OCCUPIED COUNTRY

Walkin' Spanish

Sheer boredom made me drag myself and my enfeebled foot back to work yesterday. A mistake. This morning found me on the phone to my boss letting him know I wouldn't be in again. I had hoped that a little exercise would, perhaps, be just the job. Wrong. On top of that, I was next to useless at work anyway. Couldn't lift, drive or walk any significant distance. That only left paperwork - or what passes for it in today's modern, almost paperless office - and if wanted to be as bored as that I would've stayed at home for certain.

So, more phone calls to my doctor and I have finally got an appointment for Thursday morning at 8:40. No doubt I'll be as mobile as Michael Flatley by then.

And what a week I picked to be incapacitated with next to nothin' to do but read, cogitate or watch TV. The Pope pops his clogs, Tone calls an election and Prince Bloody Charles marries his mistress.

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The nonsense of all religion is, for me, encapsulated by the singing and chanting to a Big-Man-Who-Lives-In-The-Sky while swishing a fancy ball with smoke coming out of it over the Pontiff's coffin. If the perpertrators of this act had been living in some South American rainforest, cut off from 'civilisation' for centuries, we would have smiled and said "ahh poor, unsophisticated savages" as the Discovery channel, or somesuch, allowed us a 'unique insight on a tribe who still lived a pre-industrial life'. As it was we were witnessing a Western, European country in the 21st century.

Furthermore, if that wasn't medievil enough, in an age of mass, instantaneous communication, we will discover when the all-male conclave have elected a new Pope via the emmission of white smoke from a chimney somewhere in the Vatican. White smoke. Not a web site, TV broadcast or owt modern, but white smoke. I guess their God doesn't approve of digital, or, come to think of it, analogue, technology. He must've give up on his 'creation' not long after the invention of the printing press.

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Actually I wrote about the Pope's funeral the other night and thought I'd lost the post after Blogger went Tit's Up - as it frequently does. I've just re-discovered it and I'll post it at the end of this. It's quite weird how my scribbles can change so much - about the same subject - in a couple of days.

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The election is boring me shitless already. When the fuck did politics become as sanitised as this?

I'm not listening anymore. There's no passion. Why? Well, sadly I really do have to point the finger at the media - and Murdoch's gutter press/TV in particular. Sadly because I believe a free press is vital in a Democracy. Sadly , in a Democracy that is reaching the Bread and Circuses stage of its development, the free press has become an Orwellian palliative - pandering to endless, mindless obsession with good-looking, intellectually-airbrushed celebs. We'll be declaring war on some previously unknown continent next, and lying blatantly about 'our' success. It started in the 80s - the Devil's Decade, when Thatcher (*spits uncontrollably, curses vehemently and punches wall*) was madeover from a frumpy, strident-voiced asexual horror, into Judge Dredd (with added domination).

As this obsession with media image took root, every politician was churned through the same 'consultancies' and we ended up with the sterile, don't-say-the-wrong-thing-for-fuck's-sake-the-Media-will-pick-up-on-it, pile of shite that we are presented with today.

Does anybody out there remember George Brown drunkenly pontificating on the night of JFK's death? Powell's 'Rivers of Blood' speech? Churchill being profoundly pissed in the House of Commons? Heseltine swinging the Mace in rage? John Nott telling Robin Day he'd had enough and walking out of the BBC studios? Neil Kinnock talking of taxis delivering redundancy notices in a Labour council-controlled City?

Sad and devoid of interest. Fuck it. I'll vote Labour. I can't handle Tories. Deep within they're selfish twats who, in my experience, always analyse situations on a what's-in-it-for-me basis. The Lib-Dems I quite like. The Lib Dems round here though gave us a councilor who spent most of his four years in office living in Amsterdam, not turning up for surgeries and generally being the subject of much pissed off correspondence to the local Rags.

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Which brings me to Chuck and Camilla's nuptials. Well, what can I say? Just get on with it for fuck's sake. But don't - purlease DON'T - bore the fuckin' arse off me by ensuring it's rammed down my throat on ALL major TV channels.

Even Dearest wanted to watch it to see Mrs Parker-Bowles' dress! What is it with wedding dresses? Overpriced fairy frocks that are never worn again. Pointless.

Dearest's obsessive fairy-frockery combined with my incapacitation meant that I was subjected to this 'small' wedding for far longer than I would've wished. Before I left the lounge and hobbled up to my eyrie however, I witnessed a sight that will stay with me for the rest of my life.

A minibus approached the scene of the nuptials. The crowd cheered and whooped and waved and fluttered flags and fainted and orgasmed (possibly). That minibus was chock-full of fuckin' wastrels. Arseholes who haven't done a day's work in their lives. Ordinary folk (well apart from obvious tendencies to elevate pricks to stations far higher than they deserve) screaming and whooping and clapping and acting irrationally because a bus-full of dickheads with blue blood drove by. Shocking. And all to a soundtrack of gushing, psychophantic twaddle from the mouths of the BBC, ITV and all the other TV stations that we can now pass our days watching.

And, of course, the day after, Chazza and his Missus are attending Church; because without the Church telling everyone that they have a devine right to rule, they'd just look twattish and full of themselves wouldn't they?

Medievil.

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Here's the post about the Bob Hope from the other evening as promised:-

It's The End Of The World As We Know It (and I feel fine)

Am I missing something? Was there this much outpouring of the "world's" grief way back when? The "world's" press (BBC included) are falling over themselves to rewrite the right-wing pontificating cult-leader's past and make him out to be a rational voice in a planet driven by geo-political necessities. He was an intellectual inadequate. He BELIEVED he was the representative on Earth of a supernatural being who no one has ever met, seen or talked to. Just like a Witch Doctor. A supernatural being moreover who made the Earth and the Universe in one short week.

They were singing and chanting and incanting tonight in St Peter's Square - just like pre-industrial tribes paying tribute to a water god or some such. Fuckin' medievil if you ask me. But then again nobody will ask me tonight will they? Spoils the way it plays on Fox or Sky or even the BBC.

So long Karol, you have shuffled off your mortal coil just like all those AIDS sufferers YOU condemned to death with your nonsensical intransigence over condoms. Not to mention all those extra mouths to feed in parts of the world where food was at a premium. Frankly you did fuck all to help. A rain dance or two might have helped. Rain dances are as relevant to the modern world as "Holy communion" in my book.

For now, in an age of t'Internet and the rest, we will witness the election of a new Pope being broadcast to the world via white smoke from a chimney. Finger on the pulse or what? Set up a web page - or even a blog you jostlers, you career men - you wankers, you inadequate rain-dancers.

The media (BBC Radio 5 mainly for me) are talking this reactionary, ill-educated waste of space up like he was worthy of attention. He isn't, he wasn't. He believed he was God's representative on Earth. In any other walk of life we would have called it like we saw it. We would have called him a nutter. And quite correctly in my view. And now all his colleagues have started the shenagigans that go with attempting to elect a new Pope.

Good luck, in the meantime I'm off to bed.