Don't Stop 'til You Get Enough...

I think everyone probably has a “I remember where I was when I heard that ‘such-and-such’ had died” story. For me, it’s John Lennon. Despite being far too young to know anything about him when he died, I remember my teacher telling us that he was the guy who wrote ‘Yellow Submarine’ and for some reason that etched itself onto my infant mind.

Of course, there have been others over the intervening years. The mass hysteria surrounding Princess Diana’s death left me feeling excluded. I didn’t feel a part of the subsequent outpouring of national grief, and, to this day, I still don’t get it. I remember coming into my parents living room and hearing some reporter or other talking about a royal death and just assumed that the Queen Mother had finally snuffed it.

This week Michael Jackson joined the exclusive group of dead personalities and celebrities that give people their ‘I remember where I was’ stories. This small group have surpassed mere celebrity and became ‘Icons’. Along with the likes of JFK, Elvis Presley, James Dean, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison and Marilyn Monroe (amongst others), this group’s fame reached across generations and, with the aid of a tennis player scratching her arse and a guy holding a baby, kept Athena going for years. (Come to think of it, Athena only went bust after MJ became a plastic manfreak – I wonder if it’s related?)

Anyway, I digress...

It’s always rather sad when someone dies young, and despite what you may think about MJ as a human being, he was a talented musician, entertainer and showman. He touched many people (pun intended).

However. while watching the last three days of ‘Michael Jackson still dead’ updates on every news bulletin, interviews with the always relevant Uri Geller and ‘Blanket’ coverage of MJ’s family, I can’t help but wonder if there is anytihng else that could be considered newsworthy happening in the world?. I suppose the loyalist paramilitary decommissioning of weapons is, at heart, simply a local interest story and when you get really into the detail of the situation in Iran, it’s still really far away and they’re all ‘a bit dusky’ over there... !?!

I expect that the editors of the Daily Telegraph are crying their eyes out. Not because ‘the King of Pop’ is dead, but because the run they have had on the expenses scandal has finally been relegated to page five.

For the members of ‘the Icon Club’, it’s not the contributions they made to popular culture that we typically remember, it tends to be the ‘car crash’ (figuratively or literally) that really elevates their status. For every live fast, die young James Dean, there are at least a million live slow, don’t die Chesney Hawkes...

Also, we have lost out on some great and worthy icons purely because they didn’t have the forethought to die before they did something to fuck-up their blossoming iconic status.

For example, Ozzy Osbourne could have been remembered as the Prince of Darkness forever, rather than the shambling, incontinent wreck he is these days, if he’s only thought to die in the early 90’s. Cliff Richard really could have been the British Elvis, if he’d only have crammed-down a couple of pies and shat his way into the Iconosphere – but no! He had to don a purple stripey blazer and sing to the grey-hair brigade at Wimbledon. We’ll always pine for the wasted genius of John Lennon, but Paul McCartney? If you wanted to die a real Icon, you should have thought of that before you hooked-up with the one-legged, mental, gold-digger...

Anyway, goodbye Mr. Jackson. If you see her, give Ms. Fawcett my love. You are not alone...

Abide with me...

Yesterday saw another Summer Solstice pass with little incident at any of the major Pagan sacred sites. Having seen images of the 36 thousand-odd Swampy-like revellers at Stonehenge peacefully witness the overcast dawn of the longest day in the northern hemisphere, I wondered in what other circumstances would such a diverse cast of individuals get together to joyfully celebrate the religious ceremony of a small minority at their sacred place of worship.

I don’t know for sure, but I don’t expect most of the people gathered at this event were card-carrying Druids or Pagans of any sect, but they shared a moment together where the diverse belief structures, moralities and ethical frameworks didn’t matter – they just wanted to enjoy a spiritual act together, whether it belonged to their belief structure or to someone else's. (Although, I expect some of them thought they were at Glastonbury and were actually just wondering when The Prodigy were coming on).

Were their beliefs all that different?

I was born into a working-class family in the West of Scotland and, like everyone around me, my moral structure was actually a reflection of my parents, and their parents before them. So, for the young SpiderBoz, Protestant Christianity was it. I was baptised into the Church of Scotland before I had a voice to object, and was handed my chalice of guilt to carry with me until I sought escape.

I quickly grew to understand that there could be a choice of more than simply left-foot or right-foot Christianity. My friends had a wide variety of different belief structures (Buddhism, Hinduism, Islamism, Mormonism, Sikhism and so on), but to my forming mind this was simply semantics. Anyway, they still believed in ‘God’ so difference did it make?

The main thing was, irrespective of culture or religion, we had a commonality of morality. Albeit different, we had a moral framework from which to hang our ethics. For most it was based on differing theistic beliefs but we, on the whole, got on. As far as I can remember, there were no Crusades or Spanish Inquisitions, there were very few witch-burnings and nobody declared a holy war on anyone, with the exception of the Rangers-ites and Celtic-ists, but that was mostly fought in an orderly fashion on the battle pitch.

These days I don’t believe in god, but I still thank my parents for this part of my upbringing. Not because of the long, tedious hours spent in church and Sunday School on Sundays, or at bible school and Boys Brigade during the week. I thank my parents for the moral and ethical standards that they instilled in me.

More and more parents are looking to the state to provide an ethical framework in schools, while the schools are struggling their way through the increasing burden of bureaucracy with little, if any, power to enforce discipline within their walls. As I look at the news reports of children forming delinquent gangs, assaulting each other and attacking disabled people, I can’t help if morality is solely taught through post-watershed TV, the internet and the Xbox.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that religion should be adopted or taught in schools, nor am I saying that religion in itself is a good (or bad) thing. What I am saying is that people need to be shown right from wrong before they have been nurtured by society into delinquency. And, frankly, this is the parents responsibility. If you don’t feel you can provide a decent, loving, respectful, moral and ethical upbringing for a child - keep your junk in your pants.

Seriously. If you try to get an animal from the RSPCA, you have to fill in a questionnaire to assess your knowledge and suitability to look after the animal, subject yourself to an interview to ensure that will provide an acceptable level of love, patience, time and commitment, have a home visit to ensure that your house is ‘good enough’ for the pet, and they will even ensure that you have sufficient income to pay for it’s care and upkeep, too. If you want to bring a child into this world, all you need to do is down enough lager or Bacardi Breezers to convince yourselves that getting jiggy without any protection would be a fine and dandy idea. You need a license to own a gun, or to drive a car or even to own a TV, but you can drop a multitude of future ASBO recipients without even knowing the name of the other parent...

We need to get back to a state of morality. Bringing gods into the equation seems to be a recipe for high-horse ranting, politically correct wankness, or exploding backpacks. Well-intentioned Humanists seem to have gone too far down the Richard Dawkins organic, fair-trade, free-range, tie-dyed ethics route. So what does that leave us?

Well, after an entire morning of agonised soul searching I have finally found a religion I can relate to. The good book is an uplifting 2-hour long film, so you don’t have to spend years dedicated to it’s learnings, the ideology could fit easily on a postage stamp but it gives a better moral education than can be found in the ethics teachings of all the schools across the land.

Dudeism

By the middle of the first afternoon on my quest for faith, I had even taken the oath to become an ordained Dudeist priest. So, if you’re reading this from the good-ole U, S of A, and you want the Reverend SpiderBoz to officiate at your wedding (subject to legal confirmation from the local County Clerk) as long as you’re happy to pay for my travel and accommodation expenses, don’t hesitate to drop me a line...

For all the world religions, faiths, belief structures, moral frameworks, and so on. I can find few who can sum up what I have been trying to say so succinctly and eloquently:

“Life is short and complicated and nobody knows what to do about it. So don't do anything about it. Just take it easy, man. Stop worrying so much whether you'll make it into the finals. Kick back with some friends and some oat soda and whether you roll strikes or gutters, do your best to be true to yourself and others - that is to say, abide”

Amen

Ding, Dong! The witch is injured...

I had a very brief flicker of doubt about my social conscience this afternoon.

I found myself strangely cheered by the thought of an 83 year-old woman falling over in her home and breaking her arm. The old woman in question has dimentia and a history of strokes, but yet the thought of her falling over and breaking her upper arm briefly brought a warm glow and a sense of peace to what was turning out to be a reasonably ordinary day of work, work and work.

“What the fuck is wrong with you!”, I hear you say.

Where could I possibly begin to answer that...

Luckily, in my mind, an imaginary someone helps me to find a possible answer; “Are you some kind of sociopath?”

Possibly... Given the evidence to date, I couldn’t in good faith rule it out...

“She’s just a defenceless and senile old woman in a state of distress. And you find that heartwarming?!?”

Yup! A little. I’m not jumping for joy, but I’m not crying for our damaged society, either.

I could say I don’t feel good about myself for it, but I’d be lying. I don’t feel anything about myself for it. But I still feel... not exactly happy... but certainly content.

“Sick cunt!”

True. But I suppose I should give a bit of context to this before the authorities are called, or you decide you have happened across some strange, niche market, fucked-up blog about geriatric cage-fighting. The old woman in question is not an elderly relative or some kindly old spinster helping out at the local Oxfam. She’s not even a neighbour with deliveries of milk spoiling outside her door while I amuse myself at the thought of her slowly wasting away alone and forgotten by the world she was once a vibrant part of thanks to the wonderful policy of ‘care in the community’.

The old woman in question is Margaret Thatcher.

The news report stated that “she had tripped and fallen at about 0800BST. An ambulance was called and she was transferred under police escort, with her special branch protection detail, to the hospital”. Most of us will never receive anywhere near that kind of special treatment in our dotage, partly thanks to the privitisation of the NHS in the 1980’s, but I presume that Baroness Maggie will be in the best of hands.

So, back to the brief concern for my social conscience. Should I feel bad for her or not? After all, “There is no such thing as 'society', there are individual men and women, and there are families."

I was in primary school when she became the first (and, to date, only) female Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland. My formative years were against a backdrop of New Wave and New Romantics in the charts, big hair and shoulderpads in the streets, and the A-Team and Knight Rider on the rented Rumbelows TV in the living room. My young self knew little of politics in the early 1980’s, but I knew that the bogeyman was real - and her name was ‘Maggie’, ‘The Iron Lady’ or simply ‘Thatcher’. She was the one who stole the milk and caused Santa not to visit my friend’s whose parents were forced out of work from the industry we used to have.

I grew into a teenager through her reign, to a background of social unrest, industrial strife and high unemployment. The attitude of the country was that ‘Greed is Good’ and through monetarist economic policy and economic liberalism, this was reinforced by our country’s leaders until it helped us into the economic crash of the of the late 1980's and recession of the very early 1990’s – all under the rule of that same wandered, frail and injured old lady.

Even years later, long after she had departed from power, when, as an adult, I had to pay my poll tax and student loans, I realised I was still suffering for being one of ‘Maggies children’.

It would be naive and churlish to say any of the current recession and economic crisis is due to Thatcher’s policies, we have had almost 20-years and a succession of governments to right the political wrongs, if not the memory of the fashion wrongs, of the 1980’s. But we don’t appear to be able to learn from history.

Our current Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, Lord Mandelson once claimed of New Labour that “we are all Thatcherites now”, and in terms of economic policy this seems scarily accurate – history has a habit of repeating itself.

In the long term, it will be interesting to see how history remembers Margaret Thatcher. I, like many of my generation, will not remember her fondly. But now there’s an outside chance that one day in the future, once they finally stake her into her casket, I will remember a day way back in 2009 when she did something to bring a smile to my face and a warm feeling to my soul.

“To wear your heart on your sleeve isn't a very good plan; you should wear it inside, where it functions best.”

Extending the hand of antipathy and enmity across Europe...

I recently had to wipe off a mouthful tea I had just spat into the face of a close friend.

The reason for my ejaculated beverage was that, while talking about the European elections, my dampened friend had previously commented that they were completely disillusioned by all of the major political parties and that they were thinking of voting for the British National Party (BNP).

Once I had dried my friend off and apologised for any minor scalding, we then discussed their rationale in a more mannered, and ultimately drier, way. We spoke of political policies leading to the credit crunch and of the recent expenses scandal and of any number of other political SNAFUs over the last few years, we also spoke of the reactions the other parties and how this amounted to little more than white noise and bluster rather than anything substantive.

I could only concur with their assessment of the state of politics in the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland, but had to disagree with the conclusion that the best way forward for the British people in Europe was to vote for a legitamised state of racism, mistrust and hatred. (See Private Eye, No. 1237 “The expenses row has really put me off politics... so I’m going to vote for racism, bigotry and hatred instead”)

For the sake of our continued friendship, we agreed to disagree.

Back on my own, I felt a strange unease about this visceral reaction to my friend’s political opinion. It played on my mind, not because I had hosed-down a close friend with a mouthful of Assam, but, I thought, it was because my reaction was based on an assumption that I knew the politics of the BNP on the basis of my stereotyping of their target demographic of tattooed fuckwits with their family-pet pitbulls that grace any coverage on the news.

I consider myself a reasonably conscientious voter; I take the time to read the manifestos of the major parties, I try to at least have a passing understanding of the major issues and the stance the parties have on them, I try to understand the ‘themes’ of the party policies without simply relying on the soap-box politics of the modern media. In short, I throw down my cross from a position of, at least, a modicum of knowledge. I can consider my vote has been cast from a considered, measured and rational choice. To my understanding at least, this is the basis of a modern democracy.

In reading their manifestos, I felt I had given at least a fair crack-of-the-whip to Labour, the Scottish National Party (SNP), the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats, the Scottish Green Party and even the UK Independence Party (UKIP) and the Jury Team. (On the day of the vote, I realised there were a few more I hadn’t looked into (No2EU, the Christian Peoples Alliance, the Socialist Labour Party, the Scottish Socialist Party and the independent candidate Duncan Robertson) but if they haven’t done enough to even slip into my consciousness – fankly, bollocks to them!

So with this in mind, and in the spirit of equity, I decided I had to have a look at the ‘manifesto’ of the BNP. To save you the bother of looking for it (seriously, don’t bother), it amounts to a series of bullet-points basically saying (and I’ll admit I’m paraphrasing a bit here), “everything is their fault, send them home”, whether they have ever been to said ‘home’ in their life is apparently of no relevance. So exactly what I thought it would be; racist, bigotted, isolationist, protectionist, lowest-common-denominator bullshit.

Unfortunately, my feeling of unease wasn’t sated by giving myself a better knowledge of the ravings of the dumbfuck community, or even by that lovely smug feeling of being right at the beginning, I still felt the same unsettled feeling deep in my bowels.

And then I got it...

It wasn’t the fact that I didn’t understand the fucktard fraternity. It wasn’t even that someone close to me had such a lapse of judgement to consider it a good idea voting for them. It was the vote itself!

Here I am spending hours reading the sales-brochure propaganda of those professional gobshite politicians (of all flavours), making sure I understand what they stand for and what good intentions will be forgotten, watered-down and/or corrupted if they get into power, and meanwhile any dumbass, mouth-breather can make their way into a polling station and scrawl an ‘X’ on a page which, en masse, will affect every aspect of the lives of single person in the country – and more importantly, to me!. Is this what democracy is all about?

I mean, for fuck’s sake, people will even pay money to phone Sky News to register a vote of “No Opinion” – if you don’t have an opinion, save 50p and don’t fucking vote, you dumb fuck....! What chance do we have when trying to get the common prole to understand (or even give a shit about) the vagaries of economic, health or environmental policy when they can’t even yack-up an opinion on whether Jordan and Peter will get back together.

I understand the concept of universal suffrage, that everyone should be entitled to have their vote counted and treated equally. As an ideology, it sounds great. But, have a look at the common voter. Look at any city centre at about 11pm on a Saturday night and ask yourself “is giving these people the right to decide on policies affecting taxes, defence, social care, health, economy, education and so on, really the best that we can come up with in the 21st century?” By treating everybody equally under the current party politics system, we are allowing all of our lives to be dictated to by people who haven’t the faintest clue what any of the parties stand for.

People vote for all different reasons; they vote for the same party their parents voted for (possibly due to some misplaced loyalty or genomic imprinting), they vote for the person who has a nice smile, they vote for a party they heard a soundbite they agreed with (irrespective of the rest of their policies), they even vote for fucking Boris Johnson because he was unintentionally funny on “Have I Got News for You”, but how many people vote from a position of knowledge and understanding?

It’s time for a change. If we are to have a democracy at all, don’t have the shambling hoards pick a name they don’t know from a list of political parties they know nothing about, preaching a gospel they don’t understand. Give people a multiple choice exam on the political issues - and make it a hard one! If they don’t get enough correct answers, they aren’t knowledgable enough to have their opinion counted.

Don’t give me any politically correct bollocks either. People are not equal. Not because of race, sex, sexuality, belief, background, education or anything else that certain political factions might want you to believe. The new underclass simply don’t care enough to find out the issues, understand the drivers for change and the repercussions, and then to make an informed choice.

If that’s you, then, like my ill informed and tea-soaked friend, in the world according to SpiderBoz, you don’t qualify for a say.

Come the revolution...



NB: When preparing my blog entries I always try to link to any site that I feel will add to the understanding of the context of my blog or that deserves recognition in it’s own right. On this occasion however, I will not link this blog to anything remotely related to the BNP as I do not want to add, even in the smallest possible way, to the legitimacy of this collective of degenerate, neanderthal scum.