When a nation gets rid of most of its traditional manufacturing base and the skilled and semi-skilled men and women who worked in it become re-employed in jobs that border on what may best be described as pathetic and semi-infantile low grade occupations such as call centre skivvies, supermarket shelf stackers, shop workers, the so called security industry, including bailiffs, for which read generalised thuggery, along with such challenging activities as ‘heritage’, cleaning, town hall and office clerical, the latter meaning rude jumped up little shits, you know a society is going down the drain fast. Most of the people who take these jobs are employed on a contract basis. They’ve lost most of whatever self-respect they once had and now have little respect for others.
Alongside these fast growing millions are a class of semi-skilled wastrels chief among whom are footballers, high level financial services jack the lads, media jerk offs and the political-civil service mob from town hall executives to parliamentarians. These are highly paid wastrels generally of low level intelligence and a mighty capacity for arrogantly putting themselves about as something they’re not. It is right, in a way, that these creepy crawlies should generally receive astronomical salaries and enjoy the sweetest life styles in a land now given over to appearance without substance, form without content and expression without quality. A place where you can create an impression, become a celebrity, be hailed as someone of economic importance when actually the worth of everything you do and everything you are is a media manipulated fantasy. These people have had all their worth made up for them or they’ve made it up for themselves. In short they’re confidence tricksters operating in a confidence tricksters’ economy.
This post is for these people who will well understand the idea of making it up as you go along because that’s exactly what street market traders spend a lot of their time doing. For me, especially, selling crystals and minerals, making up stuff as I go along and not giving a shit because no-one is any the wiser, is the stock in trade of daily life. It’s like politicians strutting their stuff! Most of what comes out of their mouths are calculated lies but they don’t care and quite frankly, why should they? They’re part of an established political framework you can’t get rid of. They don’t even have to keep their noses clean anymore.
It’s a bit like England football team managers. Football used to be a game of working class entertainment until someone realised that the working class could easily be lied to and fooled into accepting any old rubbish so they turned the game into an industry and support for the national team a matter of patriotism. Recent managers took as much as they could for doing as little as possible and laughed all the way to the bank, justifiably treating supporters with utter contempt because they couldn’t see any further than the back page of a Murdoch. Look at it like this. If England score a great victory against, say, some team from a Pacific Islands atoll or Albania, our guys get a bonus of what a nurse earns in ten years. If they beat us, on the other hand, they get a bag of coconuts or a sack of pitta breads.
So Crystal Cobblers is a post written for all you pathetic high earning wastrels out there. It’s not for science researchers, educators, firemen and nurses, anyone who really cares about their fellow human beings and wants to make a difference. Neither is it for people on low pay who slog their guts out in the National Health Service helping the sick and the tired, nor for those who care for the old or for human beings who feel despair. It’s for people who know how to talk themselves up and elevate the value of what they do in society to ludicrous proportions.
Street traders need to know how to talk. Talk about the things they are selling. If they’re ornaments, make them look better than what they actually are. Words, after all, help create appearance. Clever description can change the appearance of things. It’s called advertising and there’s a whole industry doing the business. Through description, politicians can change the appearance of their policies! Tart them up from damnable lies to digestible possibilities. Can you think of any involving the Liberal Democrats I wonder? Now there’s a really tough challenge!
Street traders know all about it. Talking cobblers is a way of life. Street traders, especially the craft mob, are practiced masters at it. Crystal Cobblers therefore isn’t a post about making high end shoes for footballers wives, it’s about strutting your gear and making it up as you go along. Take Madagascan rose quartz for example. It’s more translucent, more vitreous, with a far more beautiful rose lustre than the stuff from Brazil. Its major selling point however is a piece of pure cobblers that I made up i.e. that it contains the radioactive trace element bismuth and if you touch the area of your skin along your fingernails with it you’ll feel a tingling sensation! I let people try it out for themselves and they always confirm that it’s true. But whether Madagascan rosy has actually got any bismuth in it who the fuck knows? It’s all made up. Just another wonderful tale from the world of Crystal Cobblers.
But then there’s more than one species of Cobblers! There’s the stuff you make up as you go along. The lying bullshit variety. Then there’s what may best be described as Establishment Cobblers. The respectable bullshit kind. In the healing racket they can be names and words culled out of other subjects and appropriated by the fraternity to become part of a language, crystal cobblers speak! Words such as tantric and shakra, straight out of Hindu philosophy bullshit. Then there’s quantum, describing changes of energy levels of electrons in physics but now used to describe changes of psychic energy levels emanating from quartzes that assist in healing. Likewise there are minerals that have become incorporated in legend with magical healing properties like green apophyllite, mordovite and sugilite. Give any mineral on your table that name, whether it is or it isn’t and the price goes up fifty fold!
It’s a bit like credit rating agencies downgrading a country. Stick in a minus here, take away a plus there and the cost of borrowing goes up a percent. The international money lenders, they’re called money market traders these days, charge a country more for their loans and somehow it’s got to be paid by the Government. No problem, they just socialise the debt. Slash retirement pensions, make people work longer, create another three or four million unemployed, increase their taxes, take away benefits for the poor and the unemployed and make it impossible for students from working class backgrounds to have their dream and go to university. None of these people really understand what’s being done to them but the credit rating agencies do. The guys who run them are exchanging prostitutes and call girls with the men on the money markets over prawn sandwiches while they’re fucking up Greece on the phone.
Talking it up! Talking it up! Giving a crisis a name so they can milk it for more. Give it a name and give it a spin. Try it out for size on Ireland and Portugal, Greece and Italy! Give it a spin… give it a name. Sugilite sounds good or how about quantum. There’s financial cobblers. People without faces or names giving whole countries a spin – forget about who’s living there! Then there’s home grown cobblers in London’s financial services sector where national and international inter-bank lending rates are decided. To operate it needs the right kind of people. People who know how to put on a front. Talk themselves up first before talking up a crisis. And what they say needs to sound right so it has to be said right! Whether it actually means anything is another matter. It needs above all to sound like THE RIGHT KIND OF COBBLERS so that everyone else locked into the verbal cycle of meaningless bullshit will understand it.
Talking cobblers to sell crystals and impress the impressionable with my knowledge of crystal healing is a similar process. If I don’t talk cobblers to the cognoscente they won’t understand me. I’ve got to talk to them in a way that’s understandable and the only thing that healing enthusiasts do understand and have an empathy for is cobblers. The minute I talk in their language there is an instant rapport between us. We are at one! I say all the right phrases and they know I am the real thing. That I am who I say. Our minds are joined. Therefore let not the marriage of true minds admit impediment such as price! Say the right name and up it goes a thousand percent. This is indeed the market finesse of Crystal Cobblers.
Forget about a stall on a street market. Just think about the operation of cobblers on the scale of an international financial market. Most of the market traders who work the City of London operate out of finance houses. I mean, if I wanted to set up a stall near the Bank of England flogging gem trees and crystals I’d need a licence from the City of London Corporation and sure, no chance that I’d get it, but if I set up a stall, say with crystals at the front and currency exchange rates or money lending rates on blackboards hung round the sides or up at the back it could very well be different. I might get a licence and instead of being moved on by the police and security thugs with pepper spray at the ready I’d get a welcome salute!
So you see, there are places for trading with their kind of cobblers and places for trading with mine. The real question to ask is this… Is there a place where the Essex boys and girls who work the City of London and Wapping, and the guys who sell fruit and veg, pots and pans, ornaments and crystals can meet? A kind of Cobblers Exchange if you will. After all, there’s a Metals Exchange, a Bullion Exchange and a Stock Exchange, so why can’t there be a Cobblers Exchange, some big freemasons’ hall where traders of all kinds can get together and talk unlimited cobblers to each other?
True, the City boys and girls already have that kind of thing in wine bars where they guzzle oysters and champagne after being busy creating extensive tax evasion schemes and pension rip offs, but then they’re only mixing among themselves and circulating the same old cobblers. What they really need is a dose of association with real jack the lads on the street. Come and hear our kind of cobblers about how we sell shit to the punters and you’ll go back to your offices with your ears buzzing! And with all you’ve been up to on the inter-bank lending market, the currency exchange and the bullion market ripping off half the world your nerves might need settling. If fact you might need some healing so come and listen to me. I’ll tell you how to relax and feel calm… I’ll help restore all your energies… Rebalance the yin and the yang of your psyche.
Let’s meet then at the Cobblers Exchange. I’ll talk crystal healing and maybe sell you a double termination and you can look into your crystal ball and tell me what Futures to invest in or recommend your personal accountant who as a friend of a friend has another close friend at the Inland Revenue. And then we can see that we’re not so very far apart after all because we basically all speak the same language. Whether its Crystal Cobblers or Financial Cobblers its all the same really.
There are no controls here at the Cobblers Exchange. You can say what you like then go back to your workplace and do it. It was set up by the Party with ethical values that held freedom to be the greatest goal for mankind. They were against all controls, all regulation. The Cobblers Exchange is the place of unlimited free market bullshit so Gordon, may I suggest some rose quartz. After everything you’ve done, I promise it will help you feel better.
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