Tuesday 4 May 2010

THE QUALITY OF MERCY

In the film, 2001, A Space Odyssey, the hero, or the cipher or the character or whatever the fuck he is,  winds up at the other side of Nowhere, in  Everywhere and Everywhen,  spun across creation and time,  as though, tripped-out on StarGate voyaging, he  is sleep-walking into a heavy-breathing revelation of The Meaning of Life, albeit  in a claustrophobic construct resembling a windowless Life on Earth. This set looks like real life, with  real furniture, Louis Quinze Futuriste, it has tins and packets of food but they're not food as he knows it, just fucking goo;   the books are just covers, with nothing in them, it's like someone has attempted replication of  his EarthLife but only superficially; incongruously,  his space capsule sits on the tiled floor and he can't make head nor tail of what's going on,  as he observes himself grown older, sadder, dying. It is for my money, whilst notable for its technical, cinematic artistry,  a miserable and confusing film, anti-human and anti-life, it reminds me of the current election process, which  looks like an election on the surface but is really something else.

What is going on here, Gordon Snot, looking like a condemned man, wandering hopelessly around schools and supermarkets, accosting children and shoppers with repeated embarrassing inanities, smiling his sepulchre smile, wanly affirming his imagined role as pater familias not only to his own poor, bathing and squabbling children but to the nation? You're eight ? That's a good age. And you want to be a footballer?  That's why we are making money available for Sport. It's great to meet you. Do you have grandchildren? We are doing a lot for grandchildren.  You know, the Tories will put them down the mines. Aren't these shops great?  Such a range of products. I'm a parent myself. It's great to meet you. Hello, how old are you? That's a great age.........

Snotty's Man o' The People canvassing is stomach-churningly embarrassing, his cruel exposure by the gobby, overpaid, smarmy fuckwit, Jeremy Vine,  a low-water mark in public humiliation, from which a decent nation would have recoiled, its prime minister being treated the way those bold, pirouetting, fag dagos conduct their great sport, barbing, taunting, cutting, lancing, stabbing their fellow creatures to death, the disgusting fucking bastards;


Snotty stumbling around, flailing, wounded and bewildered, as shit journalists aim for their mark, picadors, toreadors, matadors, gleefully nipping in and darting out,  conjoined in cruelty. What a fucking carry on.

Aside from  Tony, Imelda, Donald and George in Shock and Awe, I don't  see snuff movies, praise God, but they can't be any worse, any more unsettling than Snotty's now ritualised self-abasement, his complicity in his own humiliation;  Prime Minister Snot, why does nobody like you?  from the oaf, Paxman, being among the milder catcalls  which Snotty tries to ignore, his PR wife looking on aghast, biting her lip. For whom is this charade noire enacted?

Sensitive souls such as myself were and remain distressed by the spread of cheap'n'nasty Cruelty TeeVee, whether it's the horrid old boot, Anne Robinson or the freaks Cowell or Morgan or the, whataretheycalled, housemates on BigBrother doesn't matter; people queue up to be nasty about others' homes, dinners,  even, in a particularly grotesque show, their business proposals, the screeching fag, Ramsey, hurtles around the world, highlighted and Botoxed, to shout at witless cooks and the cooks, the cooks are everywhere, piling up ever more bizarre, arsehole-scorching inventions for the delectation of sourfaced cookery writers, dickheads and slags;   these greedy bastards pollute, corrupt and deprave  the national discourse, any wonder that we are plagued by cruel, homicidal, knife-wielding, granny-raping, vagrant-burning little bastards, any wonder that over-stretched teachers are set up for humiliation by their pupils when, as a nation, we pay Jonafun Woss millions of pounds to do the same fing to old age pensioners, guests and audience alike, go on, Mrs, do you, you know, take it up the arse? Any wonder that, morally decrepit, we now applaud every insult hurled at our prime minister - and thus, ourselves.

No good, infantile, to blame Snotty for his predicament, for our own inhumanity to him;  time after time people lament his clodhopping, his bullying, his  Stalinist mentality, as though there was a better way than his.  And now they join in the bear-baiting as though two wrongs make a right,

as though shockingly bad behaviour by skymadeupnewsandfilth and its braying audience was not only justifiable but healing, as if this bitter bloodletting would heal the wounds of Iraq, ease the ligature of civil rights denied, amend and redress the plundering parliament and properly judge and punish the rapine,  the banditry of the criminal merchant banker, the jumped-up, Thatcherite barrowboy.

Unlike the professional commentariat, which hailed his Ironness, his Prudence, for a decade, only changing tack when the shit hit the City fan, I have damned Brown's incompetence, his bullying and his downright obsessive, compulsive I-Know-Best nastiness since his entry to parliament and his preferment under Kinnock and Smith, I have mocked and lampooned him before a wider audience than assembles  here, in Ishmaelia . It is not his hurt, as such, which alarms and depresses me, just the national lack of empathy as though bullying the bully made everything OK; it doesn't, nor does it substitute for proper scrutiny of his equally ghastly opponents.

Snotty  and the rest, on all sides, in my judgement,  should be in jail  for theft and deception, for blackmail, money laundering, treason and crimes against humanity but not for an unguarded aside which any of us, baited and cajoled, tired and anxious, might have made. The fervour with which the Sun-reading nation has damned'  Snotty's language,  the alacrity with which filth like Trevor Kavanagh - shit-eating political editor of the non tax-paying Murdoch titrag -  successfully dragoon  it to reinforce Mr Cameron's tatty, Blairite banner reflect a crudity, a harshness more Nazi-German demagoguery than British democracy.

Maybe,  as Ms Lilith notes elsewhere, Nanny Duffy reminds the nation of its grandma; an orphan in grandparent terms, I wouldn't know.  Maybe this brutality  masks a  chivalric outrage, a Mohammedan concern for the widow and orphan but maybe it doesn't  and the Sun nation sits back in its armchair growling, Bigot? He didn't say Bigot, did he, not the bigot word?  He said Bigot? And to that sweet old lady? Fuck me, we can't have people walking about saying the bigot word in their cars. How we gonna keep the Pakis out,  if everybody's saying fucking bigot? That bloke, Clegg, of the Wotsits, he wouldn't say Bigot, would he, he's married to one of 'em. Cameron, is his Mrs a nig-nog, too?  Doesn't matter, he wouldn't give offence to a proper English person, now, would he? That Brown, he's a bleedin' foreigner, if I'm not mistaken, innee, how dare he call that sweet old lady a bigot, when he's a wog 'imself, like?


Maybe it is just that, after all, after the Miracles of NoMoreBoomAndBust and its attendant national bankruptcy, of EducationEducationEducation and its wastepaper A- levels and  bogroll degrees, after the deathcamp hospitals, the lavishly overpaid laziness and incompetence of our GPs, the PFI insanity of  Our NHS and after  Baghdad, Fallujah, Guantanamo, of Stockwell Underground Station and The Lonesome Death of David Kelly, after the full and wide-ranging cover-ups, Hutton and Butler and now this useless, twittering   buffoon,  Chilcott  and after the obscenity of Tony and Imelda,  whoring their way around the world, hoovering-up his Iraq bribes, after all that - and the rest - maybe Cruelty TeeVee, the modern Colliseum Games,  is all that people want to watch; maybe  Snotty's public emotional dismemberment, his protracted evisceration by semi-literate, gabshite  Lobby jackals like Andrew Rawnsley and his abandonment by the thieving charity bandits at the Guardian is the true post-showbiz entertainment of the times; if it is, we are in worse, more Ruinous trouble than we had imagined,  our times miserable and confusing, anti-human and anti-life. It looks like an election, on the surface but it's actually an exercise in Swingometer sadism,  ringmastered by  those in skymadeupnewsandfilth, who, as deeply, as equally immersed in shit as Politics plc, brought us here.

21 comments:

Edgar said...

You are a sensitive soul, Mr Ishmael: far into the tail of the distribution, 4 or 5 standard deviations above the mean, perhaps. The popular fascination with cruelty seems to satisfy a human need: it is widespread enough, geographically, and enduring enough, historically, to suggest that it satisfies more than an idle curiosity. A particularly debilitating psychological condition is the sense of powerlessness against an indifferent world. We seem compelled to deceive ourselves into the illusion of being in control, and the atrocities that are needed to provide 'evidence' of that control are, at least some of them, documented history. Persecute, or be persecuted: apparently a choice, but in fact not so, for we can choose the former, but the latter is usually chosen for us. The rules of strife seem to call in favour of those who persecute most vigorously, at least temporarily. But the dynamics of hatred are extremely non-linear and those who now train their sights upon the wall may soon be casting their shadows on it.

jgm2 said...

I'm one of those who has, after years of politely pointing out the economic and social idiocies of the Brownian Imbecility, simply gone along with berating the man for being no more than a stuttering fuckwit. In my defence there are a many blog-sites I used to frequent where such profane language is discouraged and so you are expected to stick to forensic dissections of Labour's economic and social lies and idiocies. Unfortunately though they tend to be stalked by Labour apologists who are very quick to take personal offence or offence on behalf of some down-trodden minority or suggestion that Brown (or Blair or Straw) is wilfully lying and have your opinions removed to protect the blog owner from criminal liability nudge nudge, wink wink. Ie remove what jgm2 says or I'll report you. I'm only thinking of you Mr Blog-Owner. I'm not a Labour apologist parrotting from the website of Labour rebuttals. Fuck no.

Cunts all.

This holds particularly for the BBC but also other blog-spots. So it only through time did I become aware of Guido and your own blog-sites where a full and frank discussion of Brown and Labour's incalculable fuckwittery and economic and social destruction is permitted.

However years of screaming to the rooftops about the fuckwittery at large in the land, ignored by newspapers, TV journalists, uncle tom-cobbly and all as they simply parrot the latest handout from Number 10 as if it was set in tablets of stone and handed out by Moses himself as opposed to some lying, malevolent cunt in a pin-striped suit does rather reduce my immunity to a certain glee when finally the media turn on the economy wrecking jackasses.

Sure, I'd love the BBC, SKY, newspapers to spell out just how economically fucked we are as a result of the Maximum Imbecile's reckless destruction of the economy but since they're not prepared to use that route to rid us of the jackass then I'll take ridicule, contempt, bullet in the head, what-fucking-ever.

We just need rid.

mongoose said...

I suppose that my ghastly liberal conscience would seem to require me to concur, Mr Ishmael. Alas, McBroon isn't some innocent being ambushed and insulted by Simon Cowell, or a cack-handed git who can't boil an egg being included so as to make a prat of himself on Masterchef, or even some semi-imbecile from a boyband pratting about on Celibrity Big Bollocks. The man is a professional politician - has been all his miserable life. Set out, signed up, put plenty other poor bastards to the sword on his way up. All but one I think you will find. I am more inclined to feel sorry for his poor bloody wife who now has to honour her contract with the Devil. Or does she. A Clinton Marriage beckons perhaps.

call me ishmael said...

It is not Brown I feel sorry for, it's us. I will come back to this, after Newsnight, if anyone is still around. And even if they're not.

call me ishmael said...

It doesn't matter what he does or has done, we cannot redeem him but we need not debase ourselves, like a lynch mob, egged-on by the people who have mostly, this past Ruinous epoch, been his praise-singers and who now find him inconvenient, an angry haemorrhoid on the bright new arsehole of politics, about to do a Big Society/PR shit, right in our faces.

His turmoil and his anguish are nothing to that of an Iraqi parent bereaved by one of Mr Hoon's fragmentation bombs landing in a playground, but he is clearly in turmoil and anguish, unlike Tony and Imelda, who snuck out the back door with the money, just in time, and now that the nation shares my contempt for him, the horrible fucking bastard, I feel a little uneasy. My catechism, for years, has been Up Against The Wall, Motherfuckers but it hasn't been And We'll Spit at and Kick and Abuse you, en route, if that's what Mr Murdoch tells us to do, in order that he might install an even worse ruffian in Downing Street.

I failed statistics, Mr Edgar, and do not understand your location of me on that particular sensitivity spectrum but I will, perforce, accept an Outsidership, which is uneasy in crowds or even in large groups and reluctant, no, refuses to join things. Even though I rail at the Heterophobes it is not at their Otherness but at their bullying, their insistence on impudently describing me as straight, as if in unfavourable contrast to their exoticism; nothing straight about me, go into a revolving door behind you and come out in front. I don't think anyone should be persecuted, queer people, fat people, ginger people, Jews, fags, niggers, the Welsh; where would you stop, once you started, and I just wish they'd all leave me alone, with their nipple clamps and buttplugs and anger and Bob Marley records and fucking leeks.

Mr TDG has a similar, chilly view of humankind and it is often as persuasive as your own but as I mentioned, we are clever monkeys, however few of us write a Requiem or paint the Cistine Chapel or imagine and design Hubble, we are on the increase, it is we, the unsatisfied Outsider and not the pussywhipped conformist, who panted up the shores and into the trees and the caves, onto the plains and the farms and into the cities and out to the stars, it is the minority which improves shit, the torturers and the persecuters are just stick-in-the-mud asshole bastards.

It isn't just a Brownian Imbecility, mr jgm2. There was a moving quintet at the start of Newlabour, Mandelstein, Brown, Blair, the halfpig-halfman, Prescott and the drunken, depressive, closeted fag bullyboy, Alastair Campbell, author of the war-enabling fictional documents; there were the arriviste MPs like Byers and Milburn and Blears, hundreds of them, nothing to do with the Labour movement, there was the national cohort of constituency agents and parties, surely those in Hartlepool and Sedgefield among the stupidest people in history. And there were complicit union barons, like Monks and Woodleigh, stupid journalists like Polly Mascara and Toilets Maguire and even willing, gay, putative Tories, like Admiral Lord Liberace and Lord Digby Grease of the CBI, all NewLabouring their arses off.

continues

call me ishmael said...

continued

Brown's reforms were actually mostly figured-out by Ed Balls, in conjucntion with the gangsters in the City, Balls was then Brown's special adviser and was subsequently rewarded by being parachuted into a safe seat, a ministry and, he hoped, the leadership, the premiership, even, why bother getting elected, when Labour works on the hereditary leadership principle, cunts?

The press have been onside, the retail kings have been onside, the banks have been onside, the quangos, the unions, the broadcasters, even, until recently, careerist Major General Rupert-Golightly-Jockstrap and the armed forces. This is not solely Brown's Ruin, mr jgm2, although he is the willing, front and centre, gabshite mouthpiece with his sickening son of the fucking manse Vaaal-ewes and his UpHisArse moral compass and his grotesque young parenthood, at sixty, the cunt.

This has been a massive, anti-democratic coup, extending statist control further into our lives than ever before, steamrollering human rights which were entirely outside the domain of temporary parliamentarians. To blame it all on Brown, or, worse to see Buggins' Turn Cameron as a liberating alternative is to entirely misread the situation, just like they want you to, in order that they may get business all tickety boo and back to normal, the rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate.

Don't vote for any of them and for God's sake, don't see the public trashing of Gordon Snot as any sort of deliverance, his bumbling about, tragic, pathetic and patsylike is nothing of the sort.

woman on a raft said...

I trust you are going to re-publish that as a post, shortly.

PT Barnum said...

I wandered over to Guido's Pizza Palace last night when I spotted the title of his latest post on someone's blogroll, about the sadness in Sarah Brown's eyes. And while barbed about Brown, it demonstrated a mite of compassion for his Mrs. In the comments, inevitably, the bile poured forth, rolling down on both Mr and Mrs, surpassing even the ordinary level of nastiness and spite to be seen there.

I know what you mean, Mr I. It demeans us all, this pitchfork-wielding mob squealing with contemptuous pleasure, Madame Defarges all, snickering and knitting at the foot of the guillotine at the unwinding spectacle. We, the people, did not create this cruelty-loving breadncircuses debacle, but it is very hard to be big enough to stand apart from it entirely, not to give in to the desire to have a crafty kick or two at the exposed underbelly of the monster (the political class, not the individual man) who has terrorised and enslaved us.

For me, the measure of a civilisation is how well it treats the worst people within it. But that belief requires those who wield power in our name to act with honour, good will and honesty. When they are the worst people within our society, civilisation becomes an empty howl in the encroaching darkness.

I also read this yesterday:
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/8778/
It has the best delineation I've ever read of the manner in which individual dignity and freedom has been sacrificed to managerial values and we-know-best moralism, showing what we have had stolen from us - the most precious and fragile treasures we have ever had. And too few have even noticed.

Dick the Prick said...

Brilliant.

lilith said...

I am a wretch Mr Smith, because I loved it. But I don't have a tv so all the coverage I saw I selected myself. Just clips on the blogs mainly. I didn't see it/hear it again and again like people with tvs and the radio on. I don't feel very ashamed for enjoying it. I'd like to see Blair and all of them skewered.

I'll get my knitting.

mongoose said...

All of that is true, Mr Ishmael and Mr PTB, but please let's not forget. Some of us have had an inkling that all is not right - the sums not adding up and the consequent beggaring of the nation, the erosion of liberty in the name of administrative efficiency, the selling of justice, the swinish deceit of "the investment" (always with its PR-man's definite article), the exploding babies of Iraq, the dead but only slightly bigger babies of The Rifles littering Afghanistan, the educational horror which sees just cant and crap forced into children's heads in place of enquiry and the means to practise it, a succession of Home Secretaries that would make the hens weep, just the constant fucking lies, the incompetent new hospitals with rooms too small for hospital beds, a permit for everything, risk assessments for going to the bog... I shall stop.

I saw all this. You saw all this. Can we not at least be allowed to spit at them as we drag them to the gallows? The mob today - but only for the twinkle of an eye - are part of us.

We are sad and disillusioned but not because of the rubbish. It is because of the betrayal that we hang them. Because they used our trust against us; sold it, burnt it, lied about it. Fuck the money; we'll make some more next year. And spending money madly is what Labour is for; it balances the redistributive books a bit. But where has honour gone? Where are my rights that say I can walk the street without answering to anyone? "Am I being detained, Officer? No? Then toddle off and bother somebody else. Good Morning to you." When will we see those days again?

All seems infected that the infected spy, as all looks yellow to the jaundiced eye. It is a transient, a catharsis. Up against the wall, motherfuckers, and down the pub for a pint. Better out than in. Let's have a Romanian Christmas and be of good cheer. One day in fifteen hundred. We are the masters now. Until Friday.

mongoose said...

Exactly, pull up a chair and get knitting.

Just had to listen to McBroon on the car radio. It's too late for all that sucking up, Nicky (Andrew Argyll) Campbell. One more for the gallows steps, Ms Lilith?

lilith said...

Victoria Derbyshire, Mongoose, please.

richard said...

I make no apologies for not feeling sorry for him. He's the one who made a rod for his own back, nobody else, so tough shit.

call me ishmael said...

There is no suggestion, from me, anyway, mr richard, that we should feel sorry for him. My point is that those now castigating him once praised him to the skies, which I have never done - just google the sagas of Gordon the Ruiner or Brown Over Israel or Come Out Gordon - and my subordinate point is that in using Brown as a sacrifice, the political-media nexus does not somehow, magically, clear the slate, they are all still lying thieving bastards, pimps, slags, ponces, drunks, child molesters, war criminals and traitorous, shit-eating monsters; filth, all of them and these ridiculous TeeVee shows have diverted nearly everyone's attention from the unpunished crimes of the political caste.

I think, further, that it ain't over until the Dimblebys and Paxman and Robinson and the rest have all earned their extra golfing money, some time on Friday morning.

Father Diamond would be disappointed in you, mr mongoose, hating the sin AND the sinner.

That's probably about the right dose, Lilith, of vengeance; just a soupcon. I don't mind seeing him brought to account, relish it, in fact but Mr PTB's "pitchfork-wielding mob squealing with contemptuous pleasure," that's a whole nother story, as we say.

A transience, a catharsis is/are an attractive idea but Mr mongoose knows as well as any that the journey is towards something even worse and that the howling today, makes more legitimate the cutting, the denial, the renewed plundering tomorrow.

mongoose said...

I don't hate him, Mr I. He repulses me, and I would like him hanged, but it is just the sins that I do hate. And the self-righteousness, snout-in-the-trough false piety. Father Fell is who we need on this job not Father Diamond.

TDG said...

Brown is a patient, not an agent. We should therefore feel neither approval nor disapproval but simply pity. Pity for him, and for us.

mrs narcolept said...

How much pity will anyone feel if, as seems at least possible, come Friday morning he turns out to be Prime Minister still? Thinking about it, perhaps quite a lot. Being PM does not seem to have made him happy; another five years could kill him. Whatever he wished for all those years ago in Edinburgh or Islington or whatever it was, surely it can't have been this.

Edgar said...

I wasn't trying to locate you on a spectrum, Mr I. Like those tricky geezers who compile cryptic crosswords under God-knows-what compulsion, I tend to signal my puns with a final 'perhaps?'

Mothers Ruin said...

It's all shit.

call me ishmael said...

I think it is possible that Snotty may remain in some form of control. We mentioned long ago, Mr TDG, that Brown's ailment/s remains unrecognised and untreated, too many having a stake in what he would call his career; pity he and us as we may, it is, I guess, as Mothers Ruin describes, all shit.