Twitter Watch: Vol.7
The Good, The Bad and The Unpopular.
The Good, The Bad and The Unpopular.
“How does it feel to find out we’re the evil Empire?”
Bill Hicks
Hello and welcome to this, the 7th volume of my Twitter witterings and a veritable feast of unpopular social media madness in the past seven days captured here as we spin unevenly on a rock though the infinity of the unknown. It’s been a strange week here on Mother Earth. The world remains on the brink of a nuclear as well as a mutually assured destruction, nuance is as sadly passed into the after life along with a cricketing hero to tens of millions around the world and the slithers of unpopular opinions now resemble but a cigarette paper (or indeed one of Shane Warne’s “darts”) blowing in the wind of a mighty dust storm. There is a singular opinion now, and now more than ever, so please signal your virtue, install a nation’s flag on your Matrix Biography and don’t even consider a nuanced view on anything. Do you own research? Read a book or three? Connect a dot or fifteen? See the fifty shades of grey? History is for chumps my friends. History is now written in the present whilst older history is re-written before being affirmed, holy water splashed across its pages and summarily despatched with an official stamp of approval into the One Party State Hall of Records.
For those of you new to these volumes of internet insanity, I am as anti war as my comedic hero Bill Hicks above. I’ve been politically homeless my entire life but if you require a label it’s “left” and should you desire a picture to be painted: pile of books, pack of smokes, a beach and the sights and sounds of a peaceful world at peace with itself. John F Kennedy is a political hero of mine and there is nuance in abundance surrounding the Camelot King. But he was committed to ending an inherited war and this was a huge contributing factor to the “magic” bullet that brutally ended his life.
With the death of nuance and anything vaguely resembling an adult conversation with more than barely two points of view, comes the denouncing, today, of your humble narrator, as a “Putin Apologist” on Twitter. This hilarious accusation was made by a profile with a penguin in it’s Biography as well as it’s name, so I’ve been shamed as a supporter or excuser of the Russian President and current decision maker for this abhorrent war by a penguin. Hilarious, but true. Singular view, immediate (and wildly inaccurate) condemnation. Alas, but such is the narrowed view that all social media, and not just Twitter, doth provide. How can we possibly have a large, multi tangential conversation in just 280 Matrix characters? We can but try, but we can’t. Not really. But there’s the rub. We can in that strange abstract construct we laughably call a “real world”, but there the discussion is even more diluted, even more prescribed and a singular narrative you dare not deviate from.
So I’ve been denounced in the murky corridors of The Matrix as an apologist for a war criminal by a flightless bird who’s rather a fine swimmer and protector of their families. I did point out to Mr or Mrs Penguin that warmongers such as Vladimir Putin are in a club with several others, several rather well known worldwide figures as well as their spiteful minions. Where once conspiracy theories were contained in the type of dusty old books that are now being virtually re-written before being condemned to the memory hole, the conspiracy itself is on display every hour of the day via our telescreens. The collective agenda is so blatantly on display that war criminals of every nationalistic stripe, ancient and modern, are rolling with the same crafted script for the same chaos created out of their order. As I pointed out to my penguin friend before he unfollowed me and no doubt attempted to fly into someone else’s Twitter feed he doesn’t agree with, these entities (Putin/Johnson/Clintons/Bush/Blair) are the very ugly public face to a very tangled web being weaved. Denounce who you wish, but these people are a very public face to a now very public conspiracy, and they are coming for us all regardless of whether you’re politically red or blue, a Democrat or a Republican, or Labour or Conservative here in the UK. The left is eating itself, deliberately, as is their move to the right in a collective blancmange of a One Party State, and a single party state requires a singular collective vision. Step out of line with your tangential thoughts or a more nuanced view and regardless of the rosette colour you wear, your politics, your sense or labelling of self or sex , gender or a pronoun with which you identify, the colour of your skin, the creed of your familial kin, these maniacal creatures are coming for us all.
No? OK, you can at least have a laugh at my expense as being denounced as a “Putin Apologist” by a rather cute looking bird who normally resides on the Antarctic coasts! Thus is the madness of Twitter, and so is this:
As briefly described above I gave my beautiful teenage son a capsule review of Paul Thomas Anderson’s magnificent magnum opus that is his 1999 film, Magnolia. A shy policeman, an anxious loner, a sex guru, a male nurse, a dying game show host, a man child game show contestant, a cheating wife, an overbearing parent, and coincidences. Lots of coincidences. And raining frogs and historical accounts and by the time all of these characters are wrung to the point of existential and physical exhaustion, they all combine to sing Aimee Mann’s “Wise Up”! Then the rain stops and a different kind of rain begins to fall, and you’ve witnessed several interweaving narratives containing loss, redemption, anger, bitterness, regret, grief, desire, death, life and coincidences. Lots of coincidences. When Melora Waters character of “Claudia” smiles in the very last frame of the film it’s so innocent yet so perfectly ambiguous. Is she taking the advice from the kind hearted soul whispering in soft, soothing tones to her? Is she redeemed? Can she really be happy? Or is she mischievously excited at the circle of life continuing and for all those coincidences to reoccur again within our manufactured time loop?
I love talking film with my son as it comes as close as possible to a joint venture between the two of us. His Mother and I have raised him to appreciate the beauty of a dark cinema and the largest of possible screens, as well as the continuous re-runs of the favourites he insists on watching at home. One minor example will be the lifelong smile that will never be extinguished when thinking back to a pre lockdown memory and the three of us going to our local cinema to watch The Shining for the first time ever on the big screen. I was just 8 when Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece was first released so jumped at the chance to see this in the darkness of a cinema. Walking back to the car eagerly chatting about a film we’ve collectively seen dozens and dozens of times before didn’t affect the excitement and laughter we all shared afterward one iota.
Magnolia is gloriously depressingly upliftingly magnificent. My capsule review clearly didn’t portray the nuances of the story to a son who simply stared at my cinematic description, and me, like a piece of rotten and mouldy cheese! The life of a cinema mad parent I guess!
It may have passed many of us by but UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson actually said the quote above of “seizing assets” this past week. It barely raised a murmur in the media here, but who cares about dangerous precedents? Or whether you or I could be next? There’s a war on! I hope I’ve demonstrated that I have zero love of war as well as it’s current Russian instigator and I certainly have no love for the owner of Chelsea Football Club, Roman Abramovich. But let’s start with the seizure/freezing and/or forced sale of privately owned companies and assets. Nuance and a broader view dictates the stories, apocryphal or not, as to how certain oligarchs like Abramovich gained Russian State assets, their whopping sale and resultant ginormous bags of cash. We could and should have that discussion. But the broader point is Russian oligarch cash (howsoever it was gained) has been welcomed in the UK for decades and exactly 20 years in the case of the owner of Chelsea FC, but without any proof of wrongdoing (as at the time of writing), the UK Government are stripping the assets of a privately owned company of a Russian national on the basis of their nationality and supposed connections to the President of their home country. We can, and I have, thrown satirical questions around: How much is the Government’s cut? What’s the extent of the cold hard cash involved? Do we as citizens get a lump sump as a sugar coated payment for their Fascism?
How about ringfencing any ill gotten gains and ending homelessness, charity, child hunger and destabilising societal ills?
Forever.
But here’s a rather more sobering example: Your local butcher is a man named Bob, and he’s generationally connected to Russia. Let’s say Bob, your local butcher with his small independent high street business, hangs a Russian national flag in his shop. He’s a patriot perhaps or missing home. He may not support the current President, he may in fact despise him or have zero opinion on the current matters of war whatsoever. Does Bob have to signal his condemnation of a war even though he’s thousands of miles away with his own business and couldn’t selfishly care less? What if he actually is a huge supporter of Vladimir Putin? Does this mean our Government can seize his assets? What if Bob has absolutely nothing to say on the current Ukraine/Russia conflict but he hangs a Palestinian flag in his shop as a sign of solidarity for another oppressed people having war constantly waged on them?
Seizing private assets. Forced sales. No laws broken. The current One Party State demonization of a nation/people with zero nuance and the cartoonish choices of Love/Hate isn’t a slippery slope. It’s the Cresta Run.
On a tea-tray.
Covered in goose fat.
For some reason moonlightmuse_ (The Raven’s Maître d’) follows me on Twitter and to the best of my flaky recollection for some considerable time. I rather like the cut of his writing jib! I have no idea who he/she is, but their writing style never fails to amuse me soaked as they are in beautifully evocative tones. If you appreciate the warped sense of style he/she adopts in the tweet I retweet in the bottom right picture of the three above, do follow this strangely endearing character in the Twitter madhouse.
The “Don’t you dare fucking hug your granny!” and “Come on! Welcome strangers into your home” combo tweet (far left, middle image of the three above) was an attempt to encapsulate the utter madness of that tiny rock we all live on and how unevenly it turns. This very morning (15th March 2022), the Member of Parliament responsible for the incalculable death and suffering of the very oldest amongst us (my dear old Mother too) and joined the perfectly straight faced chorus separating all of us from our loved ones and installed ungodly fear into so many about even considering giving your elderly family members a fucking hug, was smiling and laughing on a national breakfast time talk show. After two years of unremitting fear, dread, anxiety and volcano levels of worry about visiting elderly relatives in a hospital (if you were allowed in) or even daring to hug them if you were, is on national television saying how excited he is to be applying to take in a Ukrainian refugee. How very fucking noble of him.
This MP is a member of a club, the same club that Vladimir Putin also attends. Funnily enough, this same club, and a very public club it is too, contains a Mr Joe Biden of America, a Miss Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand, a Mr Emmanuel Macron of France, a Mrs Angela Merkel of Germany and the wraith like wearer of ill fitting suits here in the UK, Mr Boris Johnson.
Ever feel like you’re being had?
And how does it feel to find out we’re the evil Empire?
Postscript
I despise the phrase “winning the internet” or “winning Twitter” that people often employ, but come on! I was outed as an apologist for a war criminal by a penguin!
Longer term viewers will be fully aware of my unrequited love affair with Elon Musk and here, on the 14th day of the month of March in the year of our Lord 2022, Elon challenged Vladimir Putin to a “single combat fight”.
Sometimes The Matrix doth please me so.
Go get him Elon!
But be careful my love.
Twitter Watch: Vol.4
The narcissistic edition and my blossoming love affair for Elon Muskmedium.com
Twitter Watch: Volume 1
An ode to Hunter S Thompson and are Neil Oliver and Elon Musk going to save the world?medium.com