Tuesday 10 May 2011

NOT THE REASON WHY

It's just one of those remorseless milestones on Ruin's highway,  as you come upon them the heart sinks a little further,  the knees buckle a fraction more, the shoulders stoop  themselves;  it's just another example of the moronic gobsters shitting all over everything, including our precious language,  and of their turds of wisdom fertilising the ghastly managerialist patois which befouls the public - and probably the private - discourse.  Clearly, on balance, in a sense, in a very real sense, I simply say, a myriad of, at the end of the day, the bottom line, end of; of course the Devil, as ever, is in the detail; hindsight is a wonderful thing, you simply cannot underestimate the importance of this;  a gobbledegook of clumsy, infelicitous phrases strung together like sausages in a facetious,  clodhopping attempt to convey eloquence, erudition, even; the purveyors of this claptrap were probably never  aware that hopefully is an adverb, or even of  what an adverb is.

It wouldn't be so bad if it was just  Celebrity, gobbing away like this but it's Power, too, and Academe, lazy and stupid, they may as well be blowing bubbles.  One hears and reads govament ministers, jumped-up seckatries of this-and-that who wouldn't - at their current age - pass the eleven-plus,  so grossly malformed, imprecise, ambiguous and downright ugly is their spoken and written English.  The BBC - or Radio CIA  as it has recently reinvented itself;   these Oxbridge Atlanticists, what are they like, eh? - its cabal of job-for-life idiot presenters wallowing in Estuary solecisms, no longer quietly guards the language, is no longer an exemplar,  while Mark Beardy and Alan Yentob are paid millions,  the arseholes. Editorials in the broadsheets  are littered with sentences which aren't and the numbskulls who  leave university with degrees can neither read, write, speak nor add-up.

Seems a little perverse, then,  to object to  one more idiocy, one more tautologism, why bother, who gives a fuck, not the UPM, fluent in shitespeak, not the foreign seckatry, a man whose clunking cadences jerk up and down like a fiddler's elbow, a man who thinks he dignifies his creaking rhetoric by making all of his ays long ones, yet a man who is lauded by his fellow parliamentarians as ay most scholarly fellow, even though he is ay noisesome poltroon. Wasn't BlindBoy Blunkett Education seckatry, isn't Alan Sugar in the House of Lords, isn't Adrian Choylds the new Voice of the Nation, or is it Chris Moyles or, God help us all, Chris the gobby nonce Evans?

Object we must, though, if only to comfort ourselves momentarily, to help steel ourselves, quicken our own step,  against  Ruin's backward quick-march. I know you, and you know me.....we come together rarely in peace and love but  in sonnets of disquiet,  commentaries of outrage - you know, Who the fuck do they think they're talking to, this garland of nincompoops, slung unwontedly around our necks,  these people who bleat about falling standards, heedless that they, all over the media like the pox, are instigators, culprits not victims.

It is not for media consumption but for myself and my friends my stories are sung, nothing here is going to change the world  nor be deemed Art and some here will recall my young friend, stanislav, railing against the apostrophe Jihadists, those, still around, still nit-picking, cheese-paring, hair splitting like spiv Tory lawyers, who would by dint of their lifelessness, their faux-grammarianism ,halt or dismember, make joyless this people's forum,   and who would, bucket of cold watering,  claim to have dismissed a post or an individual comment simply by having gleefully complained that an apostrophe was in the wrong place or absent, even though their own, mean rebuttals were often a linguistic and intellectual desert. Pray, let us not be so infantile, was the burden of stanislav's song.  It is  not vernacular prose rough-hewn or inadvertence or  educationally short-changed  ignorance to which he objected   but  to the well-educated turned language-fashionista, to those privileged by grammar or private schooling   who are so contemptible;  lazy, stupid  and self satisfied, not for them the internalised self-editor whose rigour so polices many of us here,  they don't have to think about what they are saying,  these mediapolitico pricks,  or how they say it,  they are just cheap shits, in love with the sound of their own rank, turgid voices, bleating in chorus, singing, as they never fail to say, from the same hymnsheet,  on a level playing field, not moving the goalposts. 

In the 'forties, effete, public schoolboy layabout, George Orwell, wrote a furiously grand, snobby essay on the subject of politics and the English language and I will reproduce it here, eventually, it is uncannily prescient - you can hear the 'forties counterparts  of the likes of Blair and Straw and Hague and Cameron burbling away meaninglessly, arrogant, conceited and empty-headed, soundbiting in cheesy concert -  and reveals that this coarsening, this watering-down  of language's precision and invention has been on the march for some time;  who among us, here, would try to outguess its pitiless, vulgar legions? Well, now that the media nation, MediaMinster, is transformed into  no more than  a downmarket talking shop, I would. Statesmen, speechwriters, orators, my arse.

It was the reason why, which so recently bugged me ;  you know how these things happen,  you notice something once and then it's everywhere, these tautolgisms are all around, in the air and on the ground.  The reason why Prince Gormless is marrying Miss Totty;  the reason why Osama bin Wotsit was killed;  the reason why the Coalition has come together not in the interests of its members - fuck no -  but in the national interest;  the reason why AyVee is shit and the reason why it is cool to kill Gadaffi's grandchildren, collateralise the wee nignogs,  as Air Vice Marshall Rupert Golightly-Jockstrap would regretfully bluster it away, the cunt. The reason why these children were killed by us is because unfortunately these things happen in war, even though we are not at war.

And I nearly found  myself advancing, here,  the reasonwhy there has been a dearth of commentary in these quarters -  the wee policeman, though, an eternal sentinel, some chiding hybrid of Miss Boulter and Mr Hill, threw me down my internal  stairs, bless him.

The reason  is that, after a fashion, we dried up; we lonesome, insomniacal obsessives shouldn't take holidays, for if we do they throw us off our stride, completely. It didn't help that the ten days were spent without passport to cyberspace, its instantaneousness of everything. I have been driving around the UK for a longtime, now, been up and down her highways as far as my eye could see and I have always been able to finish up exactly where I wanted to be, you look at a map,  you just watch the signs,  there's millions of them,  or you can always pull-over and ask someone - you might find someone who can visualise things and give you concise, useful direction - but if you can read you can find your way, Oh, all around the country.  We've been doing it for millennia. But if GlobaCorp has its way we shall all soon short-circuit what, over aeons, became hard-wired, countless little electrical antennae attuned to who knows what electro-magnetic global grid,  what we haltingly call a sense of direction.  It's like that thing we see, sometimes, at the supermarket checkout,  the thing which reads the barcodes malfunctions and throws-up some fantastical, impossible price and so estranged is she by technology from simple mental arithmetic that the girl on the till cannot conceive of  the fact that this meagre basket of baked beans and tuna and white bread  simply cannot amount to over a hundred pounds, if the technology says it is so, then, by God, or onmybabbyslife, it is so.  The electronic calculator, the barcode reader,  the satnav,  living gloriously in the work 'til you drop future, we willingly permit them to burgle our brains, ransacking them of our wits.  Hey, babe, are you going to the Feelies tonight?

So this multi-lingual, trans-continental satellite navigation system, in the Robo-Citroen, was, for my purposes,  absolutely redundant and probably, like the mobile phone, a nasty harbinger of GlobaCorp Control Systems.  No, for me,  that manifestation of information technology is as welcome as warm snot on a doorknob.  Google, though, is my rod and my staff;  my help cometh even from Microsoft Windows, who made Heaven and Earth, I will lift up mine eyes unto Firefox Three;  the search engine is my Shepherd, I shall not want, surely Goodness and Mercy shall follow me all the days of my life and I will dwell in cyberspace forever - which, of course, shall we all - as it happened in the beginning, is happening now and shall ever be happening.  Fucked without the Internet, I was.

Ducking into netcafes and libraries for half an hour here and there, strangers keyboarding furiously, hemming me in   at my shoulders, no access to my Picasa library of freaks and knobheads, blog and email passwords forgotten, it was shit and so I gave up, until I could be at home, always so good to be back home again.  Meantime,  I read William Burroughs and shopped in one of those larcenous shitholes which rejoice in the name of Antiques Centre - sharp-faced, greedy harridans lying without restraint, Yes, it is Victorian,  the fender,  it only looks so shiny because we use a special process to clean it up, yes and the brand new screws and the brand new  washers, they are part of the special process.  It was grim sport, venturing among the unGodly and reminded us of how we cherish our relative isolation here in Scotland, the best part of England.

And talking of which, another reasonwhy  there have been a few weeks of relative absenteeism, is the largesse with your money of First Minister Salmond and the Tribesmen.  A day after returning home,  a big parcel arrived from the Scottish govament, as they insist on calling it.  So big it was, that it came on a pallet, a new, energy efficient  central heating system; a big, fuck-off, external  combi boiler,  eight radiators, a new two thousand litre fuel tank and all the knobs and pipes and detectors and alarms and programmers;  the lads were a week installing it, carpets up, floorboards up, walls drilled with brightly coloured Makita drills, pipes bent and forced through walls thirty-two inches thick,  bookcases emptied, furniture dismantled, hotwater cylinders removed, dust and shit and packaging everywhere, manic plumbers and engineers and sparkses determinedly pressing-on, to the next installation and the next.  The cost was getting on for nine grand, my contribution was  about eight hundred and, since they offered,  I took a loan for it, interest free, repayable over about eight years.  It is, of course, this sort of thing, and the scrapping of prescription charges,  as much as a righteous loathing of the MacToiletmen, which has seen Salmond, in his own mind, at least, crowned Emperor. 

I know that I should have said, Hang about, this is a Barnett Formula freebie too far, no, thank you, Sir, I will stick with my existing CH system, and my Rayburn and my coal fires,  I fucking hate radiators anyway, they leak, it's a nasty heat and they occupy walls in a way which restricts the deployment of furniture;  actually, I don't mind being a bit cold,  even though it's not a good  idea to be shivering when one has the former fag and former baconsandwich arteries, grinding and contracting, Mr Death's artificers morbidly modifying my life support piping.  And there was a time when I would have said, No, don't want it, let somebody else have it - diffident and painfully self denying, we Zen-Presbyerian-Marxists - but as Mr Doctor John the Night Tripper remarked, If I Don't Do It, Somebody Else Will.  I am sure that the UPM, Mr CallHimDave, would go into one - I don't pay my taxes for Mr Ishmael to walk around his house bollock naked in the middle of Winter, no, like most decent people I pay my taxes to fire half-million pound Cruise missiles at wogs in Libya,  that's what taxpaying ststesmen like me and Mr Sarkozy the Dwarf and Signor Berlusconi the Pimp pay our taxes for, if we have to pay any that is, which seems most unfair if we do.  

Seemed silly, not to take it, when it was offered, and anyway we retained the old, warm-air system, trunked through the house with more hardware than B & Q's got, easy on the  sinuses and hard on the damp.  Grinning grins all day long  of blithe acceptance and understanding at the workmen as they sought vainly to explain one aspect or another of combi-boiler technology and then,when they had gone, squatting in some unfamilar place at some unfamiliar surface, maybe with a telly or a washing machine on in the background made blogging impossible. The young can do this stuff, I see them laptopping away in the most unlikely places, maybe travellers, like mr jgm2 or mr yaic do it perforce, and manage without a mouse, but I can't, I need to sit down in quiet, at my own desk,  without hindrance.  Just a personal ritual, not just a ritual, the establishment of a productive environment, always been thus.  I remember, in the 'eighties, hearing Ruin's  children condescendingly explain to me that having Radio One on helped them with their homework, no, really, you have an attitude problem, Ishmael, that's your trouble. The days when we might properly - in everyone's interest - correct or even rebuke the young are long gone, now, washed away in a floodtide of over-protective consumer sentimentality;  luvemtobitsmykids, although, of course, such is self-love, mere, worthless, watered-down love.

So there it is, disorientated to the Nth. degree,  abroad, adrift, banished from cyberspace, marooned among heathen Godless motherfuckers and then, returning  home  to the unexpected, unsheduled  doings of Chaos.  But it's nearly over.  The lads just need to return and make the boiler work .  The sparks wired the  whole thing the wrong way 'round. Other than that, other than it not working at all, it's working fine. I am expecting them anytime from last Friday onwards but of course by now they will be on another job, destroying someone else's hard-won equilibrium, my malinstallation and its remedy erased from their minds.

The people in charge, when the space shuttles went to toast, they knew about it all, the O rings, the missing tiles,  there wasn't any need for all that shit to happen; maybe, like my plumber-engineers, they were just too busy being clever, maybe getting on with something else, the next mission, that they completely missed the point of their endeavour. There will be some jargon phrase for this phenomenon, some geekspeak, meant to mollify, exculpate and neutralise, something from the same shitty  lexicon as collateral damage   It can't be this way everywhere, can it? A monkey wrench up their arses, or a slide rule,  that's the remedy.
Back, anyway, to Decency's barricades and as  la belle haughty, Lennox,  insists, poppily, it's good to be back home again


11 comments:

PT Barnum said...

Welcome home, Mr. I. You have, of course, been missed. A place of reason and rage is badly needed as we are buffeted by the shitstorms of these times. (I nearly wrote 'end times' but that probably owes more to the endemic idiocy of neurologists than any belief in incipient rapturing.)

You could look upon the CH as your contribution to exposing Salmond's Napoleonic complex. A secession referendum in which the English were allowed to vote is his only hope. I expect the campaign to begin soon.

Dick the Prick said...

There's a quality thread(ish) on Liberal Conspiracy about Scottish Independence and the rub being that they've got England over a barrel and not necessarily badly so. By taking back the Crown Estate and seabeds, buildings, naval bases etc; they're quids in.

I guess i'm not too bothered either way as it's just politics being played on a different level but by Cameron (agreeing - apparently he had to under the 1707 Jock Act) that the SNPers can have a referendum - much of the process has already commenced which in some regards nullifies the objective that a referendum would achieve so popping it back into the long grass. The threat being just as powerful as the act. Interesting stuff and rather fascinating in constitutional terms.

I guess a free CH system is all fine & dandy until fucking NPower send you a bill for a fucking fortune. Hmm..

On a similar vein as to 'it's good to be back home again', there's also the polar with Mr Gil's of the Scott Herons take whereby 'home is where the hatred is' - sure he does kid's parties.

Good to have you back Sir - hope all's well.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOUMvjw9RlA

reg. said...

Amen to that. Your holiday has done you some good.

Verge said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
mongoose said...

I wrote an email yesterday with a "hopefully" in it. Even as I was typing it I was thinking "it is to be hoped" but time was pressing, nobody would notice but me, and I couldn't be bothered and winged it on its was. I just didn't see why I should even care. It is not dark yet, Mr I, but it is getting there.

And objective pronouns do not do stuff, children. And so I have a nine-year-old who knows what "whom" is. You're right, of course, though the kids do sound like Enid Blyton wrote their dialogue for them. Alas, the beasts of the field sneer and snipe at them. The worst of all things being in these coarsened times to stand out by being different.

Woman on a Raft said...

You want a holiday every four years?

jgm2 said...

Good to have you back Mr I. And who wouldn't want an entire 9,000 quid central heating system installed for a mere 800 quid. Surely the c*unts who were installing it could have billed the UK tax-payer for ten thousand and let you have the thing completely free. Or given you an eight hundred quid discount on the final price or something. You know they're making six or seven thousand in clear profit as it is.

This, as I have railed elsewhere (and here) is what is so fucking wrong Mr I. In order to supply you with a nine thousand pound boiler some c*unt somewhere has to earn about 30K so their tax can be funnelled to you as a bribe. And you, you ungrateful bastard, are going to take that bribe and, most likely, not even vote for the Mel Gibson fan-club. After all that money they took off some other poor c*unt and gave to you.

A snapshot though of our entire economy. Not just Fucking Scotland. Folk working their bollocks off (not me obviously for I am a lazy C*unt), paying their taxes and having the likes of Brown and Salmond telling 'em it's for the poor and the NHS when large chunks of it are just squandered on over-priced shit buying votes from folk who were managing perfectly well without the over-priced shit. But the money is out there. The chippy and the plumber and the sparky all get paid and, in this way, Scotland convinces itself that it has three more private sector workers. And ignores the inconvenient fact that they too are all paid by the state to carry out vastly over-priced and unnecessary work.

When I lived up in the fucking place I almost got the car converted to LPG via one of those grant schemes. In the end I didn't because it riled me so much that the crooks fitting it under the scheme were charging twice what it would cost if you didn't get it fitted under the scheme ie they were simply pocketing the grant. They weren't using the grant to fit the fucker practically for free. It was supposed to be a sweetener for the motorist to convert. Not as sweetener to these fucking crooks to set themselves up as LPG converters.

And of course the whole thing is multiplied one million-fold as Everest discovers that they can rip the government off by charging them 10,000 quid to instal 2,000 quid of solar panels. And it's not like HMG will be appearing on Watchdog complaining to Anne Robinson about high pressure sales tactics.

How much? Here's the cheque. C*unts.

Anyway. As you say - scale it up a few times and you have Cameron getting us involved in another war that is none of our fucking business. Firing half million quid rockets that represent a bankers annual tax return so that somewhere down the line one of their surviving relatives can blow up a tube train and claim we had it coming for sticking our nose in. And, do you know, they have a fucking point.

As to posting on holiday. I try not to. I may read but I try not to get involved. Having spent umpty thousand getting the entire family to the far corner of the world it is good to just immerse yourself in what you travelled all that we to see or do rather than hankering after the minutiae of the latest idiocies back home.

jgm2 said...

Scaling up even further we have the Olympics. Another 10 or 15 bn squandered to provide a day out for a few athletes from around the world. Venues built to showcase such sports as synchronised swimming and those interminable combinations of cycling event. Keirin or whatever. And blokes who are supposed to be racing sitting there side by side, stationary, balancing on two wheels, waiting for the other one to twitch like some cycling homage to a Clint Eastwood film.

The main stadium, built at vast cost, simply handed over to some London club with a pat on the head. There you go.

What a load of shit. What a total waste of cash.

And that fucking high-speed rail-link shit. Connect London to Birmingham and cut 20 minutes off the journey. It only took 90 minutes 30 years ago. 20bn quid to cut 20 minutes off the journey. A billion quid a minute. It's the Edinburgh tram scheme debacle on an world-class scale.

C*UNTS.

And breathe.

a young anglo-irish catholic said...

Afternoon Mr I, from the Starbucks on the M40, two days in Wales and a night at a Prem Inn in prospect, tomorrow with some real engineers actually making money for the country.

And without the dongle, how could I tune in, laptop perched in the edge of the Starbucks table?

Small mercies when out on the road.

Maximum respect on the CH front. This Brownian madness continues. My grandmother, always very poor, always worked into the ground started getting huge money from Brown years ago.

She thought it mad. If we keep doing this, there'll be no money left. Aye, and there's socialism. Killing the economy with kindness.

call me ishmael said...

You young people, mr yaic, so clever, so adaptable. I have a dongle for my big teevee but I haven't a fucking clue what it does and am not entirely sure that I want to know. My guess would be that soon, now,we will have some sort of wrist-mounted device, powered by the body's energy to enable our permanent, eternal, maybe compulsory connection to stuff, or is that what mobile phones do, already?

A minor quibble but Mr Snot's aim was always Power, and not Redistribution, I think that with a minor tweaking of his realities he could have been as happy snot-munching and stuttering on the Tory benches. Isn't it a fair to say that he gave as much to the rich as to the poor?

Mr mongoose is a real engineeer, not a phantom one; will he be there; Mr WOAR, perhaps?

call me ishmael said...

It woukld appear that the Tribesmen are being a little Islamic about this independence fraud which they would perpetrate - or threaten to perpetrate, the Union was joined by two parties - Scotland and England&Wales, it was enacted at Scotland's request, has consequences for all the peoples of these islands and its dismantling should be a matter for them, not for the wee fat fuck, spinning around three times in his kilt, saying I divorce thee. There is not a majority appetite here for secession, mr ptb, so that's right, it would take a tabloid English vote to make it fast; however it was arrived at it would be entirely wrong for all concerned and a pointless diversion from the battle against GlobaCorp - one which Fat Alec has already surrendered to the likes of Donald McTrump, the famous US "birther" and turdmuncher and to the power companies busy vandalising the Highlands.

I don't know Mr Gil Scott Heron's stuff, mr dtp, but Home is where the hatred is well-rooted in Sigmund Freud and notably - your library will get it for you - RD Laing's Sanity, Madness and the Family.

I don't know, mr reg, about that, a holiday is always followed by weeks or months of chaos, getting back on an even keel; mrs woar's quadrannual break seems about right, these days. I would not take any were it not for Mrs Ishmael, bless her opitimism.