It’s useful to consider them terms of the Richter
Scale in Seismology that runs one to ten. The biggest quakes reach the high
eights and destroy cities. Their power registers globally. Most of the lesser
ones run four to six. But here you’re talking in terms of absolutes. Human
scandals are relative. For example, if the Jimmy Savile situation had exploded
in the nineteen-fifties its impact would have been far more powerful than it
has been today. Say eight point nine in 1955 compared to eight today. While the
seemingly small difference is actually gigantic in seismic terms, the Savile
Scandal, shocking as it is now, would have registered as Earth shattering in
the fifties.
So in a sense, human scandal is relative to
historic time. Today we shake our heads, say they’re at it again, and maybe
even have a laugh in the pub about the high and mighty being caught with their
pants down or their hands in the till. We’ve become used to such things almost
as a daily occurrence so we’re becoming immune to the shock wave, the person
doing it or the institution involved.
Just another piece of filth at one of the banks for example or someone or other
having a feel!
The more important the individual or
institution involved the more resounding the scandal. This is because the media
need a big name to drag through the dirt for public consumption. As long as the
dirt has the right kind of distaste. Their prime objective is to sell
newspapers and fill time on television around advertising. In the late fifties
a scandal involving a top Tory politician, call girls, a Soviet military
attaché and a five star pimp was massive. The Profumo Affair caused the
Government to resign and was a major cultural sensation. It ran for ages.
There’d never been anything like it. The resulting shift in moral values led
straight to the swinging sixties. Today the same thing with all the same kind
of people involved would run for a few days in the Sun then disappear under a Cardinal's cassock.
Likewise a few months ago the Savile
Scandal involving the BBC, the police, and figures in the world of entertainment
was seriously big. Today it’s already half-forgotten but in ten years’ time
such a thing might have far less media time to travel. Right now Savile
competes with Lib-Dem licentiousness, Holy Roman hanky-panky and general church
naughtiness, sporting celebrity crime, mass food substitution on a grand scale
and gross financial impropriety by banks. One major political figure after
another, one major church official following the next down the dark road of
humiliation and exposure for indiscretion. One kind of personal weakness,
another piece of moral stupidity or another. People we might expect to know
better being unable to control themselves. Those we regard as our betters doing
unbelievable things. Knowingly, impulsively walking over the edge to
destruction.
The question is not simply why? Why do they
all do what they do, but why do they think they’re immune to exposure. Jimmy
Savile had the police to protect him but others didn’t so why take the risk?
Play a deadly game of chance so that a stretched out hand or a single
inappropriate action or word might lead to the loss of everything. Why do
people already in the public eye so willingly dance with death? Seek to embrace
public ridicule? Do they want at some deep fundamental level to be laughed at
in pubs. If so the stage is a more suitable career than politics or the church.
Why for example, risk blowing your whole career, your life’s work, your high moral reputation as a
religious leader by messing about with young priests? Didn’t you think they
might feel betrayed, lose their respect for you and give your secret away?
Why break the law so many times when you
broke into so many private lives, you journalists, churchmen and politicians?
Did you think the police or the high moral authority you had would protect you?
Your position would only protect you if you were someone like Savile and spread
masses of money around. It enabled him to do what he wanted most of his life
and take his dirty mind to the grave. He had the power of money on his side and
he knew it. Those he preyed on were poor and unimportant . It made them
vulnerable because nobody would take any notice of them, especially the police,
and he knew it. He understood vulnerability. Most of his admirers were working
class, same as his victims. He let them smell popularity. The sense of a good
thing. To those with more a discerning eye he was cheesy all over with his
soppy little gestures and gimmicks. If it looks like a rat it IS a rat so why pretend that it’s not!
The roll call of filth is illustrious! Despicable
police behaviour at Hillsborough and after; phone hacking; police treatment of
rape victims and child identity theft; corrupt rotten journalism; Members of
Parliament stealing from the taxpayer; cheating violent sportsmen; thieving
criminal bankers cheating the public wholesale; corrupt and abusive police;
wholesale sexual abuse within the Catholic Church; food fraud gangsters; the
energy price fixing racket; the moral and physical abuse of young women by the
Catholic Church and State in Ireland whose exploitation over many years ran
dirty and deep; extraordinary double-dealing at the Inland Revenue; police
working undercover infiltrating protest groups and having sex on the job; tax
evading multinational corporations. These and many more! This is no longer a matter
of a few single issues. It is generalised grossly amoral behaviour as a way of
life throughout British society.
Exploitation, moral bankruptcy and endless
indiscretion! Come to think of it though maybe it’s a bit more simple than
that. Maybe people have just lost their sense of direction. After all when
you’re smelling shit all the time you can’t remember what anything else smelt
like! You’ve got no point of reference to anything better when everyone and
everything around you stinks. The bad smell becomes the normality for you and
your kids and if that’s what you smell then that’s your reality. And as far as
appearance is concerned you’ve become just another overweight ball of lard in an
endless procession of fast food junkies who prefer snacking on shit because
they’re too lazy to cook a half decent meal.
What does it all mean? Simply that you
yourself are now part of the problem. Tattooed to the eyeballs and ropping with
sugar and fat, you’ve become another increment in a rolling parade of the
obscene. However it’s not you who are corrupt or morally dirty. That kind of
thing’s for the men of god, the politicians and the police. You’re too far down
the list. Your obesity and fast rising diabetes is your own self-indulgent
personal problem. You’ve allowed yourself to become your own worst enemy and
prey to the moral abusers. You know them, don’t you? The ones you see making
the headlines on such a regular basis. The cardinals in cassocks, the bankers
in striped shirts and braces, the politicians in suits and the rat-faced
journalists, whiskers ever out on the twitch for a story.
Talk of immorality and dirt? A million
times bigger than the biggest oil company, countless times richer than any
country on Earth, certainly half of all those on the planet put together… the
chief executive of the world’s richest, most powerful business, the Pope, has
just retired from running the Catholic Church. Sure the Vatican’s rich! If
you’d been piling up gold, precious gems, valuable paintings and endless
property for 2000 years you’d also be rich! Oh, but think of all the valuable
work it’s done over that time, like having tens of thousands of young women
work for them for nothing in Irish laundries while keeping them locked up… like
sexually abusing and morally corrupting endless numbers of its own priests down
the centuries… like persecuting their fellow human beings of other faiths with
physical violence from one thousand years to the next… Like staying silent over
the Holocaust. It’s foot soldiers always merciless wherever they had power over
the weak.
Yes, Jesus’ representative on the planet
has retired but that won’t help the Italian economy out of the shit. It could
do of course but it won’t. Why should it? The Vatican’s another country, living
like a maggot at the heart of a rotten apple. The founding fathers of the modern
republic of Italy were determined it should be a secular state but unfortunately
they failed. The maggot’s been getting fatter while Italy’s been under the
control of an even more insidious worm in recent years. Don’t you think that
somehow it’s strange? That wherever this Holy Roman religion dominates the
minds of people anywhere on Earth it’s precisely there that people are poorest
and least educated, often verging on illiteracy. From the United States and
Mexico all the way down through South
America, through large parts of south-east Asia and Africa, it dominates billions
of lives, receives endless wealth from those who are poorest and gives no
material sustenance in return. Its houses of prayer are everywhere the most
opulent and lavish with astonishing wealth in places of greatest poverty and
among those who are among the most needy.
It’s a truism even in areas of Western
Europe such as Spain and Italy, both mired in unemployment and poverty. On a
recent visit to the cathedrals of Seville and Toledo I saw enough wealth in
gold, precious gems and paintings to convince me that if it was sold the
proceeds could feed the poor of Central and South America, men, women and children,
till the end of the century. I’m not just talking of the riches and opulence
belonging to the planet’s greatest promoters of humility and piety. Add it all up
and the word ‘unbelievable’ doesn’t even touch sides. When I think of these
places I remember the beggars outside. Hungry people hoping that tourists would
give them a Euro. Hungry people the church police wouldn’t even let in!
So how much did you do for any of these while
you were running your outfit, mister newly retired? More broadly, how much do
any of these so called spiritual leaders do for anyone when all’s said and
done? Yes, yes, you give them faith. Faith in ‘the Lord and his teachings’… but
considering that Catholicism is a faith totally bound up with spiritual
teaching it’s remarkable that throughout most of its history it’s been busy
acquiring material wealth, a practice that’s gone hand in hand with its
ministry of teaching, especially those naïve young priests and innocent girls
in Ireland, to name only one place where it’s been busy!
In recent weeks we’ve had a real roll call
of dirt. In recent days we’ve been getting a real dose of holiness. Never mind
him joining the Hitler Youth. He didn’t have
to do that but he did! Never mind young priests the world over swept under
the carpet during his time in office. Never mind the ruthless exploitation of
defenceless young women in Ireland. Churchy commentators at the BBC have
frothed at the mouth every time the man in virgin white linen has so much as
taken a step! This organisation with terrorists friends should be more mindful
about its own moral turpitude than play footsie with dirt. In an increasingly
cynical world it’s an increasingly serious question involving the status of
innocence or guilt. About who in a much wider sense is getting it over on whom.
And the winners in our dirty piss taking
society? Bankers! Footballers! Tax evading corporations! And last but by no
means least Liberal Democrats!
It’s just not true that you can’t fool all of
the people all of the time. Someone just made it up and everyone likes to
believe it. It makes them feel clever. Makes them feel they’re not being fooled
when they are. ALL OF THE TIME!
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