.
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What’s the story? Payday lender Wonga has collapsed into administration.
Reasonable Take: Honestly: burn in hell! And take your latex puppets with you!
Grateful Cheese: Wonga might not have been perfect, but hell they were my Wonga.
What do you think of when I say the words Wonga Dot Com? That horrendous blue logo, perhaps? Slapped on the weathered, ever-compromised Newcastle United shirt. Maybe the spectre of those foul elderly puppets from their adverts hovers into view. Do you find yourself trapped in a nightmare – imprisoned in an office full of decaying latex bodies in cardigans, all of them wittering that the “money will be in your account in 15 minutes” with increasing volume, as you claw at the door in an attempt to escape?
Or perhaps it’s simply the stark bollock nastiness of their business that springs to mind: offering immediate short-term loans to people (often, obviously, in dire financial situations), that in some cases came with an annual interest rate of as much as 5,853 percent. Do you think of the people who took out payday loans of £250 and were forced to pay, on average, £150 in interest; or the loan offered to a 13-year-old schoolboy? Maybe you think of the mentally ill teenager who killed himself the day Wonga cleared out his bank account?
Whatever you thought, I bet you didn’t think: Wonga are misunderstood and actually a dear, dear friend of mine.
James Ball did. The Guardian columnist took to the keys this week to pen a heartfelt tribute to that special payday lender who had seen him through the tough times. “Don’t paint the most famous payday lender as a villain, it performed a valuable service in a troubled society,” his piece begins. Next week: don’t knock Jeremy Kyle, his counsel is a salve for society’s most vulnerable.
As Ball explains, when he was first getting started in journalism Wonga rescued him from a few close calls (sadly not including the time he “once spent two days sleeping on a beach after locking my keys in my flat”). With money tight from month to month, he maintains the rubber puppets were the only way of making ends meet. He was cold, he was naked, he was sleeping on a beach, and Wonga was there. With a tear in his eye, Ball concludes that while “Wonga is a symptom of a society in which millions of people – millions of families – can’t make enough money to get by, even on essentials”, we shouldn’t cheer their downfall.
There’s a line towards the end of the piece that seems to betray the fatal misreading at the core of this take. Ball says: “too many people who write about struggling to get by never have, and so misunderstand where the problems really are”. Perhaps, if this were a piece suggesting we shouldn’t stigmatise people who’ve been driven to using Wonga, he might get to pull that line. But he isn’t asking for that. Instead, using a very specific set of personal circumstances, he’s suggesting we shouldn’t stigmatise Wonga itself – as though struggling families have been misunderstood by the liberal elite who think they know best. As though struggling families actually… love Wonga?
The end of Wonga, he reckons, will actually serve to make things harder to those living on the breadline. Instead, we should concentrate on the causes of poverty. “Let’s spend less time worrying about Wonga,” he says, “and more worrying about why people need to use it.” Which sounds good, until you remember that Wonga’s entire business model is based on trapping people in ever-worsening cycles of debt. That is to say, one of the main reasons people needed to use Wonga was: Wonga.
What’s the story? The deaths of both Aretha Franklin and John McCain.
Reasonable Take: These are two separate events towards which I have completely separate feelings.
Mixed Grill: Aretha Franklin and John McCain are probably having a pint in heaven right now.
I’ve spoken before about the frankly unforgivable practice of celebrity death mash-ups. Just because famous Person #1 died within a couple of weeks of Famous Person #2, doesn’t mean you are obliged to try to shoehorn them into the same, twee heavenly tableau. Prince didn’t want to “rock out” with Alan Rickman any more than Barry Chuckle is likely to be playing pool with XXXTentacion.
There are a few elements that make this entry to the canon particularly egregious. Can’t put my finger on exactly why, but the phrases “freshman section” and “kinda makes me smile” leave me cold and unresponsive. Mostly, though, it’s the utterly, almost gratuitously, absurd suggestion that that Franklin and McCain are currently trading barbs about Trump over a cold one. Many people have pointed out the obvious unlikeliness that an icon of the civil rights movement would be particularly pally with a Republican senator who voted against a national holiday in honour of Martin Luther King.
More than anything, though, don’t these people have better ways of paying tribute to dead celebrities? Regardless of whether you’re the sort of person who likes Aretha Franklin, or the type to tweet extensively about “McCain the SOLDIER, McCain the FATHER, McCain the PATRIOT”, surely you can see that instantly cooking up images of them rocking up at their “heavenly dorm room” with a backwards cap on, bumping into every other vaguely notable person who happened to die in the same month, is gimmicky at best.
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’m missing the poignancy in the “epic celebrity death crossover” genre. But until I myself shuffle off this mortal coil, and see first hand the heavenly scenes of Leslie Grantham sharing a bargain bucket with Avicii… count me out!
PRIME CUT: James Ball is the author of Post-Truth: How Bullshit Conquered the World.
