Friday 21st October 2022
“It’s the end of the world as we know it (and I feel perturbed)”
The scent of Elon Musk and the stench of politicised psychopathy
“That’s great, it starts with an earthquake
Birds and snakes, and aeroplanes
And Lenny Bruce is not afraid”
I’ve been listening to REM a hell of a lot and did so on my brief return journey once again to Ironbridge recently. That day it was the “Document” album from 1993 and as a gentleman of advancing years I always listen to albums rather than the pick-n-mix approach today of singular favourite songs. I was an angry 16 year old when I first heard their album “Green” and for this and so many other reasons it’s an album I’ll treasure alongside so many others (Monster, Out of Time, Reveal) and all the way through to their final album a decade ago, “Collapse Into Now”.
It’s been a strange few days both within and without The Matrix hasn’t it?
I’m currently the poster child for disaster capitalism as I plead for some crumbs off the Master’s table amid a personal financial crisis as well as now being hounded by the albatross around my neck of a near 9 year old debt that isn’t entirely or really mine and which had laid dormant since 2016.
6 years ago!
Deep joy I can tell you.
Seemingly there’s a new benefactor of my debt, an amount which has steadily increased to eye watering levels and which these hounds of hell would’ve paid a tiny fraction for and which they now own despite having played no part, created not a thing or expended any energy on its creation. Buzzards and vultures, picking over the carcass of a dead and unfairly adjudged exchange of energy and now an albatross, a dead, stinking, rotten shell of another life has been returned to sit squarely upon my shoulders.
Deep joy I can tell you.
Disaster capitalism, standing on the shoulders of the misery of others.
Is it any wonder I fervently pray that Michael Stipe and his REM band mates are right and it is indeed the end of the world?
Within The Matrix, the unrequited love of my life Elon Musk has finally purchased the social media network platform Twitter. Only he hasn’t, not yet. But he’s going to. Probably. And whilst this particular shenanigan and charade takes place, media both from the age of the dinosaur as well as today’s social and electronic cesspool suggest he’s now paying too much or too little and the arguments and accusations rumble on as to how many and how prevalent “Bot Accounts” are and, as I’m sure Elon himself is incredibly keen to know, what influence and under whose control and funding these purely robotic, algorithmic accounts of doom are.
Our love affair has been both secretive and a lengthy one now and was only strengthened further when Elon said he loved the Quentin Tarantino written and Tony Scott directed film “True Romance” and quite frankly, anyone who loves that particular masterpiece can’t be a wrong-un, surely? I’ve urged Elon to accept my offer of a platonic date (you can’t hurry the arrows of love) and for us to watch this film together before finding a quiet diner for a piece of pie and a heartfelt discussion on this ode to 1980’s excess and the love story residing at its bittersweet heart. I’d love to hear Elon’s theories on the role Elvis Presley plays in the film, the career of Van Kilmer and has he watched the original “Dr Zhivago”? I want to nerd out on the camera angles used in that incredible film ending gunfight, Brad Pitt’s hilarious cameo, the verbal joust between Christopher Walken and Dennis Hopper and I want to look into Elon’s beautiful eyes and those eyes of a futuristic pioneer and ask him, outright, if he cries at the end. If he says yes I’m marrying him on the spot and without witnesses or need for a golden ring.
Who needs such trinkets when we’re on the precipice of nuclear annihilation?
I want Elon to be the star of our particular true romance and the Clarence Worley/Elvis Presley character but I fear he’s just another Drexl Spivey in disguise. With Elon being, in his own words, “a free speech absolutist” he won’t mind me divulging both our love tryst and the questions I wish to pose to him, “True Romance” related or not, and I may well startle him with my opening admonition of him — I don’t need his permission on a social media platform to use the freedom of my own speech.
Or rather, I shouldn’t.
Here’s the thing everyone seems to miss: From the very minute that you, dearest of readers, entered this world from your Mummy’s tummy and were rudely smacked on your new born bottom by a friendly nurse and cried your very first cry (a new born “proof of life” if you will), you were afforded your freedom of speech. It’s grouped together in a quaint old phrase that has lost nearly all of its meaning as well as its lustre, “inalienable rights”. Your creator, or your God if you prefer, bestowed upon you these rights at birth and they cannot be taken away, for good or ill, by any Governmental authority or anyone else for that matter. They include the right to free speech, free assembly and bodily autonomy and so no-one individual, even that hunky mass of male masculinity that is Elon Musk can grant you your freedom of speech. I appreciate his assurance of absolutism in regard to free speech on the platform he’ll soon be the owner of but we’ve collectively allowed the erosion of these freedoms to a point whereby people are running around with their hair on fire screaming that Elon’s a Fascist because he believes in free speech (now that one sure does tickle me!) but the one that doesn’t make me titter are the vacant and somewhat conspiratorial looks I get whenever I mention inalienable rights. It’s as though I’m using my freedom of speech but speaking in a language no-one seems to understand or, more worryingly, appreciate any more.
Anyway, talking of those inalienable rights…….
The “speed of science” eh? What a ruse that one is! But I bet you’ve barely seen this on the “News” on your telescreens have you? Dutch Politician Rob Roos had a simple question for a senior executive of Pfizer in the European Parliament earlier this October regarding the testing and results of these tests on the transmissibility after ingesting their virus medicine to which the executive replied with a sniggering “No!” before continuing:
“We had to move at the speed of science to really understand what was taking place in the market. And from that point of view we had to do everything at risk”.
Whose risk exactly?
This admission was verbalised.
This scandal was admitted to.
So shall we stop being coy and say we’ve been lied to (knock me down with a feather, sarcastic Editor) and then seek the immediate arrests, trials and considerable jail time for all concerned? And when I mean all concerned I don’t just mean the executives of this particular pharmacological company I mean everyone in the links and chains and news outlets and celebrities who endorsed it and well, everyone concerned.
I’d ask you if you’re ready to have that conversation but trust me, you won’t be. You had far too much invested in this world before the horrific year of 2020 and the equally dystopian years that have followed. You’d rather believe your own lying eyes rather than daring to see the truth that you’ve been lied to your entire life. Whether you’re a new born baby taking its first verbal screams of freedom of speech or a centurion receiving a poison pen letter of grudging celebration from the King, you’ve been lied to your entire life and so I guess the above lie is just par for the course.
“Safe and Effective” anyone?
Here in the UK we have an abundance of pretend world leaders who spout a tired old script of being “world leading” and “unleashing the power of the UK” and all whilst curtailing the freedom of speech, assembly and bodily autonomy in the name of the greater good that Pfizer now admit they hadn’t tested for. We’re onto our fourth Home Secretary, probably our thirty third Chancellor of the Exchequer and soon to be our third Prime Minister in as many months and “Ole Blighty” doesn’t just look like one of those barmpot third world dictatorships and Banana Republics we used to laugh at, we are one. Come and gone is a Home Secretary whose “dream” (her words) it was to send refugees to Rwanda and the bungling chap who found something incredibly hilarious at the Queen’s funeral and who then deliberately tanked the value of the Pound, has been and gone too.
The carnival of the bizarre ladies and gentleman, round and round it goes, where it stops, nobody knows, but at least we’re rid of the hideous lady who dreamed of sending poor vulnerable human beings to Africa.
They’d probably say it was “world leading” compassion too.
Now we have the prospect or doom laden spectre of Boris Johnson making a Lazarus like return and Prime Minister of the UK once more. Hilarious isn’t it? We’ve gone from the Churchillian stoop and mannerisms of a xenophobic child kicked through an expensive tailors shop backward in an ill fitting suit and deliberately badly styled hair, to a mop and bucket supply teacher and rabbit in the glare of a dimming bulb, to presumably back to a lying liar that everyone loves. There is one other alternative as the Conservative Party go through the charade of yet another leadership contest and a man with a wealth and enough cash for a thousand lifetimes and who rather than kicking back on a beach every day flipping cards into a top hat whilst laughing uproariously at his incredible good fortune, no, he’s a kind, compassionate man who only wants to be of service to the nation. As his name’s Rishi he’s garnered the nickname “Dishy Rishi” as we’re all treated as 7 year olds on this island sinking into the English Channel and can’t be trusted to question his background or, more pointedly, his motivation for not smoking the fattest of cigars and drinking the largest bottles of champagne he can get his hands on whilst toasting his good fortune to be one of the richest men in the country and the world.
Whilst the social media platform Elon Musk will eventually purchase screams for a general election amid the political turmoil and yet more vaudevillian stage show nonsense, everyone misses the connections and links and chains that bond all of these characters together as well as those of the “Opposition” (stop laughing, editor), Labour Party. There is not a cigarette paper of difference between either of the political parties as we live in a One Party state where the actors have their entrances and their exits and they play many parts, sometimes being a Prime Minister for the second time in a matter of weeks, and all the world is indeed a stage, the Establishment and the established order continues, and you’re a noble fool if you believe otherwise.
My comedic hero Bill Hicks is far more famous in death than he ever was whilst alive in his criminally short earthly experience, and with the ever widening expanse of The Matrix his quotes, comedy bits and gags are now ripe for memes and ways of making a pointed political statement. What you may not find in meme/gif form is his statement that we’ll never realise the “psychic price” we’re paying for allowing these psychopathic death cult scoundrels to flourish among us. Bill sadly died in 1994 and so at the time he was referencing George HW Bush, Bill Clinton, Janet Reno and a whole host of Establishment figures “across the aisle” of American politics and public life. Red or Blue, Democrat or Republican, he saw through the veil of the two party democratic system for the One Party dictatorship it’s always been. What psychic price are we paying for the Pfizer executives to lie to us, let alone the politicians across the world who’ve parroted the same old scripted “safe and effective” lines time and time again? Or the celebrities who willing coerced their legions of fans to take the medicine? Or the absence of this story on your local “News” or the national news anchors and editors who’ve completely refused to show the protests and demonstrations worldwide throughout the past two and half ghastly years?
What psychic price are we paying when we continue to believe our lying eyes?
Viva humanity
Viva la revolution
“It’s the end of the world as we know it (and I feel perturbed)” can be found singing and dancing between pages 319 through 328 within my late March 2024 self-published book “Tales I Tell Myself”.
"Tales I Tell Myself" - link to Amazon
Thanks for reading. I hope this message in a bottle in The Matrix finds you well, prospering, and the right way up in an upside down world.