Sunday 31 May 2020

The Sunday Ishmael 31st May 2020

 Scientific and health advice suggests that it is far too early to ease lockdown, if the purpose of lockdown was to slow the spread of the coronavirus. It is entirely justified, however, in order to distract attention from those who have contemptuously and with impunity  breached it, to give a Parliamentary imprimatur to what is happening anyway, and maybe avoid a summer of rioting as predicted earlier in these pages.
Trafalgar Square George Floyd rally 31/05/20
With America still burning
George Floyd protests in American cities
And Emily upsetting her bosses by telling the truth
Emily modestly dressed for once



We must turn our thoughts to the Eck-onomy and how we can do our bit to save the nation. Maybe it will help if the younger mr ishmael helps us to understand how this money thing works. 

Writing in 1987:
Me and the Pound

The pound is holding its own against a basketful of currencies


I am 37 years old, and, for what it’s worth, I have an Ordinary (very ordinary if you ask me) National Diploma in Business Studies. I also have an A level in Accounting as well as O levels in Commerce – Commerce is a sort of Economics for beginners, it explains how banks borrow money from poor people and lend it to rich people and how the insurance business is a license to print money – and in Economic Geography. I know better than most where rubber, pineapples and printed circuits come from. Sometimes, like when I’m talking to Mark, a boy whose knowledge of current affairs starts and ends with Top of the Pops, I think that I have a better than average grasp of matters geopolitical. I know, for instance, that the Nicaraguan Government, like the Chilean one before it, are basically ok guys, it’s just that they prefer Karl Marx and Fidel Castro to Cecil B. DeMille and John Ford, so, obviously, they’d be better off murdered by the C.I.A., better dead than red. I don’t like to brag about it but I’ve seen forbidden BBC videonasties about satellites and so I guess I’ve broken the Official Secrets Act. I know, too, that there are some unanswered questions about the sinking of the Belgrano and the bombing of four-year-old Libyan terrorists. And I’m one hundred per cent certain that we’d be better off having a plague of locusts than being protected by Star Wars. But the pound and a basket of currencies? Well, I’m afraid that’s a mystery to me.


You know what it’s like when you see Peter Sissons on the lunchtime news programme. He’s done all his world coverage, interviewed a couple of pundits about the latest police killing, shuffled his papers around – like he’d actually been reading from them – and then he takes a deep breath: “In the City the Financial Times Share Index is up 2 points to 1876.4 and the pound gained against a basketful of currencies”. It’s as though I’ve been reading an ordinary novel and, all of a sudden I turn the page and it’s in Sanskrit; meaningless phrases and numbers jangle like some intergalactic shipping forecast.


When I watch it in the evening it’s not so bad. Right after the Royal Family update or human interest story Alastair Burnett, in heavy, statesperson-like tones says: “In the City the FT index closed at blah-blah-blah, a drop of 3 points and the pound, following a day of election rumours, closed at 1.764932 against the dollar, a drop of 2 points. Goodnight Majesties, Royal Highnesses and exalted persons everywhere”. You know where you are with News at Ten. It’s all rubbish. The Queen Mum is out of hospital, Princess Margaret is sober, Prince Edward is firmly heterosexual and Princess Diana has a new pair of tights, or possibly vice versa. Cardboard cut-out Kings and Queens, fairy tale romances, soldiers and horses, castles and palaces. All’s well that ends well.


But what about the pound? What does it all mean? Well, it seems to me that some people have so much money that they use it to buy other money. (Really) They’re not happy having bundles of money, more than they can possibly spend. They want more. They want different money. They want the best money that money can buy. Having billions of pounds is no good to them. They’ve got to have the very best of everything. Yen, Marks or Pfennigs, doesn’t matter which, just as long as it’s worth more than something else. (Some people call this free enterprise. Other people call it greed.) What happens is that they wake up in the morning and decide they want some marks. They get on the Carphone to the broker and say “buy me a hundred million quid’s worth of marks (or dollars or yen)”. Now, somewhere in the City, word of this gets out. Nobody wants to be stuck with a warehouse full of pounds when somebody else is buying marks. So everybody starts swapping their pounds for marks. And then the guys with the marks say to themselves: “Donner und Blitzen, wait a minute. If everybody wants to buy our money it’s gotta be worth more than we’re charging for it. Jack the price up Mein Herren.” Supply and Demand. The guys who bought early – cheap - are grinning like Cheshire cats and ordering up matching his’n’hers Porsches or Lamborghinis and the guys stuck with the pounds – which are worth only a few pennies less than yesterday – are drowning their sorrows in Champagne and snorting a bit more coke than usual. The result, meantime, for the rest of us, is a strong mark and a weak pound and millions of Germans over here on their holidays, cluttering the place up with their Audis, buying up Harrods and having the best time of their lives since Dunkirk.
Sometimes it works the other way ‘round. The pound gets bought and the other stuff gets sold. It means that your window cleaner can go bombing off round America for his holidays, and bringing home more than he could last year. Like AIDS. But what that means is that it’s difficult to export things to America because as a result of, for instance, the dollar being weak, the yanks have to fork out more of them for their imports and so they’ve got less money left over for bombing the Libyans and Nicaraguans; less money for microwaving everybody from space and less money to spend on generally ripping the guts out of the third world.

Now when Wall Street catches a cold Threadneedle Street doesn’t just shiver, it nearly shakes itself apart. With a strong pound and a weak dollar everybody’s in trouble. Just like you’d expect when the richest people on earth have to pay more than they want to for things. If Americans begin to think that what they do unto others is being done unto them then we’d all better look out. They start smacking import taxes on whisky, gin, Rolls Royces and the like. What that means, as everybody knows, is that people like the Guinesses have less money to give their children to buy heroin with. Less money to spend paying off Judges and less money to spend on bribing both the government and their buddies in the City (who are often the same people). So, to make good the deficit, to satisfy the shareholders, that’s to say themselves and their families, they have to throw some more people on the dole or into prison. As we know they are not averse to doing that. But sometimes they think to themselves that perhaps if there’s too much unemployment their party’ll be ditched at the polls and, heaven forfend, they’ll all be nationalised. So what they do is they all get together and say, “Look, chaps, we’ve had a good run, let’s get things back on an even keel, let’s everybody buy some dollars and get rid of some pounds. We’ll all know well in advance so we won’t lose too much money, the Americans will feel better and anyway all the national assets are going for a song. We’ll make a killing on British Airways. We’ll stick a couple of politicians on the idiot box to explain it all to the proles. You buy some shares for me and I’ll buy some for you.”

It’s just the same with the oil. Have you ever noticed? When there’s a shortage the price of petrol goes up. And when there’s too much the price goes up. When the arabs are in agreement with themselves the motorist has to take diabolical liberties with his flexible friend. And when the arabs are falling out with themselves he has to do the same thing. And it’s not just the arabs. When the oil companies strike it rich in the North Sea everybody still has to stump up for the exploration costs, and when they’ve been met, the whole enterprise is sold off at a knockdown price to the chaps in the City. You would think that it couldn’t work the same way under any and all circumstances. But it does. There’s a shortage so we have to pay more. There’s a surplus so we have to pay more. If it’s not the arabs it’s the cost of drilling under the sea. And when the price of petrol goes up it increases the price of everything else and we have inflation.

 Inflation means that the poor have to work harder for less money in order for the people who have more money than they’ll ever need to make more money. (Some people call this wealth creation, other people – the same other people – call it greed.) It also means that the poor pay more taxes – apart from in an election year when all the voters get money, or promises of money, thrown at them – and the rich pay less taxes. This is to encourage the rich to make themselves richer because the poor would be nowhere without the rich. It also means that because the poor have forced the rich to throw them out of work and into prison or onto the dole and the government is obliged to keep them living below, or, failing that, on the poverty line (a figure which the government makes up for itself) they (the government) have only enough money left to arm the police against the poor, buy missiles which they can never fire and finance wars which they can never win. It’s not, then, surprising, that they have no money to spare for schools or hospitals or old people. That doesn’t matter really because the rich, the wealth creators, have private health schemes and private education, both of which are subsidised from the public (that is to say “poor”) sector and most of them, like the Queen and her friends and relations, (some people would describe them as public servants, a national asset – the other bunch would call them parasites) have more houses than they know what to do with.

It’s the same with the butter and cheese and beef mountains and the wine lakes. The farmers, God bless ‘em, are subsidised – paid tons of money – to grow all these surpluses. When they’ve got the money they buy up more land, destroy more countryside, and then demand more subsidies to grow more surpluses which, in turn, go into store for a few years before being sold at less than cost price, not to our own poorfolk, but to, of all people, the Russians. You know, the ones we have to spend billions of pounds defending ourselves against. (I know, actually, what’s going to happen with the Russians. The butter is just a dress rehearsal. The EEC are going to sell them a few billion litres of wine at about a penny a tankerful, wait until they’ve smashed their empty glasses down in a fireplace, toasted the revolution, done a few Cossack dances and fallen over dead drunk and then the Sixth Fleet’s going to leave off bombing and strafing the Middle East, steam into Murmansk and liberate all the poor benighted soviets. There’ll be a MacDonald’s in Red Square before they know what’s happening.)

I suppose the pound means different things to different people. To me it means a pint. To Mark and Mandy and Becky it means a week’s pocket money. To an old age pensioner it means an hour or two of their living room temperature being relatively comfortable. And to an Ethiopian child it means the difference between living and dying. What we have to remember though is that it’s hard in the City. I mean you generally have to undergo the rigours of public school and Oxbridge, probably have to work, oh, up to thirty hours a week and maybe manage to get abroad only six or seven times a year. And then there’s the overheads: clothes for Ascot and Henley and Wimbledon; a couple of shotguns and shooting clothes, a decent set of golf clubs, a horse or two for riding to hounds; a reasonable cellar; a good tailor, perhaps a Roller and an aircraft and that’s not to mention the drug bills or the slush funds.

There are people, some of them Doctors and Professors, some of them journalists and commentators but most of them politicians – you know, power-crazed lunatics with an answer to everything – who attempt to explain this bizarre situation to us in terms which we will understand. They talk about free market forces. (This means buying cheap and selling dear. That’s ok with things like tanks and missiles and napalm but right out of order when it comes to things like drugs. You can get a Knighthood – a “K” as it’s known amongst EPs – or maybe the Queen’ll give you an award for selling fragmentation grenades but you can get fourteen years for selling cannabis.) 
 
They talk about productivity. (This means hijacking technology, throwing people onto the dole or into prison, and maximising profits.) They talk about growth. (This means that the impossibility of the situation is such that the illusion can only be sustained by constant expansion. Ever more diverse and larger numbers of goods must be produced whilst still being kept just beyond the reach of the majority of people who produce them. You know – by the time you can afford a video or a computer it’s out of date.) And they talk about monetarism. (I think that means controlling the other three by dint of limiting or increasing the number of pounds actually in circulation, but I could be wrong.) What these people have in common is that they are all raving mad.
 
Surely it should be clear to them that one nation’s balance of payments surplus is another nation’s balance of payments deficit. And that on a shrinking globe: it’s high time we had global management of resources. And that this entire strong pound nonsense means that the weak will continue to starve. And that the only way there can be a strong American/European economy is for there to be a regiment of mad scientists, funded by mad financiers, dreaming up germs, nerve gasses and particle wave death rays and ……ah, what’s the point?

I think, actually, that I understand all this pound business better than they do. I think that whether the pound is up or down, weak or strong, in or out of the basket and whether Peter and Alastair smile or frown when they tell me the Financial Times Index, you can bet your life that today, like any other day, it’s been a case of one bunch of Mr Greedybastards having a good day and another bunch of Mr Greedybastards having a not-so-good day. That’s what it means. That’ll do nicely.

Afterword:
Mr Ishmael wrote Me and the Pound in 1987.
Twenty-seven years later, he wrote:

I never understood money, mr mongoose, never had enough to share mr jgm2s anxieties, for instance, and since Peter Sissons used to declare the daily value of the pound against a basket of currencies I have been convinced that the whole business is fantastical, awaiting only an Emperor's New Clothes moment for the whole idea to evaporate.

To me it has always been pretend money, well, since paper money, anyway. Gold coin, I can understand that, but central banks, printing paper, borrowing money into existence, nah, can't fool me with that, whaddathey think I am, fucking Irish?

39 comments:

mongoose said...

Well, mrs i, if we didn't understand money before the current panto, we are doomed now.

Bungalow Bill said...

Greed for power and money, or should that be for money and power; whatever money is, of course - which probably means it's power first. Mr I saw that they hate us and, most of all, that they hate the poor. And so it proceeds, the simpleton Left acting as cheerleaders, to the manner born.

Ah well, we have these consoling pieces.

mongoose said...

Yes, Mr BB, I think that money is power, or a measure of the accumulation of it.

Unfortunately, I think that there are at least three types of money. There is the money that we have - or don't have - to buy Rice Crispies or shoes for the kids, and this is the money that troubles 99.9% of humanity. This is real money - as Churchill and his gold standard would have understood it. Money which can be spent or unspent, or asked for by the submission of a paper chit. Then there is bankers' money. A banker can have a real ten dollars in his britches but then lend an imaginary 100 dollars to poor sods, usually of the previous shoe-buying category, often on disgracefully ususious terms. This, I think, in passing, is the bit that keeps the poor poor and the rich rich.

And then there is government money, and in the shade of which we are all amateurs. I would be interested to know what Mr Mike thinks. How, Mr Mike, are we to pay for turning the planet off for three months? What is going to happen this summer when the unfurloughed find themselves unjobbed?

Mike said...

Mr mongoose. I'm just a humble mathematician, and share the thoughts of Mr I from 1987, as true today as they were then. I've worked extensively in the City of London, as well as with Government, and I can tell you there is an awful lot of smoke and mirrors, and with a few honourable exceptions they are not that clever - mostly bullshitters and chancers.

Now to the serious question you pose. Well, of course there is no way that any of this debt can ever be paid off. The US, for example, is projected to have debt of 125% of GDP - this is based on official figures of borrowing, which are a lie as so much is off-books. And the US GDP is massively inflated as well - for example, the recent trillions of debt count towards GDP as if they were productive, when in fact they are destructive of wealth. Any debt > 100% of GDP is widely acknowledged to be totally unpayable and unsustainable.

We are no way near yet a proper reckoning of cost. Its still in the hands of politicians trying to steer through the virus with the least damage to their polling numbers. The post-mortem of accounting will soon be inevitable, though, and it will not be pretty. There are some immutable facts of economic life and these will soon be evident. Just as the alchemists thought they could create gold, so the fools gold of money printing will become obvious. As for the jobs and business coming back, its just my guess, but if 50% comes back eventually, that will be a good result. In other words there will be a bloody big hole.

There will of course be winners and loosers as in this game its relativities that count. My own Australia has had a good pandemic: 7202 cases and 103 deaths at this moment; we have borrowed to pay for lockdown but relatively little. China and Russia have also had good pandemics: China is back on track to growth, and Russia has had high cases (a measure of their extensive testing) but relatively few deaths and because of their strong financial reserves will be economically unscathed. The West (the US and Europe, and to a slightly lesser extent the UK) by contrast has had a terrible pandemic: ineptly handled, and a sudden massive economic burden (which came of top of the already struggling financial systems). In addition there is the now self inflicted wound of societal unrest in the US, a symptom not just of dead Mr Floyd, but of all the ills that plague the US. This could easily spread when people soon find they have no prospects.

Long and short of it is that there has been a big swing of the geopolitical scales from West to East. It confirms the failure of Western capitalism (voodoo economics) and a big swing to the future of Eurasia. A lot depends on what happens next. There are signs that Europe is moving out of the US orbit and looking East. The UK would be well advised, IMHO, to do similar and unshackle from the US.

mongoose said...

Thanks, Mr Mike, I knew you'd know more than I do. It is the absurdity of it all. We spend a decade of "austerity" trying to get the public finances back pointing in the right direction, and then we spend another decade's worth of splurge money in a two-month pay-for-everything madness. That cannot be real money, and can surely never become real money. I wonder at what long-term rate the UK gov could borow it. I guess that it is miniscule.

I think the infection and death/recovery numbers are not yet internationally comparable with any confidence but almost everywhere has had a handful of hundreds of deaths per million of population. Given the exponential nature of transmission, we all did about the same whatever steps were taken. The overpopulated and colder nations of western europe with their more sophisticated recording habits having it the worst. It will turn out to have been a very much worse than usual flu season averted at massive financial and social cost. Clearer minds than mine, I hope, have been balancing those scales.

Is anybody surprised at the riots? Everybody knew that about a month is the time it takes for folk in lockdown to start going tonto. And so double that and you are waiting for the first spark. Why do police officers all become bastards? There was no need for any violence at all. The geezer was nicked and handcuffed.

mrs ishmael said...

mr mongoose - "Why do police officers all become bastards" Because it's fun. Because it's power. Because it's sexy. Because they can. Because the blood starts pumpin'.
Now, them's scary thoughts. Why do folk take drugs? Because it's fun. Why do they kick shit outta each other? Because it's exciting. Why do folk riot? Because it ain't boring. Young police officers have the same brain wiring as young rioters, the same adrenalin spurting through the blood.
A psychologist explained it to me once. "You see, mrs ishmael, the part of the brain that is responsible for the regulation of pain is situated right next to the part of the brain involved in the sexual response. There's often a short circuit."
That's one explanation. Douglas Adams had a word of caution - anyone that wants the job - that's the last one should get it.
Best not get smug about the behaviour of US lawnforcement - to date there have been 1741 deaths in police custody or otherwise following contact with the police in England & Wales since 1990. Here's a link:
https://www.inquest.org.uk/deaths-in-police-custody

Bungalow Bill said...

The indescribable Hancock tells us that the "economy is going to have to change" and that we'll hear more about it all from the Chancellor and PM. Well thank goodness for that then, just when I was starting to worry.

mrs ishmael said...

Thank you, mr mike, these really are the chronicles of ruin. Is there any way outta here?

mrs ishmael said...

Hmmm - negative growth, plummeting house prices, furloughed workers redeployed to get the crops in... good thing we don't have to worry, mr bungalow bill, as the restructuring of the eck-onomy rests in such safe hands.
And there won't be any more babies to clutter the place up. On my commute home from the office this evening, Evan Davis, on Radio 4 told me that we have to think about sex. He said that the lockdown rules specifically outlaw sex, as two people in a room indoors who do not share a household, are not allowed to get down and dirty as they have to stay 2 metres apart. So they wheeled out a sexually transmitted disease expert, who told us that the numbers of people who report for assistance with STDs has plummeted since lockdown, then a sexologist who told us that people are meeting on the internet and doing the cooking together and watching films together, (in their separate households) and that the nation is returning to old-fashioned courting.
Right.

Mike said...

Mrs I: "is there a way out of here?". In a word NO. It can only get worse, at least for the rest of the time I will be breathing. The more I think about it, the more the virus has done the world a favour, and brought the rotten house of cards down. Darwin would have approved.

mongoose said...

It reminds me, Mr Mike, of 1982. I was a baby in lockdown trying to cram the three years of study I should have been doing into six weeks.

So it is today, 2 of my 3 about to enter the post university world but both more diligent, disciplined and studious than I needed to be have secured (I hope) billets. What the hell is going to happen to proper poor people is anybody's guess.

Mike said...

Ah! nostalgia, Mr mongoose. I'm older than you. I was studying for my A levels by candle light during Heath's 3 day weeks - and listening to Ali fights on the wireless. I managed to get through it, but them's were the days when a slice of Hovis was all we expected.

mongoose said...

Yeah, half a decade, Mr Mike. I loved the three day week and the power cuts. We got candles. It appealed to my fading Catholiciism.

I am though sure again that my kids should leave this sinking ship and find new shores. I am though not now at all clear that there is anywhere left to go to.

Mike said...

Mr mongoose. Take a look at Aus and NZ. And the closest landfall is SE Asia.

Mike said...

PS Mr mongoose. Let them have a gap year - 6 months in Aus, 3 months in NZ and 3 months in SE Asia. You may never see them again.

Anonymous said...

One nasty side-effect of the police brutality protests is the likely polarisation of moderate thought - the enlightened young sound like horrible little Maoists to me, banging on about white privilege (as practiced and lived in Gdansk, Greenock, and Ebbw Vale, right?) and encouraging their fellow teenagers to "educate" family members. As Mr Ishmael (not entirely devil's advocating, I suspect) once wrote, who gives a fuck what a sixteen year old thinks? A worthy tee-shirt slogan if I ever heard one - counterpoint, if nothing else, to the "silence is literally violence" I heard spouted on the radio this morning. (I'll shut up, then, innit?)

v./

mrs ishmael said...

I know what you mean, mr verge, the self-absorbed, self-righteous, judgemental pronouncements of the enlightened young trigger a knee-jerk reaction in me, also, in which the phrase "quick rub down with a house brick" features large. And yet, shouldn't we be mildly pleased that this generation - after a succession of bovine ineffectual complainers - has become politicised? The manner of their doing it is embarassing yet the fact that they are doing it maybe gives a faint illumination to our darkness. Perhaps their fervour will even get them down the polling station - Nah, they don't do that, with their single-issue politics, their blame-dumping on my generation (wasn't my fault, honest, I complained bitterly when I was a girl and much good did it do - whatever did happen to feminism?)) and their universal contempt for anyone over 40, this generation sees nothing but boredom and mockery in the structure of organised politics - and they have a point, Mister Tiny Speaker, Mister Sir Speaker, Bo-Jo the Ho-Ho, Sir Keir et al.
But if their politicisation takes them onto the streets, there to stop a rubber bullet (have you seen them things?), face a water cannon, tear gas, police batons and Covid 19, then not only are they a damn sight braver than I have ever been, but they are engaging in the political process in the purest form of all - riot, insurrection, blood, flames and paving slabs.

mrs ishmael said...

messrs mike and mongoose have been waxing nostalgic about the Three-Day Week.
For our younger Ishmaelites, the Three-Day week was introduced by the Conservative government to conserve electricity, the generation of which was severely restricted owing to the effects of the 1973–74 oil crisis (another story) on production, transportation and inflation. Industrial action by coal miners further compounded events. In the 1970s the majority of the UK's electricity was produced by coal-burning power stations. To reduce electricity consumption, and thus conserve coal stocks, the Conservative prime minister, Edward Heath, announced the Three-Day Work Order on 13 December 1973. Commercial consumption of electricity was limited to three consecutive days each week. Television broadcasts shut-down at 10.30 pm each evening. From 1 January 1974, commercial users of electricity were limited to three specified consecutive days' consumption each week and prohibited from working longer hours on those days. Essential services including hospitals, supermarkets and newspaper printing presses were exempt. High rates of inflation had led to the government capping public sector pay rises, and promoting a capped level to the private sector. Wages did not keep pace with price increases. On 24 January 1974, 81 percent of NUM members voted to strike, having rejected the offer of a 16.5 percent pay rise. Every region of the NUM voted by a majority in favour of strike action. The strike began officially on 5 February and, two days later, Heath called the February 1974 general election while the Three-Day Week was in force. His government emphasised the pay dispute with the miners and used the slogan "Who governs Britain?” The Daily Mirror ran a campaign to support the NUM. Its edition on election day in 1974 showed hundreds of crosses on its front page to represent the miners who had died since nationalisation in 1947, accompanied by the message, "Before you use your cross, remember these crosses". The Conservative Party lost its majority. In the ensuing attempts to form a government Heath failed to secure parliamentary support from Liberal and Ulster Unionist MPs; and Harold Wilson (Good old Mr. Wilson – Open University) returned to power in a minority government. The Three-Day Week restrictions were lifted on 7 March 1974, the same month the oil crisis ended. A second general election was held in October 1974 gaining the Labour government a majority of three seats. Tough times, as sick MPs were stretchered into the House to vote. Miners' wages were increased by 35% immediately after the February 1974 election.

The Three Day Week = Class War. Honest, not invent.

Anonymous said...

Yes, (riot), the purest, but also, I can't help thinking & fearing, the dumbest.

Much weeping on Radio 5 this afternoon/evening. OK, fair enough, but these were professional presenters; there are stories every week, every day probably, that should reduce them to tears. A child stabbed to death by a deranged stranger in a park. The ghastly horror of a fatal dog attack. On and on. There's an element of lachrymose showboating here that gives me the creeps - not so far removed, perhaps, from the compulsory emotion that follows Dear Leader everywhere he goes in North Korea. Shades of the Lady Diana kleenex convulsion, too. (No coincidence that people have stopped saying "I think..." and started using "I feel..." instead.)

(NB slightly OT but maybe not entirely: Covid death rate per 100,000 in the Rhondda valley is very high, even higher than the alarming BAME rate as far as I can tell. Where's the Welsh Lives Matter hashtag?)

v./

Bungalow Bill said...

Aggressive sentimentality, Mr Verge, is our age’s curse. Reason and truth have no grip because they are simply deleted or drowned in bile. We lurch from one absurd spasm of self-righteousness to the next. People who are moved to emotive falsehood so readily are thereby made much more controllable, aren’t they, because they are never aware of the real horrors, still less resisting them.

Mike said...

Mr Verge and Mr BB: two words sum up the generation: Facebook and Instagram.

mongoose said...

Yes, mr v, there's still no white privelege up the end of the Rhondda. Nor did my lot find much in Connemara. Such soft-headed, witless claptrap. I am waiting for my first hearing of the word "denier" of white privilege - condemned he will be for merely questioning the routine general premise.

The seventies, eh, mrs i, what a decade of lousiness. Did you have any of they velvet loon pants? I did. What a loser.

mrs ishmael said...

But, mr verge, when were cannon fodder required to think? Thought processes positively get in the way. Thank you for drawing us back so firmly to our work here - racism, misogyny, sexual intolerance, religious hatred and every other manifestation of cruelty and exclusion all create their own angry backlash; but essentially they are just side-bars to the main event; as mr bungalow bill reminds us,they are useful distractions which blind people to the real nature of their oppression. Divide and rule. It is only when common cause is made across the factions that mr ishmael's vision of "up against the wall, motherfucker" may flicker into being. I don't know the Rhondda or Connemara. I did know inner-city Birmingham. If change is ever to be achieved, the poor have to stop hating each other, irrespective of ethnicity, gender, religion, sexual orientation....

mrs ishmael said...

Of course I did, mr mongoose, my dear. And ordinary trousers could be converted into loons by opening the outside seam from the knee downwards and inserting a long triangle of contrasting colour and design. Velvet loons - I bet you looked drop-dead gorgeous in yours.
For our younger Ishmaelites, put down your Facebook and Instagram and pay attention, here - loons were low-slung trousers, very tightly fitting around the hips and thighs, and then, from the knees down, grading into wide, wide bell-bottoms, under which you wore your platform boots, thus giving the illusion of long, tall, skinniness (essential for boys and girls, as the androgynous look was all important and gyms hadn't been invented). The look was completed with a tight little top, tucked into your loons and secured by a serious belt.

Bungalow Bill said...

I had an atom of hope that Johnson would prove an intellectually interesting PM. More fool me. He and his government are set fair to be the very dimmest we have had. His "briefing" this evening was deranged, and we're fucked.

For those of us too aged to bolt, as advised by Mr Mike, to SE Asia, strong hallucinogens look like the only respite option.

mongoose said...

Mine were brown velevt corduroy with sky blue panels in the leg flare bits. My excuse is that I was 12. I think me dear old must have had a bit of Gloucestershire hippy in her.

And tank-tops. Knitted tank-tops like Alan on Rising Damp.

Was it any wonder that when the punks and ska hit town a few years later, I adopted a pair of black 501s and have never worn anything else?

Anonymous said...

Any you'd particularly recommend, Mr BB? Must be 40 years since the foolish bravery of adolescence let me mess about with relatively weak street LSD and (not so weak) magic mushrooms (Liberty Caps, I believe.) Accounts of DMT are fascinating but since the only way to be sure of a clean dose would be as a volunteer in a neuroscience lab, I think it's safe to say that particular curiosity can stay unsatisfied - who wants to trip their box off in a hospital room, wired up and all that?

This reminds me - Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics once claimed to have dropped acid every day for a year. As I understand it, LSD has no effect the next day unless you double the dose. Maths aren't my strong suit but if his claims are to be believed, he'd have been in 6 figure dosages long before that year was out. Crazy times, crazy guy?

cheers

v./

mongoose said...

2^364 is more than there are stars in the sky, mr v. But then taking anything like a lot of acid would mess with anyone's medicinal logkeeping . I used to think that proper sex'n'drugs'n'rock'n'roll wore out the human body at 28 years. Anyone who got to be older than that wasn't doing it properly.

Bungalow Bill said...

Ayahuasca, Mr Verge, though the brew requires careful supervision to calibrate the DMT. We don’t need to be lab-bound but can simply take ourselves to the local Shaman. A whole new version of social distancing.

Willie Nelson has just had to abandon weed at 87, Mr Mongoose, for health reasons. But he’s not really rock’n’roll and marijuana is not ayahuasca.

Anonymous said...

Thanks, Mr Mongoose, I knew it was a lot. Maybe, being rich & famous, he's neurologically over-endowed, tolerance-wise, eh?

Forgot that one, Mr BB. Much obliged. I think there's a Burroughs book called the Yage Letters describing his travels in South America; long time since I read it, but seem to recall the psychoactive vine has no effect on its own - stomach-acid destroys the compound before it gets into the system - but when the shaman you recommend mixes it with something else from the forest, the stomach's destructive capacity is suppressed and the potion can work its magic. Given the thousands (millions?) of possible plant combinations in the amazon, how the fuck did they work out what this pair would do? Boggling stuff. (Just googled to check, and the Burroughs title is right - sounds like you need a good shaman, though, and I don't like the sound of the projectile vomiting very much! Must be getting old...)

cheers

v./

mrs ishmael said...

I had to look all this stuff up, having had only the briefest flirtation with illegal substances back in the day. Good to know you boys are maintaining an interest. Anyway, mr verge, Google tells me that the Amazonian shamans were able to use the correct combination of forest plants because the plants explained to them what to do.
Right.

mrs ishmael said...

Somewhere - I think it's in the comments - there's a description by mr ishmael of walking through Birmingham with his brother in the early hours of the morning, completely off their faces, with the neon lights crackling in their hair. Tried to find it for you as it is a great piece of writing, but abysmally failed - there's just so much in these pages.

Anonymous said...

Curious coincidence - this just caught my eye...evidently there are other sources than the amazonian vine, though I rest my case on the choose-your-shaman-carefully issue:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-52920291

v./

Bungalow Bill said...

Never mix powerful hallucinogens and pornography, Mr Verge.

Anonymous said...

An adage we can all get behind, Mr BB. Probably true of toads, to boot.

v./

mrs ishmael said...

Order, Order.
Health and Safety notice:
Our readers should note that the practices of injecting bleach and licking toads is not endorsed by the management. The use of pipes in the consumption of toad exudates is probably safer than the use of pipes in the consumption of tobacco products, but is not recommended.
I know you're bored, but there are limits in a decent family blog.
And as for mr. mongoose, about time he changed his black 501s since he's never worn anything else since the Eighties. Just saying.

mrs ishmael said...

Here it is:
"Way, way back, my late brother and I took some Mescalin and found ourselves wandering what seemed like vast, continental distances around early-hours Birmingham; somehow we started in Moseley and next thing you know we were in Castle Bromwich. I think what happened was that every so often I would become paralysed by the complexity of driving a car and we'd get out and walk for a bit. The sodium streetlights seemed to be burning my scalp off, their columns hissing and crackling, neon tubes lasered my brain and traffic lights changed in a slo-mo kaleidoscope so utterly disorientating that I couldn't hold-on to whatever it was that the colour indicated - was Red for Proceed With Caution, or was that Green; why don't they just stay one fucking colour until a man gets a grip?"

Bungalow Bill said...

He said it best. It's a bad one in most places, Mrs I, but in Birmingham you can see why things got out of hand. Here in Liverpool, the scenery is naturally more sympathetic.

mongoose said...

The Yage Letters? A slim volume was all that was left of body, soul, and tomorrow.