Does it sound a bit phony when I say that in my Grand Prix of priapic glee I was actually seeking salvation? Does that sound like something you might hear in a Southern Baptist church or a South London gospel gathering or, worse, a treatment center for sexual addiction?
My research in this area has been quite thorough, and I’d say my findings are quite conclusive. I’ve engaged in scenarios that from the outside looking in, when I was an adolescent in Essex, would’ve been indistinguishable from Eden. Looking at a papped shot of myself emerging from a London nightclub at 2:00 a.m. with a blonde on each arm and shades on, I can still be deceived into thinking, “Wow, I’d like to be him.” Then I remember that I was him.
Brought up on Frank McAvennie, and Benny Hill on the telly, and Carry On, it’s easy to understand how a mental plan is formed. I can’t unsee the truth behind the photograph, the reality behind the veil. That night with those two immaculate girls, delivered from Babestation,* via some club in Hanover Square, did not feel like it looked.
When I got back home to the house that I’d dutifully purchased and done up like a space-age Byron would’ve: flocked black wallpaper, shag pile carpets, Jacuzzi—ah, the Jacuzzi, lowered in the garden by a crane that gurgled like an oracle in my garden, murkier with each new sacrifice. A TV in every room, a yoga studio with a wipe-clean floor. But unless you do the yoga you don’t get a wipe-clean mind.
The girls come in and drink wine. I don’t drink wine, so I don’t spill wine but they do. The humanity will not be silenced as we kiss; nagging angels burden me with their invitations. Glasses get broken like promises I was given, given then and given when I took these ideas on board.
Kisses are exchanged and lips get derivatively bitten and I am unsmitten and unforgiven, and when they leave I sit broken and longing on the chaise. The glass window above the door says No. 1: Number 1 Gardnor Road. It casts a shadow from a streetlamp, and on the wall it looks like “No 1”—“no one,” as my mate Matt observed, and I am alone but for the cat.
Even though when it works, after I rip it up in front of 3,000 at the Brixton Academy, and I head back with a netball team from Essex, all Fays and Tracys refracted from Grays and “Faces,” after the mandatory Jacuzzi I look up at them from the quilted mortuary slab of my chamber as they pick over me like thwarted but amused surgeons. I watch them through anesthesia and pray amnesia will help me forget what I’m doomed to regret. Like perfumed and glossed vultures, they peck my carcass, and a petit mort is insufficient; I am like Frankenstein here, assembled from boneyard parts.
Other people’s limbs and thoughts, stitched together and jerked to life.
Why is this not working? Was Sam Fox lying? Is Hugh Hefner lying? Is everybody lying? They look like broken toys to me, like an unlicensed Pitsea Market ET whose finger don’t light up, given to me, sat on my knee.
I don’t want to be led back to that, I want to be delivered from evil.
For thine is the Kingdom, the power, and the glory, for ever and ever,
Amen.
* * *
* They weren’t delivered, they came of their own volition. I just like the poetics of delivered, it sounds better. Those women aren’t a corporate entity worthy of fearing, neither is Babestation. Silly business all round.
17
War! What Is It Good For? Capitalism. Obviously.
IF YOU CAN TRANSCEND THE LIMITS OF THE INSTINCTUAL AND ANATOMICAL self, you can become part of a kingdom of unified consciousness defined by power, glory, and eternity. This is a journey I have made, but enlightenment is not like a summit that can be scaled, then perched atop of, like a jolly mountaineer with rosy cheeks eating a pork pie. It is a commitment to live in the moment.
When I consider myself to be a member of a community, living in the present, my agenda lifts, my agency returns, and I am no longer a passive and redundant consumer but an awakened citizen. Dave DeGraw, who we left on the other side of the Lord’s Prayer, explains the dilemma we face as an uninformed populace:
“Due to the mainstream media, the average person has no understanding of this unprecedented increase in wealth. Imagine if the average American understood that U.S. millionaires now have $50 trillion in wealth.
“$1 trillion is 1,000 billion. For an estimated $30 billion you can end world hunger. You can wipe out the entire national debt of the U.S. with just 25 percent of that wealth.”
I always thought that classified information and top-secret files mostly consisted of data that, if known, would cause people to rise up. Later in the book, Noam Chomsky will explain that to us in detail. We are creatures with an intuitive need for fairness. We are like the monkey in the cage fed cucumbers while our neighbors scoff grapes; we are in a position to look through the bars and see this injustice and to open the cage door.
Dave leaves us with another quote from Jefferson: “Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.”
This is similar in intention to the Yogananda quote: “Darkness may reign in a cave for thousands of years, but bring in the light, and the darkness vanishes as though it had never been. Similarly, no matter what your defects, they are yours no longer when you bring in the light of goodness.”
Thomas Jefferson, Yogananda, and Dave are all saying the same thing: If people are informed, enlightened, awake, change will come. Well, that’s easy enough; we just have to communicate with one another.
Having a Revolution will be easy. Maintaining the Revolution will be where we face challenges. The reason for this cockeyed optimism, which has motored me this far through the book and indeed through life, is my certainty that we all want the same thing but are describing it differently and ascribing the solution to different structures.
Some people, like the ISIS insurgents in Iraq, have an idealized view of Iraq and likely the world beyond, built upon, I suspect, a militant interpretation of Islam. People like Donald Rumsfeld and the U.S. military–industrial complex have a different ideal that they’d like to impose.
Out of sheer bloody diligence, I have extensively researched the meaning of the phrase “military–industrial complex,” and as a result you are seconds away from knowing what it means and being able to dazzle your pals down the youth club or high-society banquet, depending on who the hell you think you are: “An informal and changing coalition of groups with vested psychological, moral, and material interests in the continuous development and maintenance of high levels of weaponry, in preservation of colonial markets, and in military-strategic conceptions of internal affairs.”
Remember when that war with Iraq was on your telly? We were told it was absolutely necessary for our personal safety in, I dunno, Ohio or Plumstead, as Saddam Hussein was on the very precipice of developing weapons of mass destruction that would end up in the wrong hands, which as far as I can work out means brown hands, and could ruin our experience of Argos and Dancing on Ice.
One million people took to the streets of London in protest under the banner of the Stop the War Coalition, because they didn’t believe there were any weapons, that Argos and Dancing on Ice were safe, and it was all an economically motivated, resource-driven trick.
It turned out they were right. There were no weapons that could do any serious damage. In fact, when Saddam Hussein was found in a hole he was living in to stay out of trouble, Iraqi resources didn’t stretch to full-size Mars bars. He only had little fun-size ones down there, which to me is the sign of a nation on the brink of implosion.
Through the 20/20 vision of my retrospeculars, we can now see that the primary beneficiaries of the most recent Middle-Eastern conflict that Western nations got properly stuck into were not ordinary people in England, America, or Iraq but big global companies that are above such quaint notions as “nation.”
Dick Cheney, a man whose name sounds like a prick encased in armor, has strong ties to a company called Halliburton; they made $35 billion from postwar contracts. They do stuff to do with
fuel refineries but have countless subsidiary affiliates—none of which, disappointingly, are Haribo, so nip that rumor in the bud.
Loads of British firms made tons from it, including security firms like Aegis, run by a fella who was a high-ranking army officer. In a way all this top-level corruption is just a manifestation of a particular aspect of understandable and ordinary human behavior.
Like when I need plumbing done, I might get my mate Mick’s cousin to do it; that, I suppose, is a form of cronyism. It would, I suppose, become more problematic if I lied and said next door were using their bathroom to make weapons, then went round and smashed it up, then gave Mick’s cousin the job of repairing it, and blamed my neighbors for the damage and made them liable. Especially if, before the whole fiasco had taken place, a million people had protested outside my house saying it was a blag.
This is why people feel disaffected. Everyone knows—not just in their rational minds but in their guts, our collective folk knowledge—that we are being unduly shafted and grifted by the people at the top—whether it’s Cameron and his mates cutting benefits while raising taxes or big financially motivated wars where poor people from this country go and kill poor people from Muslim countries so rich people from both countries can do their thing.
We’ve got more in common with the people we’re bombing than the people we’re bombing them for.
That is why it takes some pretty well-drilled, old-fashioned optimism to get down to the polling station on Election Day. The very system in which we are invited to ritualistically but irrelevantly participate is designed, DESIGNED, to prevent significant change occurring.
The best arguments I’ve heard for voting since I admitted I don’t do it have been to exhibit politeness for dead people.
Well, I believe in the Glory of God. I believe in the power of people to manifest here on earth a society that represents holy principles. This inoculates me from their bollocks.
Find out what the powerful want you to do, then don’t do it.
What would most terrify the plutocrats and oligarchs that jerk the threads that twitch the flaccid marionettes?
An informed, engaged, collectivized, connected global population with no interest in petty prejudice or tribal illusions sold to divide, whose energy is pragmatically directed at the creation of a justly organized society.
I met Alastair Campbell the other day, and he’s a lovely bloke who likes football, cares about people, tries to do the right thing, and still justifies that inexcusable war. He told me he liked Tony Blair but didn’t love him, thought social mobility could be reduced to people describing themselves as middle class, and was proud that less people than ever before describe themselves as working class.
Class is a daft system that we have to dismantle, even those of us who glory in glottal stops and hard-luck yarns. I’ve had a bit of a look round the aristocracy recently, and they’re not enjoying it; I think they’ll be glad when it’s over. To proceed we must accept each other, as we are not where we’re from.
My mate Johann, who’s been doing research for this book, thought I was too nice to Alastair Campbell; he surmised it was because I was enamored of his chappish demeanor.
There may’ve been a bit of that, but I also know that as well as being a spin-doctor extraordinaire, the power behind the throne, the ball-breaking, hard-talking, journo-smashing inspiration for The Thick of It’s Malcolm Tucker that he’s got mental-health issues, and I saw grace in him.
This business of seeing divine interconnected beauty in people has been happening more and more lately, and I put it down to meditating too much. Liberated from the materialistic projections of anatomical distinction between humans, who I now see are a refracted projection of one supreme consciousness.
As Bill Hicks said, “We are one consciousness, experiencing itself subjectively, there’s no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves.” Which ain’t bad for a stand-up comedian from Texas. I felt for Campbell because I too have had the odd struggle with the brainbox, and I was fascinated with how he must cope with life after office.
“They sicken of the calm, who knew the storm,” said Dorothy Parker. I told Campbell that quote and he went a bit wistful.
He’s pretty good, as one of neoliberalism’s foremost propagandists, at getting his point across. I said to him, “Alastair, what did you do that war for?”
He—remarkably and with a straight face—tied it in to 9/11 (you remember those towers; there were two of ’em, I think). He said that he and Tony, who has since gone on to become an adviser to a Kazakhstani dictator and a board member of a Middle-Eastern oil company, were playing it by ear when the World Trade Center collapsed in a way that some people say looked like a controlled demolition.
He said, “We had the same information as anyone else watching it on the TV when it happened,” which makes me question the value of international espionage, if all these James Bonds and Jason Bournes are getting their info off of Ceefax.
In the intervening period between the 9/11 attacks and the invasion of Iraq, there was accrued considerable information that concluded that the only real link between al-Qaeda and Iraq was the letter “Q.” It was an alphabet war, which must be hard to stomach in Arabian countries, as they don’t even use that alphabet.
The rationale for the war was reverse-engineered. First the objective was decided upon—invade Iraq—then information was compiled that made that course of action plausible.
A bit like the homophobes I’ve mentioned who ransack the Bible for scriptural justification for their odd prejudices, which in truth can only really be strangled homosexual urges. Otherwise, why bother?
I’m sure there are other books that’ll give you a much better account of why the war in Iraq was phony and what the real reasons were; I fucking hope there are. Imagine there wasn’t; imagine this was the most well-researched account of the political and economic motivations for the Iraq conflict available. Imagine that after this book came out, I had to go on news shows with Colin Powell and Jack Straw and sternly talk them through what they’d done, while they looked down at their shoes, a bit red-eyed, and apologized. Then Obama had to have me at the White House and put his hands up and said I’d rumbled them. Then I was flown to Baghdad to meet with leaders of ISIS to explain that there’d been a terrible mistake, that they were right to be angry and that their violence was distinct from that which had preceded it only in scale. Then they asked if I’d stay and be in charge of a unified Iraq, and I agreed, but Obama said he’d step down and let me run America, so I do that an’ all, and then I dissolved the Union into a federation of fully autonomous, interconnected collectives led by elected local jurors from the community, that followed a central edict built on respecting the way of life of others and ecological responsibility and then shut down Disneyland, saying it was “childish.” That would be better than what’s happening and I’ve only had a few hours to research these ideas. Imagine what we could do together?
18
U’KIP, If You Want, We’re Awake
LIKE MUCH OF THE STUFF IN THIS BOOK—THE ECONOMIC IDEAS, the speculation on global trade treaties, the irregularities of the financial system—there are loads of other books that will give you the score on Iraq far more adeptly.
I’m not Noam Chomsky, you’ve probably noticed; I’m happy to be Norman Wisdom. All I’d like to do is dispel the idea that there are no alternatives to the systems we are currently using to organize society. And that behind all the myriad corruption and injustice is one all-pervasive idea and when it’s overthrown, we’ll all be better off.
Noam Chomsky is a linguist, political theorist, and a name you’d better start saying at gatherings if you want to be taken seriously. If you are one of the clever, educated people that is reading this book, you’ll already know that he’s a prominent dissident who has spoken out against U.S. interventionism and the role of propaganda in sedating a population. If you’re not clever and educated, you now hav
e a basic understanding and should stop putting yourself down.
Chomsky says that, at this point in history, alternative visions for society are vital and that those based on cardinal human values of sharing and being ecologically minded deserve serious consideration.
The situationists, God love ’em, were on a quest for authentic life based on these cardinal values—authentic life with authentic relationships that embrace love, play, participation, and creativity.
These are universal aspirations that are oddly neglected in our materialistic culture. One way to consolidate and unite the majority of humanity might be to focus on our similarities, not our differences. Sure, the ISIS insurgents right now rampaging through Iraq, somewhat making a mockery of the initial impetus of the West’s invasion, may be fuming and Muslim, but beneath their militant goals we will find love. Of course, Rumsfeld and Cheney and three generations of mercantile Bushes have got hopelessly entangled in cultural imperialism and greed, but beneath the lust for power is fear and beneath the fear is love.
As surely as the elemental ingredients that make up the temporary event of your face are carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen whether you’re an antagonized Sunni mercenary or gout-infested neoliberal tyrant, you are unified too by consciousness and love.
Consciousness and sentient awareness that we’re expected to believe has inexplicably flowered, with no physical, chemical, or biological explanation, from the peculiarly perfect conditions of our planet.
With so much in common, it’s extremely primitive to fetishize and flap about difference. In certain anonymity-contingent fellowships that help communities of people to live free from addictions to substances and behaviors, one day at a time, there is a principle that each group is fully autonomous except in matters affecting other groups or these fellowships as a whole.
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