''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.
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’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.
