WORLD CUP FOOTBALL BRAZIL 2014 : ENGLAND’S CHANCES

I’ll preface my views about the England football team’s chances in the upcoming World Football Cup being held in Brazil with the following remarks. It may have escaped the attention of the large numbers of football fans and supporters in England but the national sport and focus of so much of their attention and devotion is no longer simply a game or a sport and hasn’t been for at least twenty years. These days it’s a business and very much so for the teams of the Premier Division and some in the Champions League. As businesses, many of which are owned by millionaire backers with additional investment coming from the equity market, their essential function is to make profit, not simply to entertain their lemming-like supporters. That said the  serious money is not made from supporters who devotedly pay increasing sums to pass through the turnstiles or buy merchandise. The real profit is made in the buying and selling of players. What is euphemistically known as the transfer market where the skills of individuals are bought and sold on what is essentially a professional meat market.

So let’s get it clear for all those romantics who love the game and follow their clubs and their heroes. The Premier League of English football was created as a meat market for you to do your weekly thing and watch those you think are great with the ball earn the kind of money for ninety minutes’ work a week that might otherwise take you many years to accumulate! You need to think they’re highly skilled and marvellous with the ball anyway because you’re attending your weekly ritual and paying for them and while they earn very serious dosh the real money is made in deals done in the back rooms over their names. One of the more interesting results of this evolution from sport to business is the relationship between a footballer’s pay and his value on the transfer market. Most of the players, whether they’re foreign or British, come from working class backgrounds and are often poorly educated at best. When lads in their late teens suddenly find themselves much in demand for skills real or pretended and soon earn huge salaries enabling them to indulge in a fantasy lifestyle, something happens inside their heads. They become prima-donnas. And so many of these players in the English Premier Division teams are simply just that with varying degrees of ability.

The important thing is that they don’t have to demonstrate wonderful skill. What really counts is their name. One that’s regularly mentioned and talked about in a media carefully geared to the interests of a barmy footballing public. This not only includes newspapers but television where commentators for football games, particularly those involving the English national team, specialize… absolutely specialize in talking players up so that a hopeless performance full of missed opportunities and a serious lack of skill is turned into a dull performance or an off day! And nowhere is this best typified than by those supplying commentaries on England’s games on television where quite frankly, judgements verging on double-think over ghastly misses sound plain pathetic. And quite frankly even more so because the people they’re talking about earn a weekly wage that’s simply staggering.

England’s players primarily come from the Premier Division of the English Football League. It’s a Division whose teams incorporate very large numbers of highly paid teenage prima-donnas attached to whom are eye-watering values on the transfer market. It’s the value that counts. One that’s supposedly based on their footballing skills but more often in fact depends on a value acquired by proxy from the media. The Premier Division indeed is more often a place full of talked up names rather than players with brilliant professional skills. At best a weak combination of mediocre skills and names. Skills more suited to club performances where they are regularly surrounded by supportive colleagues than the English national team.

This said, it is from among such players that English football team managers and coaches make their selections for the English national team. Among whom, I repeat, are many players with poor all round skills who have a tendency on and off the field to conduct themselves like prima-donnas! Especially so with the attention of a football-mad clientele at the time of a World Cup tournament and it is here that I wish to comment on the very unusual overall selection procedure used by England football managers both now and in the recent past for creating their team. Anyone with any basic common sense would think that when a new manager takes charge and begins the process of creating a national team, the word team here is crucial, you might think that for the first six months to a year the manager would immediately create a pool of best players from those available and spend the next three years blending them together, harmonizing their actions and performances and further developing their skills to the sharpest level possible. In other words spend all his time building a united, skilled and disciplined team.

In the case of creating England’s football team of today exactly the opposite has happened. In fact, right now, with only a few days to go before England’s first match against Italy, no-one yet knows who’ll be playing! Not even those in Roy Hodgson’s pool of players! Now having what may be described as a TEAM essentially involves players who are very experienced in working together and know each other’s capabilities and skills. It’s something entirely different from putting together people in an ad hoc fashion, changing the composition of the group from one game to the next and even more jokingly, swapping them around by making endless substitutions within the course of a single game. Such a procedure is a plain recipe for disunity and disharmony… players not knowing exactly what they’re supposed to be doing which leads, in the case of uncertainty, to them repeatedly passing the ball back. In only too many of England’s games recently that’s exactly what they’ve been doing! Passing the ball back when they should be pushing forward with imagination, confidence and drive. Knowing where they are going and what they are doing because they all know each other and are blended together as a fighting unit.

In short, Roy Hodgson’s creation of England’s football team over the last few years has been little more than a joke when you compare it to the creation of the national teams of Germany, Brazil, Spain and Argentina. Even of Portugal! All these countries have been carefully building their units for years, just as the great French team of recent times was put together. With these national sides it’s been a matter of careful construction. Of harmonization. In the case of the English team it’s been more like chucking people together and hoping.

If anyone needed evidence of how true all this is then think about what you just saw on television against Ecuador and Honduras! You’re talking of big name players here earning big time money at their clubs, yet the performances were dismal. Deep shit at best… and players like Welbeck and Sturridge are being put up for England when so many of their previous performances are puce. Is that a joke or something? They are essentially club players nothing more, same as Wayne Rooney. Presumably, to play for England you need to be better than that. Presumably!

But I guess that all of this will escape the attention of the large numbers of England fans all heading for Rio who will, I prophesy, wind up drowning their sorrows after games against Italy and the Uruguay in the arms of those world renowned Rio de Janeiro mulatto prostitutes and have to attend certain clinics back home in England before getting into bed with their girlfriends and wives. Sure, how I’d love to see them beat the Italians only the latter are sharp, slick and dirty, and England just can’t afford any misses; and as for Uruguay they can kiss it so it’s out in the Group Stage I’m afraid. But then never mind. If British men in front of the telly and those being laddish together inside and outside the pubs can join in singing In-ger-land, Rule Britannia and God Save Our Gracious… with the Army inside Brazil’s stadiums then that’s what really counts. They’ll all be back in a week or so, excuses prepared! It was too humid… too hot… too cold… The food gave us all belly ache… Yes the excuses are ready and waiting, same as they’ve always been!

Honestly, I really don’t want it to be that way. I’m rooting for the team same as everybody only what team is that? When England start preparing in the right, methodical, disciplined way with serious professionals rather than puerile prima-donnas, then I’ll know. In the meantime, best of luck. And please, you boozed up English fans in Rio, or wherever, unless you want a much greater agony than watching England go down the plughole, try using a condom.  

AMERICAN HELLBOY : BARAK OBAMA

If the United States Intelligence Services are monitoring this Post, same as they’ve been bugging the phones, emails and other electronic communications of Angela Merkel, Francois Hollande and most other European Heads of State, just as they’ve done to others round the rest of the world, to say nothing of their own citizens, those of Europe and just about anywhere else, then good! To those who work for your security services I really hope you enjoy what you read. You can add my name to your lists of hundreds of millions anytime. Please, be my guest. I’d consider it an honor!

A few days back, condemning what he described as Russian “aggression” in the Ukraine, American Hellboy Barak Obama said in Warsaw, “How can we allow the dark tactics of the 20^th century to define the 21^st.” The comment was made apropos what he and his State Department describe as the Russian “annexation” of the Crimea and verbal support for the pro-Russian dissidents in the Donetsk region of the Ukraine.

Looking at the Ukrainian situation factually it is more than clear that the American State Department actively supported a takeover in Kiev by violent gangs of thugs from Nazi political parties to oust the then democratically elected pro-Russian President of that country. A new Government was then installed in Kiev without any elections taking place. After this a democratic election took place in the Crimean Peninsula to determine whether or not the people who lived there wanted to remain Ukrainian citizens or join the Russian Federation. An overwhelming majority voted for the latter. It should also be noted that the Russian Federation had and still has an ongoing treaty with the Ukraine to station the Russian Black Sea Fleet at its Naval Base in the Crimea and allow twenty thousand Russian troops to be stationed there. Finally it should also be noted that the vast majority of the population in the Donetsk Region of the Ukraine are Russian and have participated in various referendums to join with the Russian Federation. The legitimacy of these votes have been denied and condemned, along with that in the Crimea by President Obama, the American State Department and heads of all states in the EU. Currently the so called dissidents of Eastern Ukraine are being bombed by aircraft from the new unelected Government in Kiev and attacked by its ground forces.

None of these circumstances matter to Barak Obama and his State Department whose ultimate aim is to have NATO nuclear forces stationed in the Ukraine right up to the Russian border.

This Post however if not essentially about the situation in the Ukraine and how the Americans view it. It’s about how President Obama and State Department view Russian history of the 20^th century. True, there was a great Revolution there in 1917 which freed countless millions of Russians from servitude and slavery, and true, Joseph Stalin, subsequently leader of the Soviet Union for three decades committed many atrocities against his own people one of which was to murder all his old early associates in Lenin’s Bolshevik Party and turn Russia into a semi-fascist State. But then the Soviet Union defeated Nazi Germany in the Second World War at a cost of 30 million of its citizens and soldiers. So be clear about this American Hellboy Barak Obama, it wasn’t the hundred thousand American troops at ‘D’ Day who defeated the Nazis and captured Berlin but the Russians and citizens of the Soviet Union.

Okay then, if Russia of the 20^th century doesn’t altogether come up smelling of roses for your sensitive nose Mr American Hellboy let’s see what kind of record America’s got going for you. Let’s see what you’ve done and what kind of heroes you came up with. First though let me point out that black people in your country were being lynched from trees on a regular basis up till the 1930’s and beyond in most of the southern states of your so called land of the free just because of their colour. Now I’m hoping they’re not the kind of dark tactics you’re referring to Barak Obama or maybe they’ve just gone out of your head.

Okay then, dark tactics. America in the 20^th century. Firstly after your war with Spain at the end of the 19^th century to break its grip on its former Central and South American colonies you continued your Monroe Doctrine and basically turned these countries into your very own Banana Republics, run by your protégés who were mainly murderous dictators. A policy that continued well into the 1980’s.

Secondly, with the horror of the greatest war the world had ever seen beginning in 1914 and already running for three years in Europe, YOU SINGULARLY FAILED TO INTERVENE, ONLY DOING SO  AS LATE AS 1918 AFTER MANY BRITISH, FRENCH AND COLONIAL SOLDIERS AND CIVILIANS HAD DIED. You stayed out of this war almost till its end in order to see what you could get out of it. Such dark tactics were repeated just two decades later when the United States turned its back on Britain and France, already fighting to the death against Nazi Germany with British cities being bombed on a daily basis. Yes, all those Nazi sympathizers you had in America helped you maintain your dark tactics of isolation. That is until Pearl Harbour, December 1941, when you finally joined up with the British. You stood by all that time, unwilling to join us while our cities and people were being attacked. And then you only came in AFTER the same had happened to you.

Well your War Record in Europe doesn’t smell at all sweet to me Hellboy Obama. Some might call it dark and cowardly tactics. Others less kind might say it stinks.

And in between the two wars weren’t you engaging in some seriously dark tactics at home? Worthy of mention is the long and brutal attack on the Labor and Trades Union movement around most of America by police, state troopers and armed gangs of private security operatives. The use of thugs and strike breaking organizations to attack demonstrations for worker’s rights followed by the gigantic strike by corporate America against its entire working population heralded by the Wall Street Collapse of 1929 in which the bankers and financiers ripped the heart out of the American people much as they did recently are very significant dark tactics. Dark tactics then for ten years or more during which most rural black Americans were living in slavery. But then I suppose none of this is what you’d call dark tactics President American Hellboy Obama because such things don’t qualify as dark when they happen in your own country.

And when the Second World War ended, you know, the one America only entered reluctantly, your political system threw up something real special. You surely remember him don’t you, that very special master of dark tactics, Joseph McCarthy. Surely you haven’t forgotten the long anti-communist witch hunt that gripped your country in the late forties and early fifties. Surely you know about the attack on so many American Jews, accused of being communist not only by Joseph McCarthy but also by one of your very own predecessors, that very eminent master of dark tactics Richard Nixon. Well we really don’t want any of those dark tactics of the 20^th century to get into the 21^st, now do we? Or did you just forget about all the evil you got up to at home in America Mr Finger Pointing President?

But then let me remind you what you go up to outside your country while all these dark tactics were going on. Firstly what America’s armed forces were doing in Korea in the early 1950’s After installing puppet government of monsters in the south of that country you began dropping endless quantities of bombs on the north. It began a fifty year spree beginning with the ten year bombing of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos which saw American soldiers on the ground engaged in endless killing and massacres of civilians. Soldiers... civilians... It didn’t matter who or what. Just fire-bombing and shooting. But those weren’t dark tactics were they? Those weren’t what you’d call War Crimes because all those people killed were killed in the name of democracy. American democracy!

During this time the world witnessed the splendid behaviour at home of Richard Nixon, earlier master of accusing innocent people who became master of spying on opponents in the Democrat Party. Well I’m sure you don’t want any of that Watergate stuff to get into the 21^st century do you Hellboy Obama?

Not long after another of America’s Presidents with help from the State Department and Central Intelligence Agency organised a military coup in Chile led by openly fascist General Pinochet against the democratically elected Government of Salvador Allende. Getting rid of someone who wasn’t much more than a liberal like Allende was a great victory for the CIA. Now they had a murderous fascist running the Government of Chile. A dictator who’d control the world price of copper for businesses back home. Democratically elected Government out, military dictatorship in. Dark tactics? No, surely not! We wouldn’t want any of that in the 21^st century. Certainly not in the Ukraine!

Oh wait a minute, I forgot to mention that America sponsored and supplied the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba by émigrés and gangsters after Castro took over, then the Iran Contras Scandal in which President Regan secretly supported an invasion of Nicaragua without Congressional knowledge after a socialist Government took over there.

And who came next? Pray help me along! Wasn’t it President Clinton’s favorite intern in the White House. You know the one who regularly sucked his cigar while he was busy dismantling Yugoslavia. As America manipulated a war between the separate states that Tito had united into a single country, using religious and ethnic tensions to pull it apart, Clinton then turned American forces and those of the EU against Serbia, bombing the hell out of the country month after month. Dark tactics? Not a bit of it. They were spreading democracy!

And after Yugoslavia came Lebanon, and after Lebanon the invasion of Iraq, and after that the bombing of Libya and then the Iraq War and ousting of Saddam Hussein. And after that the War in Afghanistan. Now this last one is special. Early in this conflict the Taliban were quickly defeated by an alliance of troops from neighboring states led by General Dostan and his Northern Alliance. The Muslim extremists were all but wiped out but then American stepped in! The Northern Alliance was sidelined and eventually disbanded by the American military and a year or so later the Taliban were allowed to return. This increasingly drew in American troops and a whole multi-national force including the British. All the time the Muslim extremists were increasing their foothold so that today they are back where they were. Very far from being defeated, with the full armed forces of America engaged in a major armed conflict in that country. Just like Iraq, Vietnam, Korea…

Was any of it dark tactics? The kind of thing we don’t want to bring into the 21^st century? Why certainly not! Not a bit of it! Once again it was America exporting democracy. Same as it’s now doing in  the Ukraine! Supporting the Nazi-inspired takeover in Kiev by the same kind of nationalists who served as Concentration and Extermination Camp Guards at Sobibor, Auschwitz, Treblinka and elsewhere assisting in the mass murder of Jews during the Second World War. Nice people you’ve got for friends these days Hellboy Obama.

Is it dark tactics for Hellboy Obama and his neo-conservative run State Department to turn the heat up on Putin. Promising to bring American troops into Poland and the Baltic States bordering Russia along with NATO military hardware? No, it’s defending democracy! Is it dark tactics to currently threaten China with serious consequences, namely the American Far East Fleet, in its dispute over territorial waters with its neighbours in the South China Seas?

Well from the point of view of Barak Obama none of the above constitutes dark tactics. America’s conduct both at home and abroad is a beacon of light. Especially now that it’s threatening both Russia and China with consequences…

Think of America today. Its civilians shooting each other en masse on a weekly basis. The dark horror of its criminal justice system and program of ritualized state executions. Its State and Federal police openly attacking and beating up civilians on a daily basis and regularly doing the same to working people striking for better pay and conditions, or students engaged in lawful protest. Just think of America today with a minimum wage officially less than 6 dollars an hour. Think of the 5% of the population who own 80% of its wealth and the 40% of its population who go hungry each day.

America we don’t want you to export anything into the 21^st century because your record in the 20^th stinks. Stop bombing, shooting and killing people actively or by proxy all over the globe and start treating your own citizens like human beings.

Threatening people here, there and everywhere is a sure sign of a nation that’s morally bankrupt. Today America itself is economically bankrupt and with its history of vile behaviour around the world we are living in the most dangerous of times. The world’s people don’t want America bringing any more of its  dirty dark tactics into the 21^th century Hellboy Obama so stop lying about everyone else just to hide your long time record of murder, lies and oppression.  

THE TURD THAT WON’T FLUSH

The Newark by-election is over and the Liberal Democrats have been wiped out. Annihilated! Just over a thousand votes out of thirty-eight thousand and their share down by 17% plus. Fifth behind an Independent candidate and the Greens. Kicked up the arse by the people of Newark and lost their deposit. Poor things, nobody wanted to know. Wanted to hear how keen they are on having unlimited numbers of immigrants coming from East Europe to take away British jobs on a daily basis or how much the love the vile EU bureaucrats who make it all possible. No, the voters of Newark didn’t want to hear the Lib-Dem shit anymore so they put a boot up their backside. But wait, what’s this? Friday morning and their Party Leader invisible! Hiding away somewhere with his face white as a sheet and trying to work out what to say. Maybe  planning to tell us all over again that they’re paying the price for a good cause. About the heroic sacrifice they made by hooking up with the Tories.

Sorry Nick, did I hear you say something? Did I see you open your mouth? Sorry mate but I don’t understand. After the kicking you got are you actually still with us? I mean, I thought you’d have stuck your head in the dustbin by now. Stood up like a man, taken responsibility for all the election defeats and resigned. Handed the job over to the nation’s favourite Scarecrow by now. The man you were having a well- rehearsed Nigel type pint of beer with in a pathetic publicity stunt just a few days ago. But no, you still  haven’t appeared. Probably figuring out that what with all the D Day stuff covering the headlines there it will all go away with a couple of aspirin and you won’t need to show yourself looking like a born loser all over again.

Your current lead role as Silent as the Grave wimp in David Cameron’s Court however raises another point. Why, pray, are you still out there pretending you’re half decent when the British people, at every chance they get, think you’re an opportunist political shit? Well truth to tell Nick we’ve only just got the lowdown. After the next General Election, when you your Party get the caning you deserve and lose most of your seats, what’s left of your Party we’ve heard, are planning on pulling another sordid political number like offering yourselves up to the Milipede and Labour in another stinking Coalition! Don’t try and hide it Nick! The secret meetings between your senior associates and the Milipede’s top henchman like Lord Adonis…  and no we’re not talking Greek Gods here, more like skinny runts… also once bosom pal of Dark Gordon Brown are now public knowledge! But then isn’t it true Nick that you’ve also been having your own secret meetings with the Milipede recently about drawing up plans?

Yes, you’re planning on doing a dirty deal with Labour if the election looks hung and the Tories can’t bear the smell of you anymore. You and what’s left of your Party in the middle all over again. On heat for another sniff of political power and ready to sell yourselves to whoever flashes the biggest bundle of jobs in the Government.

Yep, you and whoever’s left of your crew lip-sticking it in with the Milipede’s lovelies. That’s why you’re still there Nick. Why you’ll always be there never mind the kicking you’ll get every time British voters get the chance to express an opinion. Doesn’t matter if you lose every deposit you and your Party stick up… Doesn’t matter if your share of the vote drops below 2% … Doesn’t even matter if the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Chief Rabbi and the Pope all send you texts telling you to get the hell out. No, none of it counts. You’ll still be there for the next General Election, never mind that everyone hates you. Never mind that the whole country’s praying… No, your cheesy face will still be around with the same old policies that make everyone puke. Waiting to make one final deal with whoever you can climb into bed with.

Trouble is, after the next General Election when your Party hasn’t got enough seats to fill a public toilet, who’ll want you then baby? Ten seats left out of fifty and betrayal written all over your faces you can go kiss it from here to eternity!   

Yes we all know what the Liberal Democrats are Nick. After you lied about student fees you lied about energy prices. And after you lied about energy prices you lied about controlling bankers bonuses, getting rid of their filthy practices and more.

And now we all know you’ll do anything to stay in Government no matter who’s running it.

Okay Nick it’s now Friday, the day after Newark, so go take a look at yourself in the mirror. The public know you’re not going anywhere Nick. Just toughing it out as the turd that won’t flush.

FASHION: DEDICATED FOLLOWER OF…

The words of the title belong to a really good pop song sung by The Kinks in the 1960’s. In this post however they refer to the very visible habits or popular fashions adopted by the British people in recent decades many of which would be strange or peculiar to say the least to observers of British cultural life before 1980. Today there are strange fashions abroad among the British people to do some very strange things. Some are so strong that they’re almost cultural imperatives, calling for the adoption of practices that would have seemed seriously out of place in the 1940’s and 50’s, and unusual at best even from the 1960’s, a supposedly swinging and liberated time, up till the end of the eighties.. Essentially the habits and fashions to which I currently refer here have been aspects of British cultural life that have rapidly exploded onto the scene since the mid nineteen-nineties.  

They do not belong to youth alone. Generally speaking they are certainly not the sole property of teenagers nor do they belong to any distinct social class though some I’d point out are the almost exclusive property of one particular social class or another. Therefore unlike the individual adept to whom I refer in the title, the people of whom I speak here are broad social groups, sometimes within social classes, occasionally almost entire social classes themselves that take up the habit or fashion. Something  that’s so pronounced, so observable that it might almost be described as a social fact, a sociological phenomenon.

Let’s therefore take a look at some of the habits and fashions of these times. The growing, ever accelerating fashion among men, mostly between the ages of 18-40 for individual self-adornment took off from the early 1990’s. However it has also taken hold among those who are older, even in their sixties and seventies! The phenomenon is predominantly an underclass, working and lower middle class pre-occupation. In this there is a clear and direct correlation with the demise of traditional male roles in an industrial society that were an outcome of Margaret Thatcher’s economic policies of the 1980’s which brought about a severe decline across the whole spectrum of industrial production from mining, shipbuilding and heavy engineering to manufacturing and the building trades. These were replaced by the services and financial sector. More importantly however large communities of the industrial working class along with a communal philosophy were replaced by a new philosophy of personal individualism. It is from within this context that the growing phenomenon of individual self-adornment should be viewed.

The nature of this individual self-adornment is now visible for all to see and consists of the new general fashion of men in the social classes referred to above wearing earrings and being engraved with tattoos. The fashion for both is now commonplace so that individual self-adornment is no longer an individual attribute but a social characteristic. It’s something new. Something not previously observed. There are many reasons that might account for this but the most plausible to my mind revolves round the issue of identity. Alongside the demise of industrial occupations and communities has come that of old certainties. Society has evolved as a shiftless, amorphous and uncertain entity, particularly in the realm of employment, and with it has come an uneasy sense of individualism. With past certainties doomed and behind them among which is the breakup of traditional family structures and the stability they engendered, young people were and are faced with a growing identity crisis. The spirit of community in Britain is dead. The spirit of individualism alive and kicking. It’s new manifestation cannot be communal, with the prime exception of support for a football team. It has to be individual and personal. Hence the explosion of the fashion for personal bodily adornment.

Stud earrings for men. Also a generalised habit in the gay community. Tattoos for men and women. Arms, legs, faces and heads, and for many middle aged ladies a rose tattooed above the bottom crease. One can only think that large numbers of husbands don’t find the irony distasteful! In recent years this search for identity has become a copycat habit. In the hands of skilled practitioners it has become a skilled art form and mighty expensive. Here I leave the subject with one simple thought. Those who’ve adorned themselves in their need to establish identity might just as easily have found self-adornment in mind as much as body through education, travel and self-awareness. Tattoos and earrings are a concerted attempt at visible display Educated men and woman can equally display their new identity to others through their intelligence and a caring spirit.

* * * * *

Another new social fashion among young men and women not seen as a social fact until recently is alcohol abuse, drunken and anti-social behaviour openly and publically on the streets of towns across Britain. As a mass phenomenon it’s widespread and has spilled over into the package holiday resorts of south and east Europe as a vile and distasteful attribute of uncontrolled individualism. For the Europeans this expression of our youth is also something new. The fashion for this conduct home and abroad undoubtedly has its origin in the removal of restrictions which licensed the sale of alcohol by the New Labour Government of Tony Blair.

Pubs, clubs and bars could now sell alcohol round the clock, a fact exploited by manufacturers and retailers through the medium of price reduction. It meant unlimited alcohol being available to youths and adults 24/7, the former entirely incapable of dealing with the danger now put on a plate.

The streets of city centres on Friday and Saturday nights are a public forum for uncontrolled behaviour that quite frankly is needless. Young people going out to have a drink and enjoy themselves become prey to other emotions that have nothing to do with pleasure. In the late hours of night too many of them become victim to their own hopeless ineptitude. To an uncontrolled individualism that has its psychological seeds in a violent, turbulent family life. They become the flotsam and jetsam of recent history.  Products of rapid and violent social change over which they have no understanding and little control. Their conduct is an expression of the new individualism. Bad enough for the lads but entirely new and particularly disturbing among women and girls. A kind of wholesale liberation of female individualism in public displays of lewdness and foul-mouthed verbiage that was once though unladylike.

It’s part of the new social fashion for an individualism lacking traditional values and personal control. And with a future that may run in tandem with anger and aggression and entirely more sinister modes of personal conduct

 

* * * * *

I now want to touch on another notable though somewhat sordid fashion of recent times and that is the gruesome, stunningly embarrassing phenomenon of Hen Parties. Many of us have seen their participants. A dozen or more scantily clad ladies if you can call them that staggering out of their hotel onto the street wearing a furry red antennae headdress, ultra short bum revealing skirts with their fat legs and thighs encased in fishnet stockings perched on four inch stilettos and large L Plates pinned to the backs of their carefully contrived bulging blouses. Don’t worry, it’s only a suggestion. Clearly they’re no longer learners by any means, the majority more like instructors, married or not, capable of giving just about any man a serious refresher course after six vodka tonics. Sorry, I forgot to mention the balloons. In the case of these randy adventurettes most important for buoyancy!

For the more upmarket parties they may be seen getting out of a stretch limo and piling into a City Centre bar but for most it’s a walk to a pub for a well-planned last night as a single girl for the bride of the morrow. Her last night as a single woman with her friends all around her, all play acting at being randy bitches or are they? I mean only play acting! The pub specializes in such antics. They’ve become routine. Almost a drag. Well not quite if you know what I mean. It’s well known for catering for such sexually explicit heat-fests with dirty suggestive language galore and an experienced male stripper with bulging pectorals and tight leather pants to put the whole atmosphere on a Bunsen burner and titillate the Hens to a frenzy if not the Queen of the Night who they might heavily prompt, if she’s foolish enough to comply, to do something on her knees in front of the stripper with her head covered by a towel that she might have serious cause to regret later!

Most Hen Parties are lewd but then there are distinct levels of lewdness. What a Hen Party is not is sedate. They are explicit expressions of licentiousness among and between women for the purpose of giving their friend, a soon to be bride, a memorably bawdy send-off that will accompany her into the world of domesticity. A reminder of the loss of freedom. An experience of the last chance saloon of eternal pleasure!

 

As a social phenomenon Hen Parties date back no further than three decades and as a serious fashion probably closer to two. There are specific areas of the United Kingdom that are famous well established venues such as the north-east of England with its center in Newcastle. In fact the pubs and bars of whole sections of the city are given over to such jollification. This gives us a clue into the character of these events and the social class of their participants. There’s no denying it. Hen Parties are the prerogative of working class and lower middle class women. They are most definitely not a self-expression of middle class femininity. Their aim, essentially, is to achieve a sexual communality at the most basic and common of levels. True, they’re basically meant to be fun. A sexually frivolous send off. But copious amounts of alcohol having been consumed they can fall off the sharp end of the spectrum of naughtiness.

Working class Hen Parties are full of working class values and behavioral norms. Different today to what they once were thirty years back they now contain the individualism and a sexually liberated mentality that saw its first spark in the sixties but only bloomed thirty years later. Even so there’s a real contradiction at work here. This particular rite of passage has now achieved the status of fashion but it’s a rite celebrating an essentially ancient tradition and just as important, mass phenomenon though it may be it’s also a highly lucrative business.

That said there’s still something deliciously sordid about them. Women young and old dressed up in a kind of perverse desperation… only too often looking and acting like tarts in a public display that comes close to the ludicrous to any outside observer. Looked at dispassionately, as an increasingly fashionable and popular ritual, this new form of self-expression is part of a generalised shift of working class female identity. Of a sexually liberated identity perhaps that could only emerge in the new post-industrial Britain.

Most men are happy taking a peep at a Hen Party on the move but they’re not allowed in. Sorry, didn’t you know they’re restricted!

 

* * * * *

Finally one of the new fashions I wish to consider is that of obesity. I’m talking female obesity. Grossly fat women. Today they appear before our eyes just about everywhere. We’ve become familiar with oversized, overweight women in recent decades and now it’s a sight that we live with. Something that’s relatively new. A condition we might have seen only occasionally in the four decades following the Second World War. Today we see it on a regular basis. Again it’s an underclass, working and lower middle class phenomenon. In some cases its cause is physical. A medical disorder of one kind or another. In other cases its cause lies in psychological factors. An eating disorder perhaps. Even so there’s no getting away from the fact that both men and women eat far more these days than they did four, five or six decades back.

Consider the circumstances. Twenty years ago few people regularly snacked out on the streets or drank coffee likewise. Now it’s a habit adopted by millions. The lunchtime snack has become fashionable, served by the newly created availability of a wide variety of comestibles provided by supermarkets, sandwich and baguette bars and cafes. Weightwatcher type pasta and salad snacks have become highly fashionable along with the continental baguette. In short people are eating more because it’s only in recent decades that snack type meals have become so readily available. Without it the new eating out habit would barely exist and less food be consumed. It is therefore safe to assume that the new commercially fed availability of pre-prepared food is responsible in most cases for overconsumption and obesity.      

True, other factors such as those outlined above may come into play. However the cause of obesity plainly lies in over-eating but then it’s not as straightforward as that. In large part the growing wave of obesity ties in with eating food containing excessive fat and the participants of the habit taking little to no exercise. To put matters plainly the fat isn’t burnt off and has nowhere to go except circulate within the body of the consumer so a habit of years results in the obesity we witness today. And alas, equally serious is the fact that it has increasingly become visible in children.

This is a working class, underclass phenomenon among whom eating fast foods in burger or chicken restaurant chains became fashionable from the 1980’s and has now evolved into a tidal wave of quick and easy consumption. It became fashionable. Relieved women of the burden of cooking, turning consumption into an equitable outdoors social affair rather than the traditional shared experience of eating at home. A new commercial tradition therefore replaced that of family, much in line with the fragmentation of old communal values of a former industrial society. More broadly it became part of a new less active culture, that of consuming rather than doing.

Readily available consumption in the shape of food with a higher fat content, coupled with the changing less active character of work has slowly but surely led to the fashion for obesity that’s with us today and it will take far more than the strictures of celebrity chefs to free a fair volume of the population, especially women, from the excess fat they carry. It will take a revolution more than anything. A situation where working class women don’t much like how they look and the discomfort of the weight that they carry, start getting hard- nosed about their condition and become determined to change it. Eat less and healthier, start taking exercise in any spare time that they have, regain their confidence and begin looking lovely all over again.

Tattoos, earrings and Hen Parties are fashions that are silly. Obesity is a fashion that’s harmful. All of these will eventually pass, when people start respecting themselves once again.

DEAD MAN WALKING : THE POLITICAL GENIUS OF NICK CLEGG!

About a year back in WALKING THE GREEN MILE, a post I wrote about Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats, I hinted at the man’s political genius after some defeat or other saw the Liberal Democrats go down the drain. Today however I feel compelled, at the beginning of this new Post, to make a confession to my readers. It is that I utterly failed to understand the true brilliance of his new philosophy. A fact brought home to me in the last few days by the voting behaviour of countless millions of people who understood it far better than I. His deeply thought out, awesome political strategy is clearly THAT LOSING IS ACTUALLY WINNING and that the fewer people who vote for him the more successful he actually is! How else can you explain his self-satisfied face after the recent election result and that he never came out on television eating the humblest of pie?

To him the result was a victory! Thus the people of Essex, Kent, the West Country and the North of England who dropped the Lib-Dems like a hot potato really endorsed him and his policies over immigration and Europe after all. Yes, he martyred himself! Did and said the right thing to save us all! Joined in a wretched Coalition with the Tories to save the country. Stood up for EU membership over the interests of the British people as their true savior. So the fact that hardly anyone voted for them in the European election and they lost so many council seats in local government was a great victory! Yes, it was the Lib-Dems who were the Party of high minded political morality over common expediency. The Party who said and did the right thing!

Well actually, if you believe that about a man and his Party who lied about student fees and who’s lied about just about everything since you’ll believe just about anything!

So when the voters of Essex realised that voting for Nick Clegg would help build a new bus terminal for Romanian immigrants using British taxpayers’ money… or pay for thousands of Romanian gypsies to come to London and rob British people in Oxford Street… or support building two hundred thousand new houses for East Europeans to step straight into with full housing benefits soon as they arrived, they all decided to support his brilliant new philosophy that losing was really winning and went out and voted for Nigel Farage instead!

Such a clever fellow. And Britain’s Deputy Prime Minister no less!

Looked at another way the choice for the electorate was clear. What would they rather have? A pint of beer and a fag, something transparent, or a Cleggy style pasty, the contents of which you simply don’t know but is mainly vegetable when British people prefer real chunks of beef. With the Lib-Dems it’s always likely to be white wine and veggies or a cheesy on a stick whereas Nigel’s clearly a full English breakfast bloke.

Nick Clegg however won’t go. Why should he when he keeps on winning like this? Soon he’ll get another serious kicking at the Newark bye election but it won’t matter because all the smoked salmon grandees of his wretched Party will go on telling him what a great winner he is, and he believes it because of his new philosophy you see! Talk about delusional! I suppose that’s why the Tories love him so much. And why at the next General Election he’s toast!       

But okay. If you want to stay with the man in his bunker till the Russians arrive you’re welcome!

THE PHENOMENON OF CELEBRITY

The phenomenon of celebrity is complex, besides which it’s been around for a very long time. Longer in fact than most people can imagine. Roman Emperors had their favorite gladiators and chariot racers, as did the crowds who watched them perform in arenas all over the Empire. Like the modern celebrities of today they were essentially entertainers. The most famous and successful gladiators for example were widely acclaimed and became public figures in their own right. However as I’ve said the nature of celebrity itself is complex, particularly regarding what it actually is and who creates it. In the English speaking world today celebrity has become something far greater than a handful of individuals from the world of entertainment whether it be sport or popular music. It has taken on the character of a culture, uniquely individual and existing for its own sake as much as a vast public that supports its existence.

Celebrity is no longer a function of individuals with powerful and highly diverse talents, simply because it is not necessarily the talents of those who have them that make them celebrity figures. Celebrity is something that is made. Something created by others. It is an artificial construct created to make those individuals something much more than they actually are, turning them from solitary existence into public property. The essence of celebrity in some cases is that the qualities and talents of some individuals is universalized, whether it is appearance or ability of some form or both. In other cases however, if no qualities or talent exist, it is simply the appearance and name of the individual that is externalized for public consumption. Thus many celebrities have no other public function than to exist as public figures within the culture itself. They exist to live as celebrity in the public eye simply by virtue of their existence without any talent or ability of any kind. The best way to describe such a thing is self-created nothingness whose private life and public antics are cultivated to create public interest.

Such`people are a self-perpetuating phenomenon that would not exist without public interest giving it life. It’s public interest that is the oxygen for this rarified form of existence that from the point of view of any outsider must seem utterly alien. A kind of life form created by typeface or electrons! Fundamentally do nothing people creating an existence purely for public consumption. And there’s the contradiction really. Fundamentally non-existing people who large sections of the public are madly curious about and sell newspapers and magazines. Magazines entirely devoted to figures from a cult of nothingness! But then the question remains, who is it that actually creates this cult of celebrity? Surely not the nonentities themselves. In themselves they are only its vapid participants. Is it then the public, the millions who chew on the carefully contrived not so private lives of celebrity meat? Only in a passive sense, perhaps. As the vultures who feed on it.

No, the cult of celebrity just like its members are creations of a mass media. These are the providers, the institutions that create those individual candidates for cult membership. The first stage lies in ascertaining their potentiality and the second developing a story around them. Finally all that remains is communicating their existence. Creating a public interest situation as it were. Physical appearance is important but so too are specific attributes of personality. In this sense the mass media, whether newspapers or television, are vultures in a much more fundamental sense. They feed off the creatures they create and feed off the public who buy their creations. They are the pimps of a large slice of modern Western culture. But then in truth it is not really they who create the cult in the first place. They only take a lucrative cut on the adulation created, that is from the profit they make out of it. No, the real promoters, those who use the media as a facility are those who have the greatest political need for it because the cult of celebrity is in its essence a social and political distraction. Something given to the lower classes of society free of charge to gain their attention, occupy their thoughts and divert both from their own concrete circumstances of life.

Not that those chosen for this role are averse to its attractions of glamour, status and financial reward. Such people are not above pimping themselves. Using agents to help them strut their stuff publically and make full use of the role given to them just as much as they themselves are touted out and pimped by the media establishment. It is a lecherous blood-sucking relationship indeed with all parties in on the act and the public culturally seduced, bought and sold as a mass of people often incapable of diverting their attention to the real social and economic ills surrounding them in the society in which they live.

The cult of celebrity is mainly directed at young people. People with a chance to make a difference but who have become apathetic and soporific since the 1960s, the time of the last great political involvement of British youth subsequent to which they have mostly been apathetic. This cannot be simply excused by what political parties and politicians have become in recent decades and the vile nature of both; neither can it be excused by the appalling consequences of the Thatcherite philosophy of individualism, social greed and a general dumbing down of critical intelligence. Neither has this disconnection from the life of our society been a function of a growing drugs culture or the steady growth an unfettered culture of drinking and boozing created by New Labour’s Tony Blair. Both of which you can see on the streets of major British towns and cities most weekend nights. No, the malaise runs deeper and its cause lies in the purposeful created alienation of our youth from what they experience around them and diverting their attention elsewhere.

In the twentieth century the cult of celebrity took off from the 1920s and became an important feature of American and British society mainly in the sports and entertainment industries. Hollywood, theatre and baseball stars for example while in Britain it was football. It was relatively dormant during the forties and fifties, returned marginally in the sixties then took off spectacularly from the 1990s into the heated celebrity cult fervor we have with us today. In Britain a kind of footballer celebrity madness along with the pathetic character of popular music idols who are more often lyrically illiterate than not. It’s the same in America though in the latter substitute basketball for football. Many participants have certain ability if not talent but anything there is infinitely magnified and blown up out of all proportion for public consumption and the creation of celebrity status for public adulation. Others, whose celebrity is wondrously mysterious have little to nothing to offer but have celebrity status all the same.

In the latter case what seems mysterious to the critical eye is indeed a magical thing. People who have virtually nothing to offer, have almost no redeemable feature and quite frankly virtually nothing going for them are referred to as celebrities and have celebrity status given to them by such wretched prompters as the BBC Television  and Radio Services along with the Murdoch outfit, Sky Television. It is the BBC particularly that encourages the creation of celebrity. Something that is essentially a political act. But then as anyone with any intelligence knows, the BBC is the British Establishment’s highly political news media channel. A major force in British society for maintaining social order. However, having pointed to the recent historical appearance of individual celebrity and its recent generalised explosion into a cult, it is worth noting that apropos my argument of celebrity having the key function of creating distraction, its  appearance is always connected with times of economic depression. The 1920s and 30s for example and certainly the last two decades.

In the United States, where economic depression has run unchecked for three decades or more the cult of celebrity has turned into a major industry, incorporating sport but far more the mass media, particularly television. In the latter case, countless programs all with advertiser support promoting celebrity entertainment shows and drama. And along with it countless magazines featuring their participants. Indeed, there are specialist channels entirely given over to celebrity performers! In Britain we have popular entertainment programs in which celebrities are created, often out of political ghouls or media ghouls of one form or another and turned into creations for public adulation in programs such as Strictly Come Dancing. What actually possesses people to like such people and scenes says a lot about those who watch and their own problems, same as those who hook in to celebrity drama reality shows. These audiences are indeed comprised of people who bond with those they observe. People who live other lives from their armchairs! Choose their heroes or villains without having to do much let alone think!

Countless people in our society have the ability to become their own heroes. Heroes of their own action and care. Instead they sell their own life force and often their conscience to distraction, whether it’s in the form of garrulous, smart and smarmy television show presenters and their participants or the flimsy infantile creatures of popular music or worst of all, the mostly offensively useless celebrities of football whose performances are more often than not an affront to the eye. And yet it is entirely natural that these creepy-crawlies are among the most cultivated creatures of celebrity in our society. Cultivated since the 1930s for an industrial working class but now more than ever in recent decades for those who are left. A tribalised institution for tribalised working communities many of which have long gone has turned into a tabloid back page obsession.

Celebrity and its cult has been sold to a passive, mainly uncritical public by those who know about the buying and selling of people, but then the public more often than not has been only too willing to buy what’s on offer. Give themselves up willingly to those without any real individual worth or talent just to be entertained. But then that’s really the problem isn’t it? What kind of entertainment is being dished up by creatures like Jedward? What it might actually mean is that the intrinsic character of entertainment itself is changing into something coming at them from such a low level that they can no longer recognised it for the awfulness it is. It’s a frightening prospect. Anyone now under twenty-five no longer having the ability to appreciate any song, sound or music from three, four or five decades back because there’s nothing these days to compare it with! Their critical, analytical facility, something nurtured historically, has been castrated.    

Where for example is this critical facility in relation to the current wave of the last decade of modern pop music. There has been an almost complete abandonment of melody, lyrics and vocal delivery. Most compositions if you can call them that are reduced to a few words repeated over and over, neither clearly pronounced nor understood, often sandwiched between heavy electronic syncopation, emerging as little more than a rasping sound in an, at best, moronic tuneless indulgence. Rap music on the other hand is a kind of structured oral indulgence of supposedly meaningful lyrics which are often nothing more than culturally or sexually abusive, lauded because it is supposedly representative of black Caribbean culture. Both are soulless and lacking in harmony but they and their performers promoted as performing artists for British youth.

Fashion in creating celebrity status is everything. Never mind the awfulness of the music. Concentrate on the performer. In this way, what became known as boy and girl bands achieved huge celebrity status in recent decades from Bros to The Spice Girls. The carefully timed, carefully promoted so called musical releases of the latter achieved huge financial success for their financial backers while the girl group itself achieved almost iconic status for a song most of whose words repeated over and over, shall I tell you what I want what I really really want. Each Spice Girl was individually promoted by the media to an almost shameless degree and elevated to royal status in the world of popular music before their money making potential began to drain. The creation of celebrity in this case as in so many others in this kind of febrile world specifically designed to exploit youth was never anything more than a shameless money making device whose cast has always comprised the financial promoters, the media publicists and the untalented performers plucked out of nowhere to gain a brief carefully contrived moment of fame for being something instead of actually nothing.

There are examples of this shameless enough to make any intelligent person’s hair curl. Here I’m thinking of Michael Jackson.

Celebrity however is not limited to sport and popular music. One of the most iconic celebrities of recent times has been Princess Diana, she of the wretched marriage to Britain’s future monarch. You know him don’t you? The one who talks to flowers, believes in crackpot ideas like homeopathic medicine and thinks that President Putin behaved like a Nazi in the Ukraine. Well let me tell you Little Lord Fauntleroy that the Nazis brutally murdered five million Soviet civilians in the Ukraine between 1941 and 1944 including large numbers of Jews so I suggest that you shut your ugly gob. Furthermore Putin’s baby brother who he barely knew died in Leningrad while it was under siege by the Nazis in the Second World War. Altogether your remarks are not only insulting but damnably insensitive. Back to your celebrity wife who publically accused you of cheating on your marriage and ended up loathing you. Almost from the beginning the British media took hold of her in their best disgusting manner and refused to let go. The  relationship between Princess and news-pimps however was two way and grossly exploitative. Both fed off each other throughout. The media in its usual crawling, sycophantic manner of vampires who simply can’t help themselves, the Princess successfully using it to put herself about. It was they who propelled her into the fixed orbit of eternal public adoration where she still remains so long after her death. A celebrity still orbiting the hearts of millions of British across the whole social class structure.

There’s celebrity and celebrity. Diana was someone who had no special talent going for her, but then she didn’t need to. She was married to royalty but came down to Earth to be the public’s Princess. Came down from heaven to Earth to be one of us and returned there to shine there immortal. Only Michael Jackson currently comes near to having that kind of status.

What then is celebrity when all’s said and done? What do large groups of people perceive in individuals that captures their attention, their imagination, their interest, their fascination and even more fundamental, their devotion? Is it some kind of emotional or spiritual bond? Something that connects what they perceive, some quality or ability, to themselves? If that is indeed the case then it’s a quality or ability that switches on the same perception in many. This leads to the conclusion that whatever it is, many groups of people have that same something within them, never mind whether it’s for a footballer, popular music performer or television personality, all of whom, by the way, whether Royal or not, are performers. The real question is, what is that something? To my mind it’s a combination of things. A need to worship something seemingly attractive and greater than themselves… a need to connect into a popular phenomenon like a political leader or group of musicians like a rock band. Why for example do huge numbers of youths and adults attend open air pop music concerts? It couldn’t be the music itself because the lyrics are convoluted and barely audible. No, it’s a case of being there and identifying with the group itself, in essence its celebrity.

Identification is the vehicle, but identification between what? Something within you and something in them! In you it’s a need. Understood by those who promote. In them it’s a facility to present. Your need and their offering! Interaction at a level of psyche. But then is this need to love and adore, if that’s what it actually is, in any way rational? Well actually it’s not and that’s the key to it all. It’s a basic personality disorder! Celebrity taps into an irrational need in so many people, something well understood by those who seek to manipulate, whether it’s the social media pimps who promote people like products or the barely hidden socio-political Establishment of power and wealth? It is they who exploit the generalised personality disorder within the general public. Entertainment, an essentially passive process, is activated for the purpose of participation, of bonding with the performer. You are removed from the reality of life to an emotional somewhere else. Temporarily or permanently damaged as a social actor.

Fine. Go on worshipping your Premier Star or Celebrity media performer trying to get out of somewhere or other. They live in mansions. You eat your fish and chips. And do you really care anymore anyway? That’s the real question. Are you still ABLE to care anymore, or has celebrity taken that away from you too?  

A BRIEF ELECTION MESSAGE FROM THE DON’T VOTE LIBERAL DEMOCRAT ELECTION CAMPAIGN

Herewith a sample of the sheer duplicity of the Liberal Democrats in their leaflet for the coming elections.

Banner Headlines

 

RIGHT. SIMPLE QUESTION. SO WHO HAVE YOU PEOPLE BEEN WORKING WITH SO CLOSELY IN COALITION GOVERNMENT OVER THE PAST THREE YEARS?

 

IF EVER THERE WAS A MORE WRETCHED EXAMPLE OF SHEER OPPORTUNISM IN BRITISH POLITICS TODAY THEN THIS IS IT.

 

THE LIBERAL DEMOCRATS WILL DO OR SAY ANYTHING FOR YOUR VOTE

 

REMEMBER THE FALSE PROMISES THEY MADE. REMEMBER THEIR LIES AND THEIR BULLSHIT.                             

 

DON’T GIVE IT TO THEM! DON’T VOTE LIBERAL DEMOCRAT!