And Another Thing... Never Say Never Again

"No wonder the country's fallen apart, no one says 'forsooth' anymore."

                                                                                                Mark Steel

I love the English language. It is probably the most versatile language in the world. And not because it is the language that I speak, but because it is the convergence of a nexus of older languages (Saxon, French, Greek and Latin), liberally sprinkled with myriad words from other languages (Sanskrit, Arabic, Urdu, German, Yiddish, Spanish etc) to swell its vocabulary to well over a million words. It is elastic and it is constantly evolving. The English of Shakespeare is different to that of Chaucer; the English of Mary Shelley different to that of Alice Walker. It had myriad dialects and variations, with a kaleidoscope of shades of meaning. The idiom of Jane Austin is drastically removed from the slang spoken in African-American ghettos, yet they remain essentially the same language.

English is also a rare example of a working class victory, with the dialect of the serfs having usurped the French spoken in the forts of knights and kings, absorbing and overpowering it in the crucible of the Medieval marketplace. And even after China becomes the dominant economic force in the world, English will probably survive in one form or another (being the language of international business), as a mishmash of English and Chinese. It started life as Anglish and will probably end up as Panglish.

That said, I believe that there are certain words that should be given special protection and only used in certain circumstances. The words ‘genius’ and ‘tragedy’ are two examples. The constant need of journalists in the English speaking world to sensationalise every trivial event has come to mean that these words are far too often abused. Lionel Messi, for example, is certainly a very talented footballer, but he is not a genius. Michelangelo was a genius and no matter how much spin Messi may be able to generate on a football using boots specially designed for that one purpose, at the end of the day all he’s done is score a goal. If you’re impressed by that, go to the Accademia in Florence and take a look at Michelangelo’s David: It’ll blow your fucking mind.

And this isn’t snobbery either. I’d say Newton was a genius, but not Einstein; James Joyce, but not Shakespeare. I can’t exactly define why I think this, but I think that it has something to do with Newton and Joyce having a fine grasp of complex ideas, while Einstein and Shakespeare seem to have guessed and hoped for the best. I suppose that I associate genius with the action of having a grasp of what it is that you are doing, rather than taking a leap of faith. William Blake attacked men like Newton for trusting to reason rather than belief, yet to me reason is what makes Newton a true genius. However, this theory is open to debate (like any good theory) and I’m not entirely convinced by the weight of my own argument. Einstein and Shakespeare are still godlike to me. And I’d always considered Bob Dylan to be a genius, but given that he has always claimed that he has no idea where his lyrics come from, I have just rendered him ineligible for consideration.

The word tragedy is believed to come from ‘tragus’, the Ancient Greek word for goat. Tragic plays developed from songs composed during festivals to the god Dionysus, when goats were sacrificed as an offering to the god of wine, theatre and fertility (amongst his other patronages). From these songs came the great tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides, where the tragic hero’s fate is already sealed by the gods long before he was born. The classic tragic hero of course is Oedipus.

Two and a half thousand years later and now every time some teenager dies of a drug overdose or a soldier is killed by an IED in Afghanistan, it is referred to a tragedy. As sad as these events are, they are not tragedies, but statistical probabilities. We should perhaps not refer to them in such cold and unemotional language as ‘statistical probabilities’, but to resort to the opposite extreme is just as ludicrous. Unless it was prophesised by a soothsayer that such deaths would occur and the victim’s parents had done everything in their power to send the victim away at birth and prevent the event from coming to pass, then they are not tragedies. If you want to read a true modern tragedy, read Donna Tartt's 'The Secret History', where the victim's fate is declared during the novel's first sentence.

It barely needs to be said that when our forces kill civilians during drone attacks, these deaths are put down to ‘human error’, or, as George Bush I said of the ‘accidental’ bombing of an Iraqi fallout shelter filled with woman and children during the First Gulf War, a ‘PR disaster’. We don’t mean to kill civilians and so no one should make a fuss when we do, as if carelessness is any less a crime than directed terrorism. By application of the word ‘tragedy’ to the deaths of our own troops, we can gloss over the very real truth that their lives are worth as little to the architects of the War on Terror as the hundreds of thousands of ‘non-combatants’ that have been killed by ‘our’ side.

(As an aside, we should always be suspicious of words like ‘non-combatant’. They are the Orwellian equivalent of phrases like, ‘Don’t think of an apple’. The first thing one does is think of an apple because the clause, ‘Don’t think of an apple’, contains the sub-clause, ‘Think of an apple’. Similarly, ‘non-combatant’ contains the sub-clause, ‘combatant’, immediately planting doubt in the reader’s mind as to just how non-combatant these so-called ‘non-combatants’ are. Politicians are practised distorters of the English language and should be guarded against at all times. Our first defence against their dissemination should be simply to turn them off and judge them purely in terms of what they do, not what they say. Our second line of defence is to always to ask the question, ‘What are you really up to?’.)

However, the word that is misused by more people than any other, the one that really gets my tragus, is ‘never’. I hear it being abused in one form or another on a weekly, if not daily, basis, in some form as thus: “I’ve never had chips since last week.” It makes me want to scream: “Well then you have had chips! LAST WEEK FOR A START!!!” ‘Never’ is an adverb meaning at no point in the past and at no point in the future and is in fact a contraction of the adverbial phrase, ‘not ever’. If you say, “I’ve never been to Rome before” while you’re stood ouside the Coliseum, that’s just plain wrong. However, if you say, “He always wanted to see Rome, but he never got the chance” over the grave of your recently deceased father, well that is correct (but not indicative of a tragedy).

I’m as guilty of misusing ‘never’ as many other people, but I’m trying to consciously replace it with ‘haven’t’ or ‘hadn’t’ or some other appropriate word or phrase. There is a certain laziness creeping into our language, with verbs like ‘do’ and ‘got’ replacing more descriptive phrases, even among the academic community. Sentences like, ‘We’ve made a series of calculations’ are being pushed out by more simplistic phrases like, ‘We did the sums’, as if we’re all still in primary school. The shades of meaning in our language are being lost in favour of extremes. What will we do when a true genius comes along or a true tragedy takes place? How will we be able to convey the state of something not ever having taken place when we have disabused our once noble language of all meaning? And does anyone else care?

Like the Newspeak of Orwell’s ‘Nineteen Eighty-four’, the loss of descriptive language robs us of the ability to express complex ideas and emotions, which is all the more essential as we become isolated from each other through the loss of common experience. Technology was meant to bring the like minded together and yet it seems more and more to me that its real purpose is to divide and to subdue. All the more reason to protect from cultural erosion the keystones to effective communication. 

Best Things Ever #13

The Collings and Herrin Podcast

“Opposition is true friendship.”

                                    William Blake

Over the last couple of years, podcasts have come to represent my main source of audio-visual entertainment. There are many fine examples of this relatively new form of media, but my personal favourite is the Collings and Herrin Podcast.

What is Collings and Herrin? Well, imagine an anthropology experiment gone horribly, horribly wrong. Or a hostage situation where the only survivor is desperately trying to appease his captor, who is all the time waving a gun around and calling his captive a fucking idiot. Imagine all that and you have some sense of the Collings and Herrin Podcast at its most gleefully vitriolic and childish. It is all done for comic effect and works brilliantly, regularly rendering me helpless with laughter. It is not for the faint hearted or the easily offended, but for a small band of us in the know the sight of a new episode downloading to iTunes is the highlight of the week. Which probably speaks as much about our sad little lives as it does the quality of the show, but bear with me.

The format is simple: Stand up comedian Richard Herring sits in his attic with the broadcaster and film editor of the Radio Times, Andrew Collins, and they talk, with no script and a minimal amount of planning, for roughly an hour about everything and nothing and then publish the results as an audio file, free to download later that day. And that’s it.

So what’s all the fuss about? Well, partly it’s their dedication to the project. While other podcasters have fallen by the wayside due to inertia or working commitments, the Collings and Herrin Podcast has been broadcast weekly, virtually uninterrupted, for over three years. Even when one or both of them is unavailable one week (usually due to Richard being on tour), they have recorded extra episodes to fill the gap. Also, at recent Edinburgh Festival’s they have performed increasingly more and more live episodes, last year doing a total of ten over a two week period. That’s the kind of obsession I can get behind.

There’s more. I’ve been thinking about dedicating one of these appreciation pieces to Collings and Herrin for some time and so as first step I went back and listened to the entire run from the beginning. My day job involves writing reports for an Ombudsman. It’s the kind of thing I can do in my sleep and listening to Herrin berate Collings for his belief in homeopathy broke up the day. Having been back through the entire run, I would firstly advise new listeners to stick with it. The initial half a dozen episodes are a little ropey, with some sound issues, as well as the usual problems that any new show has as it beds in and tries to find its feet. Also, it takes some time for Richard Herring’s alter ego, Richard Herrin, to emerge, with his unerring ability to say the most inappropriate thing at the most inappropriate time. However (and I’m sure Andrew won’t thank me for saying this), by the time Herrin first calls Collings mum, ‘a fucking idiot’, you realise that you are listening to something rather special.

You see, the role of the true comedian is to exist on the fringes of society, testing its limits and advancing its boundaries. The best comedians, from Linda Smith to Jerry Sadowitz, have always been the ones that serve as an observer, looking from the outside in. Of course best doesn’t necessarily mean most successful and in many ways mainstream acceptance is the death of comedic creativity (I’d take Daniel Kitson and Simon Munnery over a post-Thatcher Ben Elton any day). A truly great comedian doesn’t just go on stage and make glib statements like, ‘Hey, have you ever noticed X? Isn’t it funny when that happens and aren’t I hilarious for noticing the same thing as you and saying it out loud?’ A truly great comedian stands on stage and says, ‘Hey, have you ever noticed X? Isn’t the world insane? We should do something about that. In the meantime, let’s laugh about it and the world might seem a little brighter’. Success doesn’t always kill good comedy. Yet when you compare the rhythmic and lyrical genius of just about any classic Bill Hicks routine to the sight of Peter Kay wallowing in the stagnant, fetid stench of his own shit observations, you see that the correlation generally holds true.

By extension, Richard Herring is one of the finest and hard working comedians currently on the circuit. If you’ve ever seen one of his shows, you will have seen a man who through over twenty years of performing is Hicksian in his timing and ease with an audience. In fact, along with his former comedy partner, Stewart Lee, he embodies the true ethos of Hicks’s comedy. And in the guise of his podcast alter ego, Herring channels the spirit of Bill’s own alter ego, Pan the Goat Boy, with his continual pleading to Andrew to let him bum him, fantasies of fucking Jesus in the stigmata (and being cock slapped by the selfsame Messiah), and arbitrarily deciding which side is right in most of today's major world conflicts. It doesn’t always make for comfortable listening and if you allow yourself to be offended by it, you will be without any difficulty. Richard says that he doesn’t often listen back to the recordings, preferring them to exist in the moment. It’s also the best way to listen: Make a drink, give the moral centres of your brain an hour off, and just go with it. And as you howl with laughter, unburden yourself of some of the cultural baggage which restricts the ability to form an objective assessment of the world. Laughter is to fear as reason is to knee jerk reaction.

Yet it takes two to make a successful partnership and while Andrew may often play Herrin’s straight man, feeding him stories and taking the brunt of a tirade issued in response to something he has said or done, Collins is also a very funny man in his own right. His Free Fringe show, ‘Secret Dancing’, is bloody good and it is a pity that Andrew has said that it will be his one and only stand up show, because for a first effort it is exceptional (the DVD is available at www.gofasterstripe.com, as are all of Richard Herring’s recent shows, as well as one-off Collings and Herrin recordings). Andrew is a regular co-writer with Lee Mack on his acclaimed BBC1 sitcom, 'Not Going Out', and you will often find during live podcasts that it is something Collings has said that gets the biggest laugh (audiences are also prone to booing him for some mildly offensive thing he has said, one of the podcast’s many running jokes). There are no passengers here.

And there is still more, because I was only half joking when I described the podcast as an anthropology experiment gone wrong. It is also a chronicle of our times. Since it started, we have seen the Cumbrian shootings and the death of Michael Jackson; the first hung parliament in a generation and the days of stalemate that followed. We have also seen the BNP gain seats in Europe and their leader appear on the most anticipated edition of ‘Question Time’ since its inception. And each of these events has been given the Collings and Herrin treatment. In fact, it’s amazing to listen back to the entire run and hear the idea for Herring’s anti-fascist show, ‘Hitler Moustache’, almost spontaneously appear during one episode. The idea of growing a Hitler moustache is muted by Richard one week and by the following week it has became the basis for his new Edinburgh show.

But there is also the meta-experiment, because the Collins and Herring Podcast is a record of itself: A small internet community, gathered around one central focus, self-funded, profile-raising and autonomous. But maybe that’s just me, because small internet communities fascinate me, as they seem a good model for the future, with more people likely to become self-employed, working from home (in a return to the pre-industrial model) via the internet. And as the office is worker is decamped and sent home, these small internet communities may just take on greater social significance.

You get some idea of that significance when you consider the podcast’s own brief and abstract chronicle, from its early beginnings, reviewing the Friday papers, mocking John Gaunt’s right wing comments in The Sun (and attracting his attention), to tales of the Mitford Sisters and the theft of an iPhone. A rhino-not-for-sale sign has not been for sale, Andrew has abandoned his Sisyphean attempt to remove graffiti from the toilets in the British Library, and Richard has offered to call any of your friends cunts for a small donation. It has even seen one dedicated fan, Tina Wiseman, die at a tragically young age and I think it is a testament to the podcast that her death affected so many people at the time, even those of us who never met her. Because the real tale of the first hundred and eighty odd episodes of the Collings and Herrin Podcast is the birth and evolution of a friendship. Two men who had been colleagues in the past, became partners through necessity and friends through opposition. And above all else it is the development and the transformation of that friendship, as heard over an hour a week, which continues to fascinate me.

If you’ve been affected or offended by anything in this article, then the Collings and Herrin Podcast probably isn’t for you. Don’t worry about it, the world is an enormous place and there are plenty of other spaces to hang out. Yet its improvisational and iconoclastic style are endearing enough for a virtual community, a model village for the future, to have sprung up around it. Come on in, if you dare.

http://www.comedy.co.uk/podcasts/collingsherrin/

Why I'm Giving Up Football

In the last few hours I've come to the decision that I am giving up watching and being generally interested in football. It’s not that I don’t enjoy football, I do, and Liverpool have a bright future under Kenny Dalglish, but it’s what football has come to represent that has been bothering me for some time, probably ever since last year’s World Cup. The South African World Cup was meant to offer some hope and be a new start for a nation sorely treated by the west. Instead, it ended up being about a swarm of corporate locusts flying in, landing, stripping an already poor country (thanks to the IMF and World Bank’s involvement) of even more money, before fucking off to relieve the next recession hit country of its assets. A five mile exclusion zone was placed around each stadium, preventing street vendors from getting in on the act, while Budweiser and Coca Cola made a fortune. And that, in a nutshell (yes, I am the nut), disgusts me.

I forget who said that when the painter paints what the public demands, it’s no longer art, but business. And football, indeed sport in general, is no longer sport, it is about selling respectability to the likes of McDonalds and Carling, which is like BP sponsoring Greenpeace. I thought that I could assuage the guilt I feel by not actually contributing anything to the business. I watch most games on the internet, the only two games I’ve been to in my life (both last season) were with tickets bought by other people. I own one scarf, and that’s it. But it’s not good enough and no matter how I try to kid myself that the last few Liverpool games have been great for the club and city, the nagging of my conscious is still there.

This week Steve McManaman and Robbie Fowler, along with Maradona and some other has been footballers, travelled to Chechnya to play an exhibition match for the Russian backed warlord who runs the country (a particularly nasty fucker). Kadyrov himself played and by all accounts they let him win. This is the final straw for me. I cannot continue to be a fan of a sport where that level of idiocy and lack of self awareness is an everyday occurrence. Presumably their next stop will be Burma or Syria.

Yet it’s more than that. You see, the reason why I own no shirts or merchandise is that I have desire to belong to any nation or race or class or clan generally. ‘I must Create a System, or be enslaved by another man’s, I will not Reason & Compare, my business is to Create’. So says Los in Blake’s Jerusalem (the proper Jerusalem, not the hymn commonly called Jersalem). This weekend I have finished reading The Complete Works of Blake, Volume 2 of Robert Graves’s Greek Myths, and a second reading of Finnegans Wake, probably the most challenging work of fiction ever written. When I finish writing this piece I am going to spend the rest of the night redrafting the second chapter of a novella I am working on. And you what? I’ve achieved all this on my own. I didn’t need an overpaid advertising Whoarding (sic – very Wakean) to act as proxy because I have nothing else in my sad little life to look forward other than liver failure, I did it on my own. Which isn’t to say my life isn’t sad, it is, but I actually like it and I’d actually like to get on and achieve something of my own. No matter what Liverpool do or do not achieve next season, I'm still going to have to get up and go to work in the morning.

I don’t enjoy the rivalry, I don’t enjoy the feelings of dislike to people who follow some different arbitrary bunch of millionaires to the ones that I like. I named myself the Eponymist because I practice my own ideological belief called Eponymism. Eponymism is simply the recognition that we are all unique and so everyone’s core ideology should be likewise unique. That doesn’t mean that you can’t be part of an appreciation society or have similar hobbies to others or like the same films and music as others, but the partisanship and the sectarianism of football makes it more like an organised religion than anything else and I hate organised religion and I can’t continue to take an active (or even passive) interest in football. Football makes you see the world through rose tinted spectacles, claiming the obviously untrue as gospel, which is certainly like every religion ever created. Yet unlike Blake, Reason and the scientific method are of great importance to me and this atavistic tribalism only clouds judgement. It means that I will now have nothing to talk to with most people in the world, but fuck it, if that’s all they’ve got then they’re not worth knowing. I’m not judging anyone who continues to follow football, it’s your life and what you do with it is your own affair. It's just not for me anymore.

Think I’ll still watch cricket though. I can enjoy that without becoming emotionally involved (and it's slow enough to allow reading).

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/11/chechens-flock-team-soccer-stars

6th Epistle to the Foxnewsians

Dear Foxnewsians,

Now come on, you must have been expecting an epistle from me on this of all weeks. Sorry it’s a bit late, but as we’ve previously seen, I do like to take my time to reflect and consider before speaking, so that I can try and form a cogent argument (after all, I’m not Sarah Palin and a stream of non-sequitors doesn’t really work for me). So grab a coffee, sit back and smoke ‘em if you’ve got them, because this is a gonna be a long one. You should also be aware that the words, ‘hypocritical cunts’ are liable to be used on a number of occasions.

So Osama Bin Laden is dead. My first reaction was this: Yawn. It would be like if Al Qaida had killed Dubya. You’ve killed a figurehead. Well done, well done you. My understanding is that most of the actual masterminds of 9/11 died in the attacks. Bin Laden was the money man. So what? I hear you foam, it’s the same thing. Well then, when the Indonesian Army invaded East Timor in 1975, slaughtering 200,000 people, a quarter of the population of that tiny country, 90% of the funding for the invasion and 90% of the weaponry used came from the USA. The then US ambassador to the UN, Patrick Moynihan, said that he was ‘proud’ that it was his obfuscation that prevented the UN from taking any action to prevent the wholesale slaughter of civilians. Where’s their ‘justice’? Hypocritical cunts.

Now don’t get me wrong, I have no strong feelings about an international terrorist being killed one way or the other, but if I’m going to celebrate the death of a mass murderer then I’d rather save my jubilation for when a major one goes, like Kissinger, Bliar or Cheney. The 9/11 attacks, for all their perceived global significance, were a minor event in terms of casualties. More civilians have been killed by US drone attacks in Pakistan in the last five years than died in the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. Evil and cowardly we call it when it is done to us, yet the majority of those drones are controlled by twenty year old kids, sat behind VDU screens and joysticks in an US Air Force base in Colorado. Kids who have been raised on a diet of Call of Duty and Splinter Cell. If you blow yourself up, you’re a coward. Sit behind a screen 10,000 miles away, slaughtering people who you don’t even have the common decency to look once in the face and you’re a patriot and a hero. Hypocritical cunts.

In fact, I think I’ve worked out the real reason why the US government has decided not to release the photos of Bin Laden’s corpse. It’s because Osama was the millionth person to be killed in our so called War of on Terror and it wouldn’t be great PR to see a photo of his body sporting a party hat, surrounded by balloons and ticker tape. I hope his family gets to keep the car though. Is it still a car you get for being the millionth?

It changes nothing. It won’t end the war in Afghanistan because the war in Afghanistan was never about Al Qaida or 9/11. This is, ultimately, why I don’t believe in a 9/11 conspiracy. I mean apart from it being totally barmy (take one look at how incompetent the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were conducted and tell me these people were capable of carrying out anything so well executed as 9/11) The invasion of Afghanistan had already been announced in the European press in May 2001. If you’re planning a massive conspiracy to kill your own citizens, why announce what you’re going to use that as a justification for in advance? There are even some suggestions that Osama gave the go ahead for 9/11 as a pre-emptive strike in response to the planned invasion. Cart before the horse people, cart before the horse.

If the West had really wanted to destroy Al Qaida following the attacks, it only had to do one thing: nothing. Al Qaida were already a spent force in the Arab world. Their attacks against western tourists in Egypt in the 1990s saw a wave of protest from moderate Muslims denouncing terrorism and Fundamentalist Islam. But then Arabs have always been far more politically savvy then we in the west. The Middle East was a land of moderate Islamic democracies until the end of the Second World War, when western dependence on oil became an addiction and democracies were overthrown and replaced by tyranny and brutality.

The prime example of this is Iran. In 1953, President Mosaddegh renationalises the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now BP), leading to his overthrow by the CIA and British secret services, execution by their agents, and the return of the Shah, who instigates a 26 year program of some of the most bloody repression that the Middle East has ever witnessed. But here’s the punchline: Jimmy Carter makes a state visit to Iran in 1979, telling the Iranian people how proud they must be to have such a benevolent leader. This is the final straw for the brutalised Iranians and Carter’s visit leads to the Islamic Revolution (*drum roll, crash of cymbal*).

International terrorism is entirely the preserve of the west. Not only is the most successful terrorist organisation in history the CIA, but Al Qaida’s effectiveness in recent years is down to us, because you see, we need scary Muslims in the world to justify the continued manufacture and sale of arms. Following the 1929 Wall Street Crash, America only emerged from the Great Depression because of the start of the Second World War. Armament contracts to Britain boosted GDP and this was the reason why America joined the fight, to protect its investments (bombing Japanese Pacific bases just long enough to provoke a reaction). If Britain had lost the war, the US wouldn’t get paid (although the Bush family would have been just fine, they did make their fortune from business done with the Nazi’s after all). Since that time, the American economy has been largely reliant on its arms industry, which in practice has meant fermenting conflict the world over. It’s also why so many democratic governments in the Middle East and South America have been overthrown and replaced with genocidal cunts. A regime living in fear of its own people has far more need of security equipment than one of elected representation.

During the Bush II years, the US government passed the point where it spends more on weapons and defence each year than every other country in the world combined. The internal collapse of the Soviet Regime had presented a real problem for western leaders, because they could no longer blame international terrorism on communist forces. The only other viable ‘evil empire’ to scare US citizens with was Islam, representing 20% of the population of the planet. Ever since the Berlin Wall came down, the west had been looking for an excuse to elevate Islam to Global Enemy No 1 (remember the Oklahoma City bombing? Remember how quick the US media was to blame it on Islamic terrorists, until it became clear that one of their own homegrown fundamentalists was responsible). 9/11 was (for a time) great for US business. $1.13trillion have been spent on our phony war. Hundreds of thousands of innocent people have died, but they’re only poor people, so they don’t count. It’s nothing new. In response to Al Qaida’s 1998 attack on US embassies in Nairobi and Dari Salaam, Bill Clinton bombed what he said was a chemical weapons factory in the Sudan. In fact, it was one of only two pharmaceutical factories in the country. The last figures I heard suggested that 20,000 people died of preventable disease as a result of that terrorist outrage. But again, because they didn’t die in glorious Technicolor on the Breakfast Hour, they don’t count. Bill Clinton, you are also a hypocritical cunt.

Nor is the USA, or even the west, solely guilty of this hypocrisy. There is another continuing war, besides the War on Terror. It is a forgotten war, because it is taking place in Africa and no one gives a fuck about Africa. It is happening in the Republic of Congo. Over four million people have been killed since 1998. It is being perpetuated by arms companies from the USA, UK, France and Russia. Altogether now: Hypocritical cunts.

I didn’t bother to watch the crowds celebrating Bin Laden’s death in New York (if I wanted to watch a bunch a idiots celebrating a non-event, I could’ve watched the Royal Wedding, but I’m not simple), but it was depressingly familiar to see many Americans who, when given the opportunity to demonstrate some humility and decorum, instead opt for the usual flag waving and triumphalism, as if there is anything worth celebrating (it really was like the Royal Wedding). The usual cries of ‘an eye for an eye’ were to be heard, but I am sure that you, Oh Foxnewsians, remember the words of the big JC. We covered it last term. Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? “You have heard that it was said, 'Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth. But I tell you, Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.” Anyone seen this before? Ask me what I think about Christianity and I will give you the same reply as when Ghandi was asked what he thought of western civilization: I think it would be a good idea. If the precepts of Christianity had been applied ten years ago, then Al Qaida would, like its erstwhile figurehead, have disappeared beneath the waves a long time since.

I’m a cynical cunt, of that there is no doubt, and I suspect that the timing of Bin Laden’s assassination has a lot to do with the Arab Spring that is flowering across the Middle East. The protestors have largely been peaceful, despite facing the usual western backed repression, killed with our bullets. Be in no doubt, our leaders are terrified of a moderate Middle East. They have no need of our arms. They have no need of us, period, but we need their oil, and that, however much naive idealists would like to bury their heads in the sand, is what it all comes back to. Killing Bin Laden seems a desperate attempt to re-energise Jihadist groups (the US had known he was in Abbattobad since at least August last year) in order to maintain the transparent lies of the War of Terror. It would appear a futile gesture. The Arab Spring heralds the winter of American Imperialism. The Arab Spring is your Suez Crisis (goggle it).

I know that the ‘lefty-liberals’ in both our countries would love to continue to think the best of Obama, because he’s black and a Democrat and his wife is hot, but it’s time for a reality check. Bill Hicks said that whoever’s President, they get shown footage of the Kennedy Assassination from an angle you’ve never seen before. “And then the screen goes up and the lights come up, and they go to the new President, ‘Any questions?’ ‘Er, just what my agenda is’." However, the US educational and political systems are set up in such a way that you don’t get to be President if you’re likely to challenge the established order. After doing what Bush couldn’t (wouldn’t) do and take out OBL, Obama’s a shoehorn to be re-elected, and he will be as ineffectual in his second term as he has been during his first. And then, like Clinton and Carter, he can spend his days touring the world promoting peace and democracy and everyone will kindly forget that under the laws we established at Nuremberg in order to try the Nazis, he would be guilty of the same crimes of aggression. Just like every US President since Truman. One last time, with feeling: Hypocritical cunts.

You shall hear from anon.

Amused, Manchester.

PS: Two words: Glen Beck. *al la Nelson Muntz * Ha ha!

www.philosophyfootball.com

5th Epistle to the Foxnewsians

Dear Foxnewsians,

Long time, no sense. Well, unless a sea-change has taken place in the offices of Fox News during the last six months. I freely admit that I finally went and got a life and stopped taking an unhealthy interest in your activities. However, I don’t want you to think that I’ve forgotten about you and so here I am to give you a hearty prod and see if my contrary opinions can’t push y’all to clutch your chests and fall to the ground in a heart-attack-domino-drop. I live both in hope and denial of the superiority of my own dialectic.

Well, I see that Mid-terms are upon us (upon you rather). However, I am nothing if not perverse and so I’m going to ignore that and turn instead to the issue of Mel Gibson.

Mel Gibson (and I think this is an matter on which we can agree some common ground) is an idiot. Mel Gibson denies that the Holocaust took place for the sole reason that his father didn’t believe in it and his father never told him a lie. Kind of like the story of George Washington, only in reverse (and just as fictional). I assume then that Mel Gibson’s father never made a mistake. I assume that Mel Gibson’s father never took the wrong turn off the freeway or backed the wrong team or incorrectly answered a trivia question or got caught in a storm without a jacket or failed to receive a hefty return on an investment. I assume that Mel Gibson’s father never died, but ascended from planet Earth to take up his position as King of the Galaxy, because according to Mel Gibson, his father was infallible and for an infallible being this would seem the only logical end. Either that or Mel Gibson’s father’s son is an idiot.

And I appreciate that to some this may seem disrespectful to the father-son relationship, an accusation which I would deny. I’m sure that Mel loved his father very much. I loved my late father too, but that doesn’t mean that I think he was perfect. He had no sense of direction whatsoever and sadly I have inherited that defect. Then again, I did also inherited his Complete Works of Shakespeare, Complete Works of Oscar Wilde and The Complete Sherlock Holmes Stories, so it’s swings and roundabouts (or whatever the equivalent American phrase is, figure it out for yourself).

Yet we all know that Mel Gibson hates Jews, we’ve all heard the tapes. And why does he hate Jews? Because they killed Jesus. Cue my eight point rebuttal:

1. What, so people who are alive today are responsible for an alleged event that took place two thousand years ago? Well that seems a healthy and balanced view of the world (sarcasm). It’s like in this country, I know people who hate all Germans because of the war and the Holocaust, as if the people in Germany today are the same as those that were alive then and are therefore responsible for firing up the ovens. And isn’t it interesting that for someone apparently so in love with Jesus, Mel would much rather follow the Jewish creed of “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” than the diametrically opposite belief that Jesus states during the Sermon on the Mount (“You have heard that it was said, 'Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth. But I tell you, Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.”)?
2. Now my biblical knowledge may have a few holes in it here and there, but if I remember my New Testament correctly, it was the Pharisees that demanded Jesus be punished for blasphemy. The Pharisees were a Jewish political group that colluded with the Romans so they could retain power and influence over the poor and less influential Jews in the Empire, while living off them and keeping them subservient. So what Mel is saying is that the actions of any political group that claims to represent a clan or nation speaks for that nation entire and that any crimes committed by that group are the responsibility of all.
   
   Taking points 1 & 2 together, this mean that every American and Britain alive today is responsible for the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and for the mistreatment of Native American tribes. Every Italian alive today is responsible for the genocide of eight million Iroquois on the island of Hispaniola that was perpetrated by Christopher Columbus and his men: Every Spaniard is responsible for the actions of the Conquistadors in Latin America. And you, Oh Foxnewsians, you yourselves are responsible for the deaths of the over one million Tibetans who have been murdered by the Chinese government and for the ethnic cleansing of Tibet’s population, which has been largely replaced by Han Chinese. And why? Because your Great Leader has media interests in China, which mouth Chinese state propaganda. The Great Leader is in cahoots with the Chinese government and as we know, that means you too are in cahoots and the perpetrators of genocide.
3. If I remember rightly, Hitler thought something similar. And yes, I know that according to internet chat room protocol, my argument should be null and void at this point for merely invoking Hitler’s name, but in this case there is a specific correlation (as opposed to the kind of spurious links that your channel seeks to make between Hitler and Obama or the Democrats or Muslims or Orange County Waste Management or teachers or salamanders or the left handed or whoever else you’re trying to demonise in that instant before another circuit around the Fox Goldfish Bowl of News refocuses your attention on some different arbitrary target). It is my understanding that as a Christian (and not an occultist as Indiana Jones would have you believe), Hitler also thought that the Jews were responsible for killing Jesus and if he killed all the Jews, God would reward him by granting him a place on His right hand side. 
4. I wonder if Mel realises that according to the mythology that he purports to follow and believe in, it was necessary for Jesus to die on the cross (or a stake in the ground or nailed to a tree or hung from and then thrown into a tree, depending on which bit of the Bible you chose to believe). According to God’s nonsensical and downright weird covenant with Adam, God would send a Messiah who would die for our sins, thereby absolving us of Original Sin. So God, an omnipotent, pantheistic being leaves temptation in the way and then is surprised when the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge is eaten. Yet while he holds Adam and Eve responsible for this, he also agrees to send a Messiah to Earth as a sacrifice (which might be taken as an admission of guilt in a court of law). If Jesus doesn’t die then there can be no forgiveness of Original Sin and the entrance to heaven remains blocked. So surely Judas, the Pharisees and the Jews are the heroes of this piece. And yet somehow this is the fault of anyone directly or indirectly related to any of the Jews living at that time. Which leads me to my next point… 
5. That that actually includes everyone alive today. Whether you’re Jewish or not, whether you believe the world is 4.5 billion years old or 6,000, by simple application of geometric progression, you are related to everyone from that time that produced offspring. We all have two parents, four grandparents, eight great grandparents, sixteen great, great grandparents and so on. Even assuming four generations of your family per century, going back just one millennium assumes that you are related to over a billion people. Yet given that there weren’t a billion people alive on Earth at that time, many of these direct decedents must have been one and the same person (your great-great-great-great-great-grandmother on one line of the family would also have been your great-great-great-great-great-grandmother on one, two or more lines). There is then a lot of doubling and trebling up and it turns out that we don’t need to go back very far into history before we reach a point where we are all related to a particular historical figure like Charlemagne or the Pharisees. And if their crimes are the responsibility of anyone in anyway related to them, then that includes everybody.
6. Mel, you do realise that Jesus was Jewish, don’t you? Moreover, you do realise that most of the book that you revere as divine revelation tells the mythology of the Jewish people? So if you’re upset that Jesus was killed then you surely only have the right to be upset by his death, if it can be proved that he was the son of God and therefore the Messiah (although of course the Old Testament never says that the Messiah will be the son of God). Yet as Tom Paine pointed out back in the 18^th century, if the Jews, the people whose Messiah Jesus is meant to be, if they say he’s not the Messiah (“He’s a very naughty boy” etc), then he’s not the Messiah, so what are you bitching about? In fact, if I remember rightly, in a couple of the Gospels Jesus is recorded as saying that while he is the Messiah, his sole responsibility while on this Earth is to return to God the Jews who had turned away from their faith (lost sheep, with all the implications that that metaphor implies). Gentiles need not apply. He actually said that (not in so many words, but the meaning is clear: Christianity is a club open only to Jews). It was only because the Romans needed to install a monotheistic faith upon the Empire, to implant in the minds of its population the idea that one God = one Emperor, thereby securing the imperial dictatorship of Constantine and his heir and successors after years of quasi-democratic rule, that Christianity was adopted in the first place. And yet even those censored texts that were included in The Vulgate (the Latin Bible) are quite clear on this point (well, as clear as the Bible is on anything): Jesus was a rabble rousing rabbi, fighting against the occupation of the Holy Land and the corruption of the Pharisees and that was that all he was interested in. If he came back today he would most likely be found in Gaza, railing against those same corrupt politicians.
7. 
   

And I’m bored of this already. I could go on, but what would be the point? It’s like when people ask what came first, the chicken or the egg. This must be a pre-Darwinian question, because clearly it was the egg. A chicken is a bird, but reptiles lay eggs, same as amphibians and fish, and they all predate birds. So it’s the egg ok? The egg came first. The egg. The chicken came a few million years later. And like the chicken and egg, Mel Gibson’s prejudice against Jews predates his justification for his hatred, which is delusional on so many levels that it would require an essay ten times this length to peel away the multiple layers of self-deceit. And anyway, as we have recently witnessed (or at least heard), his unfocussed hatred is not restricted to Jews, but flies at African-Americans and women and probably anyone else who isn’t a bigoted prick in exactly the same way that he is. In other words, deep down Mel Gibson probably hates just plain everybody. And when you hate everybody, well that’s such a very lonely place to be that it can’t rightly be called hatred anymore. What it is is fear.

Jesus said, “God is love.” And Leopold Bloom, the eponymous Jewish hero of James Joyce’s Ulysses, said of hatred, “That's not a life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it's the very opposite of that that is really life.” Jesus, Bloom, Marx, Chomsky, Emma Goldman, Shylock, as much as Mel and his ilk hate and vilify Jews, they do seem to resonate throughout history and throughout literature. For a people that today represent just one quarter of one percent of the population of the planet, they’ve done well for themselves. Which leads to all kinds of conspiracies about a Jewish cabal ruling the western world. The proponents of this conspiracy are so vacuous and educationally sub-normal that even the writing of this sentence has already expended more energy than their horseshit is worth. Indeed, I have often speculated whether Judaism would have survived as a religion had not the Holy Roman Empire wanted someone to persecute as a distraction from its own sins. Did the very act of persecution reinforce the importance of Judaism in the minds of its followers and give the religion a longevity that it wouldn’t have otherwise had? If Christianity hadn’t been adopted by the Romans, would Judaism have ultimately been absorbed by Islam, which is the true successor of Judaism anyway, not Christianity, which is a pagan religion painted over with whitewash to make it look new and Eurocentric.

All of which I admit is mere speculation. But hey, what’s speculation to some is a full day’s ‘fair and balanced reporting’ to others.

You shall here from me anon.

Amused, Manchester

PS: Oh go on then, I can’t resist it. So, big surprise, Americans have replaced one set of corporate puppets with another set of corporate puppets, the status quo is preserved for the 234th year in succession and somewhere, in a BP boardroom, executives are lighting cigars off the flaming back of an oil soaked pelican and manically laughing. Less enlightened individuals refer to this state of affairs as a democracy.

“Hey, the country’s fucked.” “What do we do?” “I know, let’s vote back in the people who fucked it up in the first place.” It’s hardly surprising for a midterm president to be defeated in elections, doesn’t that happen like every four years anyway? After all, with the ‘choice’ of two alternatives that are essentially the same, the difference in votes for each ‘party’ is only ever going to be marginal. Moreover, in a country where as little as 50% bother to vote for either party, quite big changes can be affected with little actual swing from one arm of the Republican-Democratic party to the other arm of the Republican-Democratic party. A large part of the population of your country (and here too) don’t vote because they know that their interests won’t be served by either faction, but your population seems stuck in a monotonous swing from one arm to the other and back again, without anything actually changing in the meanwhile. Even when the ultra right rise up and form the Tea Party (no tea, no actual substance of any kind as far as I can see, just a bunch barely sentient reactors banging on about “No taxation without representation” while they are manipulated by multinational behemoths who already have all the representation they will ever need to ensure that they pay as little tax as is offshoredly {is that an adverb? It is now} possible), well even then all that the Tea Party can think to do is form a more militant wing of the more militant arm of the already quite right wing Republican-Democratic party.

“He not busy being born is busy dying.” sang Robert Zimmerman (to preserve today’s theme). And the more that America stands still, the more it slips from its once unassailable position, towards the historical mire that awaits all once great empires, with a dozen fledgling bullies waiting to take its place on the global stage. The Tea Party volleys and thunders, but they are like the tolling of the church bells that Keats described as the death rattle of religion, “sighing, wailing, ere they go into oblivion.” Yet as those lines were not written by an American, the patriotic and ideological adherents of the ultra right will most likely not even know his name. Which is a pity, because one of the things that the English have always done better than anyone is poetry. And of the English poets, Keats may just be the greatest.

The Sun God, Apollo

Best Things Ever #12 The Air Conditioned Nightmare

I hate complacency. Complacency is the tool through which special interest groups convince you that your way of life is under attack: And then they tell you who is to blame. Curiously, those responsible usually turn out to be the self-same people blocking the route to power of these special interest groups. Complacency leaves you vulnerable and once vulnerable the individual disappears beneath the weight and the inertia of the mob.

I’ve been thinking about complacency a lot recently, having reread Henry Miller’s sublimely cynical rant, The Air Conditioned Nightmare. Written in the 1940s, Miller had just returned to his native United States after a decade spent slumming in Paris. War was raging in Europe, America was about to enter the fray (late, as usual), and Miller set off on a journey across the continent to assess the state of the country of his birth.

What he found was a nation in decay. “Never has the status quo seemed more hideous to me.” he wrote. “This is not the worst place to me. But I am here and what I see hits me hard.” Actually, he just meant Pittsburgh, but his assessment was as bleak in Boston as it was in Los Angeles; New Orleans as in Mobile. Miller understood only too well the dangers of complacency. “Nothing is deader than the status quo whether it be called Democracy, Fascism, Communism, Buddhism or Nihilism.”

Today, as then, Americans feel that their way of life is under attack. We in Britain have often been jealous of the American capacity for boundless optimism and certainly during times of unending growth, when there is more than enough food in the trough, it is a fine attitude to possess. Yet the quality that many Americans have always lacked is a healthy sense of cynicism. When recession bites, when the rich plunder and the poor are blamed, well then a lack of cynicism is like having not been exposed to illness as child: You have no immunity. You become sick and put all your faith in snake oil salesman, like the oddly named Tea Baggers.

Reading The Air Conditioned Nightmare is an antibiotic shot to the arm. There are those even amongst Miller’s fans who describe the book as being uncharacteristically pessimistic and negative, but I don’t find that in its pages. What I take from it is a sense of realism, a sense of perspective on the American dream, which has always been just that, a dream. Miller observed his nation’s fears that its very institutions and way of life were under attack and his conclusion was damming:

“[T]here are things which ought not to be defended, which ought to be allowed to die; there are things which we should destroy voluntarily, with our own hands.”

Before you can start changing your life for the better, the first thing one needs to do is enter into a period of reflection and self-assessment. America is a country which from the outside looking in is tearing itself apart through tidal forces. The institutions which laid it low, dragging the rest of us with them, are now the ones who now ask the poor and dispossessed to have faith in them. The American Right is somnambulistically sleep walking into fascism, when what it really needs is to wake up and take stock of its place in the world. “How to become conscious?” Miller rhetorically asks us:

“It’s very dangerous you know. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you will have two automobiles and own your own home with a pipe-organ in it. It means that you will suffer still more – that’s the first thing to realize. But you won’t be dead, you won’t be indifferent, you won’t be insensitive, you won’t be alarmed or panicky, you won’t be jittery, you won’t throw rotten eggs because you don’t understand. You will want to understand everything, even the disagreeable things. You will want to accept more and more – even what seems hostile, evil, threatening. Yes, you will become more and more like God. You won’t have to have to answer an advertisement in the newspaper in order to find out how to talk to God, God will be with you all the time. And if I know what I’m talking about, you will listen more and talk less.”

This is Henry Miller finally reengaged with the world, a work as near to a restating of the principles of the Sermon on the Mount as anything written in the twentieth century, which is probably why, like the actual teachings of Jesus, it is almost entirely ignored in America. And yet there are passages contained within The Air Conditioned Nightmare that should be recited every Sunday in every church up and down the country. The American Right would have its followers believe that Barack Obama has destroyed America, and yet Miller observes that even by 1940 it had been a broken nation for a century or more.

What Miller reminds us is that there are no easy answers to life: There is nothing in life worth having that is easy to come by and those who claim that there are should be treated with suspicion and dismissed. “It’s the democratic way.” Miller reminds us:

“And so the future, which is always imminent, gets aborted and frustrated, shoved around the corner, stifled, mangled, annihilated sometimes... a world of finite curves that lead to the grave or to the poor-house or the insane asylum or the concentration camp or the warm, protective folds of the Democratic-Republican party.”

Henry Miller was far from perfect. That’s ok, none of us are. To err is human and Miller was certainly that. However, to live with one’s own imperfections is to be open to the possibility of being wrong. Only with that important precept in mind can one start to move forward, freed from the inertia of prejudice and paranoia and mindless patriotism, which another great American, Ambrose Bierce, called, “Combustible rubbish ready to the torch of any one ambitious to illuminate his name.” It’s almost as if he’d met Glen Beck. Then again, opportunistic chancers fill the pages of history. Men like Glen Beck are ten a penny and they are worth even less. People like Henry Miller are stardust in comparison.

Besides, there is always hope. “If you have a dream of the future, know that it will be realized one day. Dreams come true. Dreams are the very substance of reality.” You just have to be awake first.

Modern Fable

"Have you not learned, my esteemed communicator,
 That the created is not the creator?"
                                             Arthur Conan Doyle, To An Undiscerning Critic           

Chapter One

There once was a town in the north of England. In days gone by it had been a giant of the Industrial Age: Now those dark, Satanic Mills were shrouded in dust. How dismal it was in the bleak mid-winter and no amount of gaudy lights or glass baubles on plastic trees could mask the pervading air of pessimism. It is here that our tale begins.

On this grey afternoon, a group of lads rode into town. They came with the flag of St George rippling in their wake. They parked, descended into the precinct and prepared themselves. Their self-appointed leader stepped forth to speak:

“We have come here today to issue this town with a warning. We are in danger; danger of losing our identity. There is a growing threat to our town, a dark cloud that looms over us, threatens to wash us away. It is threat of immigration. A threat that has been clear and present in our once proud nation from before I were born.”

“Both my grandfathers fought in the fields of France. Fought and died, I tell thee, that Europe could destroy fascism forever. And for what? How did our leaders reward us for defeating Hitler? Huh? They filled ships with foreign garbage and dumped it on our shores to stink up place. Britain has become a dumping ground for everyone else’s unwanted junk. Well I say enough is enough. Shut the borders and ship them out: All of them.”

“Now, a man will ask, ‘I was born in this country, but I’m Muslim, can’t I be both?’ And I'd ask him, then what cricket team do you support?” He smirked. “Obviously he would reply, ‘Pakistan’.” He emphasised the first syllable of the final word. “Then you are Pakistani. Go home, your country needs you. Mine does not. Go, worship your heathen god in your own land and I will do same in mine. This…” An oblong of Islamic green was held aloft. “This is his flag.” A white star and crescent at its centre, a white bar at its seam. “It is not my flag and it is not yours. I will not let it end up mine. If you feel the same as me, you must stand with us, arm in arm, shoulder to shoulder on cliffs and shores of this still proud nation and protect it from barbarian hordes.”

The others applauded their leader, bolstered by a single pair of hands from the crowd. Half a dozen people had stopped to listen. Most wandered off at the end, reluctantly accepting the leaflets that were foisted at them. Only one remained. Two women, previously unseen, approached the group. They stopped in front of the leader.

“Michael John Brown,” said one, “you ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

“Too right.” said the other. “That young Asian lad’s not two minutes out of hospital and here your lot are back on't streets preaching hate.”

“Ladies, ladies.” Mick replied, calmingly. “We ain’t preaching hate to no-one. We’re exercising our democratic rights. We’re standing up for our right to live in a white Britain. To not have it swamped with bogus asylum seekers who scrounge off social, then blow us up in return.”

“Oh yeah,” rejoined the former, “and what about young Rasif, eh? Who had he blown up?”

“Now Maggie, you know right well that case hasn't come to court yet and I’d be in contempt to talk of it. When it does, my lads will be acquitted.”

“Oh please,” Maggie said, “everyone in town knows you lot did it.”

“Aye,” said the other, “though I see you managed to get off scot free as usual. You always were good at letting others take blame for you. Like our Chris.”

“Your brother got expelled ‘cause he got caught. Had nowt to do with me. As for that Paki, he had it coming, whoever dealt with him.”

“What, because he stepped out with our Ashley? Where was t’arm in that?”

“Where’s t’arm? Where’s t’arm? What if they had a kid? We need to keep this country white, our blood’s already thin enough from all the fucking Jews we took in. No, whoever dealt with that little shit stinker deserves a medal. If that’s what it takes to stop us from turning into mongrels, like them, so be it.”

“Oh, now your true self comes out, Mick Brown.” The argument had attracted far more attention than the speech that caused it. “You say your stopping us from becoming mongrels, but your t'ones that roam about place like pack of dogs.” There were many nods and noises of general agreement. “Your mother would be ashamed to see what you’ve become.”

All pretence vanished. “Never, EVER insult my mother again.” Mick towered over the women. “If you do, I will make sure you regret it.” Unbowed, Maggie made some reply, but another of the gang was speaking at Mick’s ear and pointing to the far end of the precinct. Two policemen were striding towards them. “Mick, let’s get out ay here.”

“I don’t fear no pigs.” Mick sneered.

“Aye, me neither, but see us three, we’re on parole, Gaz here is on probation. You, ya jammy cunt, you can stay and stand up tae them if ya like, but we canny afford nae more trouble from police.” The last word sounded like, poll-eece, in his thick accent.

“Fine, go.” Mick commanded. “But I’ll not forget this.” The others pushed through the swelling crowd, using its mass to obscure them from their pursuers. Once clear, they jogged off. Mick turned to the crowd, raised a fist in the air and declared in a proud, clear voice, “No surrender to Paki-fucking-stan.” Then he ran.

Their captain may have missed a penalty, but the crowd of the George and Dragon were philosophical about the 0-0 draw. “I’d rather be a Paki than a Turk.” they sang. “I’d rather be a Paki than a Turk. I’d rather be a Paki than a Turk.” Someone started a chorus of Rule Britannia, the rest quickly joining in. “Britain never, never, never shall be slaves“

Centre stage, Mick’s gang occupied their usual table. A sheet of bronze coloured material overlaid the MDF. Pools of beer had formed between the bumps, the ashtray smoked from the continuous supply of half-finished cigarettes.

“Nice speech that today Ian. Nice and short.” Mick told him. “Might even use it at demo tomorrow.”

Ian drained his pint. “I still say you shouldn’t have changed it to, ‘before I were born’.”

“We’ve been over this Ian, it were too long.”

“What did it say before?” Frasier asked.

“It said,” Ian replied, proudly, “’before the men who stand before you here today were born’.”

“Like I said.” Mick replied, sternly. “Too long.”

“Aye, right enough.” agreed Frasier, “that’s tae long son. Don’t want tae confuse cunts with tae many words.”

“See.” Mick said. “Even the Jock agrees. No offence Frase.”

“None taken.”

“Yeah.” said Tom, the youngest of the gang. “Jock knows something about speeches, ‘e’s always making ‘em at work.”

Frasier stared daggers at Tom. “See if you call me Jock again son, I’ll fuckin’ do you so I will.” He hooked a thumb at Mick. “That cunt there is the only one who calls me Jock.”

“Aye, ‘cause I’m the only one that would last ten seconds against him. Shut the fuck up Tom. Our Frase may be a Jock, but at least he ain’t a cockney fairy like you. Happen that’s as bad as being a fucking Paki.” The northerners laughed at their southern cousin.

“Hey Frase,” asked Ian, “can we call you a Scot then?”

“Sure son. That’s what I am, a Scot and proud of it.”

“And yet these Pakis hate being called Pakis. I don’t get difference.”

“Who gives a fuck what Pakis think.” Mick bellowed. “They’re Pakis and they can fuckin’ well lump it.”

“Hey.” said Gaz, returning fully laden from the bar. “Check out guy at bar.” A man in corduroy jacket and spectacles sipped from a cognac glass.

“Don’t know him.” Mick said.

“Apparently, that’s Carl Miller.” Gaz informed them.

“Carl Miller’s an urban legend.” Ian replied.

“Nah, Harry swears down that’s Carl Miller.”

“Who’s Carl Miller?” Fraser asked.

“Carl Miller, so it goes, married a spook.” Mick replied. “African she was.”

“He was a teacher at the college.” Ian joined in. “She was one of his students, Nigerian I reckon.”

“Does it matter, Ian? They’re all the fuckin’ same, wherever they got hit with ugly stick. Anyway, turns out she were only after a green card. Soon as her papers came through, she fucked off with another coon. Had a boyfriend all along.” Mick swigged at his ale. “Well that’s what you get for trusting a fucking nigger. Carl Miller, eh. Excuse me lads, I gonna have a word with Mr Nigger-Lovin-Miller.”

Mick picked up his pint and slammed it down on the bar. “You’re Carl Miller.”

The other turned his head, looked Mick up and down, then faced forward. “I know.” he said.

“You married a nigger.”

“Well, I was married to a woman of African extraction, if that’s to whom you’re referring.”

“Well, I hope you’ve learned your lesson. Coons will fuck you over soon as look at you. Just like the fucking Jews.”

“Very enlightened I’m sure.”

Mick sneered, “You’d do well to mark me lad. They’re not like us.”

“I know.”

“They’re different.”

“Right.”

“Ya hear me.”

“Yeah, yeah, Black people are different to white people, I get it.”

“Right.”

“Same as Muslims aren't like Christians.”

“Yeah. Bunch of fucking extremists.”

“And the French aren't like the British.”

“Dirty, soap dodging bastards.”

“Nor are the Welsh like the English.”

“Sheep shaggers.”

“Or southerners like northeners.”

“Bunch of queers.” Mick's voice directed back towards his table.

“Or Yorkshiremen like Lancastrians.”

“Don’t even get me started on them cunts.”

“Or City supporters like Rovers fans.”

“Blue scum.”

Carl's laugh was filled with scorn. “Mick, is it?”

“Aye.” Mick wasn’t laughing.

Carl narrowed his eyes, “So, if I understand you correctly, you hate anyone who doesn’t live like you do.”

“If they ain’t white, aye.”

“So long as they're not French.”

“White, British, smart arse.”

“Unless their Welsh or from the south or Yorkshire or support the wrong team or, presumably, are gay or drink the wrong beer or live in the wrong part of town, eh.”

“Oh you’re a real fucking smart arse, aren’t you!”

“I am. See, this is my theory.”

“I don’t care.”

“I wasn’t giving you the option. See I think you’re so ignorant, your incapable of accepting that there might be any other way to live life other than the one you’ve chosen. Which must confuse you, yeah. You’re infallible, why aren’t you much better off? Well it must be someone's fault, right. So you look out of your window and what do you see? Muslims and Jews and southerners and Goths and City supporters, all living an alternative lifestyle to your's. Well, if you ain't to blame, it must be their fault. If they lived according to your creed, or went back where they came from, you’d be ruler of the universe by now, wouldn't you.”

Mick stared through Carl. “I am going to make you regret every word out of your fucking mouth.”

“But isn’t that fascism? Make everyone dress like you, think like you, worship you, and eradicate anyone who deviates from the norm. Then, and only then, can you claim supremacy, while the world inexorably regresses.”

“Did you hear what I said?”

”Yeah, yeah, I hear you loud and clear. You don’t have a coherent counter argument so instead you resort to threats of physical violence.” Mick made to speak again, but Carl silenced him with a raised hand. “Please don't delude yourself into thinking that I'm the least bit afraid of you, Mick. I pity you. But perhaps you're right. Get rid of the Pakis. Get rid of the Niggers too. And get rid of the Yids and the Frogs and the Queers and the Poles and the Reds and the Blues and the Green Eyed and the Trannies and the people who live at No 73. But keep people like you. Come the apocalypse, we'll need someone to sweep up.” Carl drained his glass dry, while his opposite stood frozen with rage. “Anyway, must be going, I’ve obviously been here too long, I can feel my IQ starting to dip. Besides, having witnessed your sing-along-a-bigotry earlier, I'm a little concerned you're about to start throwing faeces at each other.” Mick's face was bright red, but still he didn’t move. “By the way,” Carl said, spinning back ‘round, “you might be interested to know that I married Mbelina to stop her being deported back to rape and torture. I married her to save her life. A friend did the same for her fiance.” He winked.  “See ya around.”

After a time Mick seemed to emerge, as if from a trance. He looked about, but Carl was long gone.

“So, did ya give that nigger lover what for?” Frasier asked, as Mick’s sat down.

“What? Oh, yeah, yeah.” Mick drained his glass. “Who’s ‘round is it?”

“Tom’s.”

“Right, Wendy, four pints of beer, as you’re still drinking that fizzy, queer shit.”

“Now look Mick, I don’t mind a joke, but don’t call me queer.”

Mick grabbed Tom by the jaw and pulled him close. “When you sup a man’s drink then I’ll call you a man. Until then, I’ll call you whatever the fuck I like and you’ll take it.” Mick released him. “Don’t make me add your name to the list of people who are gonna get my foot up their arse. Like those two witches, and Carl fucking Miller. Move it, bummer boy.” Tom sulked off to the bar. Four sets of bitter soaked lips laughed.

*

The ale flowed and time marched on. Last orders came and went. Ian was the first to leave. 'The Wife' texted him home. “Come in number four, your time is up.”

“Aye, you’re just jealous. Night lads.” He wrapped himself in a German Army and jacket and slipped out the door to much laughter and pressing of thumbs to foreheads. And when, an hour later, the landlady insisted it was time for bed, there was much innuendo.

The gang bundled out into the winter chill and splintered into three. Mick went his own way, as did Gaz. Frazier and Tom staggered down the street together. For a time, neither man spoke, each lost in his own intoxicated thoughts, boots against pavement the only sound as long, rubbery strides brought them closer to home.

They came to an alleyway to piss. Frasier crashed his hand against Tom’s shoulder. “Listen son,” he said, his neck no longer able to support his head, “I’m sorry about before, showing yous up in front of them cunts.” He clumsily buttoned his fly. “They nae more respect me than they do yous, y’know. It’s no respect son, it’s fear. See if they didnae know I could do the lot of them, they’d treat me nae different.”

“Mick, ‘e don’t fucking respect you though, Frase.”

“No, son, but I ain’t about to mess wee that cunt. The man’s insane. Y’know what he tells me? He tells me he writes, ‘I Hate Pakis’ on fivers wee one of they ultraviolet pens. Then he pays for drinks at the George.”

“So?” Tom replied, the two men balanced against each other in a wobbly triangle.

“So? So some daft wee cunt pays wee a twenty and gets one ay Mick’s fivers wee he’s change.”

“Right.”

“Right, so he goes tay buy fags at the Paki shop and they’s one of they ultraviolet lights Pakis use to check you’s no slipping ‘em fakes.”

“Shit.” said Tom with a dawning realisation.

“Aye, Paki checks the guy’s money and it says, ‘I Hate Pakis’. At best he gets a mouthful ay abuse. At worst three ay they cunts work there kick shit out ay him. Happened to Wayne Archer last week.”

“Fuck.” said Tom, incredulously. “What did Mick say?”

“Nothing.” Frasier replied. “Says it’ll teach cunts no tae buy from nae Pakis.”

“Jesus man, cunt’s fucking tapped.”

“Hey, none of your blasphemy. And none ay your jive talk neither. Just ‘cause ya smoke that shit, there’s nae excuse for talking like nae nigger.”

“Sorry Frase.”

“Nae problem son. What I’m saying son, what I’m saying is it’s one thing beating up a Paki, but when it’s our own kind, that’s bang out ay order, ya get me? I disnae give a fuck who cunts is buying from, you don’t turn on your own. My old dad taught me that.

“Agree with you there Frase, bang out of order."

"Listen son, I’m sorry about showing yous up before.”

“Ya said Frase.” The Englishmen patted the Scot on the shoulder.

“Aye, right enough. You’re a good lad, Tom. Stick wee me and I’ll see ya go far.”

“Cheers, Frase.”

“Oh and Tom.”

“Yes Frase.”

“See if you tell anyone what’s been said here, I’ll cut ya fucking balls off.”

“Yes Frase.”

“No even me, ya here.”

“Yes Frase.”

Silence.

“Come on.” Tom said. “Let’s get fucking ‘ome.”

“Aye, right enough.” The men staggered on their way. A pair of eyes watched them from the darkness.

The door slammed louder than expected upon Tom’s return. A curse escaped from his lips, but no sound echoed from above. He slipped on the chain and crawled upstairs.

Tom crept into his room and switched on the bedside lamp. He kicked off his aging trainers and threw his Burberry cap on the floor. Then he removed the pint glass from his bedroom table and tiptoed across the landing. Here he rinsed it, filled it with water and drained it dry, before filling it again. It clinked heavily on return to its original place. His hand slipped under the mattress, removing the cigarette papers and brown material hidden there. He burned one edge of the eraser shaped lump and crumbled the pieces into the cigarette paper, adding tobacco to the mix. The lot was rolled into a tube and his tongue ran down the rim. He roached one end and twisted the other to a point. Then he drew the curtains, turned two handles at either end by ninety degrees and pushed the window open. Once his head was clear, he ignited the cigarette pursed between his lips.

“Allo” said a strange voice.

“Fuck me.” Tom jumped, the joint nearly falling from his fingers. “What the fuck are you doing there?” A face had appeared at next door’s window.

“Err, I am sorry, I am new ‘ere.” A slow, hesitant voice.

“Great, that’s all we fucking need.” Tom replied. “Fucking Poles moving into the area.”

“Pardon?”

Tom spoke loud and slowly, “Are… You…  From… Poland..?  Why…  Don’t…  You… Fuck… Off… ‘ome..?

“Err, no, I am Engleesh.”

“No offence mate, but you don’t sound very English to me.” Tom took a toke and blew smoke in the stranger’s direction.

“I am, how you say, born in this country, but my family move away when I am enfant, no.”

“Yeah? Funny, ‘cause I was born in London, but ma dad brought us back up ‘ere, where ‘e was born.” He sucked on the spliff once more “So 'ow come you come ‘ome?”

“Err, I do not like France so much, so I come ‘ere, to my ‘ome, no. The French, they are too arrogant, no.”

Tom laughed. “Ha ha, nice one. Nah, seriously mate, good on ya. We need more guys like you, coming ‘ome, ‘elping us to stand arm in arm, shoulder to shoulder against these black cunts swarming in.”

“Pardon?” said the man, furrowing his brow. “I do not understand what you say.”

“Pakis, blacks, coons, ya know. From Africa and Iraq and that.”

“Ah yes, I understand ‘ow you say, you do not like black people?”

“Nah, some of the coons are alright I suppose. Guy I get my stash from is half-caste. ‘e’s pretty sound. For a nigger. By the way, don’t tell anyone you seen me smoking this shit.”

“Smoking sheet?” The same baffled look.

“Yeah, weed, y’know.” Tom replied, taking another pull. “’Ere son, get on that.”

“Thank you.” the man replied, pinching it by the middle. “You are most kind.”

“Sorted. Keep it quiet though. Jeez, Mick would ‘ave my balls if ‘e caught me smoking weed. Nigger poison, ‘e calls it. ‘E’s one to talk. Cunt snorts so much coke, swear down ‘e’s the only one keeping them cunts going.”

“Ah, I see, this Mick, ‘e is your frère?”

“What's that? My frère?”

“Oui, your frère, your, eh, ‘ow you say, brother.”

Tom laughed again. “Mick, my frère. Ha ha, nah, I ain’t related to that twat. ‘E’s just a guy I know. Nasty fucker, too. I mean, fair enough, I ‘ate Pakis, right, but that cunt ‘ates every fucker. Pakis, coons, Jews, cockneys, queers, the lot of ‘em.”

“Pardon, I still do not understand, what is, ‘ow you say, Paki?” The man handed back the spliff.

“Cheers. Pakis, from Pakistan, Muslims like. Y’know, there are streets in this town where whites like us get our ‘eads kicked in just walking down 'em. Not that you’d want to go down ‘em, smelly bastards. Cunts are too busy blowing themselves up to bother to wash. We go down for a rumble though. Bang a few Paki heads together like, teach cunts a lesson.”

“Ah, I see. So I ask, if you were in charge, no, ‘ow would you do them?”

"Sorry mate, I don't get ya."

"Err, if you were in charge, the, 'ow you say, ruler."

“Ah, right, you mean what would I do with the Pakis?”

“Err, yes, these Paki.”

“I’d ship ‘em out, get rid of them.”

“Get reed of them?”

“Yeah.” He smiled at the thought. “If I ‘ad my way, Pakis wouldn’t exist.” There was a moment’s silence. “’Ere,” he said, passing the joint over, “finish that off will ya mate. I ‘ave to go to bed, my ‘ead’s gone all furry.” He giggled.

“Most kind.”

“See ya ‘round.”

“Ah yes, bonne nuit.” The window shut and the man was left alone. He took a single drag on the butt and flicked it out into early morning air. “Never existed.” he said, in perfect English. “Interesting, very interesting.”  An instant later, he was gone.