An old man in a final, ruinous act of betrayal.
They're wetting themselves, again, at the Filth-O-Graph, old friends like Mr Swiss Bob and Mr Old Holborn, the tobacconist, as John Prescott takes his seat with the other Establishment ruffians, confusing ennoblement with Decency, they cling to some notion that Prescott lets the place down, when, in fact, he embodies its purpose, current and historical.
The thieves, the bullies, the degenerates, the killers, the rapists, the robbers, the assassins, these have always been made Lord or Earl or Duke or some such for services against the people, over time their descendants have sought to persuade us, like Uncle Sam's slave owning dynasties, that theirs are the Good Families, even though they are filth and yet simple folk believe that somehow this remaining batch of hereditary scum and their time-served, verminous, political hatchetmen and women and noncing bishops can somehow be polluted by the addition to their ranks of the stupid, greedy, cock-waving fuckpig, Prescott.
There is nothing novel or controversial in Prescott's annointment, in fact it usefully demonstrates or should, even to the blind that there is no significant difference between the benches of the government and the so-called opposition - how many times, one wonders, must we speak these truths before people stop acting like children, my party's better than your party, Jesus fucking wept? - that the only place for all who connive against us in these dark cloisters is Up against the wall, motherfuckers?
19 comments:
Mr I: I agree, but I do feel that the Noble Lord Prescott has plumbed new depths of hypocricy, venality and downright stupidity. The only saving thought I have is that he may be taking the piss - but that assumes a degree of intelligence on his part. One feels some sympathy with Moaty.
I don't think, mr mike, that Prescott has the wit to take the piss, it having been taken so extensively, so adroitly out of him by the Mandelson-Campbell-Blair-Brown Project. He has not an inkling of how stupid he has been made to look - as Deputy Prime MInister or as Party Peacekeeper and now, as Baron, an ox among ferrets and reptiles.
Historically it used to be the survival of the fittest. In Lord of the Pies case, it is the ennoblement of incompetent venality. In the past, regardless of morality, courage in battle was a necessity for advancement. Little changes but the weaponry. Ishmael, you need to offer an alternative to be taken seriously. revolution needs troops and battles to fight! The guillotine politics of history were every bit as nasty as the victims it took. Same as the Russian barbarity in the indiscriminate murder of children, whose crime was to be born to wrong family.
When someone shits in your face from a great height, I believe the favoured expression to proffer to our honourable Lordships is 'good shot'. Mother fuckers all. How tediously fucking standard.
Not being led by the nose, willingly, by skymadeupnewsandfilth, isn't that an alternative; isn't the rejection of the oxymoron of career public service an alternative, at least an alternative way of looking at things, mr old rightie?
In terms of evolution it has been the survival of the fittest, certainly, but you must not confuse that axiom with the doings of kings and bandits and pimps, nor must we necessarily ascribe courage in battles to their survivors and to the compliance of their tame historians; I think you refer to the survival of the canniest, rather than the fittest, fittest in any sense, that is.
As for the impotence of the malcontent with which you charge me, I would offer the thought that it was the malcontent who brought us out of the seas, up the shores, into the trees, the caves, the plains, the farms the cities and outwards, to the stars; the contented, the - forgive me - conservative would still have us swimming around in our own shit.
Been on holiday, mr dtp? Not sightseeing in Northumberland, I hope. Yes, Johnny sits, now, on the ermine-edged latrine bench of State, shiting in our faces, with the rest of them, lawyer-thieves, slags, bullies, pimps; career, boneheaded lobby fodder, as proud of himself as they are. Fuck me, I heard that even little Paul Boateng got a peerage; what a shithole.
Mr Ishmael, I see no reason for you to defend your stance nor your prose. If one cannot see the state-we're-in clearly and soberly, what use any "alternative" since it will always be derived from some version of the bedtime stories our rulers employ to keep us as frightened children, startled at every sudden noise and calling out for Mummy?
You see clearly. Your readers are helped to see more clearly. Tis sufficient unto the day.
Thanks, mr ptb, that's gracious of you. Others, though, sit on a different bench to you and I.re. That doesn't mean their comments are unwelcome and should not be treated with courtesy and seriousness, even in refutation.
I read somewhere, years ago, now, of someone putting the same - to me - facetious "Whats yer alternative?" argument and the response was "I don't need to have an alternative in order to know that the status quo is rubbish but if you want one give me the vast, almost infinite resources of the civil service and the machinery of government and I'll come up with one, sharpish."
That is a more pragmatic statement of position but I prefer, never tire of, my whimsical reverence for the fishmen and the sea-apes, our dissident ancestors.
It is not that one cannot think of alternatives but that all revolutionary alternatives have historically regressed to essentially the same model of stratification, of haves and have nots, of asymmetric power. It is as if any deliberate change is doomed to failure. There is a deep reason why that should be so; it is striking that conservative thinkers rarely address it.
Thanks, mr tdg, it is as you so cogently say but is it not also the case that some incremental changes for the better (a lessening of that assymetry) have accrued since, say, the English Civil War's eschewing the Divine Right of kings; I think I would be right in citing that episode as briefly revolutionary albeit that not only did it lapse swiftly into the stratification you mention but actually Restored its symbolic and practical hierarchy. I don't know if the palatial, luxuriant presence of Elizabeth Battenberg Saxe-Coburg - or whatever she is properly called - and her spawn entirely negate the efforts of the New Model Army to rein-in despotism, who can tell at such a distance but for most the idea of the Divine Right is bollocks.
The Up against the wall, Motherfuckers mantra of young stanislav is not actually a call for revolutionary death squads but an expression of fathomless contempt for Power, framed in the lexicon of its servants - the cops, the armies and the blind ones, jeering at Compassion, over at the Filth-O-Graph.
I have an incremental change that I'd like to put forward for adoption by the House. How about MPs stop being a bunch of thieving dirt-bags? We will consider it a start that our elected representatives do not steal from us.
Such civility, Mr I, does you nothing but credit.
As you and Mr TDG say, for all the PizzaCrew's talk of wire and lamp-posts, for all of New Labour's foetid gassing about equality for all but for some more than others, they live within the same paradigm: give us power and we will make the world perfect.
If Gerard Winstanley, and not Cromwell and his spawn, had sat at the head of the post-Civil War government, we might now live in a very different world. Or the Commonwealth would have been even shorter lived, since those groups of Diggers and Ranters and Quakers and Baptists would have threatened the real powers in the land. Perhaps they didn't execute enough people. More likely they thought that the truth of a juster, freer society was self-evident and self-perpetuating.
You have more history than I, mr ptb, as does mr tdg; I shall try to upgrade my knowledge a little via Google. Mr TDG's observation about reform - or revolution - relapsing, ever, to tyranny is troubling and what little I know of the Civil War is that it was an opportunity squandered, perhaps by dint of those forces - of entropy or laziness or cowardice - which he alludes to but does not explain.
We have been arguing, as you know, for some time, he and I, about the perfectability of mankind; the discourse, in itself, being a hint, a fragrance of a tiny perfection.
The pianowire and the lamppost fantasy may, I fear, owe much but not all to my young friend, stanislav. Mr mongoose has long deployed a hempen and timber metaphor, replete with lists of the condemned and the order of their departure, mr killemallletGodsortemout favours a blanket extermination and I sometimes fear that mr old holborn, the tobacconist, just down the cyberstreet, would cheerfully beat his chosen miscreants to death with pick-axe handles; none of us, of course, possess the wherewithall to actually instigate even the mildest rebuke or punishment, none of us will really contribute much to the thought that the truth of a juster, freer society (is) self-evident and self-perpetuating.
The explanation of a "form of life", it seems to me, has to be more complex that the form of life itself. So when a society tries to explain itself it is always going to fall short of its own complexity, just as someone's sight always falls short of his visual field. The theorist will argue that the complexity can be reduced by identifying elements of deep structure (e.g. control of means of production, social contracts, etc, etc) but all he is describing is apparent surface regularities that need not be generative, indeed cannot be generative, for if people were that simple they would be the fleshy robots idiots such as Dawkins imagine us to be.
Mr Cromwell is viewed with an ever darker eye the further one gets from Whitehall. And it was a political event perpetrated by the political class. Parliament rebelled not the people. Although my knowledge too, Mr Ishmael, is somewhat shallow.
The decay of principle, eh? Great Expectations to Primary Colours. It is always thus. It is as if the pursuit of- The pursuit of what? Power? Impact? Fame and wealth? The pursuit of whatever it is corrupts the pursuit and the pursuer alike.
There have been many versions of this but Dick Gaughan wrote it and here's his, 'The World Turned Upside Down', a song about the Diggers, led by Winstanley, and their taking over the land at St George's Hill in Surrey in 1649.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWzzvnPOyTM
In the same year as Charles I was executed, multitudes of groups who had been oppressed, suppressed, imprisoned, hanged under monarchical government all suddenly looked to a future where they might be free in thought and free to take back all that had been stolen from them. Instead, they got Cromwell and his henchmen seeking a new kind of monarchy and almost all hopes were snuffed out, usually brutally.
Where many had fled persecution to the New World, these had stayed and fought and died. And under the Lord Protector they kept dying.
The richest of all these ironies is that he passed his crown to his lad. You could not make it up.
Is this the same observation, mr tdg, which Professor McLuhan made regarding our inability to observe our environement - whoever discovered the sea, it wasn't a fish? I think it is.
There was a Brian Aldiss novel, Non-Stop, in which, at the close, a couple of inhabitants of a huge, largely ruinous spaceship, - long over-run by a hydroponic jungle and, its original purpose lost in the mists of time and its once scientific crew, now, many generations on, fallen victim to superstition and fable and brutish tribalism- manage to activate an escape shuttle and pull away slowly from what had been their sealed world, their only reality for centuries, to eventually, at some distance, see it for what it was, a tiny speck in the vastness of Creation, yet a few hours previous, its totality. Only from without could they begin to understand or explain it.
It was a haunting image, of futility and helplessness, tempered by optimism and resilience, light years beyond the showy doggerel of Mr Dawkins and his pushy ilk.
This business of the human race being willing to fall in behind any leader and scramble to do his bidding, even to the most cruel whims of that leader is, I'm afraid, quite natural behaviour for our species, just as for dogs. If you have ever owned a pair of dogs, you will see this characteristic: one dog, however stupid, is top dog, ususally by virtue of aggression and character, the other is submissive and will act as second lieutenant, follow orders, protect the top dog, and eat second. However, the urge to be top dog is always a persistant itch, and the submissive dog, sensing weakness in the leader, will sink his teeth into the neck of the top dog, even if heavily out-classed in size and make his bid for the leadership. This is our genetic inheritance. We are pack animals and will follow any pillock who achieves leadership, even to our own detriment. It explains the god-shaped hole in our brains. And as for Cromwell, passing on his inheritance to his own offspring, this is staightforward selfish gene behaviour. This is why men have gone to such lengths throughout history to ensure their offspring are their own (chastity belts, incarceration, segregation from men) - after all, every woman knows her own children, whereas men, certainly until DNA testing, usually had to put up with a good guess and good faith.
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