Or

How I Learned To Stop Worrying

And Appreciate The Fact

There Is A War

In a continuation of my fascination with the fact that even notoriously proud and elitist broadsheets give full-page articles over to Z-List celebrities trashing their lives for our consumption.

“Can I stop? Do they like me yet?”

I’m going to start this message by using Kerry Katona as the anchor to which all parallels are drawn whether stated or not.

I know it works like a sort of soft goat cheesy buffer between the misery that has always been the river of our world. On one page, I can be dragged down about the corruption that has been endemic since Ireland attained its republic. On the page after, I can read about women protesting the potential loss of the medical cards they should rightly get once they reach a certain age. Yet there, nestled like some sort of literary cock for you to suck when it bobs up from between the breasts of seriousness and reality. Is the softener, the KY to their swarfega fist. One big full broadsheet page dedicated to Ms. Katona’s continuing depixalisation as a normal human being.

It’s trying.

But I’m not using it like the others, as the halfway salve before I move to read more misery. There isn’t the fascination of the car wreck, my life moving in slow as I pause to take in the firemen working the Jaws of Life.

“She’s blinking out, one pixel at a time and you’ll be there to see it all until there is only darkness and you’ll have forgotten about her until the eight line obituary forty years from now”

It is more the fascination you have when you see a morbidly obese person walk by you in a supermarket. You know the type, the ones that have some sort of second ass protruding over the area where their genitals should be. But not the type you think. It’s not the staring at an oddity, betwixed pity and awe. It is the sheer disgusted spite they need. A cold sneer of command in the knowing you’re just better than they are and goddamnit they should know it by the way you look at the bloated excuse for a monkey they’ve allowed themselves to become.

We could have used you back in the day. The detritus we outrun so the cave bear is sated.

Don’t look at me like that.

I Know you’ve all thought it.

What stood out about the article is a small line, where one of the spokespeople, when asked why Ms. Katona’s husband didn’t stop her from going on live television when she was clearly a slurred wreck. The answer given was that her husband as an ex-taxi driver, had no experience in show business and would not have had the same clout as Max Clifford or one of his people, in pulling her from the show.

Wait a minute…

Hold that thought.

Now, to set things straight, I don’t believe in marriage, its sanctity or otherwise. I do however believe in a partner’s duty or ability in being able to stand in and say “No, my partner can’t do this/isn’t able to do this/is unwell.”. For whatever reason. I do believe, maybe I’m wrong, but legally, marriage somewhat sanctifies this above and beyond the simple girlfriend and girlfriend status quo.

It is a distinct line though.

This growing universal powerlessness.

Where not even a husband can protect his wife from something voluntary because of his past, because of his lack of experience within the world she has willingly entered.

This is the parallel anchor.

Right here, right now, in Ireland.

We are suffering through the tyranny of watching someone act like a sort of biblically anthropomorphised Famine. Atop their skeletal horse, they wither our health system.

I wouldn’t mind, maybe so much, if the woman in question were not morbidly obese. If the fact that when her mother was dying, she did not lie on a gurney in a corridor waiting, waiting.

“It’s not rape darling…”

“Not if they’re coming right at you.”

I wouldn’t mind if under previous health ministers we had drives to stamp out obesity in Ireland.

Sadly a point of contention – the growing weight gain amongst the populace and its corresponding health problems was once regularly a feature on our television sets. On our news programs, on daytime TV, it filtered through everything.

This all about stopped.

Once our health service got taken over by a morbidly obese woman.

When they try to take it up in Government.

She quivers her lip.

When they mention her mother never waited for attention in hospital. She’ll get the red eye and say that was a low blow. The usual cocksuckers waiting for their chance at the political acid test biker attended gangbang will leap to her defense.

“Someday, I hope the wrong mother dies. Someday, I hope he or she is like an avenging angel skulking through a garden at night. Someday, I hope they watch her bleed out in that slow clawing manner that only a morbidly obese person can. Whining, bawling, “why”…when they know exactly why…someday”

If I brush aside private hospitals built on public land.

If I brush aside the whole medical card shenanigans.

If I brush aside the fact they want withhold the HPV vaccine from Irish girls. Condemning a new generation.

I can look at the fact that we have a morbidly obese woman in a fair and solid position of power within government, over public health.

Yet

She has no reason for such power. Her political party, barely concealed Orwellian monsters, have gone the way of the Nazi. Dissipated into the corners of Government and society. A memory, but not so distant that we can’t acknowledge the fact the wolves are amongst the lambs now and we don’t know just where they’ll end up.

She does not intend to stand for re-election. She is not answerable to anyone of interest. Her party is gone. The current party is happy to watch her hatchet job the health system because they can’t be blamed, except in abstract… “Sure, didn’t you vote her in?”

It’s not rape she’ll tell you.

If you question her, she’ll quiver the lip, faux the upset and the whips will come out. I’m ashamed to be the same nationality. To see my country’s health system represented by someone who according to any number of unnamed witnesses around Dublin, has to be scrambled out of the way of. Just to let her weather system pass.

Not content with the wheezing donkey of a health system she inherited. She decided to superglue in some hubris there and re-craft it in her own image.

That’s right.

What went from a wheezing old donkey, scraping at the stable door with a shoe hanging off a nail. Became a grapefruit trying to stand on toothpick legs.

Yet you’re powerless.

And that, right there, is the growing sensation of this decade. Maybe this century.

I don’t need to speak about the erosion of civil liberties under the ghostly Batman specter of terrorism. There is too many already doing that.

I’m just here to remind you, that you’re being raped.

Parallel anchors and parallel lines.

This isn’t just Irish-o-centric.

Some sort of appeal to a people so beaten down if you tell them sewer was up, they’d be swimming.

It’s just a parallel line running beside you.

In the machine, we know similar is happening to you.

Okay…

Well maybe not the unhealthily heavy health minister.

But you get the idea.

Even if you tried to do something you’d be told you didn’t have the experience or clout.

Which begs the question; at what stage in world history did we accept the fact that a motley collection of solicitors and barristers had the experience to run the various institutions of state.

It appears to be endemic, worldwide.

Get a degree in law.

Run for office.

Profit.

Granted, in some places, religion still rules the roost. Like Africa. I am reminded of an African man paying me to write up essays on theology for him. When I offered to edit it and it became apparent I knew what I was talking about. He would return week in, week out with essays that were less and less finished. While running over an edit, I asked him why he had come to Ireland to study theology.

The answer garnered was quite disgusting.

He wanted it so he could become a pastor. The reason he wanted to become a pastor was because he would be respected. The reason he wanted to be respected, was not to help his people. It was so he could get rich and of course, once he was rich, he would have power.

In the seconds after telling me this. He offered to pay me good money to do his homework for him. All his essays.

He was quite open about it.

There is a part of you that reasons with yourself that just like the little questionnaire they have at American immigration.

“Have you ever been or are you a member of a terrorist organization?”

Something like.

“Do you intend to use the education you’ve come here for to unjustly accumulate wealth and power in your native country without care for your countrymen and women?”

They seem open enough about it.

If they tick that little box, we should just ask them to follow us through that door. We’ll have the pit pre-dug. A simple execution in a doorway that opens to a mass grave.

This slowly rolling wave of powerlessness.

We’ve become the children forced to watch our drunken father whip our mother with his belt. The old tarnished Jack Daniels belt buckle opening neat welts through the cheap blouse she had the gall to buy herself.

When she’s suitably cowed and whimpering.

He’ll rape her, just to make sure.

Maybe it’s the look of slow realization they’re being raped that is the worst part. In Ireland, right now, For love nor money you cannot get an alcoholic drink to consume in the safety of your own home after half ten at night. I tried to explain that one night to an Irish couple standing in my local pub as they tried to get carryout.

Dumbfounded looks.

“When did that come in?”

Months upon months ago. Ask if they’d been away. No. The sudden passing of shock and amazement, then rage.

“That’s just ridiculous!”

Yet try telling them to write letters to their representatives in government. Urge them to do something, to raise their voice.

The rage disappears. The head becomes downcast and the voice a mumble. Nah, we’ll just try get a bottle of wine a petrol station.

Caring is great, isn’t it?

Fás – The Irish employment authority supposed to promote job opportunities and training courses for school leavers, postgraduates and professionals.

Government funded with a mandate to help reintegrate the unemployed back into the work force through retraining and placement.

Around one Billion a year.

A good percentage of which went on first class flights, fancy dinners. I’m not so much appalled at the sheer piracy of the scum who ran Fás. But more the fact they pissed money against the wall in the utterly useless process of paying for Mary Harney to receive beauty treatments on the taxpayer. It’s not even a case of putting lipstick on a pig; it’s something much worse. Perhaps, it is like trying to empty the sea with an eggcup full of holes.

The civil and social services in Ireland are referred to as ‘The Corporation’. Due to the complete hack job our Government has done to the country, it is stumbling day to day, teetering close to bankruptcy. I have a very good comparison of how it’s finances compare with Fás with a little story I garnered recently.

A book-publishing lecturer was visiting and was taken out for lunch by The Corporation. After a modest lunch two gin & tonics were bought. When the bill was presented for reimbursement, The Corporation refused to pay for the gin & tonics and the person in question was forced to pay for the gin & tonics out of their own pocket.

Ask a Corporation worker about first class flights and they’ll laugh and tell you that if Ryanair tickets can be bought they will be.

It is not enough for Rody Molloy to resign. He should be striped of his assets and imprisoned. Though in my opinion, that is too good for him.

Salvage his organs and sell them to wealthy businessmen, reimburse the state with the money made.

Once again though, that might be too good for him. It might just be too much crow to know some portion of the man is still alive somewhere.

If they actually have the gall to give this man the customary golden handshake for quitting his job. If they actually reward this man for grabbing us by the ponytail, wrenching our head back and shoving us over the kitchen table to ravage us.

Then, I’m sorry.

But these people need to be treated like the cancers they are.

Cut from us and incinerated.

After the outright attacks the Government have made against the freedom of the press. I find it completely understandable that we have to attack these people and their corruption through the institutions they funded with our money and allowed to run rampant.

I wonder if the IDA is next. I’m sure there is enough favoritism, corruption and nepotism endemic for there to be a fine feast of crows.

Expose the roots of the sickness then follow them to the source.

Panting…

I am spent. I have nothing else to offer on the subject bar convulsions as I whip about in some strange political St. Vitus dance, frothing at the mouth as I scream things like;

“Those black hearted bastards fucked us, fucked us, fucked us fucked fuck bastards fuck fuck…”

Later, tired and weakened by all this, I’ll become like Judd Crandall in ‘Pet Semetary’. Sitting on my porch, sipping a beer as I explain in a weary voice,

“sometimes dead is better.

The Indians knew that…

They stopped using that government.

when the government went sour.

Sometimes dead is better…”

And just like Louis, you won’t listen. You’ll turn away; return them and we’ll be in for the same horror.

Just keep in mind.

You didn’t panic when you could.

You didn’t avoid the rush.

Don’t bother making apologies for them anymore.

We all know you walked into that door.

It’s okay.

We’ll accept that, if that’s what you want us to accept.

Just don’t try and make us like them.

The glorious revolution doesn’t exist in street protests they’ll violently put down anymore.

It exists in crippling them with class actions, lawsuits and letters.

Sue them.

Sue them all.

Then sue yourself.

Rifle back a round of bureaucracy and fire it back at them.

Rape them back with their own tools.

If only because they won’t notice at first because they’re too busy raping you.

And remember.

It’s not rape if they’re coming right at you.