The Judge RANTS!
Date: 26/12/05
*^%$£$*!!!!
I'm in a crap mood tonight.
I was denied my lie-in this morning by what I can only call a
'grungy' feeling in my guts. Mucus, I think. I don't why it affects me
when I'm trying to grab some extra sleep, but it does. It's Saturday
morning, usually, the only morning I get the chance for some extra Zs,
but the Bank Holiday brought the same result.
Add to this the fact that I don't seem to able to eat big meals
anymore (an unfortunate problem to have at this time of year), and the
fact that my blood sugar levels are through the roof (giving me that
'heavy-legged' feeling), and you can see why I'm rather pissed off with
things at the moment.
Groups of pimples have re-appeared across my shoulder and on my
right hip. And my right eyelid has started twitching, which
makes browsing a right royal pain.
I don't know whether all (or some) of this has to do with the fact
that I haven't used my lightbox since last Friday
morning. I hope so, because I don't want my hypochondria to kick in
with wild imaginings as to what else could be causing all this.
I'm also bored. So bored, in fact, that I started going through
Blogger sites at random, just to see what a lot of total strangers are
up to. I went through them with a large degree of listlessness. There
are an awful lot in Portuguese for some reason. Then there are ones
which are full of photographs (hey! there are special sites you can do
that on, you know! Or, at least, create a different page to put all
those pics of 'modern sculpture' or your bloody dog on!); there are the
ones which have embedded audio/video on them, which leap out at you
before you have any chance of stopping them.
And this is all before you even get to the verbal content of them.
If it's not some hyperactive 14-year-old girl from Wisconsin who's
unable to type anything other than txtspk, it's a whole load of
other Americans who absolutely insist on telling you about
their special relationship with "Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ,
in whose blood my sins were washed away" (sounds pervy to me,
buddy); or it's the wet-behind-the-ears-and-around-the-crotch college
Republican who insists that Bush is surrounded by a governmental
machine which has been infiltrated by red Islamic vegetarian Democrats
who are planning on assassinating the little monkeyprick and replacing
him with a world government under the control of the Illuminati.
Well, I suppose freedom of expression is indivisible, and it takes
all sorts to make a world (but just a few sorts to destroy it). But all
this did nothing to elevate my mood. It merely bore in on me ever more
firmly the realisation that things have got much worse in 2005 if you
believe in the right to dissent. Here, in the so-called United Kingdom,
peacefully protesting against the Government's policies can get you
arrested and sentenced under anti-terrorism laws. That same
Government is hell-bent on introducing not only an ID card system which
will be hideously expensive and deeply dangerous, but now wants to add
systems which will be able (at least, in theory) to track everyone's
motor journeys at any time.
In the equally soi-disant United States, the authorities
can spy on you, tap your phones, intercept your mail and trawl through
your private life without a warrant because some DC shyster has told
Bush he has the power to authorise it and that that magnificent
document The Constitution is "just a goddam piece of paper".
You can have your ass hauled halfway across the continent to be thrown
in solitary on suspicion of being active in environmental campaigns,
and have corrupt prosecutors throw charges at you which carry mandatory
minima of thirty years in maximum security; charges which they
know they can't prove, but will use against you to try to get you to
cough to something (plea bargaining must be the most odious
practice ever introduced into the legal procedures of an allegedly free
country - it reduces justice to a mere commodity to be haggled over).
So, as we stand on the threshold of 2006, the same crooks, bunglers
and murderers are in power in Washington, London, Moscow and Beijing;
they are surrounded by the same amoral chancers from ideological
axe-grinding cliques and avaricious corporations, and the media are
still stuffed with people who defame the honourable trade of journalism
by merely regurgitating the vomit which they themselves are fed by that
self-same élite, rather than doing what they are supposed
to do: question power and the powerful on the real issues
facing our world, and keep questioning the bastards until you get the
truth out of them. Instead, anyone deemed 'unsound' to those in power
is either silenced by being denied access to the media; or, where such
a tactic would be too obvious (as in the cases of, say, Noam Chomsky or
Harold Pinter), reported in such a way which encourages the great
publics of our lands to think that these few voices are 'brilliant
minds, of course, but dreadfully wrong'.
And so it goes. Indeed, so it has already gone. We are
facing assaults on our liberties which are as dangerous as the assaults
from the same sources on the ongoing viability of our existence as
societies and as a species. We are all encouraged to talk about
something else, to think the same as everyone else and consume
ourselves to extinction.
What is worst of all is the feeling that there is no pulling out of
this dive into the Land That Reason Forgot. Who (singular or plural)
will save us from our zombification? Hard to see. The official
political opposition in our respective countries is either enfeebled by
its own cowardice or stymied by its own desperate desire for power for
its own sake, and hence trying to outflank the governing party on
exactly the same extreme. In DC, in Westminster, in the Duma
and the People's Assembly, the cry goes up: "We will do the same,
but we'll manage it better!".
Happy new year.
