Slender Man Sighting In English Community?

A small town in the south west of England has been inundated with sightings of a tall, bald male who is suspected to be a roving paedophile. Dressed in a dark suit, the loitering individual has been reported to police over three times in the same number of weeks, culminating in what is speculated to be an aborted abduction last Tuesday. The scandal has launched a small scale police investigation.

All of the sightings are curiously similar in that they all pertain to have seen, or have been pursued by, a tall, thin, pale male wearing a dark or black suit.

The first sighting took place last Thursday. Bernard Cooper, 42, who drives one of the many road-gritting vehicles which have proved so invaluable this season, was working an early morning shift and claims to have sighted the figure on a country lane leading to the town itself.’

‘It was just me and Nick (Bernard’s colleague) in the van, and we was (sic) basically just gritting the road going into town. We must have got about halfway across the route when we noticed this guy stood at the edge of the road, and we just assume he was a drunk or a hitchhiker. I drove on for a bit, but Nick seemed a bit worried about the guy, especially as the snow made it freezing cold, and it must have been about four or five o’clock in the morning. So we turned around, but couldn’t find a trace of him. Nick says he was pale and completely bald. I didn’t really notice that, but he seemed very thin, and was wearing what looked like an old dark suit.’

Nick Graham, 40, a resident of the concerned town, was unavailable for comment when a local paper contacted him yesterday morning.

The other two sightings are similar in that both seem to take place around areas popular with children. Chantelle Smith, 19, currently unemployed, saw a figure of a similar description in a local park which her young children were playing in.

‘I was letting the kids play for a bit after school, and they were just getting on with that really, in their like innocent little way, and I couldn’t help but notice that a gentleman across the park was staring at them, very intense like. He didn’t look like the parent of one of the other kids and he was dressed like for work – he was wearing a black suit and carrying some kind of suitcase. I’m very protective of my children; do you know what I mean? So when he just stood there staring at them I got up and went over to tell him to, you know, to move on a bit. He was very, very thin, sort of stick-like. I think he had a shaved head, but he might have just been bald. He must have got a whiff of me coming over because he disappeared then. I think he must have been a peedo (sic) and the idea that he was eyeing up one of my little girls makes me livid.’

The third sighting took place as recently as last week, in the home of Nicola and Ahmed Aakash. Their daughter, 8, began crying and shouting at a long, thin shadow which kept flickering across the window, which she had perceived to be a tall, thin man. Nicola, a public relations advisor in the city, initially thought nothing of it.

‘You know what kids are like, seeing things under the bed, and that sort of silly thing. So I thought nothing of it and told her the whole thing about there being no monsters in her wardrobe, and even went through the pantomime of looking through the room with her. Then I heard about the young mum from across town who thought she’d seen a man staring at her children in the park, and my daughter kept having these awful frights at night about the ‘thin man’ at the window. A few nights ago Ahmed and I were enjoying a quiet night in, the kids in bed, when suddenly there was an awful scream from upstairs. Ahmed and I ran up there like a shot, burst into my daughters’ room – and the window was open, wide open, and a freezing cold breeze coming in from without. And there was thing stood over the bed, bent right over it, with incredibly long fingers. I screamed at it, I tell you, and Ahmed dashed forward ready to come to blows with the thing, and it seemed to float backwards, straight out of the window. Straight out! The sick little bastard must have broken something, falling from that height. I hope they get him.’

Accident and Emergency departments across the county have been instructed to inform police of any recent casualties matching the description. In a statement released yesterday morning, Community Support Officer Giles Logan urged locals not to panic: ‘There is no evidence to suggest that the sightings all relate to a common menace, and police authorities are yet to have tracked down anyone even slightly resembling the individual as he is described in the witness statements. I have already had a few keyboard jockeys come forward and claim that the individual is linked somehow with the Slender Man abductions in America. I can assure you that such a notion is pure myth. Nonetheless, I urge anyone with information on this matter to come forward. I would also urge that the culprit, should he even exist, come forward so that he can explain himself.’

The investigation is ongoing and no subjects have been named. You can view the full article, published in a local newspaper, here:

www.wessexherald.co.uk/community/16930ogwk6/.122org

One of several alleged 'Slender Man' sightings in America. The image depicts a strange mass ressembling a tall male in the background.

Right-Wing Smear Jockey Stumbles Across The Truth

The ease and enthusiasm with which the left wing has adopted Julian Assange as the last bastion of truth has vexed those whose hearts beat on the right to no end over the last few weeks. Of course this is arguably because right wing politicians have never held honesty particularly high in their own regard, but Melanie Phillips, of all people, raised an interesting counter argument to this in her daily column on Tuesday.

Having poured a standard issue load of vitriol over left wing liberals, as is customary these days to fill up copy space, (and hell, if you’re getting paid over a pound a word to do it then frankly I really don’t see much of a problem with that, it’s not as if what she has to say usually makes any sense anyway) Phillips drew our attention to Assange’s motives for blowing the inner working of the US government, amongst others, wide open. Yes, it could have something to do with trying to transform global politics into a more open, transparent plane. Yes, it could have something to do with Assange taking it upon himself to be a moral mouthpiece for the violently oppressed proletariat (come again?). Yet what if the ugly reality, the true motive behind this delicious scandal, is revealed to be Assange’s ‘’all pervasive nihilistic rage,’’ as Phillips herself phrases it. Hyperbole aside, she’s raising a valid point which is yet to have been addressed or analysed in depth so far: what if Assange just wants to fuck shit up, as it were?

Even the most liberal of left wing fan boys for Assange will concede that the damage he has wrought upon global politics is enormous, and the shockwaves the cables have sent across the world, the middle east in particular, are going to reverberate back and cause a great deal of problems for western states over the coming years. Sure, the United States will quite easily ride out the bulk of the consequences, the shattered relationship with Pakistan, already hanging on a threat, or the increased tension with Russia, hardly a surprise in the first place. However, closer to home, Prince Andrew is still blushing and fumbling his words over the PR cataclysm of his rather undiplomatic comments of yesteryear, the government’s own diplomatic status with countries in the middle east lies in tatters, and after all this Assange continues to taunt the West that he has thousands of more cables set to blow, ready to rent apart even further the growing ruptures between Occident and Orient.

Let’s not forget a more local issue which the entire debacle has thrown up –that of housing the self-proclaimed ‘journalist’ in our own European hotbed, putting the Coalition under increasing pressure to either extradite Assange to Sweden or continue to exasperate allies by holding him out of bail. There are few people out there who will deny that the trial is going to be an utter mockery of international law, simply because the prosecution is standing on quicksand, and even when one takes into consideration the unreleased cables, it would be no surprise if the Assange case becomes old news before next August. This self-styled Australian hacker just wants to watch the world burn, a rather good idea in my opinion, but it’s not going to last for long. And that’s assuming that he doesn’t fall down a ravine or lose eighty per cent of his brain cells in a routine check up or crash his plane in the Alps.

Julian Assange: Even The Bigots Are Backing Him

Promotion of the charges being levelled against Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, and intense scrutiny over their integrity has recently emerged from an unlikely source – British rightwing tabloid, The Daily Mail.


 Known across the nation for its bare faced bigotry, shameless ignorance, blistering disdain towards open-minded youngsters and chronic lack of any sense of style, the Daily Mail is truly the last newspaper one would expect to indirectly assist the plight of an individual like Assange. When it isn’t waxing lyrical about the joys of casual racism and waging wars in Middle Eastern countries, one is likely to find the Daily Mail pouring vitriol over liberal politicians and anyone who doesn’t have a room temperature view. Yet nevertheless such prejudice, it would seem, has been lifted in favour of battling the common enemy of freedom of the speech. Or has it?


 All publicity, one hears over and over again, is good publicity. When the Daily Mail runs Assange’s trial on the front page of their paper, instead of bitching about middle class, jumped up student protestors, it makes quite a profound statement regardless of what the text in the columns might say about Assange as a person. It says, of course, that this is a story worth covering and indeed the unsavoury circumstances surrounding Assange’s nebulous rape allegations also deserve critical analysis – should Mail reporters be capable of such a thing, of course. One must compare recent pages of other papers associated with the right to understand the magnitude of this – the Telegraph and the Times avoid even mentioning Assange’s name where possible, and seem crippled with fear at the prospect of transgressing against the views of the current politician’s power. Of course, this would be rather a difficult thing to do anyway when giving head to the swine under their desks.

But let’s not fall in love with the editor of the Mail just yet. One could certainly argue that the Mail’s fascination with Assange actually has nothing to do with his achievements as a political watchdog, and therefore their indirect support of him through exposure loses much of its relevance. On the contrary, it’s the sensation of the story which no doubt gets some chubby copy editor’s pulse pumping, as he wheezes and sweats over the prospect of a new, sordid exciting public figure to ejaculate over. A recent article in the Mail uses their trademark schoolboy humour to poke fun rather affectionately at Assange’s underground hideout, likening it to the super secret base of a villain from a Bond film. Nauseating clichés aside, the Mail probably just succeeded this time in doing what it usually does best – twisting anything of tangible merit into a grotesque circus of parochialism.

Can Style Be Substance?

So I’m supposed to be trying out that pared down style now. All those adjectives, superfluous nouns and weird exclamation marks flying all over the goddamn place were getting old. No more corpulence.


It’s a shame that the Blade franchise, stemming from the Marvel comic book incarnation of the same name, has died out for several reasons. First of all, the visceral style of the first two movies in the trilogy had a sensual edge to them which really seemed to capture the zeitgeist of the nineties, that icy, hard, cool exterior with not much underneath – firm to the touch yet brittle. And inside...inside...

 We won’t dwell on the third of the trilogy. Some things are best left dead and buried.

 The second reason seems to stem from a growing disdain towards films which produce an overt aesthetic which does not conform to that which is set down by the status quo of conventional Hollywood blockbusters. That grungy, eastern-European setting to Blade 2 was unpalatable for viewers who desired their Western brains uncontaminated by the Other and all its grotesque trappings. The idea of a bureaucratic race of bloodsuckers, by the same token, also seemed no doubt a little too close to the bone. There are enough people out there getting fucked by pale guys in suits at it is.

 The third reason has something to do with the short lived season of the Blade series. It was a fat candle with a big wick and in the very short period it took to burn bright and out most viewers were either drooling over the basketball or seriously pissed off by the fact that their brains had been stimulated by a rich mélange of neo-noir aesthetics and stylized ultra-violence.

 Those last two facets of the Blade franchise are what brought about its demise in the first place. There’s something bizarrely familiar about that alternate universe which viewers find unsettling; the shortcomings of the director to alienate the audience from the spectacle has had the opposite of the desired effect. The protagonist grabs a cop and dashes his brains out against the trunk of the patrol car. Broad daylight. New Yorkers everywhere. No one pays much attention. At first the sight seems intrinsically ridiculous. Maybe the director was lazy, the viewers think, and shift back into their seats. Either way, the complete apathy of human beings towards each is being illustrated in no uncertain terms on the big screen. The movie ends. No one pays much attention.

I suppose it’s ironic. The director sets out to make a film which art only in the most superficial sense – the surface is the canvas. So can style be substance? The end result is the complete opposite of what anyone had ever intended, and that, I guess, leads into why the films are associated with what one lazily refers to as postmodernism.

Do Not Bend

So I finally got through the traumatic process of editing alongside the team at a certain Europhillic publication and the finished piece is right here:

http://www.europeandme.eu/10diaphragm/513-recreation-for-the-masses .

It might be recognizable from the original but I wouldn't know because I have no intention of re-reading the goddamn thing.

March Of The Pigs

Cacophony in the UK - tabloids baying for blood from one end of the newspaper aisle to the other, wild-eyed media moguls screaming through print in one last desperate spurt of rancid discourse, anything to drag those foolish atheists away from certain destruction and eternal retribution in fire, burnt bodies and the old sagging cunts of the sex industry pushed reluctantly to page fifteen...

London. Out of the dust and the filth, somewhere in the near distance, reeling in and out of the fog, a great armoured car, hideously stuffed with epithets of holy war, penetrates the vision of the crowd and, arms flailing wildly, an old decadent figurehead calls out to deaf ears, eyes clouding over in doubt as the cheering begins to fade and perhaps through the cobwebs of his mind some far-off and distant thought emerges, at last, ‘’Gott ist tot – und wir haben ihn geotetet*!’’

Two grotesque vignettes which neither objectively chart the Pope’s visit to the UK, nor do they present the occasion in any meaningful and constructive way. Indeed, such vibrant and shamelessly subjective accounts of this demonically powerful politician of the void are quite destructive. Yet it seems there is no other way to cover or analyse or simply relay the events unfolding in London which surround the Pope – indeed, which surround the Catholic Church – because one becomes immediately embroiled in the dogmatic values of the Church itself, within a matter of seconds.  The imagery of hellfire and brimstone, and the so-called ‘’war lingo’’ one is more accustomed to seeing in Iraq/Afghanistan reporting will always rear its ugly head, simply because the temptation to do so is almost entirely overwhelming.

Never before has such a prestigious, revered and literally worshipped figurehead in the discursive movements of this era been torn down from his coach and drenched in the filth of his followers with such vigour and enthusiasm. First came the wave of child abuse allegations, corrosive to the minds of the loyal, but sweet nectar to victims, atheists, cynics and free-thinkers alike. Then Professor Hawking murdered God via the Times, just as countless free-thinkers have done so before him: Darwin, Nietzsche, Camus, Sartre, Sade, Foucault, Montaigne, Bachelard, Houellebecq, Russell, Shakespeare...

While this strange creature writhes and moans on the ground, the only remaining possibilities are to remain the passive observer and grossly gape on, or indeed to participate in the sacrilege, the heresy, the natural order of things. Even Catholics have dealt fatal blows to the Pope without even realising it – Anne Widdecombe’s disastrous attempt to portray the Catholic Church as a source for good, via ad hominem arguments and dogmatic values, stands as a valid testament to such a bold claim. Each time devout members of the Catholic Church condescend to the level of the thinker  (as opposed to the follower -another inversion of the natural order not uncommon in this cult) their clumsy attempts to jam the pieces back together only tear more stray threads from the garment itself. Total disintegration. Grab a limb, and pull as hard as you can.

*''God is dead - and we have murdered him!'' Thus Spake Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche

Morrissey Strikes Again...Meat Is Not Murder...Death To Burnt-Out Indy Statesmen

Morrissey For Rolling Stone

There must be some obscure cosmic law about blows to ideologies coming in twos, as this is exactly what occurred to me last week when I was emotionally raped by Morrissey’s self-interested, publicity-hungry, compound adjective-saturated rant about sub-species to Simon Armitage, and then aurally raped by the equally self-interested, patronising and rather barren early Smiths offering ‘Meat is Murder’ which I’d checked out through a dubious combination of personal obligation and morbid curiosity (Rape rape rape rape rape rape rape – Guardian readers know what I’m talking about it).

Most people probably perceived the Morrissey/Armitage faceoff as a car crash days before it even took place, but maybe someone had decided to set the editor of G2 up for a fall – or indeed perhaps the editor wanted to watch from afar as sparks flied and all eyes turned reluctantly away from the tabloid centrefolds and onto the Guardian’s front page. Either way, the interview between M and A was by all accounts an absolute train wreck –for M at the very least – which barely succeeded in stretching beyond the usual sycophantic drivel of starry-eyed journalists (or poets in this case) being pissed on by their teenage idols. Enough of these pithy, corpulent sentences, goddamnit.

 Morrissey is obsessed by animal rights – the cynic inside wants me to draw his attention to the wealth of crises and orgies of suffering which strike his own species, but I guess even fluffy cuddly little balls of cells also need some kind of spokesperson. There is an impressive backlog of Morrissey interviews carried out by celebrities and straight, respectable (ha ha) journalists alike which all contain the hallmarks of a bitter, anxious attitude towards the future, and this one was no different. People are used to Morrissey moaning and lamenting the loss of his melancholy yet totally fictitious Golden Age of the North, but they’re not used to poet laureates getting the verbal equivalent of a kick in the head. How ironic that Morrissey’s disdain for eating animals alive does not include fellow northerners, the hardiest and most obstinate species of them all.

The second blow came in the form of what I believe is the second Smith’s album, following their impressive yet flawed eponymous debut (not my words – except eponymous, because it’s a great word), aptly entitled ‘Meat Is Murder.’ The meat in question seemed to take on many forms throughout the album: initially it was the trembling, angst-ridden Manchester schoolboys, quivering with homesickness and fear of pseudo-homosexual punishment from their captors, ahem, teachers. Then it was the unrequited teenage lover, reduced to meat in the broil and beer-soaked hedonism of the local fair, pining and whining after one of many worthless whores, greater victims to their own caprices than anything which bandy-legged Indy kids could unleash on them. Then, finally, it was the fluffy, adorable little animals themselves (mainly cows, I believe, due to the cacophony of anguished mooing in the background) in the final track. This was, I suppose, intended to shock and horrify middle-class, ignorant contemporary listeners about the horrors of meat but it simply came across as patronising and self-righteous. Especially that awful, awful chorus.

 There’s something rather beastly about dragging up a dated album and beating it into the ground. Especially from the standpoint of a generation already desensitized (raped?) by propaganda such as ‘Meet Your Meat’ (do check it out, it’s rather flamboyant, considering the subject matter) and all those other shock-tactics docudramas out there. Anyway, it’s unlikely that this latest Morrissey bomb is going to do any harm to the legions of die-hard Smiths fans out there – in fact, I’ll bet it even caused a sales spike in copies of Meat is Murder. Oh, I’m such a pig.

Lab To Become The New Lib?

Nobody held a gun to Nick Clegg’s head and forced him to enter into a coalition that was, to many, a walking oxymoron. At least no one did so in the pseudo-physical, extortionate or even figurative sense. However, that doesn’t completely dispel the notion that a merge onto the side of the Conservative party was chiefly an escape route, or move for survival, just as parasites would sooner choose a new host to feed on than waste away alone. Abysmal election results and a growing roar of hilarity from the media dogs surrounding Clegg’s press office would no doubt have fuelled the hatred from within the party itself, and who knows if Clegg would have been forced to stand down after such a chaotic, unstable and ultimately futile act of rebellion against traditional party politics? The heretic, it seemed, could either be burnt at the stake or make a prompt conversion and enter the fold. And the latter, according to politicians and journalists across the spectrum, is exactly what he did.

 

So Clegg married Cameron to keep a legacy for himself. Any mindless walking penis would probably do the same out of sheer desperation. Yet the strange pseudo-conservative policies and ideals being peddles by the Liberals in their slice of the pie, and a strangely docile opposition to Tory policy itself as only served to stoke up once again the fuels of heresy and discontent in the Lib Dem party. This, presumably, is why a large number of high profile Liberal bénévoles famously defected over to working class ‘saviours’ Labour in a desperate bid to recoup some of their fundamental values. By the same token, rumours are spreading across London this very second which suggest that Charles Kennedy, once leader of the Lib Dem party, is now also planning to defect. He may have half-heartedly denied the claims in a hastily scrawled press release, but if this isn’t a love letter to the Labour party then...well....what is?

 

So why are these head honchos and grass roots rioters alike all deciding to flock elsewhere to get off on centre-left policies (sort of the soft porn of British politics, if you will). The political field seems to undergoing a great deal of reshuffling, with the Liberal Party drawing closer and closer to the dreaded political purgatory of The Centre and, who knows, might precariously wobble there for months before finally taking a chaotic plunge into the murky world of old world elitism and class-consciousness. An unpleasant place to be indeed. Meanwhile, the Labour party, grotesquely loaded with faux-liberal, young new faces and the golden Milliband Brothers, is making appeals to the jaded Liberals of the left, namely those who were once part of the renegade SDP. Ed Milliband’s speech earlier this week was a thinly concealed appeal to those frustrated and disillusioned with their bizarrely draconian post-9/11 policies:

 

"I believe the argument is being won that on issues like ID cards and stop-and-search we became too casual about the liberties of individuals. And I believe the argument is being conclusively won that we must recognize the profound mistake of the Iraq war. I want to take my party on a journey to a different identity for the future: social democratic on economic policy, standing for redistribution and tackling inequality, liberal in our respect for individual rights." (Guardian)

 

Yes, that was me dicking around with the italics, not the Guardian, which is a respectable and established paper, as opposed to a moron with a digital screen. Anyway, the repetition of words such as ‘casual’ and ‘individuals’ and of course ‘liberal’ would make any young cynic of the decontracté variety sit up and listen. Whoever wrote this speech – probably not Milliband himself but I suppose there’s always hope – clearly wants to open the floodgates for the so-called ‘true Lib Dems,’ or rather those repulsed by the coalition. As long as the Liberal party stays joined at the hip to the Tories, no one’s going to look to them for entertaining the more radical liberal policies – so why shouldn’t they try their luck with what could quickly the become the new Liberal Left?

Those Yellow Bastards

I’ve started to entertain the notion that the ‘The Masses’ aren’t anything like as prodigiously stupid as the discursive forces of our time would have us believe. The probability of stumbling across a newspaper column with substance, be it online or on those soggy rag-pages themselves, seems to be an increasingly unlikely occurrence. It’s no surprise that papers are just as saturated with mindless, grotesquely ignorant and egotistic trash as they have ever been, but the sheer vacuity of reporting in general (and to claim that certain papers must be more than vacuous would be a dangerous statement indeed) seems to have seeped, like a viscous poison, into the once feather-light world of Opinion columns. So-called Free opinions. Deft prose. Provocative ideas, or notions or theories. Anything to resonate with that strange and nebulous human mass, The Readers.

Hell, maybe The Readers are simply getting more and stupid with every terrorist attack, famine, flood or other temporary infraction of moral order which passes them by. But a more likely cause for the sudden downturn of quality amidst the pages of Opinions columns seems to be located far closer to the throbbing wound in the newspaper industry itself: the manic, Ritalin-crazed keyboard fiends themselves gnashing their teeth wildly as they concoct potions of widespread fear and ignorance. The columnists themselves. Those Yellow Bastards. Who would have ever suspected that that self-same, self-inflicted lobotomy (the gesture of reading the news features of a politically aligned tabloid) could slither, invisible, onto this hallowed ground of free speech? Maybe I’m getting a little twisted here, trying to knot two strands of argument together in the same post. Time for another beer.

(Lobotomy with Icepick, circa 1950)

Where was I? Ah yes. Bitching about stream-of-consciousness writing – the sheer hypocrisy of it, the bare-faced goddamn hypocrisy. But let’s return to those lucky perpetrators who are actually remunerated for such atrocities. Richard Littlejohn. Amanda Platell. Giles Coren. Giles Whittel. The notion that The Readers are able to ingest this kind of material, day in and day out, without contracting some kind of strange and terrible affliction is an absolute mystery to me. The Crimes against Coherence (even if the phrase shouldn’t be capitalized, it deserves such a merit) which are committed by these word smiths are broad in their numbers. The first is an almost complete inability to construct a logical argument, of which a perfect example is this column, where a dyed-in-the-wool Tory waxes lyrical about a nonexistent Golden Age of fun, and guilt-trips The Readers simultaneously by promising that he, the archetype of good parenting, would never alow his children to be mentally sodomized by video games.

Further down the spiral, there is the thinly concealed plethora of ‘isms’ and phobias in the columns of the Daily Mail. (Ironic imagery of sores in LJ's column) That poor gaggle of victims, The Readers, is protected from absolute trauma only by sparse advertisements, which act as garish interludes between the deviant symphonies of a dissonant orchestra of Fear. And there are the laughable ad hominem arguments, seducing The Readers into adopting the political alignment of the paper – simply because the Millaband brothers do have bog-brush hair, or simply because David Cameron does present himself as something of a class-conscious rah. (Wait a second – if we’re going to start verbally assaulting such types, let’s start at the rotten core itself, and peel our way outwards. But that’s for another time...)

Yet the worst element of such columnists is not necessarily what they write, but the perverse turn of fate which allowed them to inhabit this privileged yet ultimately hollow position in the first place. The veil of meritocracy which conceals the hideous truth of our lives, a brutally nepotistic nightmare, is rarely as frail as that which shrouds the Journalism industry. There is no such thing as a simply perceptive columnist – although there are possibly exceptions, such as Caitlin Moran - simply because it is impossible to become a columnist without having enjoyed the sweet nihilism of celebrity. There are no everyman reporters or skilled, rebellious or visionary journalist working the columns because, according to the columns themselves, people don’t want to read about the subjective experiences of a ‘nobody’. People seem to have forgotten the fact that presidents and paupers alike will all feed the worms at some point in the next hundred years and rot away into complete nothingness, with nothing but a faint scratch of memory on the wall – so who the fuck is supposed to be a somebody in our society?

It all seems to spiral downwards towards – of course – an unwanted and unlikely cultural phenomenon. Something not dissimilar to ‘That Yellow Bastard.’ I’m not alluding to the racist term for an Oriental gentleman here, but that rather odious character from Frank Millers acclaimed comic strip (and blockbuster Hollywood movie of course) Sin City. Check him out. That Yellow Bastard wouldn’t have got to where he was without the help of some well-placed contacts in the family. Potential is irrelevant. And just as That Yellow Bastard is able to abuse his unsuspecting victims due to a position of power which he does not merit, Those Yellow Bastards in the papers are violating our brains with party-ties, fear-mongering and ignorance –all under the guise of a candle-wick celebrity with sequins for eyes.

Reluctant Commercial Break

I was kind of hoping that it would never come to this, but for a variety of reasons which I can’t really go into right now, it looks like I truly have no option but to shamelessly fluff every writing gig, freelancing job and revenue sharing scam to all and sundry for, as I just said, reasons which I would rather not go into right now. I guess there’s no time like the present, so I suppose I might as well begin with the one I’ve been wasting the most time on lately, mainly because Constant-Content.cm has dried up and, to be brutally honest, nobody is buying anybody’s shit.


So, onto Triond.com. Let’s get down to brass tacks, as the dear Dr Gonzo would inform us. Basically, Triond.com is a website which allows you to write about whatever the hell you want, whenever the hell you want, and earn a fistful of dollars on the side. Actually, it’s more like a meagre handful of cents, because unless you’re a true cyber geek who knows the ins and outs of the information highway (which I most certainly do not) you will sure have a hell of time trying to get some decent exposure. It’s fun and casual, and there is an at least small thrill to watching the hit counter and earning counters on your stuff gradually, gradually, painfully increase. Always a good thing to do...naaaat.

So, to conclude very hastily, if you’re interested in writing for fun and cash at Triond.com, please feel free to click here and sign up. You’re probably wondering why I’m so eager- well, I’ll level with you. If you click the link, I get a small referral bonus, but I’ll also fluff your material in the near future and it will be a symbiotic relationship of sorts. So drink up, fuckers.

Abfahrt Von Gedanken...Going Up...Bad Fries And Fremdenfeindlichkeit

THE WOODS ARE BURNING! Yes. And if I don’t at least try and regurgitate this filth onto something civilised, like a keyboard, it’s just going to ferment in my brain until I start foaming at the mouth and somebody gets shivved. Probably me. I’ve got a maggot in my brain for each hour of sleep that I lost last night, a monstrous debacle of jet clouds, turbulence and cold, empty hotel rooms. Frankfurt airport is Hell. No questions asked.


I should probably get some sleep, but this needs must raus. I’ve still got that weird, out of town feeling, driving like an asshole, pushing the car up to over one hundred on the drive into town, and watching other people being watched in traffic. Someone grinded past playing Lady Ga Ga – no one plays that out of their own free will, I thought, and gave the poor girl a poor sympathetic grimace. But what the hell was I doing? Where the hell was I? Goddamn these useless tangents.

Let’s start from the beginning, that would be the most rational place to commence. My diary notes are hazy at best, barely spilling over a single page of A5 but the few scraps I can salvage from it will have to do:

It’s not a binge if it doesn’t give you cardiac arrest, and then, scrawled into the corner, The Mountains....Jonny’s in America.

I’d left town on a high and was dreading the possibility that sometime, sometime soon, I would crash down suddenly and unexpectedly, in a most inconvenient place, such as up the mountain, or something, Yes, I’m afraid of Americans, I’m afraid of the worst...

But time out of town seemed almost synonymous with recuperation and the opportunity, greatly overdue, after all this forgetfulness and arrogance and gnashing of teeth, to finally just chill the fuck out. Enough shaking. There is good beer in Austria, and good people, and they know it. There were no malicious sideways glances or glares as we exited the Terminal at Graz, no pallid veils of tolerance. Those would come later, when we met the other countries. It was hot in the city and I was sweating like a pig, but that was OK.

(The author, bemused, sleep deprived, pissing away the time before climate change fear-mongering)

The others were friendly – and then some. We rolled up to a hotel in Judenberg, considerably more salubrious than the hellholes pasted over tourism leaflets in the airport, and the staff had faces made from real skin. No fakes grins and thick clumps of foundation to hide the xenophobic turmoil of their brains. Excellent good. Hours later, perhaps many hours, I strike up a conversation with one of the employees at the bar and the ice breaks easily thanks for a few somewhat endearing grammatical errors on my part. Austrian German was tougher than it looked, and the host on the plane had taken to my attempts at all kindly. But this was different – I was instantly adopted as her little pet, something to stroke and coo at when the job got dull as hell. It suited me fine, as did the extra beer and cigarettes.

Heavens forfend – twenty minutes of frantic typing and all I produce is mush. The relevant content, you couldn’t stretch it over the eye of a needle. Very poor indeed. The cider can is getting low and my keyboard’s groaning with the strain.

NB: My companion for the week has been HS Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 and there is a lurking fears in the sleep deprived fibres of my brain that, sub-consciously, this will into some pathetic, sick, contrived work of pseudo-plagiarism. Hideous. But words are words and I’m out of brain cells.

Extortion!

Out of the pungent vapours of beer, sweat, and god knows what else, down the stairs, down the ragged red strip of fabric, through the entrance (Why are we going through the fire escape? This must be some kind of administrative error.) and into, really, nothing in particular. The venue looked not dissimilar to some hideous old aircraft hangar that had sagged in on itself, crippled by its own self loathing, and there wasn’t a vibrant statuette or proud portrait frame in sight. (Call that a red carpet? Someone asks, a rhetorical question, we presumed. It looks like it’s had something amputated. The poor fool. He was probably right)

‘It looks like a fucking bingo hall,’ someone moaned and, according to a partially torn poster hanging uncomfortably above the urinal, it certainly was. It would seem that the architectural dress code, if such a thing truly exists, had strictly prohibited style, and it was perhaps for this reason that an attempt to merrily carry open bottles of wine inside the hangar/hall/hole was met with an orgy of frowning and tutting at the door, and someone faintly implying that I was being an inconsiderate asshole.

‘What do you mean, he can’t come?’ Some poor drunkard moaned, clutching her wine bottle tightly against two sagging burst balloons, ‘you mean this isn’t a suitable companion?’ Not unless style or class was on the agenda, but it seemed that the venue and the latter were no longer on speaking terms.

Matters improved considerably at the bar – reasonably over the top, treat-yourself-luv-it’s-the-fucking-ball price labels, but self conscious and guilty about it – however there was once again a sudden and unpleasant surge downwards as we approached the table. Everyone is talking about cummerbunds. I am not wearing a cummerbund – in fact, I don’t even seem to be wearing socks.

Eventually, sustenance arrives, born lethargically on the huddled backs of fierce, angry women who bark strangely exotic words at each other, referencing, presumably, the food, but in between their brain and their mouths some terrible transformation takes place, and what spews out orally is nothing more than garbled ejaculations. ‘Broo-lay! Krem-fresh! Do-fin-wars!’

‘Right.’ A particularly terrifying individual is stood directly behind my chair, glowering down at the puny post-it card bearing my name and some odd initials. ‘I wan’ a Gammon and I wan’ a Chikkin,’ she snarls at the hapless young boy, tentatively bearing a bent tray loaded hideously with the rickety plates of the meal, costing in excess of twenty pounds.

‘This isn’t Gammon, damnit,’ my drunken companion seethes, eyes fixed down on the sinewy strips of meat, mercifully all but submerged in gravy. ‘This is ham – this is just ham!’ Someone informs him that, really, the two meats are essentially exactly the same, but the attempt at consolation was promptly torn down and devoured hungrily, the hapless agent branded as ignorant and uncultured. Unlearnèd in the manners of food. Quite.

My attention drifts away from the small lump of chocolate on my plate which followed the Gammon – which didn’t taste too bad, even if it wasn’t true gammon – and over to the flashing lights and bold white panels of the photography stand across the hall. There seemed to be some minor dispute taking place.

‘What do you mean you can’t take a picture of all five of us?’ A bold young man was retorting incredulously, as his friends looked on in horror and restrained admiration for this defiance of the infallible photographer, ‘there’s more than enough room – we need to do a group photo.’

‘Group photos come later,’ he said. They didn’t.

‘Do not question my authority as a supreme fountain of aesthetic knowledge.’ They didn’t.

The masses then seeped into the centre of the hall, a dance floor of sorts, and so began the final desperate spasms of egotism. There might have been a band playing.

This strange throng of animals had moved as one for six years. But as the last synthetic fibres began to peel away, no one took much notice.

Rags Of Filth

‘’Ngh...yeah...oh yeah, that’s what I like...that’s how I like it, so cold and hard, so rough and rugged, that’s what I’m into lads, that’s what – oh hello, I didn’t see you there. Oh, you know exactly who I am. Remember me, the acid-tongued columnist from the Daily Mail? You're not a reader? Oh dear, you must be some snivelling fool from the under classes, or even worse, a Guardian reader. Oh, heavens forfend! I’m sorry you caught me like this; I was just shooting my load off over this circa 1940s helmet, British forces, of course. Best in the world rah, didn’t you know. What’s this? Oh, just a few odds and ends from the war – ah, the second world war, what a heavenly thing to have been whirled up in, don’t you just love to reminisce about it? I’ve got a few old guns and whatnot lying about here too, I just adore shooting my load off to it all. It’s the roughness, the derring-do and the sheer nostalgic quality to it all – yes, we Mail journalists do have a true fetish for anything hearkening back from that lovely period. Golden age, didn’t you know. Now do turn around a second, while I finish off.''

‘‘Pass me those tissues – lovely. Thanks. You know, it’s funny that you should have mentioned the second world war because I have a profound adoration for everything anti-Nazi, especially planes, lovely things, planes, and it just really makes me stir...down there. People claim I’ve got a nasty habit for trying to link everything back to the war, but they’re a bunch of ignorant young people. Good God, I can’t stand young people at all – so bloody arrogant, so bloody alternative. Plagues of the nation, truly plagues of the nation, we ought to exterminate the brutes! Where were we? Ah, yes, the extermination of those Jew-killing German bastards. Yes. Well, you see, I wasn’t the only one seeing clear links between the England match against Germany and the war – in fact, everyone at the Mail does, did I mention we all just absolutely love the war and everything vaguely resonant of it?’’

‘’What?! Of course it was appropriate to compare the efforts of the brave, patriotic and heroic British, oh the British, oh the Britishers, Oh God save our gracious....Ahem! Yes, it was certainly right to compare...their...efforts, I like to call them ‘the few’, don’t you know – CAPITALIZE THAT WHEN YOU PUT IT IN WRITING YOU SWINE, AND SHOW SOME BLOODY RESPECT, YOU YOUNG NAIVE PIECE OF TRASH – and the English team, referencing that rather ghastly match. And I’ll tell you why – it’s my duty, as a noble and patriotic citizen, a columnist to boot, to make sure that no one who ever reads our paper – those who don’t read us aren’t worth the efforts, they’ve all been brainwashed by the liberal media – can ever forget how profound the difference is between German people and BRTISH PEOPLE and, perhaps more importantly, are never able to cast the cast-iron stereotype of Germans out of their minds. Post-war relations? A fig’s end!’’

‘’Was that a knock from outside? Open the cell door, will you? No doubt my editor, he’s in rather a foul mood today, after England lost the football to Germany and all – what’s that, master? Yes master. Young people urinating on memorials in Manchester, master? Awful, master, awful, awful, awful. Repugnant. Of course I’ll sort them out, master. I’ll find the little runt. I’ll bite his cock off. Yes, master. We do, master. No, nothing worse than a following generation of new world values or, perish the thought....liberal ideas, master. That truly would be a hideous world to live in – see you tomorrow, master. Are you still here? Good heavens, if only they hadn’t scrapped national service, little bastards such as your ilk wouldn’t be poisoning the streets – off with you! And make sure you take your bloody hat off when you walk past the English flag, you self-interested, misinformed, blinkered, ignorant bastard!’’

I Support Freedom Of Speech...Lol, jks I'm Nicholas Sarkozy

''Fascist....moi?''

It’s not every day that a pesky little chunk of political discourse called freedom of speech, or freedom of the press, for that matter, gets, to put it bluntly, defecated upon from above, but of course that’s because most countries in Europe aren’t unfortunate enough to have an image- conscious, lecherous demon of the Cabinet like Nicholas Sarkozy.

Heads rolled this morning as the admittedly brutal and acid-tongued political humouriste Stéphane Guillon was fired, no, enthusiastically thrown out on his ass, from Radio France due to his comments on the show regarding (you guessed it) Sarkozy being perceived by certain sensitive members of the public, in effect, conservatives, as ‘nasty.’ It must be said that the French word ‘méchant’ does no justice to our sorry Anglophone equivalent, but I suppose ‘sanctimonious cunt’ makes a vaguely suitable substitute for it.


Understandably, the left wing are furious, as although Guillon claimed to have attacked both conservatives and liberals in equal measure, Sarkozy certainly seems to have recently become his favourite toy. Foaming at the mouth, drunk on his own colossal political power (I’m talking about Guillon, actually) he can’t help but drool over the microphone as he spews out onto the radio waves some of the most scathing and destructive political insults known to man and beast. Even the word weasel came up a few times, perhaps in a subtle transatlantic nod to everybody’s favourite acid head, mescaline chomping Hunter S. Thompson. He’s so awesome it would be a total crime not to throw up a large picture of him, and hell, he would more than approve of Guillion’s anti-Sarko craziness.

But mindless drizzle aside, there is an alarming implication at the centre of the media furore – it would seem that Sarkozy, urging to lick his wounds and massage his bruised ego (heavens knows he’s taken a beating in the last six hours, let alone six months) Sarkozy has simply decided to make those that criticize him disappear. Thanks to the darlings at Le Grand Journal, Guillon got a little bit of final exposure on his way out, but for all we know, he could be breaking rocks in some Cuban jail or something, right now. Goddamn Conservatives.

HP Lovecraft A Racist Fiend?

The Rats in the Walls alluded to it, The Horror at Red Hook beat us over the head with it – but the question still stands: was the talented and controversial writer of cosmic horror, Howard Phillips Lovecraft, revered across the world for his flamboyant, corpulent horror fiction, a massively racist bigot?
 I have a lurking feeling that re-printing the phrases Lovecraft uses in his work would get this sorry salvatory of bloggy flesh sent down immediately, so I can only allude to his verbal assaults against black people, Asians, Indians and Arabs in passing – but anyone who flips through a copy of Lovecraft’s fiction will most certainly know what I’m talking about it.

 Lovecraft sure as hell wasn’t violently racist – his wife, Sonia Haft Greene, often commented that he would, to cut a long story short, go ape-shit around foreigners but this is the only solid evidence other than Lovecraft’s fiction that implies he was stoically, enthusiastically or passionately racist. The old wives’ tale that he was contacted by an emerging National Sozialismus Partei during the early thirties has been disproved by numerous scholars – S.T Joshi couldn’t find a trace of evidence that even alluded to this kind of lunatic theory, yet the racist label remains steadfast and difficult to remove.

 Of course, perhaps one loses sight of the fact that Lovecraft, for all his wonderful horror fiction, was something of a reclusive snob, who certainly held prejudices against the crude, uncultured American masses – so why shouldn’t he hold the same disdain against foreigners? By the same token perhaps he, not unlike Conrad, Waugh and, I suppose Fitzgerald, was simply a product of a generation which held racism as a common value – a fundamental pillar of a society which had an irrational fear for immigrants.


Personally, I think the fiction actually speaks for itself – I’m not even referring to the cat called n***** man, or the ‘grotesque negroid features’ of a black boxer. Anybody who scares the shit out of people by writing about creatures which, fundamentally are aliens, is bound to be housing some kind of racial views – the creatures and hideous creations of his fiction are, perhaps, simply crude allegories to illustrate his own racial venom in an acceptable medium. Hell, I don’t know.

I Want To Dig Up A Certain Metaphysical Poet And Chop Him To Messes

I’ve got the shovel, the lantern, the battered copy of the Necronomicon and, to put it bluntly, I’m about the walk out the door and act out of my vindictive rage-fuelled fantasy on a certain metaphysical poet, who has been the epicentre of much stress and pain in my insignificant and ancillary existence, being a box of worm seed, salvatory of green mummy and slab of fantastical puff paste, over the last year.
 Yep, it looks like I’m through the hysterical stage and now I’m just gonna march over to the poet’s corner, pretend I’ve come to renovate, or paint, or something, and then I’m going to dig in, dig out, and tear up a few bright bracelets of hair around bones and if I get the time, an outward soul.

Goddamnit, I am sick of the motherfucking conceits in those motherfucking poems – I can hardly take it anymore. I don’t care if that subtle wreath of hair which crowns his arm will keep his limbs her provinces from dissolution and all that other happy go lucky orthodox crap. If it wasn’t for John Webster’s casual and refreshing nihilism, elegantly reminding of us of what a shadow, or deep pit of darkness doth, fearful and womanish mankind live, then I probably would have ran screaming from my educational institution by now.
 I guess it’s time of evening, although I should not harm nor question much that – goddamnit. I’ll have to leave it, just in case it breeds idolatry. Goddamnit. Donne must be turning in his grave.

John Donne: The Lusty Misogynist?

I’ve got an exam on this nightmare angel of linguistic deviance, so I might as well try to kill one bird with two stones (or rather, merge two hemispheres with one compass) and spew out some kind of commentary on his identity as a woman-hating sleazy bastard. I guess I'm also, rather conveniently, spreading venom about Conservative politicians. Anywayy, the twentieth century vision of Donne, outside of Eliot’s opinion, certainly seems to be one of unaffected scorn towards metaphysical poet and ‘massive priest’ John Donne. This is, of course, understandable because feminism has become saturated into not only popular culture but also a healthy dose of post-modernist (whatever the hell that is) works, and so any derogatory comment levelled against females is, according to the masses, an implicitly misogynistic comment.

There is more than a germ of truth in that last sentence, regardless of whether one attacks Donne as a feminist, a historicist, or a fellow misogynist. Lines in his poetry such as ‘nowhere lives a woman true and fair,’ or ‘Hope not for mind in woman, at their best, sweetness and wit they are, mummy possessed,’ stand as potent ammunition for anyone who wants to brand the ‘M’ word onto Donne’s pious forehead. However, I would imagine that the same people who count Donne in this dubious circle of writers also include Bret Easton Ellis, Martin Amis and of course Ernest Hemingway. I haven’t got a god-damned clue if Amis is a woman-hater, I still haven’t got around to reading Money, but it wouldn’t surprise me if he’s regarded in this way due to the presentation of females in his novels.

However, most readers who bring up these rather dubious comments that Donne has made –and apparently if you think those are offensive, wait until you get an eyeful of his letters – will of course neglect statements which imply the complete opposite if misogynistic impulses. There is a pervasive theme of spiritual equality in Donne’s work – the sexual union is a spiritual union – and both the female and male entities are equal participants. Take The Good Morrow – ‘my face in thine eye, mine in thine appears’ weaves the image of two lovers equally fixated upon each other. Likewise, ,Donne’s statement in The Fever, that her sickness will burn out fast because ‘much corruption needful is to fuel a fever long’ contradicts somewhat the bitter epithet of Twicknam Garden that ‘alas, hearts do not appear in eyes, Nor can you judge what woman thinks by her tears, than by her shadow what she wears .’ It’s also an exaltation of purity in woman that contrasts violently with his smug assertion in an early Song that ‘nowhere lives a woman true and fair.’ People seem to neglect the fact that Donne, to a certain extent, has steeped most of these poems in imagination – although scholars are hell-bent on proving otherwise – and therefore the opinions expressed within them are not necessarily supposed to correspond with each other. Nobody thinks that the internal monologues of Browning belong to the same character- so why think the same about Donne’s poetry?

The second reason to suspect Donne’s identity as a misogynist is the fact that everybody was a misogynist during the 17th Century, just like everybody was terrified of going to the Hell in the 16th and everybody wanted to burn witches in the 15th. We don’t brand Conrad as a racist –ok some people do – so we shouldn’t blame Donne for being a product of his environment. By the same token, the entire artistic community was possessed by the theme of female infidelity and mindless fucking. We see it everywhere else, but we only reprimand Donne for it.


There are all kinds of reasons to hate Donne – he was deeply religious, his poetry was shamelessly egotistic, he, to paraphrase Ben Johnson, ‘deserved hanging for not keeping accent’ and perhaps most frustratingly of all he weaved insane threads of deviant logic to come to fucking weird-ass conclusions – twisted ‘iron pokers to true love-knots’ indeed. Oh man, I’m exhausted. I think I left some cider in my wardrobe – Big Time...

Reznor's Side Project A Train-Wreck?

What the hell happened to Trent Reznor? One minute he was the brooding Byronic hero for the MTV generation, spreading gorgeously casual nihilism across the otherwise sterile channels of the music industry across the globe, and now he’s spewing out contrived and unimaginative crap alongside his spouse, whose name has almost completely escaped me, and some other guy that I’ve never even heard of. So much for being objective and doing my goddamn research.


The ‘train wreck’ in question is an EP which was recently released for free download on the band’s website, howtodestroyangels.com, or some crap like that, and has raised all kinds of strange questions about Reznor’s artistic credibility. The problem is that most of his fans revere him as the epitome of an anti-commercial musician, and his ingenious viral marketing and refusal to charge for his music downloads stood as a testament to that. So does the extremely generous gesture of releasing copyright free tracks onto nin.com, which fans are able to take for themselves and create their own remixes. Happy discovery. But the latest Reznor offering has only managed to engender concern amongst his closest fans and followers. Or maybe they just hate his wife, I don’t know.

How To Destroy Angels takes its name from that rather wonderful signal by that old creepy industrial band Coil, who hung around the same kind of dark dingy Gothic ruins as Boyd Rice did, and seems to attempt to pay homage to the track itself through the jarring, discordant riffs and the baying of some crazy-ass machine of groaning cogs and wires in the background- hell, I don’t know what they’d call that in the music industry. Taking a shit on a snare, or something? I don’t know.

 As someone who tries to defend the merits of industrial music in the face of a society almost crippled by its obsession with the same old god-dammed Lady GaGa hooks, I want to exalt Reznor’s EP as a grand offering of mechanical dissonant joy, but the problem is that by rights, it just doesn’t sound like industrial music. Admittedly, nor did Trent’s material as Nine Inch Nails, but his own leathery voice and laborious panting merged with the clanks and whirrs and screams of his music rather brilliantly. The same just doesn’t happen in How to Destroy Angels. Except the opening track. Wait a second, where the hell am I going with this...

The bottom line is that Trent’s churned out something of a howler this time round, and although it’s by no mean the finished product, the quality of the EP itself has cast some doubt over the minds of most industrial fans, mainly because the female vocals make the whole fucking EP sound like some kind of Blondie/NON cross-over. That should be pretty cool, but it How to Destroy Angels is anything to by, it’s not. Nevertheless, if you really want to, you can download the EP here.

Motive-Hunt for Cumbria Killer is Meaningless

Only the morally squeamish and those poor fools striving to uphold some long dead derivative of old world values and chivalry will have anything to gain from sifting through the corpses that lie in Derrick Bird’s wake in search of a motive.

The reality – and one which nearly all institutions will continue to deny, regardless of how many of us take up arms and start murdering our neighbours – is that this rampage was by no means a ‘sick fantasy played’ out in all its brutal physicality by a ‘bloodthirsty freak or lunatic’. The truth is quite the opposite and one which few people are ready to deny. And the more articles that newspapers churn out expressing their total bafflement at a solid motive for Bird’s killing spree, the more likely it is that the true root of the problem will be buried forever under heaps of the usual sensationalist trash.

The whole debacle is to a certain extent reminiscent of the Columbine and Virginia Tech killing sprees – with only one fundamental difference in that whereas Bird seemed to be a happy family man, the college killers were isolated, alienated, frustrated and voiceless. It probably draws people’s minds to the otherwise normal and happy middle aged men who ‘went postal’ during the 80s and walked from cubicle to cubicle, shooting everyone in sight. The grind and the filth and the misery of the life of an average Caucasian male became simply too much. But of course, it was really easy to bracket Seung-Hui Cho and the gang into the bracket of ‘kids brainwashed by Marilyn Manson,’ or ‘impressionable youth corrupted by television’ but that’s just not the case for Derek Bird.

Newspaper editors, and by proxy their readers, seem so fixated upon the importance of indentifying a cause and effect trend in a killer’s background that might point to a motive. This means branding violent video games, films or music as ‘triggers,’ the Ausloeser fuer Gewalt which apparently sparks off every rampage that ever takes place in an institution for young people. But could it be that for a surprisingly large proportion of the population, there is no visible trigger to sudden excesses of extreme violence?

Of course, it’s unlikely that ninety per cent of the population conceal murderous urges. And statistics can tells us (because we oh so adore the refuge of cold figures) that it’s highly unlikely that a rampage like this will occur again in England for a very, very long time. The search for Bird’s motive, then, may not be rising out of moral or legal grounds. If Bird had a motive, then it would of course distance him from the rest of the general population: ‘Sure, poor guy was abused as a child/lost his parents/ was bulled/ was a eunuch, that’s why he did it.’ This desire to distance oneself from the killer seems to be the motive for searching for a motive – people are two terrified to accept that Derrick Bird was a perfectly healthy human being. Just like them.

‘No!’ People will protest, ‘Bird was a monster!’ But the differences between ‘humans’ and monsters are rather superficial, and if normal citizens are able to gas millions of their co-workers, family friends and contemporaries, then the moral transgression towards personally taking out one’s frustration isn’t such a giant leap after all.

Nothing triggered the killing spree – maybe something in the minutiae of his lifestyle brought the killings themselves on – but the actual desire to violently vent his frustration on innocent, well-to-do people would have lain dormant in Bird’s mind for month, maybe years, growing bloated on his disdain for Man and all his grotesque, selfish, narcissistic habits. No one wants to accept that the same aggression just might have been festering in everybody else’s brains too – anybody could have turned out like Bird. It’s not a mathematical formula of cause and effect that defines someone’s desire to start murdering people. It’s a long, slow process of gradual alienation, frustration, loneliness and general feelings of anger that are expressed everyday but thousands of people on the internet, radio, on the TV – it’s the same discourse in a more saleable manifestation.