The Sunday Ishmael: 12/01/2025: A Denial of Perspective

Burn, Baby, Burn

"It were God what done it, you know."

mrs ishmael: "Why's that, then?"

"Sodom and Gomorrah. It's in the Bible. And the Quoran. God didn't want to do it, stands to reason, Him being a loving God, but the sex got too much for Him to turn a blind eye to, so He just had to rain sulphur and fire on Sodom and Gomorrah and all the Plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and what grew on the ground Genesis 19:24–25"

mrs ishmael: "What's that got to do with Hollywood?"

"Are you kidding me? If God thought the sex was outrageous in Sodom and Gomorrah, what's He going to think about the centre of the Western porn industry?"

mrs ishmael: "Now that's where you're wrong. Porn production moved to Florida, on account of how California passed laws to say porn stars have to wear condoms and the punters, they want to see the naked cock squirting baby juice all over the co-star's face or boobies and they aren't going to pay to see cocks in mackintoshes."

"You don't say? Florida's next, then. Fire and brimstone."

mrs ishmael: "This God of yours, he's a pretty harsh dude, yes?"

"Not at all. Abraham asks God "Will you sweep away the righteous with the wicked?" Genesis 18:23 and God agreed to spare Sodom if 10 righteous people could be found."

mrs ishmael: "So that was a fail, then?"

"Yes, He sent a couple of angels and the local citizens wanted to bugger them."

mrs ishmael: "Same sex activity has been legal in California since 1976. Did God take a while to notice?"

donald: "You are barking up the wrong tree, with this sex and porn business. Nothing wrong with sex and porn is there, ms Daniels? It was all the dead brush wrong tree wood on the forest floor that should have been swept up. "

simon (waking up): "With respect, gentlemen, Bollocks. The fires started in the canyons. Where there isn't any dead wood. I'm only here to promote my new TV series, The Story of Us, you'll enjoy it. It stars me being me. As usual. But I'm going with climate change." 

mrs ishmael: "I refer you to our mr mongoose. Greenland ice cores. Natural cycles."

mrs ishmael has now left the discussion, having been arrested for the now-capital crime of aggravated climate-change-denial.

"It was aliens. Started the fires on purpose. They were seen skulking around with flame throwers strapped to their backs".

Everyone: "Who are you?"

They really do believe all this god-bollocks, at the same time, simultaneously, with believing in the sanctity of same-sex marriage, aliens and of America being a bit, you know, special.

I was wondering why Elon Musk has been championing Tommy Robinson and it occurred to me that, while we regard Tommy as a thug with unacceptable views and multiple aliases, the Americans regard him as a fearless investigative journalist and leader, much in the mould of Alexei Navalny, who single-handedly exposed the rape culture of Pakistani Muslims in the Cities of the Plains and the Establishment's role in covering it all up to avoid further inflaming racial tensions and losing Labour the Muslim vote (oh, wait, that last bit's true, isn't it?).  There are calls for the U.S. to intervene, get him out of prison and set him up as leader of Reform, displacing Nigel Farage, who, it turns out, was quite wrong about Elon being his best friend and wanting to give him lots of money. 

 Here's mr ishmael:

YES, WOGS, THEY START AT DOVER, THEY'LL FUCK OUR WOMEN,YOU KNOW, DON'T SAY I DIDN'T WARN YOU.

NIGEL FARAGE, THE ONCE AND FORMER GABSHITE.
THEY HAVE THREE COCKS, SOME OF THEM,
IMAGINE THAT.

 The fruits of Empire - the cities - now clogged in part with brown immigrants, cities which rose only by the exploitation of their ancestors, their native resources, their labour, their markets. Birmingham, Bradford, Manchester, Leeds, Glasgow, all grown boastful and smug, gilded civic halls and mercantile palaces, ostentatious and vulgar, ghastly Rotarians and bent freemasons, knowing whispers and secret handshakes; slaves, tea, coffee, spices, cotton, all fuelling industry and commerce, spawning Fred Dibnah's steamy smoky mad genius can-do world of shuttling and pumping connectedness, onwards and upwards, walking on the face of the Gungha Din. Absorbing a few million migrants, now, with common sense and tact and legality doesn't seem too high a price to pay, retrospectively, without interest.

It is the hijacking and amplification of Otherness, its colonisation for gain, by the likes of Darcus Gob-Howe and the wretched Yasmin Alibhai Muslem, it is the spawning of a corrosive race relations industry expertise where none was previously necessary, it is these petit bourgeois nouvelle preoccupations which blight Harmony's landscape; it is the lack of common sense and tact and legality, and the grandstanding of the Worthless, such as CallHimDave, which beggar hospitality and strangle assimilation.

I would suggest, furthermore, that while landlords' South Asian sharp financial practice is well-known among urbanites it is very small beer, inconsequential, compared with the efforts of the financial terrorists of Wall Street and Canary Wharf who are looting all our homes - mostly, of course, they are white and in control of the White House and Downing Street, so - the story goes - it doesn't count; best turn on the wogs. Aye, and the disabled.

Perspective, that's the thing.

Lots of people have those bootstrapping histories - industrious, self-denying parents, grammar schools and so on. But what about those who don't, who can't, those whose bootstraps are too threadbare to pull them up, or who have no boots; what about them, the faultless, the deaf and blind, the mute, the mistreated, mateless mother, the crippled, the sick, must we tramp on them that the likes of Cameron have even more than they need, must we tramp on them to make ourselves feel better, feel glad that we are not among them. I am a welfareist, but at the same time, pissed and angry, discontented, hungry for light, I would have been among the first out of the sea, up the shores, into the caves, out on the veldt, into the cities and out to the stars. There is no dichotomy between progress and compassion, au contraire, mes amis.

Back in the '80s, whilst Whisky Maggie and her spivs were gangfucking British industry, I worked in a Voluntary Projects Programme aimed at getting long-term unemployed people not back into work but into work for the first time. It was funded by the Manpower Services Commission as part of SEMAG, the Special Employment Measures Action Group and had close connections to various Community Programme Schemes which offered part and full-time work for up to a year and sometimes longer for supervisory, managerial grades. Before I could steer people to the CP, I had to source or provide basic skills training and generally a couple of days a week on voluntary community projects, some manual, some domestic, some admin. Through these simple, structured activities people learned the comradeship, the regularity and the self-esteem which accompany regular employment and I never knew one single soul who did not benefit hugely, either in the short-term or, in many cases, the long. I used to hustle money, too, from charitable trusts, particularly the Cadburys, to take these less than privileged people to see Shakespeare or the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra; my office was run a bit like this blog, ongoing conversations in which some engaged and some just watched, all of an anarcho-plumbing bent, all eventually insisting that survival required at least a degree of conformity, not to govament but to one's fellows commonly agreed purposes. Work was good in and of itself, even done voluntarily, education was good, in and of itself, the arts were for everybody, not just for Kirsty Wark's opulent wankers.

There were lots of these projects, up and down the land, once I knew the stats, which proved their worth, but it's a long time ago and I forget. What I know, though, and when I say know, I mean know, you know, as night follows day, beyond sophistry and rhetoric is that people are not naturally idle - we would not have survived all these centuries if that was the case - but people are often denied opportunity and then eventually shut out and called names.

I have nothing against employment programmes, sensitively and efficiently and productively run. But if they are used punitively, to bizarrely aggrandise the spiv and the financial terrorist to whom, seemingly, we owe our very fucking lives, who adjudicate on our rights to services paid for with our own money, whilst they piss champagne down each others' throats and blow cocaine up each others' arses then we deserve to lose everything they steal from us, in the name of book balancing, the fucking bastards. It is not the impotent poor whom we should thrash but the idle fucking rich.

I spoke Brummy on the street and Belfast indoors. Even then, at five or six, I felt I was betraying my Mum, and felt ashamed, little knowing that all I was doing was an early example of Cameronism, poor little bastard.

That Al Sharpton, what's he like, doing all that complaining on behalf of the niggers? Doesn't he know that as recently as in our lifetimes, those white folks have almost entirely stopped lynching niggers, castrating them, burning them alive and laughing, free, from good ole boy judges and juries courts. Jesus, anybody'd think they'd been mistreated. All those Ivy League boys, from good American families, grown rich on centuries of slavery, what possible advantage could they have over the negro, ain't this the land of the free?

In my lifetime all this shit was going on, segregation and the Klan, the official face of the Southern States, fuck me, it's a good job that niggers aren't Jews, or they'd a had some other people thrown out of their country and taken it over, we'd all be creeping around observing Nigger Holocaust Day, just that the Nigger Holocaust lasted centuries, not a decade or two. What was it we called this post, it's so long ago, now, Denial of Perspective?

Here in Ruin, sympathy and compassion are infinite. 

Each man's death diminishes me

For I am involved in mankind

Therefore, send not to know

For whom the bell tolls

It tolls for thee.

The bell tolls for us all.

..................................................................

Here's something to lighten the mood, courtesy of editor mr verge:  Dining out with Walter and Connie. 

Walter and Connie, hilariously assisted by Hattie Jacques, starred in a series of short English language teaching films in the Sixties. 

As we motor on into 2025, don't forget your copy of one of the four splendid anthologies of the writings of mr ishmael and stanislav, the young Polish Plumber. Or buy the set as a luxurious indulgence for yourself or as a gift for a broad-minded friend. The anthologies have been compiled and produced by editor mr verge, the house filthster, in answer to the appalled and bereft reaction of ishmaelites to the passing of mr ishmael in January 2020.  

You can buy the Quartet from Amazon or Lulu. Here's how:

Honest Not Invent, Vent Stack, Ishmael’s Blues, and the latest, Flush Test (with a nice picture of the late, much lamented, Mr Harris of Lanarkshire taking a piss on a totem pole) are available from Lulu and Amazon. If you buy from Amazon, it would be nice if you could give a review on their website.

IIshmaelites wishing to buy a copy from lulu should follow these steps 

please register an account first, at lulu.com. This is advisable because otherwise paypal seems to think it's ok to charge in dollars, and they then apply their own conversion rate, which might put the price up slightly for a UK buyer. Once the new account is set up, follow one of the links below (to either paperback or hardback) or type "Ishmael’s Blues" into the Lulu Bookstore search box. Click on the “show explicit content” tab, give the age verification box a date of birth such as 1 January 1960, and proceed.

Link for Hardcover : https://tinyurl.com/je7nddfr

Link for Paperback : https://tinyurl.com/3jurrzux

https://www.lulu.com/shop/ishmael-smith/flush-test/paperback/product-9yjvn7.html?q=Flush+Test&page=1&pageSize=4

At checkout, try WELCOME15 in the coupon box, which (for the moment) takes 15% off the price before postage. If this code has expired by the time you reach this point, try a google search for "Lulu.com voucher code" and see what comes up.

With the 15% voucher, PB (including delivery to a UK address) should be £16.84; HB £27.04.

Liverpool Docks at Night. Atkinson Grimshaw. York Art Gallery.