Politics & Power Quote by Jerome K. Jerome

Jerome K. Jerome turns a gripe about rain into a sly indictment of civic life: both weather and government are systems we can’t control, can’t fully predict, and can’t stop talking about. The joke works because it flatters the reader’s sense of being perpetually put upon while also exposing how reflexive that posture is. “Always in the wrong” is obviously false in any literal sense; it’s the absolutism of the complaint that nails the psychology. People don’t just notice bad outcomes, they narrate them as proof of institutional failure.

The line comes out of a late-Victorian and Edwardian mood where bureaucracy was expanding, newspapers were feeding a daily appetite for scandal and administrative blunders, and modern life felt newly managed. Jerome’s genius is to fuse the cosmic and the civic: if you can blame the clouds, you can blame the cabinet. The comparison collapses moral categories on purpose. Weather has no intent; government does. By treating them as equivalents, he’s mocking the way public discourse often strips politics of agency and replaces analysis with atmosphere: things happen to us, therefore “they” must be incompetent.

There’s also a quiet confession embedded in the quip. Complaining about weather is socially safe small talk; complaining about government is its more pointed cousin. Jerome suggests the two are part of the same ritual, a performance of solidarity through shared dissatisfaction. Cynicism becomes a bonding mechanism, and “being in the wrong” becomes less a verdict than a hobby.