Friday 2 June 2017

Stephen King


"Harris & Klebold may be dead, but they're going to be mighty lively for awhile. 

Believe me on this. 

I know a good deal about spooks, and more than I want to about boys who play with guns."


Stephen King's Keynote Address
Vermont Library Conference
VEMA Annual Meeting
May 26, 1999
The Bogeyboys by Stephen King

When I speak in public, a thing I do as rarely as possible, I usually don't speak from a prepared text and I hardly ever try to say anything serious; to misquote Mark Twain, I feel that anyone looking for a moral should be hung and anyone looking for a plot should be shot. Today, though, I want to talk about something very serious indeed: adolescent violence in American schools. This outbreak has become so serious that a bus driver from Conyers, Georgia, interviewed last week on the CBS Evening News, suggested that the slang term "going postal" may soon be changed to "going pupil." I suggest that a great many parts of American society have contributed to creating this problem, and that we must all work together to alleviate it...and I use the word "alleviate" rather than "cure" because I don't think any cure, at least in the sense of a quick fix--that is what Americans usually mean by cure; fast-fast-fast relief, as the aspirin commercials used to say-I don't think that sort of cure is possible. This is a violent society. Law enforcement statistics suggest it may not be as violent now as it was fifteen years ago, but it's really too early to tell; we may only be witnessing a blip on the graph.

America was born in the violence of the Boston Massacre, indemnified in the violence of Bull Run, Gettysburg, and Shiloh Church, shamed by the violence of the Indian Wars, reaffirmed by the violence of two world wars, a police action in Korea, and the conflict in Vietnam. Most of the guns carried in those armed actions were carried by boys about the age of the Littleton killers and not much older than Thomas Solomon, the Conyers, Georgia, shooter. These wars-as well as the Star Wars of the future-can be fought at the local mall's video arcade for fifty cents a pop.

History aside, we suffer from road rage, fear home invasion, and enjoy watching Jerry Springer's guests mix it up on afternoon TV. Once the burglar alarm is set, that is. We like guns, and too many unstable folks have access to them. Some, we are learning, aren't even old enough to shave yet. It is these young killers-- these young guns, to use the title of a popular movie of about twelve years ago--who trouble us. And they trouble us a lot. Hundreds of kids kill themselves on America's highways each month, but even when a large number of them die together, it rarely makes national news. We understand the underlying causes, you see--usually these boil down to the same lethal mix: inexperience, alcohol, and that adolescent belief, both endearing and terrifying, that God put them on earth to live forever. When the deaths come as a result of gunfire and explosions, we either don't understand or tell ourselves we don't. Our fear spawns a creature with no face, one I know very well: it's the bogeyman. When kids die on the highway, it's sad but not nationwide news. When the bogeyman strikes, however...that's different. Then everyone, even the politicians, take notice.

Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were eighteen and seventeen respectively when they blew their dangerous, unhappy brains out, neither one old enough to buy a legal sixpack, or rent a car, or get more than simple liability coverage on an automobile of his own. Not old enough to be bogeymen, in other words, but they are genuine frighteners, all the same. They have closed schools in many states and caused massive absenteeism in others, where not even an outright threat of violence is now needed to unsettle children, teachers, and parents; vague rumors ("a guy I know heard about a guy who's got a gun...") or an anonymous e- mail is enough.

As the most recent incident in Georgia so clearly illustrates, Harris and Klebold will continue to participate in the American educational process between now and the end of the school year. Harris and Klebold, too young to be bogeymen; call them bogeyboys, if you like. I think that fits them very well.

That I feel pity for these bogeyboys should surprise no one; I have been drawn again and again to stories of the powerless and disenfranchised young, and have written three novels about teenagers driven to murder: Carrie (1974), Rage (published in 1977 under the pseudonym Richard Bachman), and Apt Pupil (1982). In Carrie, a girl who is ceaselessly tormented by her classmates murders most of them at the senior prom after one final, gruesome trick pushes her over the edge. In a sense she was the original riot girl. In Rage, a boy named Charlie Decker brings a gun to school, kills a teacher with it, then holds his algebra class hostage until the police end the siege by shooting him.

In Apt Pupil, a boy named Todd Bowden discovers a Nazi war criminal living on his block and brings the old man back to a dangerous vitality. On the surface, Todd is the perfect California high school kid. Beneath, he's fascinated by the Holocaust and the power wielded by the Nazis; a member of the Trenchcoat Mafia, in fact, without the trenchcoat. After a long (and increasingly psychotic) dance with his pet Nazi, Todd is found out. His response, not shown in the movie which played theaters briefly last year, is to take a high-powered rifle to a nearby freeway, where he shoots at anyone who moves until he is killed. His death is, in fact, what police now sometimes call "blue suicide."

I sympathize with the losers of the world and to some degree understand the blind hormonal rage and ratlike panic which sets in as one senses the corridor of choice growing ever narrower, until violence seems like the only possible response to the pain. And although I pity the Columbine shooters, had I been in a position to do so, I like to think I would have killed them myself, if that had been the only choice, put them down the way one puts down any savage animal that cannot stop biting. There comes a point at which the Harrises and the Klebolds become unsalvageable, when they pass through some phantom tollbooth and into a land where every violent impulse is let free. At this point, the societal issues cease to matter and there is only the job of saving as many people as possible from what seems to me to be actual evil, in the Old Testament sense of that word. Although the pundits, politicians, and psychologists hesitate at the word- -I hesitate at it myself--nothing else seems to fit the sweep of these acts and the wreckage left behind. And in the presence of evil, any pity or sympathy we feel must be put aside and saved for the victims.

This point of no return can almost always be avoided before the shooting and killing begins, and it usually is. Violence on the level of that committed at Columbine High School is still rare in American society, although it may well now become more common; there is a powerful reverb unit hooked up to the already- amplified teenage culture-politic. In that amp-cult, things like huffing, tattooing, and body-piercing spread almost at the speed of e-mail; the lure of the gun may spread in much the same way. And the guns are out there. As I said in The Stand, at some tiresome length, all that stuff is out there, just lying around and waiting for the wrong person to pick it up.

To some degree, what happened at Columbine happened because of what happened in Jonesboro, Arkansas (five murdered), Paducah, Kentucky (three murdered), and Springfield, Oregon (four murdered, two parents and two kids at a school dance). Similarly, the shootings and rumors of shootings in the weeks and months ahead will happen because of Harris and Klebold and Columbine High; because of T.J. Solomon and Heritage High. It's an amp-cult thing. Harris & Klebold may be dead, but they're going to be mighty lively for awhile. Believe me on this. I know a good deal about spooks, and more than I want to about boys who play with guns.

In the wake of the shootings, film and TV and book people have pointed the finger at the gun industry and at that ever-popular bogeyman, the NRA. The gun people point right back, saying that America's entertainment industry has created a culture of violence. And, behind it all, we are bombing the living hell out of Yugoslavia, because that's the way we traditionally solve our problems when those pesky foreign leaders won't do what we think is right. So who is really to blame? My answer is all of the above. And I speak from some personal experience and a lot of soul-searching.

I can't say for sure that Michael Carneal, the boy from Kentucky who shot three of his classmates dead as they prayed before school, had read my novel, Rage, but news stories following the incident reported that a copy of it had been found in his locker. It seems likely to me that he did. Rage had been mentioned in at least one other school shooting, and in the wake of that one an FBI agent asked if he could interview me on the subject, with an eye to setting up a computer profile that would help identify potentially dangerous adolescents. The Carneal incident was enough for me. I asked my publisher to take the damned thing out of print. They concurred. Are there still copies of Rage available? Yes, of course, some in libraries where you ladies and gentlemen ply your trade. Because, like the guns and the explosives and the Ninja throwing-stars you can buy over the Internet, all that stuff is just lying around and waiting for someone to pick it up.

Do I think that Rage may have provoked Carneal, or any other badly adjusted young person, to resort to the gun? It's an important question, because it goes to the very heart of the wrangle over who's to blame. You might as well ask if I believe that the mere presence of a gun makes some people want to use that gun. The answer is troubling, but it needs to be faced: in some cases, yes. Probably it does. Often? No, I don't believe so. How often is too often? That's not for me or any other single person to say. It's a question each part of our society must answer for itself, as each state, for instance, must answer the question of when a kid is old enough to have a driver's license or buy a drink.

There are factors in the Carneal case which make it doubtful that Rage was the defining factor, but I fully recognize that it is in my own self-interest to feel just that way; that I am prejudiced in my own behalf. I also recognize the fact that a novel such as Rage may act as an accelerant on a troubled mind; one cannot divorce the presence of my book in that kid's locker from what he did any more than one can divorce the gruesome sex-murders committed by Ted Bundy from his extensive collection of bondage-oriented porno magazines. To argue free speech in the face of such an obvious linkage (or to suggest that others may obtain a catharsis from such material which allows them to be atrocious only in their fantasies) seems to me immoral. That such stories, video games (Harris was fond of a violent computer-shootout game called Doom), or photographic scenarios will exist no matter what--that they will be obtainable under the counter if not over it--begs the question. The point is that I don't want to be a part of it. Once I knew what had happened, I pulled the ejection-seat lever on that particular piece of work. I withdrew Rage, and I did it with relief rather than regret.

If, on the other hand, you were to ask me if the presence of potentially unstable or homicidal persons makes it immoral to write a novel or make a movie in which violence plays a part, I would say absolutely not. In most cases, I have no patience with such reasoning. I reject it as both bad thinking and bad morals. Like it or not, violence is a part of life and a unique part of American life. If accused of being part of the problem, my response is the time-honored reporter's answer: "Hey, many, I don't make the news, I just report it."

I write fantasies, but draw from the world I see. If that sometimes hurts, it's because the truth usually does. John Steinbeck was accused of gratuitous ugliness when he wrote about the migration of the Okies to California in The Grapes of Wrath, even of trying to foment a domestic revolution, but most of his accusers--like those who made similar accusations against Upton Sinclair when he wrote about the corrupt putrescence of the meat-packing industry in The Jungle--were people who preferred fairy-tales and happily-ever-afters. Sometimes the truth of how we live is just ugly, that's all. But to turn aside from these truths out of some perceived delicacy, or to give in to the idea that writing about violence causes violence, is to embrace hypocrisy. In Washington, hypocrisy breeds politicians. In the arts, it breeds pornography.

My stories of adolescent violence were all drawn, in some degree, from my own memories of high school. That particular truth, as I recalled it when writing as an adult, was unpleasant enough. I remember high school as a time of misery and resentment. In Iroquois trials of manhood, naked warriors were sent running down a gauntlet of braves swinging clubs and jabbing with the butt ends of spears. In high school the goal is Graduation Day instead of a manhood feather, and the weapons are replaced by insults, slights, and epithets, many of them racial, but I imagine the feelings are about the same. The victims aren't always naked, and yet a good deal of the rawest hazing does take place on playing fields and in locker rooms, where the marks are thinly dressed or not dressed at all. The locker room is where Carrie starts, with girls throwing sanitary napkins at a sexually ignorant girl who thinks she is bleeding to death.

I don't trust people who look back on high school with fondness; too many of them were part of the overclass, those who were taunters instead of tauntees. These are the ones least likely to understand the bogeyboys and to reject any sympathy for them (which is not the same as condoning their acts, a point which should not have to be made but which probably does). They are also the ones most likely to suggest that books such as Carrie and The Catcher in the Rye and A Separate Peace be removed from libraries. I submit to you that these people have less interest in reducing the atmosphere of violence in schools than they may have in forgetting how badly some people--they themselves, in some cases--may have behaved while there.

And still...for a' that and a' that, as Robert Burns says, the amp-cult atmosphere of make-believe violence in which so many children now live has to be considered part of the problem. We may like our Jackie Chan movies, Walker Texas Ranger on TV, and the ultra-violent survivalist paperback novels--not to mention the pseudo-religious novels in which the Tribulation Days promised in the Book of Revelations are depicted in gory detail--but we need to recognize that these things are hurting us, just as so many of us had to recognize that our cigarettes were hurting us, much as we enjoyed them.

Yet there are other touchstones of the bogeyboy environment, and many of them have little to do with books or films. Bogeyboys are profoundly out of touch with their parents, and their parents are likewise out of touch with them. They gravitate toward groups run by adults and along quasi-military lines: scouting groups, karate and martial arts clubs, military and paramilitary groups, collector-clubs. The biggest exception has to do with sports. Bogeyboys rarely win school letters...except of course, if the school they attend happens to have a rifle-shooting team.

Bogeyboys come from families where the other sibs have been singled out for recognition in sports activities, academics, performing arts, church, or community service programs. Parents or other close relatives are often career military personnel. Bogeyboys do not win foot-races, get kissed by the Homecoming Queen, or garner blue ribbons. They are profoundly inarticulate and don't date much (Eric Harris was turned down when he asked a girl to go to the prom with him). At home, they stay in their rooms. If pressed, the parents of bogeyboys will often admit that they were afraid of these children long before they broke out and committed their acts of violence. If they add that they can't say exactly why they were afraid, no one need be surprised; these parents, often bright, nonabusive, and community-active, are rarely skilled at communication within the family. One wishes such families would read together, let some writer who is reasonably articulate do their talking for them, but of course this rarely happens.

Bogeyboys make few friends, and those they do make are often as crazy and balefully confused as they are. Their mutual attraction, sometimes homoerotic, has its own amp-cult effect as the friends begin to harmonize their lives, duplicating each others' favorite clothes, records, movies, video games, and Internet chat-rooms. (Books, violent or otherwise, are rarely a bright color in the Bogeyboy entertainment spectrum.) These cultural touchstones, from Metallica ("Exit light/enter night," is how the chorus to one song begins) and Marilyn Manson to films such as Scream, create a language for those who cannot speak otherwise. For awhile it may suffice; it may suffice long enough, even, for something to change before terrible, irrevocable acts are committed. In some cases, however, the pressure becomes too great. Unable to internalize their feelings of anger and inadequacy, unable to externalize them by talking freely to anyone, the boiler finally ruptures and the steam shoots out sideways. Anyone in the way gets scalded. In Colorado, twelve of them were scalded to death.

Bogeyboys, it goes without saying, also always have access to guns. But in America, doesn't everyone, when you get right down to it? Isn't it fair to say that in America, one of the great religions is The Holy Church of the Nine-Millimeter? The gun people don't like to hear it, but I think it has to be said. And if we in the arts are willing to own up to the blood on our hands, I think they need to own up to the blood on theirs.

But I repeat that it is useless at this point to get into the whole bad-culture versus gun-availability argument; it has degenerated to the point where one almost expects to see bumper stickers reading GUNS DON'T KILL PEOPLE, AC/DC CDS KILL PEOPLE. And in any case, both camps are operating not out of any real thought but out of two powerful fears. The first is that they will be blamed...and that they will deserve to be blamed. The second is more primal, and that is the fear of ghosts. Bogeyboys, drifting through the hallways of Everyhigh, U.S.A., whispering to the disenfranchised and the spat-upon that there is a way to even things up, that there is a lot of potent get-even medicine in a Tec-9 or a pipe bomb.

May I be blunt? This fear is that the violence isn't ending but only beginning. It isn't completely rational, but I think I also understand that irrational fears are often the most powerful of all. In this case, the unstated idea is that we have lived well while most of the world lives badly, eaten well while too much of the world goes hungry or actually starves, dressed our children in the best, much of it made by children in other countries who have little but their dreams, many of which are the violent American dreams they see on TV. We have had all this, some of us--maybe a lot of us--seem to think, and there must be a price. There must be a payment. Perhaps there must even be a judgment. Then into our uneasy minds come the images of the bogeyboys, who shot so well because they had trained on their home computers, and on the video games down at the mall.

President Clinton has made a few feeble swipes at addressing this issue, but one can only gape at the unintentionally comic spectacle of this man chastising the gun-lobby and America's love of violent movies while he rains bombs on Yugoslavia, where at least twenty noncombatants have already died for every innocent student at Columbine High. It is like listening to a man with a crack-pipe in his hand lecture children about the evils of drugs.

There are solutions, and there is also a calming sense of perspective that needs to be brought into play. The perspective begins with realizing that most kids in school are not bogeyboys but plain old good kids, interested in getting educations and having pleasant social lives, not necessarily in that order. The long-term solutions lie where they always have, in family lives which emphasize love, communication, and a knowledge of what the kids are up towho they're seeing, what they're saying, and what they may be using to get high on come the weekend.

One immediate solution, or a step toward it, lies in the guidance offices of American high schools, where a better, stronger effort has to be made to identify potential Eric Harrises, Dylan Klebolds, and Thomas Solomons; there needs to be a quantum shift of emphasis from job guidance to psychological guidance (although sometimes they are the same). When such guidance is rejected, there needs to be a process to remove potentially violent children from school environments. The ACLU won't like it, but I don't imagine such Columbine High students as John Tomlin and Rachel Scott much like being dead instead of at the Senior Prom. And if we are going to restrict the right of liberal Constitution-watchers to get innocent kids killed, we need to restrict the right of the gun lobby to get them killed, as well; this country needs to restrict the sale of handguns much more strictly than it has up to now been willing to do. Background checks at gunshows is only a first step.

And yes, there needs to be a re-examination of America's violent culture of the imagination. It needs to be done soberly and calmly; a witch-hunt won't help. Never mind burning Marilyn Manson's records in great fundamentalist bonfires or removing Anne Rice novels from the local library because they might give a few unempowered dweebs the idea of donning Goth clothing and powdering their faces white; let's go beyond the question of whether or not the next crop of natural born killers are currently honing their skills in Arcade 2000 at the local mall. It's time for an examination of why Americans of all ages are so drawn to armed conflict (Rambo), unarmed conflict (World Federation Wrestling), and images of violence. These things are not just speaking to potential teenage killers, but to a great many of us. Their hold on the national psyche has progressed to a point where the Columbine murders dominate our headlines and possess our thoughts to the exclusion of much else, including the mass exodus of a million Kosovars and the world's most dangerous armed conflict since Vietnam.

Harris and Klebold are dead and in their graves, but we are in terror of them all the same; they are the Red Death in our richly appointed castle (where, as the twenty-first century approaches and the stock market daily bops its way to new highs, the party has never been more feverishly gay). They are our bogeyboys, and perhaps the real first step in making them go away is to decide what it is about them that frightens us so much. It is a discussion which must begin in families, schools, libraries, and in public forums such as this. Which is why I have begged your attention and yourindulgence on such an unappetizing subject.

Thank you.

Copyright 1999 by Stephen King.

THE driver whose van struck and nearly killed the horror writer Stephen King last year has been found dead at his home after telling friends that he could not face another winter.

Bryan Smith, 43, had become increasingly isolated after the accident near North Lovell, Maine, in which King suffered multiple injuries and nearly lost a leg.

The author of Carrie and The Shining had pushed for Mr Smith to be charged with aggravated assault, which could have led to a jail sentence, and mocked him in a New Yorker article as "a character out of one of my own novels". Mr Smith, who had been left disabled by a building site accident, received a suspended sentence and lost his driving licence.

A post mortem examination found no signs of violence. King said yesterday that he was "very sorry to hear of the passing of Bryan Smith". He said: "The death of a 43-year-old man can only be termed untimely."

The author had been criticised for pursuing what some saw as a vendetta against Mr Smith, whose lawyers complained that he could not get a fair trial. Carl Magee, a friend of Mr Smith, said: "I could go out and run over a little kid; it could happen to any of us. All I'm saying is, with an average Joe, none of this would have happened. But Stephen King is on national television, he's moaning and whining."


Mr Smith, who had been taking painkillers for a back injury, was found dead in his caravan home at Freyburg, Maine, on Friday. John Thompson, another friend, said: "Bryan had nothing left. He said to me, 'I'd hate to go through another winter dragging my way up and down the highway in the snow'."



SEKHMET PRAYER FOR PROTECTION & SWIFT JUSTICE




SEKHMET PRAYER FOR PROTECTION & SWIFT JUSTICE



Sekhmet, One Before Whom Evil Trembles
I call to Thee and beg Thy protection:
I am being chased, surrounded and overwhelmed
by fearful things which oppress and threaten me.

Sekhmet, Warrior Goddess and Devouring One
Mother, wrap Thy healing wings around me;
protect me from the attacks I am experiencing.
Soothe my wounds, comfort me, give me strength
in my moment of desperation.

Great One In The Places Of Judgment And Execution
The Laws of Ma'at have been violated.
I ask Thee to take action against my pursuers:
May Thy retribution upon my enemies be swift.

Sekhmet Of The Knives,Burner Of Evil-doers
I declare, I am worthy of Thy intervention.
I do not willingly hurt others and I uphold the Laws of Ma'at
Please come to me and help me in this, my time of need.

AMEN

The Diagnosis of The Sickness

And now... The Prologue....

(Which, in the finest tradition of the ascended master of smutty innuendo and camp vocalisation par excellence, My Teacher, Frankie Howerd, will of course take up almost as much, if not more of the column inches and word count in this piece as the actual main point of me writing this article - if all you came here for is practical advice, organising tips or agitprop polemic (and 'ting) for post-Refferendum, pre-actual BreXit in Free Britania to give power and inspiration to those engaged with The Work - scroll down to the next place where you see my eye next to  "Does Anyone here like money...?", well done and good for you. Good soldiers, we're relying on you to carry us through.

Next time, try to bring a friend with you.

For anyone up for hearing me tell you all a story about equal parts Trendy Lefty 1980s Right-On GLC Gay Rights and Sexual Politics under Thatcher (and how everyone involved with it started out more or less totally barmy, and set out to drive all the rest of us completely insane, making them look more or less sane, rational and sensible (and it worked)), and equal parts how Margaret Thatcher and her Grantham Grocer Protestant Work-Ethic World-View of non-procreative sex of any kind (translation : Sodomy) came to be taught in every classroom in the land, preached daily from every studio or window of Auntie BBC (whilst making us pay for it), and posted, jn bald, stark tombstone plague-panic manifesto form through the front door letterbox of every home in England Scotland, Wales and Northernn Ireland - like State-Sponsored Jehovahs Witnessing. And how that made us all completely insane, because we Carrie around a facsimile copy of Margeret Thatcher's own sexual morality with us inside all our heads. And still do, some of us. I don't repress....Je ne regrets reins.)

For all of those people - Titter Ye Not. I present to you : 
The Prologue.

How the Thatcher Government, with the full, knowing and willing collusion and collaboration of Auntie BBC taught me to be afraid of sex and physical intimacy before I every really knew what it was....


Because IF you have unprotected sex (or if the bag breaks on you) WITH ANYONE, ESPECIALLY Girls, you WILL get AIDS and you WILL die. Here's how (in my head), that worked (works) :

Back at the very tail end, the fag-end, you might say, of the late 1980s, when I was very, very young and very, very, very stupid, when I trusted, believed, expected the BBC to tell the truth, the one, true, honest-to-goodness truth, and nothing BUT the truth (especially via the medium of television in the form of dramatic episodic fiction and situation comedy) back when I watched and learnt first from Rodney and Del Boy in Only Fools and Horses, that the deadly killer AIDS Boogie-Man was associated with the blood and saliva of homosexual men named Jason who cut hair (sorry, they style  hair in Salons, heterosexual men cut hair, and get their hair cut (no-nonsense, 5 mins in-out, clippers, trim hot towel, Old Spice, no waiting, no rimming and no fanning about with gel) in Barbers'shops, a high street trade with a LONG and rich history of always being CLEAN, free from any complicated infections or diseases associated with a long and lingering, dehumanising process of living DEATH), and also Old Slappers who function as the council estate bike, (with a fabby like a wizard's sleeve or a cocktail chippolatta being thrown inside the Royal Albert Hall), but that it's spreading, anyone can get it, if you have sex or exchange blood with an "infected" person with "The Virus", you will become infected, you will go into a rapid and terminal decline within weeks or months of first seeing your Doctor about a purple rash, you will die for certain, and you will pass on this death mark, this death sentence if you EVER AGAIN know the touch of a beautiful woman....

Or a really hot man, obviously. But then, the things they get up to...

They Know the Risks - it's their decision to play with fire, Russian roulette, loving one another, physically, so much, and so many of them, so frequently, in rooms with SO many other people... 

DIRTY - What did they THINK was going to happen as a consequence of all their filthy bum-sperm habits....



That was BAD AIDS.

In contrast to Mark Fowler on Eastenders, who contracted this dread disease (which caused him to turn into a completely different actor), accidentally, through no fault of his own, or the result of a habitual pattern of poor life choices as a result of misfortune and, rotten timing and as tragic result of unfortunate circumstance, through a tragic, random twist of fate that resulting in his exposure to the virus on account of it being injected into him completely by mistake as the blood residue drying along the length of a pre-used hyperdermic needle shared with his INFECTED (100% Straight, FEMALE), living-in-sin girlfriend; the random, completely blind change horrible and lethal misfortune  being that they were both  filthy, stinking, good-for-nothing Heroin junkies living together in a squat and using the same needle and the same syringe to share their Horse-fix and shoot up together with a shared dose at the same time, sharing everything because, oh,  they "loved" each other, and shared the same two bodies and the sane two-in-one soul, it seemed for a while...


Anyway, at least he wasn't a poof - Auntie BBC was VERY careful to make sure that was made VERY clear, repeatedly, over and over again right at the outset, that Mark was NOT a shirt-lifter, a fudge-packer, a bender, a secret friend of Dorothy's, a  Man of Convenience, or a bandit.

Mark Fowler was ALL MAN.

He caught his Good AIDS from a WOMAN, without even having ever even had sex with her or anything 
(although, it's clearly the case that they also were quietly predictably sexually active anyway, clearly, largely one would assume, although we cannot say for certain, exclusively with each otherand probably quite a great deal, all the time. Without Johnnies.) 
it was tragic, horrid, appalling BAD LUCK (facilitated by a recurrent pattern of poor life choices (Taking Heroin, becoming a Junkies, STAYING a Junkie, sharing needles with a lover of unknown background, fidelity or status, who never bothered to get tested) that caused Mark Fowler to become infected with the Virus formerly Known as Human Tumor Lymphoma Virus-III (HTLV-III) in the same year it received it's official formaj (and current) redesigns ruin as "The Human Immunodeficiency Virus" (no-one thought to specify "Number-1") meaning that they weren't expecting anymore almost identical microphages, OR EVEN ANY MUTATION OF THE STRAIN in the Cellular RNA packets "The HIV" allegedly has/had/they SAY " it" has....

Just to drop TWO, absolutely WHACKING great big, glowing in the dark positiom markers there before moving on to the actual point: 


Number 1 : D'you see what they did with the names, there...?


This is basic, fundamental slight of hand and this is STILL fooling people,  MOST people, even a quarter of a century on.

MOSTLY people who SHOULD KNOW BETTER, and indeed in actual fact, DO know better - they just chose what glaringly obvious things presented right in front of them THEY DONT WANT TO SEE, because THEIR CAREER depends on them never seeing it, THEIR GRANT is made on the basis of presupposing that they will NEVER, EVER SEE IT, they insititutuion in which they have laboured and built a world class reputation with, who pays for all of theirs children's orthodontic correction, who pays their mortgage, that made them rich (in stock options and other worthless paper derivatives, like dollars), that august, solvent, rapidly growing private enterprise venture and the key, sole service user public  institution, the very, specific government agency tasked and commissioned to find the scientific reality of the underlying true has THE VERY LIE, AND THE ESSENCE OF THE LIE EMBEDDED RIGHT THERE IN THEIR VERY OWN NAME...

They won't spot it, what I am about to point your attention to and draw you a picture of what it looks like, so maybe you will just recognise it, kinda, as having overall some vaguely familiar shape - they  won't see it.

They can't see it.


That can't let themselves see it, so they refuse to see it, and so IT ISN'T REALLY THERE. Even though it really, clearly and obviously IS there. The curtains are moving, and there a big bulge there, in the area right around where it's standing NOT HIDING - plus, you can see its shoes sticking out, look..?


So alright - first off, what is the name they gave (in 1989) to this possibly non-existent phantom virus particle thing YOU THINK you (or they, if you're not Sciency) now suddenly have on the spot, in the hotseat, caught in the act, bang to rights doing its sinister dirty-work of Death, right by the short and curlies, finally, at long last...?

The/a.... No, THE definite article, the one and only, unique, never before recorded, described or dissected on a molecular genetic level in all of the history of The World....


THE Human Immunodeficiency Virus.

Just like Chesney Hawkes, the one and only, SINGULARITY of virology, molecular biology and "Random Darwinian Chancr Evolution, taking place to perform miracles right before our very own lying eyes"- which I mean to make clear, is absolutely nothing of the kind. Except or the lying part. Nor does it either resemble or behave like something that might actually be able to do that, NOR THE TINY CLIQUE OF ELITES AND HIGHT PRIESTS PERMITTED TO ACTUALLY HANDLE IT, TREAT IT IN FACT AS THOUGH IT MIGHT ACTULLY BE DOING ANY OF THE THINGS THEY CLAIM THAT IT EITHER IS DOING, MIGHT BE ACTUALLY DOING IN SOME WAY THAT THEY CLAIM IS ACTUALLY INVISIBLE (hence it appears to the laymen or the untrained eye to be doing absolutely nothing at all), OR THAT THEY LOGICALLY SHOULD BE CONCERNED (I.e. In actual tangible fear of their lives and the lives of all their families) THAT IT *MIGHT* DO OR BE CAPABLE OF DOING IF IT GETS OUT OR GETS ONTO THEIR HAND SOMEHOW while they were studying it and poking it to see what it does and how it works....


Lab accidents and spillage, accidental releases of viruses and other disease vectors or microbes happen ALL THE TIME... And you ALWAYS have to err on the side of caution and assumble it survived the physical act of the spillage, it got out by contaminating something else, or someone else 99.9 % of the time will either just kill it, act as a potential flat surface and/or growth medium which can be immediately either destroyed, sterilised, disinfected, bleached, pasteurised, put through fire, boiled or wiped completely clean - all of which would kill it. 99.9% of the time with 99.9% of infectious agents, most of which are completely undetectablt, harmless or easily overwhelmed by native immune responses, who probably already recognise it, or its kind.

But you HAVE TO ASSUME IT GOT OUT UNTIL YOU KNOW IT DIDN'T, with strict and rigourous protocols to follow up to and including Quarantine of anyone who may have been exposed to whatever the thing is;

I once had an ex- who worked (for money) as a lab assistant in a small private lab contracted to provide ongoing testing of certain food products distributed and sold by Tesco stores, not exactly completely direct from the farm and straight on the shelf in Cardiff or Birmingham by tea-time, but essentially, yeah - they would collect the end product for sale on the shelf to the British consumer direct from a regional hub facility there out in the countryside, who would divide up the thing to go on the shelf (I think it was something like pre-packed green leaf salads for people to pick up and eat right away as part of their lunch, maybe with some additional element added in there, like to make it a Salad Nicoisse, instead of just a pure/plain green leafy salad in a bag, but that's it in terms of processing or packaging of this stuff beyond just sealing and dating it inside a Tesco branded package made of plastic film and a few pieces of card with nutritional information, ingredients list ("salad" - just kidding) printed on it - you get the general idea.

So, the point about this was, the mighty Tesco retailing dragon-thing, essentially, was just talking delivery of this raw, fresh food product (that now has THEIR name, address and lawyer's details wrapped all around it),sending it straight out to dozens/hundreds of their stores, without having any time to check them out in any way other than cursory visual inspection, conduct any kind of checking in the area of quality control before putting it immediately, directly, straight away on-sale from their own shelves in the full expectation that, if bought, the customer will consume it more or less directly straight away that very same day, or at the very latest the day after that, realistically. Assuming that that generally quite enjoy eating salads, given that they have just gone into a supermarket at lunchtime to buy one, they can perhaps be assumed to have a good level of knowledge, common sense and previous salad-purchasing/eating experience sufficient enough to have a good sense in their own minds as to how long (or, not) they can realistically be expected to stay optically fresh, crunchy and edible.


No doubt there was certainly some kind of regular supply chain quality control more in the area of regular visits or inspections to the farms who supply the salad leaves, herbs and other incrgredients (croutons, maybe?) that the regional hub packing plant buys in from as the next link further along their supply chain, but if the sort of issue that could create real, genuine problems for everyone starting immediately, the moment it reaches tipping point and begins to make things go badly wrong, that kind of arms' length hands-off-type handholding supervision and oversight  is not going to be of any use in alerting regional head office that there is a mad elephant on the rampage on their patch, and it's currently on collusion course with them, everyone who works for them, everyone who buys fresh salad from them (or might), and they are mere seconds away from Letting everyone get trampled.

The Mad Elephant threating to trample everything, in this particular instance just happens, in actual fact, to be microscopic, quiet stealthy, aggressive and just as potentially deadly as Barbar the Mad King, but able to strike far more unexpectedly and without any prior warning anyone might potentially pick up on - at least by Elephant standards, certainly.

The Mad Elephant in the Room in question being Legionella, an extremely nasty, potentially lethal bacterium known for triggering serious, and deadly outbreaks of food poisoning in any general population or local community, many if not all of which have been cases historically when someone has eaten an off-the shelf unwashed green salad that somewhere along the supply chain came into direct contact with untreated human fæces - which is what will   happen when you bring in below-subsistence level minimum wage labour from one of the poor, and desperate European nations East of Warsaw on zero hours contracts, pay them only for the time in which the Forman ACTUALLY personally observes them hard at work on-line tending, digging or harvesting the fruit of the fields.

If you are going to knock of their paid hours total pay packet total hours worked for money tendered at the end of the the week things like time spent on toilet breaks, eating lunch, being driven to and from the actual workplace they signed on to be at to report for work by the boss colleague or co-worker who offered to car share with you or take you to work (as MANY farm labourer gang bosses/field overseers DO (which is illegal, as well as being immoral), then shitty behaviour begets other shitty behaviour, which begets shitty lettuce with human poo all over the leaves as a last, final, desperate scream raging against The Machine(s) and Machine Men with Machine Minds that made them and still operate them right up to the present - and one shitty Tesco salad lettuce, covered in poo, or two, or eight or ten of them (usually the same asshole will piss everyone working under him off at once, and the result may be a Dirty Salad Protest. Because for every previous cry out against the Machine system and its Overseer/OvaSeer/Officers, made direct from the heart and from out a world of hurt, abuse and exploitation has been met at the next management echelon up from them every time with precisely the same response : "Sorry luv - I don't speak Romanian."

That's in fact actually one main reason (of several BIG ones) why it's procedurally, far more than just simply merely ecconomically advantageous (at least on paper) for these people to have positively encouraged, more than merely just simply facilitated or accepted the practice of deliberately hiring a slave labour wages workforce even more downtrodden, broken, emmiserated, downtrodden and generally regarded with utter contempt  by Management, Capital and the Owners than what is left of the British Working and Non-Working Class Masses, and they had to go beyond the Carpathian highlands to find them.

Their parents and their grandparents learnt the hard way how it goes on the work gangs sent out to jack up productivity and yields through brutal and degrading years spent under the iron rod of Chauchescu's humourlessly authoritarian gang masters on Romanias old collective farm archipelago.

A different ex- of mine (honestly, I don't collect them or anything, just the good stories), a Romanian girl born in the Twilight of the Old System in 1988 would always speak of "the old days" with near pitch perfect politically correct ambivilance for the State Capitalist Zombie economic disaster of Chauchescu planned ecconomy - this is worth mentioning further here in respect of a couple of very specific historical footnotes  that have generally been either overlooked or ignored, or more often not correctly understood for what they actually are and what they mean to us in Free Albion, as we transition of the European Soviet Sphere of ecconomics and internal markets for cheap, cheaper, cheapest labour in the race to the bottom.

Even growing up, I can remember clearly, as the epic, tumultuous chain of world historical events of that strange, wonderful span of years I remember growing up in between 1988 and 1993, there was always a sense that was created in the minds of those watching from afar the collapse of the Warsaw Pact Governments and the end of their one-party rule Politburos and their supporting social infrastructure and institutions, the suggestion was always clearly made, very much via tonal shift in the way it was being covered, and for many years following that the Romanian application of modified Marxist-Lenninism to build a stable, fair and productive society of free peoples working in cooperation to try to achieve The Workers Paradise  Red Utopia was somehow... Well, the impression was created, again, largely via innuendo and on the basis usually of very little fact, that somehow, Romania was the REALLY bad one.... All pretence toward fairness and egaligerianism had been stripped away, Chauchescu was a brutal and merciless dictator who ruled with an iron fist, without consultation or power sharing via executive committee or inner party technocrats, he just squeezed his people without mercy or pity, enforcing total obedience to HIM via a reign of terror he enforced via his dreaded (personal) Secret Police monitoring any flicker of dissent and.... I could go on but having already enduring such a relentless volley of every Cold War clichè in the book several times over, all dialled right up to 11, it makes me exhausted just thinking about it.

I have to say, the intensity of various "Western" News Agency Eastern Bloc correspondents and region bureau chiefs (all jobs, and job titles that no longer exist in news reporting any more, let's just remember that for a moment, and mark their passing and the great price we all pay for their loss, now that Twitter is cited as being authoritative as a source of reporting on anything, on any topic at any hour, and given any slant); the level of serious competition, journalist dick-measuring and all forms and expressions of Four Yorkshiremen-style boasting and one-upmanship that drove those personal and professional rivalries during those short Years of Wonder and false hope sold short was just truly incredible to witness, even as a pre-teen child who previous to that had known less than nothing about nothing squared about politics or world events in any form prior to the day the Wall began to get dismantled by Berliners (ON THEIR OWN, which was the part that scared absolutely everyone in power absolutely shitless when they realised that thy were NOT witnessing a staged event of grand Street Theatre by the KGB or the Stasi, it was spontaneous and organic and unplanned and NO-ONE was in charge or secretly running it - and I certainly have not since seen one single, solitary scrap or piece of evidence, documentary or circumstantial to contradict the claims made both at the time and subsequently by practically every world leader, power player, kingmaker, banker, intelligence agency director, analyst, Maverick, critic, agent of influence, defector, military officer, diplomat, civil servant, peace officer, eyewitness or participant to the first wave of the Eastern thaw, starting from a mass picnicking action [?!?] on the Austro-Hungarian Frontier (when that was quite a thing to see), leading up to the sudden, total spontaneous combustion of the  East German Communist Party and entire government and nation-state supporting it for reasons which, even now, I don't understand and most East Germans alive at the time couldn't even begin to explain to you.

However - the Fall of the Romanian Communist Party was something very, and characteristically different, coming MUCH later on in the chain of events. 

That unmistakably and undeniably WAS a synthetic, planned stage managed and externally directed attack, destabilisation, a kangaroo court military show-trial and am extremely grubby, brutal and cowardly Presidential assassination th kind rarely seen at the time outside of Latin American Palace Coups, such as the overthrow of Allende - brutal personal violence, corpse desecration and gangsterism are its hallmarks, with executions in the manner of the street gang crime of the inner cities, in stark and directed contrast to the military form of execution usually favoured in that part of the world where the officer-class condemn and indict the dictator or generalissimo for Crimes Against the People, either real or fabricated - such was not the case, here. And they had a State Broadcaster Outside camera crew videotape everything - not that the process in fact ended up getting dragged out or lasting terribly long.... The pure hatred on display for the leader and his wife was palpable.

I really do have to wonder why -just as I have to wonder recalling Plato's dialogue on the relative merits and shortcomings of republics, tyranny and oligarchy, and which is by far the better for the common man to live under and pledge his lifesblood and fidelity to;




This Flanders 'Mare

The Blue Death

The Belgian Disease

This Flemish Pox

BE-NE-LUX Fever

Tyler's  Cramp

Mason's Elbow

Auditor's Pinch


Peoples of these British Isles, Your Attention Please : Having commenced my own study of the extent, breadth and fundamental nature of this Flemmish Malaisse, this Permanant, Rolling National Crisis of Confidence, and the promise of potential cures, my initial findings are now in and they are these : Things are indeed, as I had previously intuited, no nearly so bad or so severe as it may superficially have appeared to be, with our peoples, our nations and in our composite, unified sovereign Nation-State.

They are in fact worse. Far, FAR worse, than I ever dared contemplate myself to fear. 

You therefore leave me with no other options left - as of right now, I am going forward at RAMMING Speed, course locked in, Dead-ahead Full-Worf Factor 9.99 - You drove me to this...


"YOU ARE KLINGONS *WITHOUT* HONOUR..!!! I AM WORF, SON OF MOGH !! SIRE TO THE HOUSE OF MARTOK, FIRST SON OF THE HOUSE OF MOGH AND I SAY YOU ARE *NO* KLINGONS!!! YOU COWER, LIKE STINKING, WRETCHED P'TACH WHILE THE BLOOD OF OUR FALLEN WARRIORS LIES STILL WARM IN THE VERY COUNCIL CHAMBER LIKE SO MUCH TARG-FODDER WHILE THE HATED ENEMY OF OUR GREAT EMPIRE, THE ROMULAN P'TECHT'NICHT!! MAKE THEIR ESCAPE FROM OUR VERY THRONE WORLD !!!!

O PROUD AND MIGHTY KLINGON RACE - KHALESS CALLS TO YOU ALL, BLOOD TO BLOOD TO ANSWER THE CALL TO ARMS - TO AVENGE THE PROUD KLINGON BLOOD SPILT THIS DAY AND DIE WELL, FOR THE GLORY AND TO RESTORE THE NOBLE AND LAMENTED NAME OF HONOUR OF YOUR GREAT HOUSE AND OF THE EMPEROR KHALESS AND HIS NOBLE IMAGINE IN FLESH SO CRUELY AND SACRALIGIOUSLY CUT DOWN, SLAIN BY THIS RANK TREACHERY IN OUR MIDST !!

TONIGHT, WE  DINE IN STO-VO-KOR ON THE HEARTS OF EVERY FLAG OFFICER IN THE ROMULAN INVASION TASK FORCE AND THEIR FLEET !!!

BEWARE, O RESTFULLY DREAMING SPIRITS OF THE DEAD OF MEN OF LESSER RACES - THE FIRST KLINGON WARRIOR IS ABOUT TO ARRIVE !!! FIE !!

K'PLA !!!

Swift Curses : "The Queen Margaret Stuff is Difficult"

O thou well skill'd in curses, stay awhile,
And teach me how to curse mine enemies!
"The Queen Margaret Stuff is Difficult"

Male Oxbridge English Literature Professor, 
On why he doesn't understand Richard III

HEAR ME!!, you wrangling pirates, that fall out 
In sharing that which you have pill'd from me!!!

Which of you trembles not that looks on me? 

Can curses pierce the clouds and enter heaven? 

Why, then, give way, dull clouds, to my quick curses! 





Poor painted queen, vain flourish of my fortune! 
Why strew'st thou sugar on that bottled spider, 
Whose deadly web ensnareth thee about? 
Fool, fool! thou whet'st a knife to kill thyself. 
The time will come when thou shalt wish for me 
To help thee curse that poisonous bunchback'd toad.


Stay, dog,!!! for thou shalt hear me. 
If heaven have any grievous plague in store 
Exceeding those that I can wish upon thee, 
O, let them keep it till thy sins be ripe, 
And then hurl down their indignation 
On thee, the troubler of the poor world's peace! 
The worm of conscience still begnaw thy soul! 
Thy friends suspect for traitors while thou livest, 
And take deep traitors for thy dearest friends! 
No sleep close up that deadly eye of thine, 
Unless it be whilst some tormenting dream 
Affrights thee with a hell of ugly devils! 
Thou elvish-mark'd, abortive, rooting hog! 
Thou that wast seal'd in thy nativity 
The slave of nature and the son of hell! 
Thou slander of thy mother's heavy womb! 
Thou loathed issue of thy father's loins! 
Thou rag of honour! thou detested—
look'd for no reply. 
O, let me make the period to my curse!
A murderous villain, and so still thou art.

To serve me well, you all should do me duty, 
Teach me to be your queen, and you my subjects: 
O, serve me well, and teach yourselves that duty!
Duke of Buckingham. Have done, have done.
O princely Buckingham I'll kiss thy hand, 
In sign of league and amity with thee: 
Now fair befal thee and thy noble house! 
Thy garments are not spotted with our blood, 
Nor thou within the compass of my curse.


What, dost thou scorn me for my gentle counsel? 
And soothe the devil that I warn thee from? 

O, but remember this another day, 
When he shall split thy very heart with sorrow, 
And say poor Margaret was a prophetess! 

Live each of you the subjects to his hate, 
And he to yours, and all of you to God's!

Warriors of the Wasteland



The Struggle is Permanent and Eternal

From diamond mine to the factory
Everybody's doing what you've got to keep on doing for society
Make this world a good place to be
Let livin' be but don't work for free
Playing isn't paying so work is what I'm saying
Working for the world go round
The battle cry don't mess with me
I've traveled the world for eternity

Warriors of the wasteland
Sailboats of ice on desert sands
Warriors of the wasteland

It seems to me that the powers that be
Keep themselves in splendour and security
Armoured cars for Megastars
No streets, no bars, Your Wealth is ours
They make the masses, kiss their assets
Lower class jackass, pay me tax take out the trash
Working for the world go round
Your job is Gold, do as you're told
They pay you less then run for Congress

Warriors of the Wasteland
Sailboats of ice on desert sands
Warriors - what a Waste, man
I'm working for The World go round, go round

Diamond mine to the factory, yeah
Make this a world, a good place to be

Warriors - what a waste, man

Warriors

We're rats in a cage

Suicide a go go


The Struggle Continues.