CHILDREN OF DARKNESS

From A Liverpool Lullaby,
by Stan Kelly.

Oh, you are a mucky kid,
Dirty as a dustbin lid,
When he finds out the things you did
You'll get a belt, from your Dad.

One of the early sights of ruin was that of Scousers, in 1993, hurling themselves at police vans conveying two ten-year old child killers to court, their acrobatics, their shouting themselves hoarse at terrified infants bleakly counterpointing the already take-your-breath-away horror of the ghastly events; grown men, these were, chronologically; if only these warriors, so boldly, so publicly willing to dismember those a quarter their size, had wrought a more manly example, been a better behaved, more concerned, more adult presence in the shopping precincts, if only they had set a better example, themselves, who knows.....wankers.

The boys who killed, tortured to death, in fact, another child didn't, though, spring from Satan's ejaculate, pre-formed and Evil, even the stupidest among the String 'em Uppers, would not confuse real life with The Omen, would they?

It's not as though, all of a sudden, Evil Young Ones have been sent among us, our only response being to drag them from custody and beat them to death. The deranged teen gunmen who seem to punctuate the American high school experience, they don't just leap from their mothers' wombs proficient in the use of automatic weapons, crying Eat lead and die, motherfuckers, spend their first years peering down sniperscopes at neighbouring pushchairs. No. Something which happens to many of us, something to which we are most of us, exposed, in some, causes real, serious damage, it might be the telly, the VCR, the DVD, the Internet, God help us all, there are some terrible sights in there; it might be a book, I have books which I do believe have a tendency to deprave or corrupt, I keep them on a very top shelf and I wouldn't let just anybody read them, but in unregulated households kids get hold of all sorts; in households with transient, serial parents, child welfare, if understood at all, may be a very low priority resulting in premature sexualisation; denied responsible treatment themselves they fail to understand power and responsibility, knowing only casual, indifferent brutality, lust and fetishised cruelty, what is sophisticated play in adults becomes devastating pain and death in children. The most recent case, of the two boys in Darlington - when I was their age I didn't know what a dildo was, knew nothing of urophilia, where do these kids learn this stuff, who permits it, I betcha it's the same sort of blokes who go throwing themselves at the Black Marias. Bet your life on ot. Was it Auden: as all the adults know and as all the children learn, those to whom evil is done, do evil in return? It might be bad or not enough parenting; it might be bad example, or good example misunderstood but whatever it is, unless you actively, like a fundamentalist loony, believe in the Devil, then, whatever it is, it is our fault and not theirs; we are the adults around here and throwing ourselves at police vans only highlights our failure.

There was a contrast, around about that period in the history of ruin. In 1987, an older man, liberated from his daughter, at an Enniskillen conflict resolution event organised by the now Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland, publicly forgave his daughter's killers. I think that he and she and others were marking some civic event, Remembrance Sunday, or something, they certainly weren't driving catholic farmers from their homes, thrusting swords into them, nailing their wives to the doors, torching their farmhouses, they were innocent of all that shit. And while they were performing their wee act of harmless, civic duty Marty Kneecaps McGuinness, blessed are the corpsemakers, Gawd love the wee man, and Gerry Adams, the famous Christian and the IRA's Nonce-Protector General, blew up Gordon Wilson and his adult daughter, Marie, she died in his arms, saying I love you, Daddy. Ten others died, too and many were injured. The IRA claimed to have been targeting a military or quasi-military parade which was attending the event and that the deaths of "civilians" were acceptable, presumably on the Long Road to Conflict Resolution. The fall-out from this event, maybe dramatised by Mr Wilson's quiet, Christian stoicism, in the face of a shitstorm of shrapnel and sundered bodies, was bad news for the bold men of the Provisional IRA, they denied that it was "Officially sanctioned by the Army Council" or some such facetious cowardly bullshit from some greengrocer Brigadier and ten years later, ten years, mind, Adams, himself, apologised, so he did, for those deaths, if not for the two thousand nine hundred and ninety other ones and the tens of thousands of maimings, blindings, burnings and kneecappings skillfully fashioned by his conflict resolution teams; now, there's proper Christianity for you.

After his daughter's death Gordon Wilson was to become a bit of a legend, he became a peace campaigner, although not in the disappointingly cynical manner of Kneecaps and Adams, and his message was always of forgiveness. Touch wood, Atrocity has never beaten at my cabin door but if it did I'd wanna be on whatever it was that Gordon Wilson was on. How else can you ever lay down your head, lay down your weary tune and rest yourself....if not by doing the thing your tormentors cannot?

But what prevents so many finding peace in Atrocity and Sorrow is not so much the hurt or the loss or the anger but these bastards.

Kelvin McKenzie and Piers Moron, celebrity cocksucking, women-hating sleazebitches, look at them, young tits on page three and insider dealing, these two fuckpigs have coarsened and cheapened the national morning, prematurely sexualised the nation's children and reduced the national discourse to a rant. Must be due for knighthoods.

skymadeupnewsandfilth, the press, all sections of it, just love prodding the wounds of Life's shat-upon and will never leave them alone, for an entire lifetime they stirred-up the grief of those bereaved by the ghastly, young Myra Hindley and Ian Brady. How much do you hate them, this year, this decade, does it still make you feel like shit, here, have two hundred quid, do you think they shoulda been hanged, would you pull the lever ? Don't get settled down. now, keep on hating, never have a moment's peace, you must never even think of forgiving people, that's not what our readers want, on a slow news day, now, is it? You keep on stewing there, mrs, never forget what those bastards did to your child, never ever put this behind you. And they do, the poor sods, Mrs Bulger and the rest, egged-on by the likes of McKenzie, denied the rest, the peace, which might heal her poor, battered soul, regularly enraged by filth like McKenzie, the rotten piece of shit.

They'll all be kicking-off again on the BulgerFest claiming that those two brutalised and brutalising young men have been too leniently treated, should have been stoned to death, resurrected and skinned alive, boiled in oil, broken on the rack, hanged in chains, drawn and quartered, over and over again,

In a civilied country, of course they never would have seen the inside of a courtroom, much less been harangued by Mr Justice Knobrot, doing his duty to the great, vengeful, short-sighted, tabloid-reading, masturbating nation of soaraway Sunreaders.

A life licensee can be recalled for any number of reasons, he or she may be unstable and, what with his early life not being that of a young Blair or Straw and with the likes of the rowdy, drunken fuckpig McKenzie howling for his blood, Venables has every reason to be unstable; he may have been in the wrong place, his license officer may have been concerned about his relationships, his habits, it may even be in his own interests that he's been recalled; he might have been shoplifting, or anything. Spectacularly incompetent in many ways, the Justice Ministry, formerly the Home Office, generally errs on the side of caution with lifers. Contrary to what McFilth and his kind would have us believe, less than one per cent of life licensees re-offend.

But that won't matter to the Liverpool mob, one minute screechimg that the Sun is a shitrag, the next dancing to the tabloids' bawdy jig. Get things out of all proportion, they do, you see, Scousers. Don't see any scallies hopping on the Belfast boat and throwing themselves at serial child killer, Gerry Adams, but then he's a grown man, carries a gun, might hurt them back.