Tricky Treats

The unfolding events  in New York and along the Eastern Seaboard of the past few days have seemed, to me at least, to be Hollywood Live.  I know that there has been massive destruction, and many have died, but this is also true of Haiti and Jamaica among others.   Only the news from The States has been an uber-intense uber-spectacle.

The media build-up, and rolling reporting, was like an interactive movie event.  Part of this is that New York, for most people, only exists on the cinema screen – and quite often getting its arse handed to it on fat concrete plate by giant apes, earthquakes, global warming,  alien invaders and giant smiling marshmallow sailors.

It is this same American Cultural Omnipresence which has changed the nature of this  very evening, too.  When I was a nipper, Halloween was the shittest name in the Calendar of Special Days of the year.  It only really manifested itself in the crappy drawing of pumpkins and witches at school.  I didn’t actually know that a pumpkin was real vegetable until my twenties, when they started to slowly appear on the supermarket shelves.

The spook creep didn’t end there.  Halloween parties started to pop up all over the place, as did a plethora of sexy devil outfits and killer nurse outfits.  Why killer nurses would wear fishnets and skimpy tops is beyond me.  Surely they’d get blood and viscera everywhere.  They would if they were doing properly anyway.

And now: it’s a Wednesday, and I’m getting ready to go to my brother’s flat for some Halloween shenanigans.  Outside, packs of children trot from house to house, feeding their inevitable diabetes and burgeoning hatred of their own flabby bodies by begging cheap sugary yuck from the local community. Inside, the news is banging on about some Halloween shit I’m trying to tune out.  My brother is putting on nibbles and drinks to celebrate the mythical thinning of the gateway between this world and the next.

How did this transformation come upon us? It wasn’t witchcraft, contrary to what the Christian Right would have you believe.  I blame it primarily on The Simpsons, with a slice of Buffy, Michael Myers and generic  American sitcoms.   The children of Britain have come into being in world where Halloween is not about sticking your head in bowl of water in the fruitless pursuit of a floating apple, but a festival of the plastic macabre, of demonic prostitution, of green creme eggs.

And why might I whinge so, you may ask? Because it’s Halloween.  If my words can create even an ounce of misery and doubt, I’ve done my bit for today’s evil.

Whahahahahahahhahaaaaaahahahahahaahahahahaaa etc.

Conference Tricksters

Watching CallMeDave’s speech at the Conservative Pantomime Season today I was reminded of that episode of Family Guy in which Peter exhibits the skills of a great debator *– he repeats his assertions - each time a little bit louder - assertions which are non-sequiturs of such magnitude they’d make Harold Pinter soil his underwear with sticky pearly love juice.

According to Dave, Labour want to borrow.  I said they’re going to Borrow.  They’ll Borrow money, y’know.  BORROW. BORROW. BORROW. Hitler borrowed money.  Peter Sutcliffe had a bank loan.  Borrowing is evil. Satan’s running the infernal shades of Hell at an increasing deficit. Therefore, Labour are Satanic Nazis - with a side of Yorkshire Ripper.

They may not have been his exact words, but they may have well as been, because he clearly thinks that Tory Conference attendees will applaud anything, and that voters are more gullible than Rozencrantz and Guildenstern jauntily hopping into the English court with their I Heart Hamlet mugs in one hand, certificate of execution in the other. Because all governments borrow, you dead-eyed moron. Even I know that, and I’m financially incompetent.

As confidence tricks go, this speech was ambitious in the extreme.  The Eton Toad would have us believe that he wants to create an Aspiration Nation. I worked at a school once which gave all students target grades which would not have been achievable without divine intervention, or systematic fraud.  Upon questioning these targets, I was told that they were ‘aspirational’ and that I was doing The Youngsters (This was the generic term de jour for the students -a bit like Childern of the Corn) a disservice by writing them off. 

While this is seemingly reasonable, I would contend that it is, in fact, sophistic bullshit which neither understands anything of the complexities of interaction that occur in the learning process nor understands that if you try to emotionally blackmail me I will spread scurrilous rumours about you at the pub. Involving dogs, car parks and Vaseline. I may even photoshop some evidence.

It was this same clumsy technique, more suitable to a school-yard debate over whose mum's the fattest, that was employed by the tadpole-faced vacuity which masquerades as Prime Minister.  Bang and blame. We are your overlords. We are the party for aspirational achievers. We are the Will to Power. Lazy people kill children. Jam tomorrow. (Jam today for me). If you oppose us, you hate kittens. Do you hate kittens? Do you? Do you really? Death to the Kitten-Haters.

The problem with this is pretty straightforward.

Firstly, Dave – you are a mendacious little slugshit. Your lies are so many they’ve taken on a life of their own and have run to all corners of the Earth to spawn further colonies of lies, and given birth to tribes of utter porkies, gaggles of grim fibs, hoards of dark untruths. You are, essentially, not a man to be trusted. If you told me it was Saturday I’d go to work. 

Secondly, no one really wants to be lectured to about the pleasures of hard graft, and the joys of greasing the wheels of social mobility with the oil of ambition, by a man whose experience of hard work is watching the servants, and who is the antithesis of social mobility. You were born unhealthily rich, and you’re still loaded.  Although you're not exactly shifting through the classes. Why aren’t you Emperor of the Known Universe if all it takes is a slice of elbow grease and a gritty determination? 

Go on Dave. Show us how it’s done. Get a Ming the Merciless costume. Declare yourself the Ruler of All Life. Wear a big shiny crown of gold and plebs' bones.

And then fuck off into space. And then die.

* This actually happens in lots of episode.  This is a fine example.