Until recently I owned a ginger she-cat that was a dead ringer for Paul Scholes. A warrior cat, Cleo willingly jumped into any and all situations with no fear, including the road out front. Sadly she collided with a large metal thing there one morning. My dad brought her off the road. We buried her in my lunch hour, wrapped in a couple of towels. Said goodbye and shoveled earth into the hole; a good pal, gone forever. These encounters between human and non-human are all too often snatched away by unyielding steel jaws. Our other cat is a three-legged skinny scruffy little bastard. Very fast. A bit like Giggs, actually. Not much of a consolation; Cleo was more human than many people I’ve known. And so is Paul Scholes, even though, like Giggs, he is in fact mostly goat.
Goat encounters aren’t common these days. I remember when Saturday nights were fraught with wiry buttheads hellbent on denting your kite. Many mornings after nights before spent dissecting evenings gone awry. Encounters that needed a vocabulary defining their threat level. An encounter of the first kind meant dirties and little more. Second kind involved words being exchanged. Third was physical violence. After that things become difficult to corral using the familiar shapes of language and law enforcement. A Saturday dinnertime reminiscence might be, “Last time I saw you yesterday, you were playing cards with what I can only describe as a troll”. How we laughed. But it was true. And that’s not funny.
We eventually get used to these wonders of cryptozoology; they slowly morph from monster to mascot as we are jaded by a drunken life. This is The Jack Duckworth Syndrome; Jack first steamed into the Rovers in 1979, a Flying Horse gargoyle from Rossamon or Inkerman Street. Totally looked the business. But gradual familiarity erased his rough edges and revealed the human beneath. They say you should never turn your back on a wild animal. Ask Bet Lynch, she knows about goats; she’s shagged a few in her time. We all have our arc, beginning with Duckworth ‘79 status, through that honeymoon proving ground period and eventual descent into muppethood. Jack was an unknown quantity from 1979 until 1983, when the Duckworths moved into the Street and the Vince St. Clair enigma ruptured. But there’s a dark side to it; Nietzsche famously said, “He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby becomes one himself”, and here lies the synergy: Reverse Jack Duckworth Syndrome. Squared. That’s right; I said reverse squared; reverse Duckworth times Duckworth. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts when such forces clash and resonate.
When we chuckled nervously about close encounters from the night before, we imagined ourselves in a pubworld populated by horrible specimens. We never thought about how others saw ourselves; growling, scowling, staggering through the crowd with goat eyes and drugged feet. Ready to insult or punch those gadflies and sock-puppets that dared get in our way. We had become monsters. Our goat genes had put us at the business end of the Jack Duckworth Syndrome. As we aged and scorned the Duckworth diminishment, so did our assailants scorn us. Paul Scholes knows what I am talking about here. For monster though ye may be, the sands of time wait for no monster. Even Scholesey – or is it Scholesy? – has finally lost his troll status and been reduced to that of Abe Simpson. Or at least Homer. Thankfully, we still have Shrek. He has a few years in him yet, but who will replace Scholes? The more interesting players always die off in the end. First it was Neanderthals, then pixies and elves, then Homo erectus, and now the goat-boys; Scholes, Giggs, Neville and Co. Generic cockheads with no personality or distinct skills remain. I mean, is Mike really gonna be the goal machine they’re saying he’ll be? Many of us are down on Mike, him being a Welsh Scouse and all, but let’s give him till Christmas and see if he produces any match-winners.
When my cat died I considered reaching out to friends online in my time of grief. The real friends I have here are all psychopaths so I turned to the internet with trepidation; there are some arseholes on the UWS message board who hate cats. Indeed, the cats v. dogs debate is one of the most divisive on the forum. I didn’t mention my little Scholesey being killed; they are cruel godless bastards on there. It would have provoked a shitstorm of death-puns, abuse and taunts from the dog-loving element, various UWS writers, assorted eccentrics and interesting weirdoes who frequent the place. I stuck to other issues instead, such as the state of the church clock in Saint Anne’s Square. Not a hand on the thing, and the square considered “posh” by those who claim pride in the city. I’ve provided free advertising for Manchester for decades to anyone who’ll listen, but not after seeing that clock. And now, with that old goat panting around the midfield, a full-blown casualty of the Jack Duckworth Syndrome, a freckled muppet-prince, a yellow card machine possessed of a need to run up to opposition players and literally push them over, with only Scouse Mike for back-up. Imagine being manhandled by a beast old enough to be your father, in front of almost 80,000 jeering northern monkeys. That, my friends, is a goat encounter of the fourth kind…
Back in the alcohol perfused Robson/Whiteside/McGrath/Moses era we had goats by the bucketload. You couldn’t move for goats, from the defence all the way up to the front end. It was a pleasure to serve the club back then. Working the bars in A and B Stands. One match, after a particularly thorough routing of the serving hatches, I filled a black bin-liner with pies. Sold them on a visitors’ coach on the forecourt right out of the bag. I remember ridiculing Paul Ince’s long leather coat while passing through the players’ tunnel area. Ince looked like he was up for chinning me. Excellent. I was about 25 then and fancied myself as a bit of a lad, but Incey saw no threat, no Duckworthy challenger. Just a half-cut tosser with fifteen pilfered miniature whiskies clinking in his Salford Rugby League tracky bottoms and a fucking big bin bag full of pies. It was the Jack Duckworth Syndrome in reverse, is what it was, and I was forced to face the facts. 25 and already coming down the wrong side of Plateau Duckworth, courtesy of a man who called himself “The Guv’nor”. Obviously suffering from a particularly virulent case himself.
So what you have is Jack Duckworth Syndrome (’79), often in reverse. And additional is the Vince St. Clair Effect (’83), which always precipitates a major decline. And don’t be thinking the Syndrome is limited to individuals. Oh, no, it applies to everything; football, teams, hooligan firms, music, species, cities and countries. I believe it extends all the way up to the scale of the biosphere – the planet itself. We all have our 1979 in the Rovers Return. Some of us even manage a brief stint as Vince St Clair if we’re lucky. Our Mancunian Duckworth Cataclysmo came at the end of the Ice Age: Ancient Manchester was a place of pyramids and vast ball-parks, where prehistoric games were watched by crowds of godlike people 80,000 strong. There were giant beasts that pulled gilded chariots. Palaces and labyrinthine gardens, where an advanced and enlightened St. Clair-like species gambolled on balmy lawns. Most of the evidence was erased by a flood of biblical proportions caused by melting glaciers. A tidal wave swept down the channel from the mouth of the Mersey, flooding the majestic Irwell Valley and causing a deluge that spread as far as the primitive hunter-herders of ancient Lancastria. One bloke saw it coming and built an Ark (Knowall, his name was). He filled the massive vessel with goats. The thing was afloat for a thousand years…strange things went on…people and goats living together. When the queer offspring of a millennia of goat-human congress came bouncing down the gangplank from the Ark, circa 8,000 BC, the stage was set; much of human history would now be controlled by these goat-boys and their violent, self-destructive ways. Manchester’s 1979 in the Rovers was obliterated by The Flood, and its horny progeny. A Golden Age of towers and gleaming plateaus smashed by a tsunami from the west. This is why Mancs hate Scousers; Knowall received a sign from on high telling him that devastation would come from that quarter, and indeed it did. The Irwell Valley was flooded with goats and Liverpool was repopulated by snakes driven out of Ireland by Saint Patrick. Now the goat-boys are almost extinct and the snakes are getting cocky. But enough of that.
The season has begun and my parents have been staying with us for 2 months. My dad’s amazed that we can buy Heinz beans and PG Tips at the local supermarket. Told me every tin of Heinz beans on earth was made in Wigan. I checked. It said “Hayes, Middx”. Typical. He wants to sort that bleeding clock out instead of bragging about beans. Same goes for the rest of you “proud” Mancs. Next to the beans sits a tin of spaghetti, in sauce. Heinz again, proper English processed fodder. My Italian wife shuddering in horror every time she sees it. But we’ve played, and beat, Arsenal, without escalating to the previous goat encounters of the third kind. It’s an uncertain time, one where Scouse Mike the (False?) Prophet has suddenly appeared, with his square head and public desire to play for Liverpool – for half what he gets paid at OT – even before he’d kicked a ball for United. Giggs and Scholes are hanging on by the skin of their hoof-tips, and a giant black question-mark is gathering over the theatre. We need a new Jack Duckworth. No, fuck it, we need a Vince St. Clair. Where is he?

What does “wilderness” mean?
I believe wilderness is a reference to large tracts of country uninhabited by humans, which haven’t been closely documented by technological civilisations.  The size of the tract is a matter of perspective, as are the appropriate qualitative conditions.  For instance, a grassland may represent a wilderness to somebody from a forested area, regardless of relative species diversity.  The wastes of the Polar Regions may seem to some people as very remote and undocumented, but perhaps lacking in sufficient vegetable kingdom life-forms to qualify as a wilderness.  The Native Americans say they had no word for wilderness, but I would be interested to know exactly how much inter-biome traffic there was prior to contact with capitalism.  If it is the case that Indians rarely, if ever, ventured outside their own ecological locale, then there is a possibility that other biomes may have resembled a “wilderness” to them, had they encountered them.  Persons from the temperate rainforest of the Northwest finding themselves in the Arizona desert may well have considered they had stumbled into a hostile and even “uncontrollable” realm.

Preservation or Conservation?
We always have to remember that the “big picture” is different than the immediate impression.  The immediate impression is that there will always be more, there will always be some solution, there will always be an end to bad things.  This caters to all areas of the human political spectrum.  The big picture says otherwise.  The big picture says that species extinction is symptomatic of a form of stoichiometric undertow in the natural cycles of this world.  Large concentrations of chemicals that used to be distributed according to an unimaginably vast synergetic physical language are now accumulating in specific corners of the globe.  Elements vital to life are being manipulated and altered by technological cultures, to the point where tar macadam and desertification rival chlorophyll (directly and through by-products).  It is extremely tempting to go with immediate impression and declare that preservation is the morally superior thing to do.  However, if current hard data is any indication, humankind is travelling at breakneck speed toward an abyss.  We are like an exceptional child in school, bored by the lack of challenge in our studies, choosing to indulge in activities that bring instant gratification instead.  We crave a greater challenge than this antiseptic, mechanised order can provide.  This emotional, intellectual and psychological stagnation may be beyond our control, and a “caning” from the teacher is inevitable.  This disciplining event could assume the form of a sudden and catastrophic decline in population, technology and self-organisation (from the cellular to the global).  The only places free from contaminated soil and water (if we are lucky) at this point will be today’s “preservations”.  Thus, today’s preservations will provide a conservation area for tomorrow’s survivors of the tipping point.  My contention is that a two-tiered system should be maintained – the conservation areas being set aside for foreseeable future use, and preservations being held in the “time bank”, as it were, without there being any explicit discussion of what their eventual fate may be (People as Ostrich).  This ultimately means that all is conservation, and all is conducted with the future in mind.
I view nature as representative of a more involved, previous medium.  It is by no means “original” in its current manifestation, but is nevertheless a link to the primal conditions that borne life.  The hole in my belly is a pipeline through to the Big Bang.  I have more respect for the soil under my fingernails, and the microbes on the hairs on my chest, than I have for the NASDAQ or the British Empire.  The taste and purpose of soil far surpasses that of American processed foods.  This detergent buffer is a destroyer, not a preservative.  The gloss of an earthworm is priceless, but the Crown Jewels carry a price writ in blood and exploitation.  When the massive trees sway collectively in the tropical storm, like seaweed, they fill in the vacuum, obeying the chaotic spontaneous commands of the full void.  The dusty moon splashes the light of our energy back at us from its meaty core, and eyeballs never sleep on this turning dream in collective consciousness.  Evolution is hermetically blended with chemical and physical time, and this consciousness is nothing special; it simply is.  There are no gaps in the fabric of reality; there is only energy (which is matter) and time (which is space), or vice versa.  The equation performs infinite gymnastic solutions, and much is symmetric, despite being inorganic or supposedly dead.  The fact is, there is no alive, there is no dead.  Only the observing hominid eye attempts to decipher or impose meaning.  The rest are too busy.  They are fighting for their lives, in the region beyond the disinfectant.  Like dissolves like.  Predator swallows prey.  Beautiful are the components, for which we attempt to provide music to express their elegance, their ferociousness, their such-ness.  Music began as an accompaniment to the rituals played out by nature.  We traded trinkets and bone and stone.  They all had a price, but not fire.  Fire was here before the gloss on the worm, before the scab formed on the mantle, before the Thing had even started to slow down.  Fire is energy (which is matter).  When the energy runs out we will cease to exist.  Meanwhile, the non-living, non-dead drama continues to unfold.  It is.  It simply is.  Everything is recycled and nothing is wasted, until we reach the late hominid phase, the clean and comfy phase.  A filthy fossil energy we have wrought on this dream, a blanket chemical response to specific pests.  The stoichiometric self-destruction unleashed by a hunger for profit and a need to be “clean”.  We stagnate on a tiny island of disharmony, surrounded by the encroaching hordes of bacteria.  The brain-stem is poised like a preying mantis; ready to worry and froth and escape or lash out against its fellow inmates on the island.  Capitalism- population is the dynamic evil-ignorant root of the problem.  The words “evil” and “ignorant” are words made up by the vocal hominids to define special qualities of themselves.  It is a small world, they say.  Make hay while the sun shines, they say.  They say a lot of things, and are very intelligent and selfish.  The island has now expanded to cover a greater area than the functioning region.  This constitutes a macro-dysfunction, a billboard on a Godless highway, a vessel deeper than the oceans and taller than the atmosphere, bearing the skull and crossbones on its label.  Don’t look up. Don’t look down.  Just look straight ahead, America.  At the TV.
The purple skies and blazing orange Mars-scapes of the desert.  A turquoise wave, curling into white water across a coral reef.  Steaming rainforests, where a mouse may travel a thousand miles through the overflowing canopy.  Photoplanktonic operas, featuring chlorella, fragilaria, asterionella and synura, pulsating, jetting and spinning invisibly in a silent pond.  In a narrowly averted silent spring.  It is real.
I have more respect for kangaroo faeces than I have for George Bush.  Bury me like garbage and give my shoes to the wild horses.  Their feet must be killing them.

For two centuries now, there has existed the idea of a vast, cyclopean land across the sea, a place where numerous independent States, both large and small, stand proudly cheek by jowl in the form of a specially galvanised political arrangement designed to confer opportunity and happiness on all who live there. People the world over dream of relocating to the endless highways, deserts, mountains and ocean paradises of this near-mythic continent, where ticker-tape parades and stars and stripes merge with unrestricted opulence in a fairytale medium of solid joy. The place, of course, is America.

America has long been touted as the land of dreams, a place where people can go to live in glamorous luxuriance, a movie come to life. The inhabitants of the planet have been systematically bombarded for decades by the American media with images and notions of America’s superiority over every other country in the world. Pictures and songs, glorifying life inside those forbidding walls, have haunted people from Sao Paolo to Tibet on a daily basis, and the world’s poor has made a pilgrimage to the doorstep of this great country in an attempt to effect entry and grab a piece of the good life for themselves.

The media bombardment is not a one-way thing. Americans themselves are also subjected to the same treatment, their daily lives filled with proclamations of their nation’s uniqueness in the world, supposedly the only truly free country. As a backdrop, television footage of global trouble spots, foreign countries torn by internal and external warfare, are beamed to the populace to reinforce the belief that America is the only peaceable nation on earth. The grisly footage, with its token shots of children covered in flies, or consuming dirty food on piles of rubble, are often discussed by retired military men or middle-aged neo-conservatives (who apparently detest all foreigners) with the tone of Roman Emperors, strong and immoveable in their marble palaces, far from the primitive squalor and conflict that rages everywhere outside America’s precious borders. Men such as Rush Limbaugh hold forth on talk-radio shows, declaring regions such as Great Britain to be “spineless” and “a socialist economic failure”, while millions tune in and agree sagely. Most of these financial experts work round the clock. They take a single yearly vacation in a woodland cabin less than three hundred miles from where they were born and raised, and never for more than one week at a time, as anything more would raise the suspicions of their peers; laziness and self-indulgence are taboo realms, unless of course that includes having (preferably brown-skinned) people actively perform menial tasks for them, or spending hours riding through the woods on a quad-bike or snowmobile. Faux slavery and playing with Tonka toys will never go out of style in America. In fact, anything that involves exploiting other people (especially other races) or wasting non-renewable resources is considered an extremely desirable way to spend one’s time. There is a reason for this.

There are two groups with whom it is customary to associate the founding of the American nation, two separate philosophies, and two sites of initial purchase on the vast flank of the Eastern seaboard of then unknown America. These are the Pilgrims and the Puritans, and it is commonly believed that they are one and the same. They almost are. England in the 1500’s was a turbulent place, especially when Bloody Mary took the throne, and proceeded to decimate the Protestant population in an attempt to return England to her beloved Catholicism. When Mary died and her Protestant sister, Elizabeth, took the throne, the Protestants retuned from their hiding places in Continental Europe, and attempted to reconstruct an England based on fundamental purification of non-religious elements. Elizabeth recognised this Bible-bashing nonsense for the non-starter it truly was, and proposed a commonsense approach which incorporated the concept of reason above all else, including Scripture.

A group which continued to believe in the purification of England’s spiritual beliefs at this point broke off, and became known, not surprisingly, as “Puritans”. The Puritans were derided by the more realistic remainder of the population, and in an atmosphere of conflict the Puritans experienced an intra-group debate which resulted in them being split once more. The products of this latest bifurcation became known as the Pilgrims, and it was they who insisted that England would never bend to their will. The Pilgrims were centred in East Anglia, a region of England long noted for hostility towards outsiders and belief in outdated superstitions. They relocated to Holland, and in time were the ones who made the legendary voyage on the Mayflower, in 1620, landing at Plymouth, Massachusetts. They took their hideous catalogue of unworkable contradictions with them, a mish-mash of dysfunctional hypocrisy that somehow found people willing to commit to its hateful, ignorant agenda.

The Puritans followed soon after, establishing a colony in Massachusetts Bay. Both these groups toiled beneath the unfortunate illusion that salvation could be found through Christ and Christ alone, as represented in Scripture. This ludicrous belief system was to persist until the present moment, literally as you read these words. Jesus loves America, apparently. And America takes cash.

When those first pilgrims made that perilous crossing on the Mayflower, and found themselves in a “howling wilderness”, they were driven by an idea far more powerful than religious freedom alone; they were in it for the money.

The continent of North America at that time was suspected to contain untold natural treasures, gigantic trees of unknown biological lineage and vast seams of precious minerals, all of which could be removed and shipped back to Britain or France for the benefit of those sovereign nations, and to the massive financial gain of the pilgrims themselves. The early writings of those who first settled in Massachusetts compose much flowery reference to God and the virtues of hard work, but embedded in these texts penned in those excited, exploratory days lies the evidence that a cash reward was the actual incentive, the psychological fuel that enabled these people to want to be there in the first place.

Finding themselves surrounded by Indians and horrendous weather, the pilgrims quickly developed an intensely selfish survivalist philosophy. Doing things “by the book” was the only way, as anything else could mean total extinction. That they had the complete domination of their natural environment as their ultimate aim was never lost on them or their descendants, and slowly but surely did they obtain purchase on this new land, bringing it into line with God’s Plan.

A phenomenon known as the Myth of Superabundance emerged very early on, basically a grand kind of wishful thinking that believed in an infinite supply of natural resources with which the earth intended to furnish the pilgrims and the puritans, as a reward for what they imagined was their bravery and God-given right to own the land upon which they depended for survival.

The eventual exposure of the Myth of Superabundance for the nonsense it actually was elicited no more than a whine from America’s more perceptive inhabitants, as by then the idea of exploiting Nature for all she was worth had almost become a religion in itself. A man was not a man if he had one iota of empathy in his bones, be it towards other men or to the trees, animals and Natives all around him. It was a code.

It is currently fashionable among American liberals of non-English descent to blame Britain for the rape of nature, and the consequent ups-and-downs of the American Plan, and indeed it was the King of England who initially stood to gain the most from this project. But as independence came to pass, and the gnashing teeth of the puritan machine continued to chomp their way across the continent, it becomes very obvious that the pathological decline in mental health now belonged solely to Americans. That’s “belonged” as in they owned the copyright. The rest of the world hadn’t the taste, the money or the verve to depict it as well. Watch a movie made by any nation other than America and the inferiority is obvious. America does violence, disaster, sexy, etc, better than anyone. And Hollywood is a beautiful thing.

Europeans had long been accustomed to the notion that space was hard to come by, that Kings and Queens ruled the roost, and all the large forests and attendant ecosystems had been destroyed hundreds of years previous. They understood that only by exploring other lands could they continue to function as powers, by bringing home the raw materials necessary to maintain their proto-industrial economies and cultures. Americans, on the other hand, found themselves in a most novel position; they enjoyed the experience of exploring brand-new environments as did stone-age hunters millennia ago, while simultaneously having the very latest implements at their disposal with which to dominate and tame those environments. This strange combination of novelty and technology led directly to the now notorious tendency of Americans to assault the natural world with the heavy-handed abandon of a spoilt brat who doesn’t know his own strength.
Having said all that, I love it here, and wouldn’t give it up for the world. The reason? There is good weather in summer, and more than enough rebels to satisfy the need for a riot. That’s right; somewhere among those East Anglian freaks there were some good eggs, and it is my life mission to rave it up with them. Cheers!

Thoughts on Neil Postman’s book, Amusing Ourselves to Death.

Neil Postman (Amusing Ourselves to Death) is mistaken in his belief that television is incapable of transmitting a serious message, but here we are talking about non-American television, which lies outside the scope of his book. Television is fully capable of conveying objective, educational facts, but American culture creates the problem. This forms an interesting bond with Moyers/Moore/Chomsky’s perspective, that financial/commercial considerations are overriding the media’s ability to be fully utilised. In the chapter, “Now…This”, Postman explains how even supposedly serious news shows are presented as discrete segments (average items less than 45 seconds), with entertaining commercials spliced colourfully between talk of nuclear holocaust, giving the impression that nuclear holocaust is not to be taken too seriously. Newscasters are charismatic and attractive, and the news-shows themselves are actually advertised in the form of forthcoming entertainment. From the TV station-owner’s perspective, this is sweet music; a “serious” image is offered (and the illusion of objective reporting) while capitalism rolls on unobstructed, aside from those pesky stop-gaps with only the entertaining newsreader for distraction. News items are often accompanied by dramatic music, which provides a guide for how we are supposed to feel about what we’re seeing, like in a movie or a commercial.
Moore/Moyers/Chomsky are looking at this phenomenon from the roots rather than the flower, so to speak. They see where the influences are coming from, and realise that considerations other than entertainment and commerce are responsible. For example, in the rest of the industrialised world, the sight of Israeli helicopter gun-ships pounding Palestinian apartment blocks with missiles represents an extremely grave and obvious disregard for human rights, by any standard. Apart from America’s. America knows only of the evil of the suicide bombers, and the comradeship of Israel in our “war on terror”. In a complete reversal, when Americans see footage of devastation in Northern Ireland wrought by IRA bombs, they celebrate the “war on oppression” but are totally incapable of differentiating between Catholics and Protestants, be they Irish or English, or what any of it truly means. They associate the Irish situation with events of two-hundred years past here in the U.S., even though British Army movements in Northern Ireland are minimal. It is no coincidence that the largest population centre in America is composed largely of Jewish, “Irish” and “Italian” Americans (and how we love those glamorous gangster movies), and it’s naive to think this isn’t a factor in our contradictory political attitude. Why shouldn’t you support a free Ireland, or Israel, if you are of that ethnic persuasion? I probably support both, and can only lay tenuous claims to both. But the systematic massaging of ethnic ego is occurring simultaneously with a capitalist steamrollering of objectivity and morals. Americans are out of control, and they have no idea why. Big business is appealing to peoples’ most basic instincts, and using them as a government uses a standing army; pumping them up with fostered opinions, and marching them off to the mall (or the Middle East, where our McCulture feels the boot of foreign hegemony hardest of all).
Bill Moyers described an incident where the American chemical industry went to some pains to discredit a documentary about the effects of pesticide residuals on children. The rough script for the production was “purloined”, and an extensive campaign to discredit the project was launched, in several media. A number of government agencies, industry figures and public relations firms were involved. Moyers also discovered that a Congressman responsible for public broadcasting funds received large campaign contributions from the chemical industry. The general picture begins to look very bleak.
Moyers explains how corporate underwriters had a very real influence on the kinds of journalism he would consider engaging in. Nothing that would “upset” anybody was allowed. Basically, nothing serious was allowed. It is an eerie feeling to contemplate what effect this situation has had on hundreds of millions of Americans; force-fed a steady diet of fast-served lies in an atmosphere of utter subjective amoralism. The root is the source of the flower’s existence, and Moyers/Moore/Chomsky are addressing the more important issue. The question is will their flower ever see the light of day, or will it remain entrenched amid the fringes, in the weird corridors of public television?

Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, a few comments.

Watching television is different than attending school in America.  As Postman says, with television the emphasis is on images and fun, rather than language and learning.  You aren’t legally required to watch television, but you are required to attend school.  You do not have to participate in anything when you watch television, but at school you are immersed in a definite medium which demands certain responses and other behaviours.  In short, there is an involvement.

The notion of “commandments” of television is related to the concept that television is “just for fun”, that it does not require anything of us in the way of effort.  One must be able to join a wildlife documentary at any point, and be as titillated by the commentary as somebody who has been watching it for over half an hour.  This philosophy can be extrapolated beyond the single show, to a constellation of wildlife documentaries (or anything else), none of which demand any form of qualification other than to be a relatively higher conscious entity (cats and dogs watch TV all the time, especially wildlife documentaries).  To produce material so utterly lacking in its ability to provoke effort, television must retain a “nowhere” perspective, ensuring that the viewer is told a story rather than asked to formulate an opinion.  From the viewpoint of television executives, asking people to form opinions is not good television, as it may cause them to change channels or, worse, send them off in search of more substantial representations of the issue at hand (like books).

Some people have learning difficulties and require a more visual form of educational instruction than traditional lectures.  As a result, increasing numbers of visual-aid learning devices are being introduced into classrooms.  Modern technology has also made it possible for colleges to offer “Distance Learning” courses, where students study with the aid of videos, the internet and DVD’s.  The commandment, “Thou shalt have no prerequisites” is quite obviously broken here, and distance learning properly finds its place on the side of education, and not entertainment.  People are not required to sit exams based on what they saw on television, nor do they receive credits toward educational qualifications, for good reason.  When PowerPoint presentations, overheads and televisions are used in classrooms, they are used as a means to an end, and not, as Postman says, as a form of “entertainment as an end in itself.”  When Postman wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death, the InfoTech revolution was in its infancy.  He cannot have guessed the potential for visual aids as a communication-educational tool.  Even so, the TV Commandments remain a threshold between two very different forms of “learning”.

The most spontaneous spirit can be funnelled into a most mediocre form, so long as that spirit is composed of mediocre aspirations.  Unfortunately, most people are.  This makes it very easy for society to fashion its next generation.    Those in the greater bell-curve are assured a buffered passage through the “education” system, surrounded by others of similar persuasion.  Those on the edges are not so fortunate.  Henry describes our school system as a carnivorous training hell for many of these spirits.  He says that the function of education is to bind us to the culture pattern.  We live in a culture of control, probably a global phenomenon.  This compounds the situation: We are rigidly controlled by teachers throughout childhood, and taught the way of control.  We are rewarded for “fitting in”, and consequently come to associate those who don’t fit in with stupidity, rather than originality.  Schools are storehouses of knowledge, of method.  If we were to destroy all schools tomorrow and start again, it would not be long before more storehouses had to be built.  Such is the nature of humanity.  You cannot have a human race without education.  The problem is that in our attempts to pass this knowledge on to the next generation (in the hope that they will create more of same), we use control, and the cycle is renewed.
In “At the Blackboard”, a child is subjected to a double-barrage of control and inability to fit in.  There is absolutely no room for originality.  His teacher’s impatience is fuelled by his classmates’ straining to outdo him by providing the answer.  Boris’s mind has understandably locked up in the face of all this, as the nightmare of failure creeps into his soul, probably leaving an indelible stain.  For Peggy, the incident constitutes a triumph.  If she is so inclined (highly likely) this will become a foundation-stone on her personal road to success.  The possibility of the teacher calling upon a child who was similarly nonplussed, and encouraging that child and Boris to solve the problem together, is less than zero.  Cooperation means creativity and consideration, two values which do not produce world-beaters.  Henry’s mention of survival and the human condition frames this situation perfectly – people are made to feel that they live in a labyrinth composed of specific pressures, and that no quarter must be given, especially when a “superior” is present.  This guarantees our rising to the top of the heap while being smiled upon by those who matter.  It would be easy to say that in this case we are dealing with mathematics, and that mathematics requires direct responses, not creativity.  However, if people are taught the relative values of cooperation and problem-solving simultaneously, this will help surmount the issues of insecurity and paranoia (cultural “noise”) that so blight our education system and consequently our lives.

Avian Influenza Virus and the Media

“How Scared Should We Be?”; Time, October 17^th, 2005, pp30-34.

The current form of avian influenza virus has been named H5N1 by virologists, after two proteins that dot the surface of the virus (hemaglutinin and neuraminidase).  The virus is generating fear among the population of the United States.  The possibility of a national or even global avian flu pandemic is relatively high, according to the article.  Recent natural disasters (hurricanes Katrina and Rita) served to deliver the message that without adequate preparation, the nation could descend into chaos in the event that transmissible avian influenza virus arrives in the United States. Millions of people will die when, and not if, the virus finally mutates into a more easily communicable form than exists at present.  Resistance to novel forms of the influenza virus (all of which originated as avian strains) is extremely rare, and new strains emerge every year.  Strains possessing the capacity to penetrate human cells are usually similar enough to normal human flu viruses for peoples’ immune systems to cope, but occasionally a form of avian influenza virus will infect humans while retaining all of its previous avian characteristics.  Under these unprecedented circumstances, there is no resistance, and a pandemic is inevitable.  References to the flu pandemic of 1918 have been made by the president of the United States and other high-ranking government figures, as a warning of what may happen, but solutions are not clear.

The current avian influenza strain has not exhibited a great ability to vector between humans; its victims have mostly been people who live or work in close physical proximity to birds.  When it does infect a person, the virus resides deep in the lungs, which is detrimental for the individual but diminishes the possibility of its being spread to other people.  Antiviral medications such as oseltamivir (Tamiflu) require administration within 48 hours of onset, and it is thought that preventative vaccines would be far more effective in the event of a pandemic.

The virus has been tracked as it moves across Asia toward Europe, infecting and killing thousands of birds along the way.  Wild ducks in particular are considered major distributors of the virus.  Human casualties have been restricted to Southeast Asia, Hong Kong, Indonesia and Malaysia, where a total of 67 people are believed to have died as a result of the virus.  Hong Kong was the site of the first infection of H5N1 in 1997.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services maintains a website dedicated to answering questions about pandemic influenza.  The website acknowledges that the H5N1 strain was first recognised in Hong Kong in 1997, infecting 18 people and killing six.  Tamiflu is suggested as a possible treatment, and the website states that research is underway to develop new vaccines and ways to generate larger quantities of vaccine more rapidly than at present.  The journal Nature (October 2005) states that human-to-human transmissions of avian flu have not yet properly occurred, but that half of the 120 people who have contracted the virus have died.  The journal describes how scientists have recently resurrected the 1918 strain from a lung snipping (Time also describes this), saying the strain is “the most bird-like of all mammalian flu viruses.”  The 1918 strain had never previously infected humans, and all eight of its genome segments were radically different from anything scientists had before seen. National Public Radio (NPR) described the U.S. as being “slow off the mark” compared to countries like the U.K, with regard to national preparedness for a major outbreak.  NPR’s Richard Knox stated that antiviral medications were going to be difficult to obtain, and production was considerably slower than required.  WHO identifies wild ducks as a “natural reservoir of avian influenza viruses” and says that these birds are most resistant to infection.

Viruses are acellular microorganisms and as such are not capable of replication outside a host cell.  They compose few essential macromolecules, possessing DNA or RNA and protein.  The avian influenza virus consists of 10 proteins and 8 strands of RNA.  It is encapsulated in a protein and lipid shell, some of which bind to receptors on the outside of cell membranes in airways and lungs.  The chemical affinity for the membrane enables the virus to penetrate cell membranes, and emerge into the cytoplasm, where the shell opens, releasing the RNA.  The RNA moves through the nuclear membrane into the nucleus, where complementary copies of it are made that then return to the cytoplasm.  This mRNA interacts with the ribosomes in the cell, and copies of the viral proteins are synthesised.  Inside the nucleus, complementary copies of the complementary copies are made, resulting in versions of RNA identical to that which was initially released into the cell.  This RNA returns to the cytoplasm, bonds to the newly synthesised proteins, and a new individual virus is generated.  The virus “buds” on the outer membrane, exits the cell and is either expelled by a cough or a sneeze, or else penetrates another cell in the airway to begin the process anew.  In time, this process overwhelms the cells, and they die, resulting in an excessive mucus load and sore throat.  Too many dead cells in the lungs (as in the case of H5N1) can result in death.

Time, as well as the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, may be overemphasising the dangers of the avian virus H5N1 being spread by birds.  Medical professionals in the regions where the most birds have been identified with the virus are certain that the virus has not yet mutated, and is not capable of spreading from human to human.  It is difficult to believe that a virus responsible for 60 deaths globally in over eight years, and which thus far has been contracted only by people living in close proximity to birds, could cause “millions” of deaths in the United States.  The U.S. government has announced “prevention measures” involving the purchase of 20 million doses of Tamiflu, whose individual treatments cost $100 each.  The government’s enthusiastic urging of people to obtain Tamiflu may be connected to private interests (Donald Rumsfeld, Defence Secretary, holds a large portion of stock in the company that manufactures Tamiflu.  Roche, the manufacturers of Tamiflu, have refused to suspend the patent of the medication, after it was suggested that this would be a way for other pharmaceutical companies to help keep up with the demand, saying that other companies may require more time to develop the appropriate methodologies).  Time described the migration of the virus in terms that suggested a deliberate assault on the western world.  The truth is, the further west the birds migrate, the less chance there is that humans will be living closely with poultry.  Virulent strains of influenza kill individual birds in the wild, before they have an opportunity to travel far and infect a large number of other individual birds.  In this fashion, wild birds reduce influenza to a mild version of its original form.

The pandemic of 1918 was most likely caused by the unusual conditions of the First World War, when hundreds of thousands of humans were forced to live in close proximity.  These conditions created the ideal spawning ground for the deadly influenza of the time.  People, (soldiers in particular) packed into all manner of trenches, trucks, service vehicles, hospitals and locomotives, were infected.  The deadliest strain found novel conditions in which to proliferate.  As one scholar has said, “to be as virulent as the 1918 pandemic, the new strain needs its own Western Front.”  Today’s crowded Asia provides a similar environment, albeit not as concentrated or stressed, but nevertheless vulnerable to an impact from the avian strain.

The crux of the issue lies in the genetics.  The Time article stated the root of the name H5N1, but failed to connect the significance of the name for the avian flu to its epidemiology.  The surface proteins on the virus are the means by which antibodies recognise a virus from previous exposures, and are thus of extreme importance.  Viruses are named for these properties, which express information relating to the hemagglutinin and neuraminidase proteins coating the virus.  It has been suggested that the mechanism governing the genetic expression of the influenza virus may be cyclic; the eight RNA fragments disassociate and recombine according to a specific pattern, and it is a matter of time before a lethal combination occurs again.  Random events are a more likely cause.  Time briefly mentions the possibility of “genetic mixing” (recombinant genes) in the event of a person simultaneously contracting a human and animal virus – an event known as major antigenic shift, wherein two different strains combine and are unrecognisable to human antibodies.  This would be required for the virus to become pandemic.  The H gene would have to be changed completely, in order for a wholly novel form of the virus to be generated.  Scientists in Vietnam recently (Sunday November 13^th, 2005) announced a major antigenic shift of surface HA and NA molecules, decoded in both humans and animals, from cases in Asia.  The name “bird flu” is scientifically redundant, when the origin of the virus is considered, but in this educated age it will be no comfort to victims of a human pandemic to be aware of where the pandemic sprang from.

Influential book: Amusing Ourselves to Death, by Neil Postman, Penguin Books (copyright Neil Postman 1975).

“Media” is a reasonably general term.  It conjures a number of quite different concepts and images in the mind’s eye.  A quite different expression, “couch potato”, is much more specific, especially when it is uttered in the same breath as “media”.  Everybody knows what a couch potato does; a couch potato watches television.  Potatoes are not considered particularly intelligent or independent-thinkers, so when they subject themselves to television all day every day, it is fair to assume they become even less so.    In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman documents the decline of American literacy, political acumen and, finally, common-sense, as he traces the negative intellectual gradient that represents what American corporations have done with information technology.

The television media in America has forever been shackled to an idea of rampant unscrupulous commercialism, wherein its customers are lied to, exploited and brainwashed, simultaneously.  Nothing finds its way onto television screens in America that isn’t entertaining.  This includes the news.  It is often said of American elections that who has the most money, wins.  When political campaigns are covered by the media, there has to be razzamatazz, there has to be glitter; shining white teeth are the order of the day.  The traditional cut and thrust of politics has become fiction, indistinguishable from beauty pageants or Super bowls.

From the olden days of the spoken word, where, according to Postman, people were able to recite literally thousands of proverbs (and students were actually examined orally as an accompaniment to their written theses), through the ages of print and telegraphy, technology and information describe a braided course.  The first telegrams were not dissimilar to the first emails; short, featureless scraps of relative nonsense, whose lack of substance was more than made up for by their amazing geographical scope.  It took a while for people to come down from this novel high-point in communications history, giddied and ready for more of same.

When radio became, in Postman’s words, “an adjunct of the music industry”, the opportunity to hear “sustained, complex talk” in our homes was severely compromised.  Television rapidly took control of the situation, and gigantic corporations, with intimate ties to politics, took control of television.

Books:

Shepard Krech, The Ecological Indian.

J. Donald Hughes, American Indian Ecology.

Shepard Krech, in The Ecological Indian, claims that the common European image of Native Americans living in “balance” with nature is based largely on myth. The presence of a newly discovered race of humans in the New World, he says, automatically triggered a false recognition in the imaginations of Europeans, of beings living in an “earthly paradise”. He describes how this image stayed with us through hundreds of years, enjoying much exposure in more recent decades of “counterculture” and environmental movements, coming to represent the antithesis of the polluting white person. Krech states that this dynamic is a construct of environmental and political publicists.
J. Donald Hughes, on the other hand, describes how the Indians’ way of life was firmly dovetailed with the surrounding ecology, illustrating their remarkable adaptability in vastly different continental biomes. The complex web of ritual, law and taboo stands as testament to the value the Indians placed upon their natural environment, where myriad uses were found for the simplest objects. Hughes depicts the coming of the Europeans as a degradation of this spiritual but ultra-utilitarian existence, documenting the rapid decline of (native) human and non-human populations after contact had been made.
Krech explains how modern ecologists have found the so-called “balance of nature” to be virtually non-existent. He cites the new paradigm, that ecology doesn’t necessarily “climax”, and that we have no reliable way of predicting the behaviour of systems. Chaos prevails, he says, and goes on to question whether there really are systems, in a bounded, physical sense. So, he says, the Indians couldn’t have chosen to “tread lightly”, even if they’d wanted to. Hughes dispenses with such philosophising, choosing instead to focus on what we do know. We know that this population managed to survive for many thousands of years, by recognising it was merely part of the whole, and that it was as much food for the whole as the whole was food for it. This resulted in a culture of respect and foresight, mindful of the finite nature of material and energy, regardless of which biome the Indian consciousness found itself in. There was always a solution to issues of nutrition and reproduction, and if it wasn’t sustainable, it wasn’t a solution.
Early in his book, Krech gives mention of the Cahokians and the Anasazi, who inhabited the two largest population centres (and who therefore constitute the two largest and easiest targets). He discusses their exhausting of resources and subsequent dissolution as a people, but there is no hard evidence that environmental degradation was the actual cause of these regions entering decline. Hughes tells how these towns have stood for centuries, and how the population of a town would divide and move if there was too much population pressure on productive land, as in the Oraibi forming a town in Moenkopi. It is more likely that war and climate change played major roles in these dissolutions.
Krech mentions that, generally, indigenous people hadn’t clustered in large population centres, nor become industrialised, and says this is responsible for Europeans’ vision of an “Eden” in North America. This supports Hughes’ perspective of a non-capitalist, harmonious people, who deliberately kept their numbers dilute relative to their world, and who, in Kech’s words, “were fully capable of transformative action in ecosystems they knew intimately.” That they chose not to, despite occupying these lands for ten millennia, is obvious: Hughes cites a Cherokee legend in which the animals worried that humans were becoming too numerous and burdening Mother Earth, as well as Pueblo observance of sexual continence and other examples of abstinence.
The belief that the Plains Indians contributed to the decline of plains buffalo populations is a major point of contention. Krech acknowledges that, because of the great numbers, the effects of natural disasters were magnified, but still maintains that Indians engaged in wasteful slaughter of buffalo. The animal’s importance to the Indians resulted in highly efficient hunting techniques, allegedly leading to surpluses where thousands were “left to rot where they fall.” This is a reference to the Indian practice of driving the bison over cliffs, or corralling them into pounds, where they were then systematically butchered. He also quotes Henry Hind, who, in 1857, came upon the remains of buffalo, each of which “deprived of its tongue and hump only”, and who saw Cree Indians constructing a new pound due to their old one being packed with dead animals, generating an overwhelming stench. Hughes counter-quotes, from sources that state that the Indian “would have looked upon it as sacrilege to destroy more than barely sufficient to supply the wants of his family.” (R.B. Marcy, 1850). Hughes says the buffalo may have been stripped of the best pieces only in exceptional circumstances, and that the bones were sometimes simply too heavy to transport, giving the illusion of wastefulness. He also says that the practice of buffalo hunting was strictly governed by military-police societies, such as the Cheyenne Dog Soldiers, and that people faced “severe punishments” if discovered hunting animals outside the announced tribal hunts. There are accounts of “disposable” corrals being burned as fuel once the hunt was over, as well as numbers as low as “41 animals” killed out of a herd of 2000. Both authors describe the tremendous versatility of the buffalo as a source of both food and material; the Indians had almost 100 major uses for these products, from boxes and chests, to spoons, moccasins and water buckets, as well as innumerable ornamental uses. The same is true of all other animals hunted.
Krech’s quote from Henry Brackenridge (“they have among them…..all the diversity of characters that exists among the most refined people”) is a refreshing truth. However, this does not take into account overall culture, specifically that culture which emphasises hozho, or environmental harmony – a Navajo expression. People are indeed people, and it is a fact that if they live in a culture committed to hozho, then even those who are without a natural inclination in this regard are bound to observe its tenets
Most of the clans were named after, and felt intimately related to, animals, according to Hughes. Tlingit Indians would refer to the bear as “my father’s brother-in-law”, which compares to “the mysterious interrelatedness of all that is” experienced by Lakota Sioux during the sacred pipe ceremony. The entire Indian world was steeped in rituals and taboos, including the giving of a speech to a bear that was about to be, or had been, killed. When an animal was captured, the hunter would apologise to it, and explain the needs of his tribe. Awareness of nutritional requirements was high. To offend the source of survival was to die. It was a dangerous thing to laugh or use obscene language during the hunt, and the first animal caught was often released, in order that it conveyed the needs of the Indians to its own “tribe”. These were people situated deep in the ecological web, who were, at a gut level, part of the material and energy flow in that world. Nowhere else do we see this utter reverence for the fellow energy-packets that represent the kaleidoscope of nature. In the absence of alcohol and the presence of psychotropic substances, this awareness can only have been intensified.
It is difficult to believe Krech’s claims that these people were capable of mindless slaughter, and that the image of the Indian as environmentalist is a myth. Their well-established belief system (which knew no tribal bounds) was steeped in the language of respect and moderation. The poems of the Sioux, Pawnee and others quoted by Hughes rival those produced by the so-called Zen Masters of 8th Century China in their simplicity, depth and clarity. The Buddhists have long been courted by the West for the wisdom they can offer us, but it seems that we may have as rich if not richer a source of inspiration right on our doorstep. The medicinal properties of New World plants has always been a topic of interest to the chemical-Eurocentric West, and the opportunity to discover even a miniscule percent of this knowledge is dwindling fast. An accurate climate record of the Americas is surely contained in the thousands of stories told for millennia by these people. The histories of the great civilisations, such as the Cahokians and Anasazi lie embedded in scholarly accounts and stories, akin to our own documentation of Ancient Egypt or Babylon.
Four hundred languages and traditions were reduced to a handful, and millions of people were decimated by alien diseases from a crowded, filthy continent far away – a tragedy second to none in history. Westerners should be proud and humbled to call the American Indian one of their own, and the study of these still mysterious people has yet to be truly realised by the academic establishment.

Some of us are fortunate enough to have reminiscences from the transition when Lancashire became Greater Manchester. When the Perry Boys weren’t quite old enough to go abroad yet. My bushman’s holiday adventures in Prestwich made the 6-week summer break a time of mystery and danger, via the tribes on the move through local parks and woods in clannish costumes; star-jumpers and Slade, Sta-Prest and soul. Sunshine and leafy roads. Original orange Choppers with proper cowhorns. Homemade trackers, Frankenstein contraptions whose frames, knobbly wheels and handlegrips were salvaged from disparate decomposing relics and electrified into life. Off the beaten track of Bury New Road, between time-warps and alehouses that tottered unsteadily on the edge of a water-eroded valley. In among the storied hollows and sleepy slopes of Prestwich Clough stand wise old trees, supernatural sentinels from the glimmering ‘seventies. A Glam-Soul collective unconscious that contains T-Rex and Detroit Emeralds. Primeval monkey business. In monkey boots. Initials chiselled into ancient bark with Bowie knives; bone-handled, pearl-handled, wooden-handled, all bearing that same vicious hallmark – the curved tip, often sharpened on both edges. Friction burns and carvings, inflicted by denizens of a near-dead generation. Sycamore and horse-chestnut trunks protruded from stream-worn valley sides. Giant scaly limbs overhead, grooved by rope-swings; a nylon noose slung over and a stick-seat tied onto the bottom. Many broken arms and wrists suffered by diamond dogs naive enough to fly without fear. Playing knifey; swinging deeply with a Bowie knife between the teeth. Jumping madly onto the stick-seat with practiced venom. Propelling oneself way out into the gorge, over the stream; radius/ulna shattering territory. Then back up to just a hair above the ground (disqualification if you touched earth). Hanging by one’s knees from the seat, gripping the rope where it met the stick. Stretching agonisingly back with one arm to slip the blade-tip just far enough into the moist slope so it didn’t fall out and counted as a point. He who sticks it highest up the hill takes all, sometimes even the blade in question. Kids in skinner trousers, brown silky Birmingham bags with patch pockets. Semi-flared blue jeans with tiny turn-ups, no trace whatsoever of a crease as if ironed on a round pole, hung half-mast above cherry-red Docs.
And then there were the Perries.
Perries would slink up in a group, dressed in whichever aspect of the Bowie chronology obsessed them that day. It was 1975, 1976, Philadelphia soul-saturated, Young Americans. Some of them played knifey, some didn’t. Just as the Glam crowd wore the dagger in the sheath, so did the Perries, but they claimed silent sovereignty – the Bowie knife was their thing and no one else’s. They were baggies thirty five years before Madchester; thick, small-collared shirts, peg trousers, docksider shoes and heavily piled wedgeheads, dyed auburn or maroon. Living embodiments of Bowie’s Diamond Dogs; wild future-kids inhabiting a ruined city, with dyed hair and skinny faces. A Disco-pansexuality that dripped hot articulate breath onto the homophobic terror of working-class ignorance. They looked soft but were generally hard as nails. It wasn’t all Perries and Bowie and Glam, though. There were water-pistols and fishing nets. Fluorescent nylon; orange, green and yellow. Spud guns; little Derringer look-alikes with orange inlaid plastic handles and real chambers to load up with potato bullets. Technicolour t-shirts bearing transfers of Steve Austin and Why Don’t You. Go and switch off yer fucking television instead? I wrote a letter to “Why Don’t You” once. Inspired by one of those wank little films they made of peoples’ hobbies; some pitiable twat in a garden shed in Yorkshire, working a potter’s wheel like his life depended on it. I told them I was an avid brass rubber; spent all my spare time touring the churches and cathedrals of Manchester, committed to transferring the visages and heraldic crests of antiquity onto paper for posterity. All completely made up; my spare time was spent kicking a ball about, washing cars for pocket-money, and shoplifting toffees and books from Percival’s bookshop in Prestwich Village. And playing Knifey with the Glam-Soul elders, occasionally joined by that weird Bowie space-face crew.
Perries dyed their hair crimson to match the likeness on the Diamond Dogs album cover, but they styled it more like Bryan Ferry; short back and sides with a lopsided long fringe obscuring one eye. Sci-Fi Scuttlers in iridescent shirts and high cheekbones.
The Perries playing and posing in Prestwich Clough were juvenile facsimiles of what lurked uptown in Pips’ Roxy Room; Catholic sixth-formers, cricketers and football freaks. Intellectual romantics, tough-guys with Irish DNA massively transformed by a deep injection of English speed. And the English mongrels in the secondary moderns were there, too. Rumour had it they shot up raw gin in the school bogs. But that was the Heys Road soul boys, a Carr Clough Diamond Dog-pack that rode scooters and fought pitched battles with the Kersal mob on a regular basis. Together these groups formed an unholy alliance that drew Perries in from Manc-riddled Hillock and points east of Heaton Park. Hair dyed with veggie food colouring from their mothers’ kitchen cupboards, Bowie albums temporarily borrowed from begrudging older siblings. Scousers will deny their existence till they’re blue in the face, and we all know why: Perries invented Casual culture.
In 1975 Bowie released Young Americans, calling it “plastic soul” – a couldn’t-care-less counterpoint-cum-tribute to the Beatles rubber equivalent over a decade previous. Lennon’s contribution to “Fame” and a scandalous cover of “Across the Universe” punctuated the soul-struck glitter from the city where Jim Bowie’s blade was first mass-produced. Bowie – the original Bowie – had made the knife and applied it thoroughly to the necks of his enemies. It was sent to Philadelphia for improvement. Bowie’s homemade blade had no handle, like the knife my dad used to cut the rind off the bacon on mad Sunday mornings. The grating sound of him sharpening “the knife with no handle” on the back step functioned as a Pavlovian alarm clock that cut through my hungover REM sleep. Rescued me from the vicious reptiles of my subconscious with a Salford-size stack of luscious brown sauce-hammered butties. The sharpest knife in our house, apart from the pearl-handled one I kept in a leather sheath from childhood. By the time I was old enough to be drunkenly roused by the bacon cutter it was a relic. Replaced by a more efficient tool on nights when teenage wedgeheads walked proud. Wary of the more developed 20-somethings, 30-somethings, 40-sad-somethings who challenged them to fights, confused at how a weird sub-sect from the mid-70s had suddenly exploded. The dinosaurs were vanquished, from our lives and from our Sunday morning dreams. Knights won their spurs; I saw one bloke battering a young Perry, astride him, punching for England. Up came another, grabbed his hair and pulled his head back. Under the muted sodium of a lamp-post the stripe was inflicted across the forehead. Blokes in their 30s do one, rapid, voices high like castrated tigers. Same again less than a month later. Big hardman wanting it outside a pub. Young Perry sliced him across the belly and off they ran again. This was no Bowie knife; these were for cutting carpets, as far as I knew. The name had changed to Stanley and the soul boys had finally escaped the Roxy Room to multiply across Salford and north Manchester. Time to leave the cosy prehistoric vault of the Stretford End and enjoy the pre-match alien clapping that ricocheted from the cantilever high above the Scoreboard/United Road segment. Spaghetti Western sound-effects from Britain’s best footy ground. It’s the northeast quadrant now, traditionally the most solid and seamless section of Old Trafford. Designed to face the Salford hordes as they pour around that corner, eager for an eyeful of their temple, experienced in life enough to demand that it passes muster. But the pride has bled away now, with the FC fans and the decent upper-working-class folk who owned season tickets for United Road seats. Replaced by cocks of every stripe from counties and countries astride every latitude. They know nothing of Knifey, of the daredevil rope-swings of fabled Prestwich. The little crews walking the streets and woods, singing soul songs in platform shoes and blow-dried feather-cuts. They know less than nothing of the auburn Perries, sharp and deadly, living life to the bone. But I was there, I saw this infinitesimal population grow and become mainstream, or as mainstream as something like that could ever become.
But back to the Now, as they say. The UEFA Champions League final made me think, and think again. I’m convinced that United’s prep for the big game was dismally poor, that they spent that week eating Cheshire/Worsley food a notch above the “catastrophic” (to use Patrice Evra’s description of English cuisine), swanning about in overrated shopping malls like the Trafford Center, glowing with pride. All the while Barca’s men were hitting the bricks early for some serious sweating, then rounding off a long morning with some group video studies of United’s weak spots. Kinda like Manny Pacquiao did in the weeks leading up to his absolute decimation of Mr. Hatton. Maybe I’m wrong.
Reading Andy Mitten’s imaginary interview with John O’ Shea on the Four-Four-Two website summed up the way most of us hoped things would go that night. We should all rightly feel like fools, like grinning under-qualifieds who’ve just been politely told, “Don’t call us, we’ll call you..”. Then there’s the optimistic United fans, they of the “You cannot say anything negative about the team, especially in a season when we won the league” variety. These are people who insist on being realistic, while chanting “Champions of England, Champions of Europe” and constantly reminding us all that it doesn’t stop there; United are champions of the world. It’s balderdash and there’s nothing wrong with throwing a tantrum and slagging off a team that loses its bottle and allows a slightly better team to completely humiliate them on the big stage.
May I also apologise for the poor quality of my last contribution to this fine publication, truncated and bollocksed as it was. I ran out the door that day and drove my wife to Hartford Hospital, where a creature was hatched. The chimp-child is now fastened to the teat and vigorously draining my missus of her precious macromolecules. Or else strapped in the car seat grinding on a dummy – a Mini-Me-Hannibal Lecter who only has eyes for my wife’s tortured nips. We’ll have to move back to Manchester before she’s old enough to learn the Yankee lingo, and before I’m too old to forget Mancunian. The sun is shining and the snow shovels are packed away. A small flower has bloomed but we fucking bottled it in the Champs League final. Nuff said.

As humans, hominids, we try constantly to project symmetry and patterns onto the environment; we insist that there are “four corners” to the “globe” (actually a shapeless lump with a horrifying protuberance on one side, and a flat expanse on the other) upon which we have evolved all these years. There are four cardinal points, they say, and there are four winds. There are four seasons, divided by slivers of inclemency which we often prefer to the seasons themselves, and there are four kingdoms in the domain eukaryota.

Five Kingdoms, two Domains; only vertebrates exhibit adaptive immunity
Eukaryota is one of two domains. Prokaryota is the other domain. In the case of domains, at least, there are not four, but two. It is a fork in the road like no other, described above as a horizontal dashed line.
Living things are divided into five kingdoms, and some would even say six (and some would say hundreds but they’re just being fucking silly), and four of those kingdoms share one domain, while the other sits alone across a gulf of discontinuity that comprises the single greatest division in the catalogue of Life. Prokaryotes are creatures which have circular DNA, which have no sub-cellular components other than the very basic necessities required to synthesise proteins, little things known as ribosomes. But there is us and there is them – and we are Eukaryotic. Eukaryotes are the elaborate ones, the ones with the helter-skelter in every nucleus (except red blood cells), the ones with a helter-skelter in the first place, rather than a circular plasmid, as the Prokaryotic genome is called. It all began as single-celled prokaryotes, dividing asexually for billions of years, until one of them acquired a sub-cellular package – a membrane-bounded compartment designed to perform certain tasks – and so our own domain was born. Lynn Margulis, of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, was among the first to determine that these sub-cellular packages were initially acquired as food, but over geologic time a meal became a mitochondria (previously a single-celled, membrane-bounded organism in its own right), and the plastic nature of cellular existence began to complexify. I just made that up. The word “complexify”, that is, not the theory of endosymbiogenesis. If I’d just made the theory of endosymbiogenesis up then I’d take the day off and go for a picnic.
Every living thing endures four seasons (even if it lives at the equator and those four seasons are identical), and has been precisely sorted by its ability to adapt to change over billions of years, but only the vertebrates have acquired adaptive immunity, that is, special cells capable of replicating themselves rapidly in response to an invader. The rest, the so-called “simple” ones, have only what they are given; there are no specialised cells which can change plastically on-the-fly, to ambush and destroy microbial invaders, parasites, or viruses.
But every four-walled house is built from four types of bricks, be it a bacteria or a horse, and those bricks are called macromolecules. The four types of macromolecules are:
1. Nucleic acid (such as DNA)
2. Polysacharrides (sugars)
3. Lipids (fats, oils, hydrocarbons)
4. Proteins
Everything which lives, whatever it may be, must be made from one or the other of these four things. Sure, there are electrolytes, but that’s getting too carried away, and it’s late, and you’re probably saying, “what the fuck is he doing? Why the biology lesson?”

Every cell in your body is bounded by a membrane which is made from lipids – fatty barriers with non-fatty surfaces that provide protection from things that aren’t supposed to enter the cell, or leave it. Membranes are one of the single most important products of evolution, for they partition things from other things in selective ways which have led to the emergence of cell-type and multicellular organisms.
Basically, what this means is you are a bacterial colony; there are scientists who’ve determined that certain macromolecules present on human neurons are only found in one other species, and that species is a prokaryote, a form of archaea, a primitive bacteria-like organism which lived on the earth billions of years ago. Why would our neurons share such a property with such an unlikely candidate? Neurons compose an extensive web in the body, a network of individuals which communicate via neurotransmitters, chemical armadas whose molecules traverse the gulfs between individual neurons and provide information to each other, not unlike the cells in a colony of prokaryotes. The question is this: Is the human neural system a colony of archaea which insinuated itself into our physiology billions, or at least millions, of years ago?
Goodnight, then…or is it?

Once upon a time, many years ago in a world not yet quite gone mad, musicians were like mushrooms and bands were spawned in patches, artistically related gene pools of little fellers, all sprouting up overnight, creating instant genres. Just add humidity and Presto! These sudden eruptions were contagious, and the youth of the day were transformed into carbon-copies of each style, with each musical form having its own hierarchy of superstars. A bit like the Greek gods, but not quite.
The rock ‘n’ roll era set the ball rolling in the late 1950’s, as several white gentlemen exploded into the public eye, all playing that same devilish brand of driving guitar music that sent the kids silly overnight. They stole it from the blacks, of course, but this is an article about why U2 are complete shit and I haven’t got time for that right now. Let’s move on.
One of those chaps back then was called Elvis Presley, and he just happened to become the most famous of all the rock ‘n’ rollers. Presley might not even have been the most talented of the bunch, but he danced funny and people saw sex in it, and that was that. Buddy Holly, Chubby Checker, and even The Killer himself, Jerry Lee Lewis, had to take a back-seat to the man they called The King. Just the way things go, apparently. But it set a pattern for the future.
Fast forward slightly, to northwest England in the early 1960’s, to the cities of Liverpool and Manchester. A new kind of music had evolved called Merseybeat, a blend of rock ‘n’ roll, skiffle, R&B, and Doo-wop. There was a host of bands playing this new form, in the many coffee shops of both cities. Its roots were again in the black music of the American south and Midwest, brought back on vinyl to England’s industrial heartland by sailors docking in the northwest ports. One of the Merseybeat bands was called The Beatles, and they became the most famous of the lot. Everybody else, The Searchers, The Hollies, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Freddie and the Dreamers, and others, all jumped in the back with The Killer and Buddy Holly, while The King and The Fab Four maintained control of the vehicle.

A few years later a phenomenon known as Garage Rock music emerged in the United States, and Garage bands with wonderful-sounding names came flowing out of the woodwork; The Seeds, The Count Five, The Shadows of Knight, Question Mark and the Mysterians, and The Standells, all produced work bearing a similar crude yet stylish hallmark. The term “Garage Rock” was a largely dreamed up notion that most of these young bands were middle-class suburban white kids who rehearsed in the family garage. That the sound quality did sound like it had been recorded in such a place didn’t hurt. But one band became the most famous Garage band without anybody but me ever realizing they even were one. That band was called The Doors, and the cheesy organ and rough-ass vocals of Garage Rock finally had a figurehead, a man who called himself The Lizard King, Jim Morrison. The Shadows of Knight, Count Five, et al, clambered into the monstrous back seat of the collective vehicle, as Morrison and the lads began to clamber into the front with the big boys heading for psychedelic oblivion. Until, that was, a clan of roughnecks from Newcastle, England suddenly appeared, the leader of which grabbed The Lizard by the scruff of his neck and lobbed him and his band into the back, while roaring “beer and acid!” Eric Burdon and the Animals had joined the party.
I realize that by this point that there were other musical genres out there, like Motown, Soul, Bluebeat, Mod, and Ska, but we have to keep to the highway here, and can’t afford to get side-tracked, at least not if I’m gonna reach the bit about U2 being complete shit in decent time, and I know you want to hear about that, so let’s put our foot down and move on. In fact, let’s just pretend that the phenomenon known as British Rock never fucking happened at all, okay?

The 1970’s had Glam-Rock, which was frankly bizarre and more than a little gay. A huge number of bands jumped on the wagon at this point, but one artist protruded above the rest like a strange, gilded sex-toy. David Bowie didn’t just invent a nickname for himself, he invented several metamorphosing personas, each with its own nickname; Ziggy Stardust, The Thin White Duke, and Aladdin Sane all graced television and magazines, while Bowie was described as a genius by those who’d been touched by his alien fingers. As Bowie snaked into the front seat (winking and licking his lips at The King, who became very uncomfortable), Slade, Sweet, the Bay City Rollers, Wizard, T-Rex, and Mott the Hoople dived in the back, where a bottle of gin was making the rounds and the air was full of pungent smoke.

If you’re getting bored with this repetitive chronology, then that’s fine, in fact that’s perfect, cos it sets you up for another pattern that began to emerge around this time; music became devoid of originality, and almost died. But then something else happened, something called Punk Rock, which saw a quite intelligible rabble of colorful characters prancing in the limelight, spitting, swearing, and sometimes even singing. In the same way that industrialization brought an end to the “Little Ice Age” (would’ve been a great big ‘un otherwise, so quit whining about fossil fuels, suckers) Punk Rock intercepted the trend towards declining musical quality, and got everybody excited for a couple of years, while more than a few oldsters vigorously objected. Again (zzzzzzzz) one band seemed to embody everything there was to say about Punk Rock, and that band called itself The Sex Pistols. As The Stranglers, Angelic Upstarts, Damned and Buzzcocks belly-flopped into the back seat, The Pistols joined the front-runners, amid the clinking of bottles and bags of brown powder that had insidiously appeared with them. Johnny Rotten spat a huge ball of phlegm into Paul McCartney’s eye, and Sid Vicious, who initially had followed Rotten mindlessly, suddenly grabbed the wheel and executed a Starsky and Hutch-style U-turn, as they headed for Nowhere in Particular, not a nice place, let me tell you. In fact, Sid and his brown powder would be remembered by all and sundry for this act, in which he almost rendered himself a proper punk, thereby performing his only truly artistic maneuver ever, by murdering his girlfriend and becoming a black man’s prison bitch. Only his suicide prevented him reaching such dizzy creative heights, which some say was a shame. It could’ve been payback for all those white man’s rock ‘n’ roll covers he’d been belting out, tellingly towards the endpoint of the Pistols great Swindle.

When things had settled down a bit, this decline continued, and the conscientious objectors got what they deserved; a crappy hit parade full of mediocre garbage. Nobody seemed to know what the hell was going on, and people like Joe Jackson and The Buggles did their best to convince us all that they had the situation under control. Somebody even dreamed up a name for this non-scene; they called it New Wave. New Wave was kind of like the Kingdom Protoctista – a catch-all term to describe a species that doesn’t really fit into Animals, Plants, Fungi, or Bacteria, but lacks any features consistent or distinguishable enough to actually be considered a Kingdom in its own right. At this point, no single band or artist was deemed to be capable of driving the vehicle at all, or even being invited into the front seat. In fact, Sid had driven the vehicle off over the curve of the globe, and many were beginning to wonder if it was ever coming back. The slippery slope became oily, defying purchase and sending the vertiginous upper-echelons of the “street-level” industry into paroxysms of near-sexual delight. Faceless, out of touch, upper middle-class fuckwits everywhere began asking themselves the same question; all the talent has dried up, there are no more original ideas! Does this mean that we actually get to decide what people listen to now?
Since the late 1950’s, the music industry had been in the clutches of an uncontrollable band of hard-core substance-abusers and incestuous, violent lunatics, precisely the type of people you should have at the helm of a behemoth such as this. But as the 1980’s dawned, a far darker and savage brand of beast took the reins; the straighthead.
Despite having been the frequent recipients of bullying in high school, straightheads are dangerous people, let me tell you. They’re the ones who initially said no to drugs, but then started doing coke and smoking pot in their mid-20’s, when everybody else had grown out of it. They’re the ones who said things like, “Trainers look so stupid! They’ll never catch on!” back in 1980, when human beings finally got a clue, threads-wise, and the world went irreversibly Adidas trainer-crazy. Ultimately, the quintessential straighthead is a person who, utterly lacking in originality and toughness of any kind and feeling deeply unhappy about it, seeks to deflect peoples’ gaze from their soulless eyes, to other more superficial aspects, such as fancy hair and clothes. Straightheads like to be the center of attention, while maintaining an ability to be outside the action. They want to be a glamorous mystery, one that never gets its hands dirty or is seen to be uncool. In short, they are sissified brats who want it all but lack the balls to grab it the old fashioned way, so they invent their own culture and social hierarchy and remain clustered in exclusive incestuous groups, far from the trenches. Manipulation is their way, not conquest.
Straightheads begin thinking about pension plans, mortgages, health insurance, and having children, when they’re around nine years old, and they begin building their evil empires right away. You can almost see their pupils distorting into dollar signs when you look into their glazed, inhuman eyes, which is one reason the bullies liked to punish them so much. Straightheads simply love labor- and time-saving devices, especially mechanical or computerized ones that somehow make others do their work for them, and, let’s face it, they’re all huge drag queens on the sly. This combination of exertive unscrupulousness, moneylust, and rampant trans-gender kinkiness was about to be launched at humanity like a bent rocketship (or a poison arrow) loaded with the wrong type of fuel and manned by unwilling, cowardly pawns. When straightheads finally clasped their clammy fingers around the swollen, throbbing gearstick of rock ‘n’ roll, that gearstick shriveled and died like a poisoned fawn, but nobody was asking, “Who killed Bambi?” Oh no, my friends, these toxopholites were firing up the barbeque and discussing hot sauce.

Hot sauce in this case is, of course, money. Beadage. Dosh, cash, wonga, Benjamins, greenbacks. The straightheads spoke the language of money, lived it breathed it, owned it wholesale. In fact, it was the only language these proto-yuppies understood. And now it was their turn. The artists who’d moved music forward for decades, in the frontline trenches at the interface between dream and reality, were gone. All that remained was a wide open market, and millions of young minds to hypnotize into believing they should buy this or that record, simply cos a man on the television told them to. While the luminosity drained from music’s last embers of originality, in the form of bands like Blondie and the B-52’s, the straightheads filled their boots and their bellies and dreamed of what would be.
One of the things that would be was New Romanticism. New Romanticism, being pretty much the first truly straightheaded venture, was almost a Trojan horse, as underneath all that explosive dyed hair and make-up there lurked some quite normal lads who just wanted to rock ‘n’ roll. And rock ‘n’ roll they did, though unfortunately the tools of their trade were more suited to a bad science fiction movie than a concert stage. Guitars and drums were suddenly ousted from the roster of musical cool, replaced by the assorted keyboards and drum-pads of electronica. It was now possible to play entire sets and not actually have to think, by programming your “instrument” to simply repeat groups of notes, large fractions of which had been purloined from the curriculum vitae of previous, more organic pioneers. Needless to say, the straighheads absolutely adored it. The individuals composing bands like Duran Duran, The Human League, Spandau Ballet, Ultravox, Visage, and The Teardrop Explodes, were sometimes normal working class blokes who’d been forced by the straightheads into applying lashings of eyeliner, eye-shadow, rouge, and together with synthesizers, frilly blouses and blue rinses in their hair, they caused a sensation.
Unfortunately, New Romantic only appealed on the mass level to those in the population who themselves embodied these girlish traits. They were the first modern musical genre to actually repulse and anger the coolest kids of their generation. Instead of running out and buying Heaven 17 records and spending all their time in front of the mirror glossing their lips, ordinary young kids were throwing missiles at the TV whenever these pretenders appeared, and were forced to take a deep look back into the chronological catalog, to a golden age called the 1960’s, for relief.
Heaven only knows who actually went out and bought those records back in the early 80s. I think I may have shoplifted a few, or bought shoplifted records off other people, but I certainly didn’t fork out my own hard-scrounged cash for crap like that. No, instead I listened to the Yardbirds, the Small Faces, the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, the Who, the Kinks, and even Herman’s Hermits, before I’d turn an ear to the New Romantics. Well, actually, that’s not completely true, cos what happened was, a genre within a genre emerged, that of the closet music listener. Basically, this meant using headphones, or turning your stereo way down in case your friends were passing in the street outside, and surreptitiously listening to certain tunes by these flamboyant purveyors of electronic faggotry. It was a risky business, and loose lips cost cred. A form of unacknowledged omerta perfused young folks everywhere, as each had his own closet faves that he daren’t ever breathe a word of. It was a New Romantic code of silence, the rudimentary tendrils of the straightheads evil plan to colonize minds and control pocketbooks.
Fortunately, those of us who spearheaded the resistance pledged loyalty to musical high-quality, on pain of death, and we kept them at bay with our 60s heroes (who by now were taking on a most purple, psychedelic tinge; we’d worked through the R&B and the British Invasion stuff, and the likes of Jimi Hendrix, 13th Floor Elevators, and Lou Reed were now the only game in town).
Presently, bands like Simple Minds and Big Country galloped out ahead of the herd, like Celtic Cossacks on guitar-bagpipe hybrid steeds, racing across the cold, dry cultural desert of the mid-80s and leaving the peacockery of New Romanticism to die in the fetid mud of its own circular straightheaded endeavors. Others, such as The Alarm, also struggled free of the electronic miasma, and followed their two big Celtic brothers, being joined in time by the likes of The Waterboys, another non-English outfit that fancied themselves to be somewhat cool, for reasons that have never been made completely clear. That these bands played real instruments appears to have been part of it, which, relatively speaking, would be understandable if they weren’t all so fucking dire. In fact, all of these Celts had one very strange thing in common, and that thing set them apart completely from the New Romantics; they all toiled under the extraordinary notion that they actually had a message (in all honesty, REO Speedwagon or an average dose of Rod Stewart pissed all over their ridiculous guitarplay, itself loaded with that same wide blue Scottish sky effect without any preposterous designs toward significance). The straightheads’ grip on the situation was never stronger, though, and as this motley band of delusional, freckled masters of mediocrity thundered apace on their unicorns, and the hippest kids of their generation angrily looked the other way, another set of Gaels joined the fray. They were to become the straightheads’ moment of supreme glory, a band propelled by pure hype and zero talent, into the contender’s position for “greatest rock ‘n’ roll band in the world”. That’s right, it was U2.
And oh, the irony, oh, Ireland! This tiny moss-covered rocky recipient of that warm river-within-an-ocean called the North Atlantic Drift is home to a quite sparkling species of equally warm hominid. The history and creativity oozing from every Celtic fort and juicy blade of chlorophyll-laden grass on Eire constitutes a jade and emerald ledger, one shot through with veins of pure gold. This is a people both downtrodden and transcendent, be it a prehistoric goldsmith who fashioned chunky rings bearing ancient, swirling pictograms, or a modern Irish bricklayer throwing a building together with the precision of an Egyptian pyramid builder. The Irish corpus callosum superbly connects its numerical and artistic hemispheres, forging a wild and precise form of self-expression, a whirlwind heavy with both jewels and trowels, and nowhere is this more evident than in its music. What many lineages experience as a furry, green, little used bridge across the brain, the Irish genome utilizes as a veritable autobahn. Since before time began, this bi-hemispherical vantage has been a hot-bed of dance, of song, of instrumentation, lived and breathed with almost unparalleled accomplishment and feeling. In the modern era, bands such as Them, Thin Lizzy, Stiff Little Fingers, and The Boomtown Rats have exploded from that green kaleidoscope, their baffling streamlined catalogs studded with material both timeless and timely. And the beauty of the place is that whether you’re sixteen or sixty, there is always a pub crammed with jiving devils that’ll stand you a pint and listen to your song. These people know a good time, and they fucking well know their music. They are biochemically superior to most other breeds, and will never walk by a ringing payphone without answering it, under any circumstances. They are just the same as you, really, but you when you are in a fantastically good mood. This magical place, my reeling friends, is where that piece of dogshit called U2 crawled from. Go figure.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not given to generalizations, especially those which encompass entire nations, millions strong. I am a firm believer that the population of any city, town or village, be it in Scotland, Peru, China, or Zimbabwe, is composed of a blend of personalities, a genetic configuration expressed via the actions and words of its denizens, and in every corner of the globe we have a certain degree of diversity. But, that said, the Irish seem possessed of a most inordinate tendency toward authenticity, honesty, and happiness. I’m sure the city streets and country roads of Dublin, Limerick and Tralee have their share of proper miserable bastards, but overall that fraction appears generally smaller than do the populations of other industrialized nations. But we are side-tracking here, so back to the point.

There are people alive today who will tell you, quite seriously, that U2 are better than the Rolling Stones. If you are reading this and the previous sentence failed to switch on your incredulity button, then you’re either a fool or an extremely jaded and open-minded person, but a fool nonetheless. U2 are better than the Rolling Stones? Excuse me, but I do not recall ever receiving that particular fucking memo. Apparently, the world passed me by sometime in the early 90s, when this type of belief system engulfed civilization. But all things must pass. Since the death of New Romanticism and the rise of the phenomenon called U2 – the straightheads answer to the Beatles – the music industry has slowly been forced to come back to the people, its tail between its legs, in search of actual talent. But beggars can’t be choosers, and what they managed to drag from the burning wreckage of the late-80’s and early-90s wasn’t pretty and it was impossible to identify the victims, they were busted up so bad.
Again, it was difficult to identify them because they exhibited no discernible consistency, no characteristics in common to actually dredge up some semblance of their being a cohesive genre for kids to rock to. Instead, there were only the marred and twisted sunglasses of Bono, reflected in the headlights like an indestructible rabbit in the face of a plastic car full of pretenders and nobodies.
That’s right, a plastic car, a toy thing, a puny replica. Sid Vicious had stupidly driven those old pioneers off to Nowhere in Particular, never to be seen again. A duplicate of that strange polished vehicle simply had to be constructed. The kids who’d been “looking the other way” for several years while U2 wrought their special brand of havoc on the minds of the young, had come to depend almost entirely on that old template, the blues-rock riff, cos quite honestly that’s all anyone ever really needed, until the straightheads took over and tried to take it away. It’s true that Bowie, Roxy Music, and some of the weirder garage people had evolved some musical sounds very unique, but these were exceptions, and they generated their own set of imitators.
These committed young musicians now set about the grim task of rebuilding a vehicle that was true to that archetype, and slowly something half-decent emerged from the chaos of the previous two decades. The music industry was faced with a horrible choice: The mindless, careless brainwash that was U2, or a bunch of actual musicians who are only able to produce copycat sounds from previous eras. What to do, what to do..?
Sometimes, right before something momentous happens, we sense a snap in the air, a silent, joyous moment of complete objectivity that is suddenly shattered by the screams caused by the labor pains when a new thing is born. In the late 1980s, the cool kids had been delving frantically back through time for almost a decade, in a bid to experience quality sounds, and those kids had grown into masterful purveyors of a hybrid thing, a queerbeast that danceth under the moon and appeared terrifyingly before one in the night. The Queerbeast danceth, that is what the Queerbeast doth do. And what a queer beast it was, too. Horned and hoofed, athletically obese, with scales and fur and vaguely luminous patches around its wrists and neck, this thing crawled from under the standing stones of northwestern England with only one thing in mind; to get people royally fucked up. The Queerbeast was neither a quadruped nor an anthropoid, and when it stood on any two of its several legs, it attained many hands in height. Across its asexual belly there jiggled a mass of technicoloured teats, each offering a different, and quite unique, elixir from the animal depths of its mysterious reproductive system. Its eyes, large and ellipsoid as they were, exuded feline predatory and motherly nurturing instincts simultaneously, and on its many feet it wore expensive trainers manufactured by fantastic, unknowable designers. A sound issued from the Queerbeast, a sound both menacing and beautiful, which activated people like the tune of the piper to the rats of Hamlyn. People were set on the move by this odd Frankenstein entity, and they followed it. They followed it to the nightclubs, and to the warehouses and factories of the dark, satanic rural hinterlands, and all at once the organic and the electronic were molecularly fused in a great wash of orgasmic conception.
A new genre had once again been invented by the people, and nobody called it anything at first, cos nobody thought it needed a name. Many of the proponents of this thing hailed from the Manchester area, but many didn’t. One thing was for sure; The Stone Roses, The Happy Mondays, The Inspiral Carpets, The Charlatans, 808 State, Northside, The Farm, The La’s, The Soup Dragons, and many more, were in plentiful supply and this was no flash in the pan. This was something else.

Manchester had seen its share of proto-versions of this thing since the 70’s, in the form of Joy Division, and then later in The Smiths, but now everybody seemed to have grasped a form of cool unseen collectively since the late-60’s, and the only thing to rival its novelty was its contagiousness. England’s northwest had been the seat of the Northern Soul movement, also in the 70s, whose flared-trousered army enjoyed nothing more than amphetamine-fueled all-nighters at clubs like the Twisted Wheel, and Wigan Casino. Northern Soul’s unique stylists were among the very first to adopt the effeminate “wedge” hairstyle, baggy jeans and boat-pumps, which were to become inextricably synonymous with the later soccer “Casuals”, and indeed it was these scallywags to whom the scene called “Madchester” truly belonged.
The whole scene became a celebration, a collective enlightenment whose flames flickered like delicious tongues, drawing all into its orbit. As droves of young people flocked to warehouse parties, and the nightclubs drafted in tight posses of a new breed of DJ, one skilled in the purveyance of the light show and the seamless blend from one track to the next, it became obvious that music’s Dark Age had finally passed. Or had it?
While the world went Ecstasy-crazy and danced all night, the straightheads skulked in the shadows, plotting to reclaim their crown. Their cannon-fodder was fired hard at the walls of Madchester, in the form of Rick Astley (a Mancunian himself), Jason Donovan, Michael Bolton, and in April ’89, hot on the heels of 1988’s “Summer of Love”, the straightheads wheeled out their ultimate killing machine; U2 and BB King, together on the same record! Now, I’m a gentleman and a sporting one at that, and I can tell you right now that as I sat befuddled and hypnotized in the pulsating pubs of Manchester, this jukebox Trojan Horse took us all very much by surprise. And the worse thing was we almost liked it.

As this thing, this unspeakably gigantic vision, trundled towards our psychedelic fortress, one or two heads turned in bewilderment, while the rest danced madly via their chemically assisted metabolism. But slowly, more and more heads began to turn, and rumors spread like wildfire through the castle. It was difficult to discern what it was at first; it certainly wasn’t made of ebony and ivory, but there was a suggestion of the media-lunar about it, an immeasurable ball of stone, half of which lay in shadow and was invisible, the other half gleaming like the vicious smile of a psychopathic circus clown. Love had come to town, like a primeval, cratered asteroid headed directly for the group heart.
For the past several years, the kids had been forging their mighty weapons, laying strange and unlikely alloys on the musical anvil and pounding them into weird forms, hybrid actualizations of the organic and the electronic. They had succeeded in overcoming the once insurmountable credibility barrier placed in the path of electronica, by dovetailing its minutiae with elegance and brute force to the undulating tendrils of the old-fashioned monkey beat. Where it was once believed that there was no substitute for the chaotic, rhythmic reports of pure human neurology, there was now the realization that this neurology could be grafted onto something mechanical, and together the two could live in harmony, like a knight and his armor.
The straightheads killing machine threatened to undo all this good work, by catapulting its heavyweight bi-chromatic orb into the heart of Fort Madchester, destroying their technicoloured sounds and crushing their light-shows like tinsel at a Christmas party in a Salford high-rise suddenly turned extremely violent. The crater from this impact cleaved the destiny of music like a reproductive isolating mechanism, causing two species to emerge from one. The denizens of Madchester continued to dance even as their habitat was fragmented and torn asunder by the killing machine, and presently the energy drained from their cohesive dreamworld and off to its bifurcated fate. Madchester was no more, and the straightheads congratulated themselves on a job well done.
But things that are alive will never stop changing, and as one of the new species took off on a totally mechanized mission, the other, more organic species generated reinforcements in the form of bands like Oasis and Travis, and a new age dawned, a product of the cleansing that comes after war. Noel and Liam Gallagher were the ones who finally unveiled the replica vehicle in all its popular glory; a bizarre, teal-colored, slightly out of style thing with a suggestion of a streamlined shape and a tendency to play tricks on the mind. It looked bad, then it looked good, then it looked bad again, but overall it appeared wearable, like a sweater your Auntie Maggie buys you for Christmas that could elicit compliments or mockery when you wear it in the pub, and there was only one way to find out. It wasn’t the original, Sid had seen to that, but at least it was something.
The Brothers Gallagher jumped in and revved her up good and loud (after a brief fistfight to decide who should drive) before zooming off across the land to pick up more like themselves, bands who would come shivering and blinking into the light, having sheltered from the machinations of an entire decade in the dark.

Football casual hooligans. What are they, and where did they begin their storied existence in this world? For many, the story of the casual football hooligans began in the council estates of Liverpool, specifically Scotland Road, where a post-Punk miasma mutated into a raucous Soul-Boy lookalike, one that laughed at the world and wore jelly sandals, big mohair sweaters, and skin-tight shitstopper jeans. This bizarre ensemble, sasquatch upper body attached to spindle-legged lower, was crowned with the most unlikely hairdo – the wedge, which has its own slew of debate and speculation as to its origins. The wedge hairstyle has been described as a most unlikely candidate for the hairstyle of casual hooligans, due to its efemminate look. These guys may have been into Bowie, but they weren’t gay! The fact is, the wedge hairstyle had been sported by Northern Soul Boys and European males for years before the casuals adopted it, and in its original “casual” form was a long, baggy, free-swingin’ affair, unlike the later tidier, shorter, more lacquered-looking versions favoured by lads outside the northwest. To this day, David Bowie is credited with inspiring Liverpool’s earliest casuals via the cover of his Low album, but in many ways the wedge, or flick, as it was known in North Manchester, was simply another continental accoutrement to the rest of the uniform, much of which had continental designer written all over it. Continental designer sportswear has forever been the focus and defining aspect of the casual culture, but people who weren’t there to see it in its prototypical form miss an important point: they wore jeans, too.
In Manchester in the mid-70s, a small population of Northern Soul disciples took to wearing polo shirts, baggy trousers with narrow bottoms, and boat-pumps. They, too sported the wedge, and were nicknamed Perry Boys, due to their fondness for the Fred Perry polo, which they wore during the summer. In the winter they wore long-sleeved polo shirts, made by Peter Werth, and it was this item that became a symbol of the early expression of so-called casual culture. Football hooligans and Northern Soul Boys weren’t necessarily the same people back in the mid-70s, but as time passed, and the glam flares and goon collars became evermore ridiculous, the uniform naturally fell into the vacuum left behind on the terraces of Old Trafford, where once the bootboys had stood. This shrinking of collars and reducing of trouser-cuffs was a universal phenomenon in England at the time, and, coupled with the love of stylish Roxy Music and Bowie, the football casuals very slowly realised they had an identity – one which was completely without portrayal or reportage in the local or national media. Casual culture was a Nameless Thing in 1978 and 1979, and it remained such through 1980 and 1981; the Scallies of Liverpool and Everton, and the Boys of Manchester shared a secret, one they relished and baptised with blood, wrought by the Stanley knives and baseball bats which were so fashionable at the time. But it was the Peter Werth, along with a couple of other accessories, that created the first universal casual hooligan look on the football terraces.

The original Perry Boys hooligan uniform was this: Peter Werth long-sleeved polo shirt, preferably burgundy, but sometimes black or blue, with thin hoops and an unusually low shoulder seam; Lois jeans; Adidas Stan Smith training shoes, and lastly a long, wild wedge hairstyle, often dyed auburn, which matched the burgundy polos (and the burgundy chunky-knit fishermen’s jumpers casuals also favoured).

Burgundy was a major colour in the football casual scheme back in 1979. It is difficult to say why this was the case; it just was. Perhaps the colour offered a form of neutrality, being neither Manchester United, City, Liverpool, or Everton. These characters certainly socialised outside football, particularly in pubs, clubs, and youth clubs, and the wearing of football colours was a big no-no. Whatever the reason, the layered auburn-rinsed wedge, the burgundy Peter Werth, and dark blue Lois were the order of the day. In Liverpool, the jeans were worn as tight as possible, betraying their post-Punk drainpipes look, while in Manchester the jeans tended to be slightly baggier, but only slightly. Both cities wore the Adidas Stan Smith trainer, which, according to Robert Wade Smith (a trainer sales-super-specialist), sold a “phenomenal” 2,000 pairs in the run-up to Christmas, 1979. In Manchester, the Stan Smith made a similar impression, and the unlikely -looking shoe was all the rage. The Stan Smith almost resembled a leather low-top baseball boot, and was the last suspect for the footwear of football hooligans. But it was a cool-looking shoe, and when combined with the Peter Werth, the wedge, and the Lois jeans, there was a synergy that bespoke belonging, belonging to a new style tribe, one which was a Nameless Thing. In other regions of Britain during this time, there are those who claim to also have been discovering the casual styles, but this is quite unlikely in many cases, as the towns in question were often utterly incapable of importing, retailing, or even recognising casual style when they saw it. During 1979, a Mod revival occurred in Britain, and it is probably this that these individuals are remembering, in an embellished form, due to wishful thinking, in light of the longevity and “rightness” exuded by those who later embraced the casual hooligan lifestyle in its myriad aspects.
Anybody who belongs to an underground movement feels a thrill of recognition upon seeing other members of that same movement or club, but in the case of the football casual, this thrill often accompanied the doing of violence to those who wore the uniform, or else “mobbing up” with others of the same allegiance (usually to a football team, or in the case of Merseysiders simply being from Liverpool and having an awareness of dressing different was good enough reason to gang up) to attack outsiders. Men living in Liverpool today claim that the casual movement began as early as 1977, when they say they travelled to continental Europe to watch Liverpool FC play, observed Europeans sporting expensive designer wear and wedge hairstyles, and promptly bought, or shoplifted, some of this style, which is quite a believable response. Some claim that Stan Smiths and Lois jeans were “in” at this time (1977), but this is very unlikely, as Liverpudlians were wearing those clothes over 2 years later. The same can be said for the claims that Merseysiders were commonly seen in Adidas Nastase, ATP, and Grand Slam training shoes in 1979, which were of a quite superior style and substance than the Stan Smith, the cheapest of which (Nastase) found its way into British sports shops (in Manchester, though it’s possible London stores may have inadvertently imported them for tennis players in the capital) around late 1980, early 1981. Robert Wade Smith, who was practically revered in Liverpool for his opening a store which sold rare Adidas trainers, provides the greatest evidence for the timeliness of the Stan Smith with his account of the shoe’s massive popularity in late 1979. Stan Smiths were briefly usurped by Kio’s Riders, a lookalike shoe available in various colours, through 1980, and indeed these non-sports shoes, along with another non-sports shoe, Kickers, formed the main competition to Adidas during that time. Not since the very early days of Casual, when youths wore Pod boaters, had a non-sporting shoe come to the fore. The point being made here is that claims by Liverpudlians that they were football casual hooligans in 1977, are to be taken with a pinch of salt. Am I, Ian Hough, even fit to be speaking about this phenomenon at all? I’m not even from Manchester, according to some people. But the truth is out there, and seek and ye shall find: There is no question that in Liverpool the casual culture was born, and that in Manchester an extension of so-called Perry Boy culture mutated into casual culture around 1979 (approximately 6 months after Liverpudlians had established a self-awareness of the movement), but it was in late ’79, early ’80 that a universal uniform was conceived in both cities, and the first true inter-city rivalry occurred, enacted by two seperate groups driven by an identical sartorial-cum-football hooligan sensibility.

We live in a changing world. Life, by its very nature, dictates this; everything is constantly being replaced by something else, be it waste products generated from what was there before, or the simple evolutionary mechanism by which an organism or environment is rearranged. These rearrangements are not all beneficial, as modern football supporters unceasingly remind us. The moaning about all-seater stadia and the so-called prawn sandwich brigade occupy our every day personal headlines, but we are becoming jaded even to this, because the world demands we adjust the focus of our woe and get with the programme. Time catches up with you, and in time that fact is subject to a compounded acceleration. The fact is the actual changing is itself changing at an ever-greater rate. Various random and non-random factors have conspired throughout the history of the world to bring about all kinds of catastrophic and beneficial events, many of which occurred long before humankind was a twinkle in a prehistoric monkey’s ball-bag.

The extinct football terraces, those megalithic structures so deeply lamented by today’s older footy crowd, existed for about 100 years, before certain irresistible forces came into the equation and consigned them to history’s dustbin. But 100 years isn’t a bad innings, given the exponential rate at which things are being replaced and updated in this dynamic living world of ours. In fact, those terraces were based on a design already millennia old. Once upon a time, it was commonplace for things to remain the same for thousands of times longer than a mere century. Take the dinosaurs. Those giant lizards ruled the world for 160 million years. Imagine that, 160 million years without change, just the same old scaly bastards roaming about, eating the same old mammals, smaller dinosaurs, plants, etc, the whole drama enacted on a primeval stage frozen in geologic time. And then something wiped them off the map overnight; it was time for a new cast of characters.
Humans have been subject to the same monotonous grind, and I’m not just talking about the cavemen, who pissed and arsed about hunting and gathering for two million years of our bipedal Homo lineage, till they stumbled on the secret of agriculture. The earliest civilisations endured millennia without even changing the style of their hats. When the two kingdoms of Egypt were unified around 3000BC, their two forms of respective royal headgear were juxtaposed into each other as a symbol of this union. It was the biggest news for thousands of years. So next time you think about how much you miss the old red and white bobble-hats, and what a load of cunts the jesters in their jingle-bells and asses ears look, spare a thought to those who had to make do with fifty generations of the same old shit, even if it did look good.
Subsequent civilisations, such as the Greeks and the Romans, enjoyed a similarly static form of unchanging existence during the times they shone on this earth, until the world caught up with them. Their amphitheatres coined a style that was to prevail well into the future due to its impeccable geometric approach to the business of attending a public spectacle. By the time the British Empire emerged, the entire world was reasonably capable of applying the latest technology to their designs for domination, which is what makes the British Empire so extraordinarily admirable; we weren’t humans in a world of lagging apes, we had our work cut out, but we still managed to travel in a fair-sized crew and dish it out to the locals, be they Maori, Kalahari, or Wampanoag, while the Spanish, French, and Portuguese variously challenged our iron grip on the situation. And still the architecture of a stadium retained all of that Ancient Greek quality.

Industrialisation, which was born properly in Manchester and copied by every cunt else, meant that Britain suddenly exploded as a global force to be reckoned with, and we proceeded to pummel this innocent green orb with our poisonous grey arsenal until it pretty much threw the towel in and waved the white flag simultaneously. The printing press and gaslight inevitably gave way to other, more rapid, forms of communication and enlightenment, and before long humankind had embarked on a mad race to broadcast and illuminate its twisted findings across the world in what came to be called Real Time. Football stadiums were fitted with amazingly powerful floodlights, which enabled people to watch games during the hours of darkness, and cameras were mounted in special compartments high above the crowd from which the match could be transmitted instantaneously to an audience millions strong.
But technology’s assault on our once innocent habitat has meant that these changes come with ever-greater frequency, including changes to our recreational venues. In the 1950s (just over half a century ago) it was common for doting couples to indulge in a day out at the pictures in town, followed by the match at Old Trafford, followed by a great night out in some frothing Salford dancehall. But wood and tarpaper was always gonna be rendered extinct by the chemical tsunami rolling across the Western World, specifically aluminium and stainless steel. Once that monumental cantilever was assembled along United Road for the 1966 World Cup, and then the extension of that across the Scoreboard End in the early 70s, an alien technology had been wrought upon the simpleman’s matchday, forever transforming British expectations of what a Saturday afternoon’s footy should look, sound, and feel like. But this realisation wasn’t necessarily universal; many grounds at this point had already attained a standard and form that would remain largely stagnant, reflecting Time’s tendency to do balls all unless prompted and prodded by the evolutionary spikiness of Necessary Change.
“Improvements” were made (and let’s face it, encouraged) to football grounds throughout the 70s, most of which concentrated on expansion rather than true improvement, and a new generation of hugely terraced death-bowls was inflicted upon the working classes, in those cities that could afford it. Britain’s youth lapped this up, and football hooliganism emerged as a very real phenomenon, magnetised and distilled, around the random crush-barriers and tunnels describing those curved terraced gradients which became hooliganism’s tailor-made spawning grounds. Heysel and Hillsborough put an end to all that, and the clever monkey was suddenly forced to rethink how he spent his spare time, as the energy contained in football crowds had finally proved a lethal uncoiling tangent capable of generating death and injury on a vast scale.
In truth, both the Heysel and Hillsborough disasters had been caused by ageing or inept stadiums; the wall that crumbled at Heysel was massively sub-par for a European Cup Final (or any other game which might attract in excess of two thousand fans) and the basic design of the entrance tunnel at Hillsborough’s Leppings Lane End was far too voluminous for the small pens it fed bodies into. Anyone with half a brain could see that the stadiums, or more correctly those responsible for declaring them fit for use, were the real culprits. That Liverpool Football Club was involved in both incidents seemed to indicate some form of mystic significance, a protracted karma played out by uncontrollable forces, but which was really just a horrible coincidence. Either of the two disasters could have happened to any English club. But the fact is, change was due, and those crush barriers and terraces were over-ripe enough to fall from the tree of progress, disappearing forever in numerous weigh-ins at scrapyards up and down the country and metabolised into other forms for the benefit of lower worlds, like rotting fruit falling from a great oak and being taken up by resident soil bacteria and small animals. We can only hope the lads working the demolitions copped for a decent earner, under the watchful eyes of their millionaire employers, the robber football barons.
An entire culture was razed and re-entered into the ecological mix of England’s material kaleidoscope, while new forms emerged; plastic seats, new stands, megastores, and a radically altered schedule, dictated by technology – in this case television. As the class of support slyly “improved” along with the grounds themselves, matchday took on an unfamiliar Americanised commerciality, while people speculated about a “European Super League”. This European Super League slowly enlarged, and many English fans came to restrict their football-watching to Euro-aways, while UEFA suits battled to control its growth. The seamless transition from European Cup to European Champions’ League occurred in lock-step with the greater march of economic and technological evolution, and the Super League was a reality before many realised it, even those who actually attended matches.

The domestic league enjoyed a massive cash injection from the middle-class all- seater prices now being charged by clubs. The game remained the same, the dimensions of pitches went unchanged, and the English Premier League began to ooze a new kind of football, one that completely utilised the park, and saw world-class athletes knocking the ball about magnificently. Manchester United just happens to be the one club that has dominated the Premiership. It could have been Arsenal, but not quite. Today, in 2007, Arsenal have a brand-new stadium, one whose capacity (60,000) is a significant 17,000 lower than that of Old Trafford. This constitutes over 25% more seats at Old Trafford, all of which are filled, week in and week out. Nowhere as much as in Manchester has the switch up to world-class soccer been exploited and mastered. United proved to be an unstoppable powerhouse through the 90s and into the millennium, one that went from strength to strength, both on and off the pitch, and the possibilities seemed limitless. The fact that United appeared to embody a form of mythic socialistic utopia in that its own fans were in financial control of its affairs, served to enchant and foster a sense of righteousness in beholders.
The wealthiest football club in the world, one of the most successful business models in existence, sat up there at the top of the tree like a red toffee apple, difficult to believe but nonetheless true. The “Peoples’ Republik of Mancunia” banners hanging from the upper tiers of their vast stadium glowed with a unique pride in the club and the city which had provided so much in the way of silverware and satisfaction. But in the eat-or-be-eaten world of high-finance and aggressive takeovers, this apple appeared unguarded, innocent, and ripe for the picking. All that was required was for the aggressor to acquire the minimum percentage of shares in the club necessary for an obligatory takeover, and among the swirling wheels and deals of United’s higher echelons, this became a possibility. Like a script from The Sopranos, United’s Godfather, Sir Alex Ferguson claimed to have been given a 50% share in a stud horse by Irish racehorse owner John Magnier, the major shareholder at Old Trafford at the time. Magnier denied Ferguson’s claim, and an internal war escalated that saw United’s business practices and Ferguson’s personal life come under a harsh spotlight beam delivered by the Irish camp from Coolmore stud farm, many of whom believed to be a notch above Ferguson in the Big Boys’ League. The feud came at a time when large scale rebuilding of the squad was necessary, and the monster that was Manchester United began to wobble a bit.
The idea of a self-owned club, one of such magnitude as United, is a very pleasant one indeed, but in retrospect it was a naïve and somewhat daft expectation that failed to see the sharks coming around the curve. Malcolm Glazer was one such predator, one used to doing battle with monsters, even if he didn’t always win. Aside from making numerous failed takeover bids for companies as different as Harley Davidson and the kitchen giant Formica, Glazer had specialised in a diverse array of successful ventures, including food processing, marine supplies, and energy exploration. Fittingly, he managed to combine all of these when he bought the troubled Zapata oil and gas company, and diversified into fish protein. Hydrocarbons, protein, food, fish, and oil, are all really just words to describe the raw components of life, and Glazer had his finger on the pulse. He knew Manchester United was the prize in world football, and he wanted nothing less than to own the monster outright. Was the food processing mogul aiming to make mincemeat out of Britain’s biggest club? There was resistance to his scheme, but in time the American’s dorsal fin was the only point of reference on the horizon, and it was heading our way.
And so Glazer battled another monster, confident in the knowledge he was taking on a behemoth and not a leviathan. The Leviathan was a scaly nightmare, a Biblical sea-monster with giant teeth that sits in a dark cave at the bottom of our collective unconscious, and you do not fuck with it. It was created on the Fifth Day (three days before Manchester) and it immediately presented a serious problem for the future well-being of the Earth. According to those who believe in such things, even God wouldn’t go near it unless he’d had a skinful, as he’d already killed its mate in order to prevent the vicious beasts from procreating, and Leviathan was proper ill about that. As myth has it, the Hebrew God eventually slew the thing, and made a great canopy from its beautiful skin, which served as a tent in which the righteous enjoyed a sumptuous feast.
The Behemoth, on the other hand, was a somewhat harmless and peaceful terrestrial creature, despite its immense size and strength. It liked to amble about, munching grass, and generally sighing contentedly. Perhaps it even owned a banner, one that said something like, “Welcome to Behemothland. I am the King of the Castle”. Either way, it was slow and trusting and fortunately (for the Behemoth) it could only be killed by its creator, the Hebrew God Eli, or Yahweh, or something. This contented primal hippo in many ways represents the proud lads and lasses who basked in the great bowl of Trafford prior to the monster-slayer’s arrival. Glazer reared up from the spangling surf of opportunity and soon had a Behemoth hoof in his buccaneering mouth, which quickly became two, and finally three. The placid beast had been wandering far too close to the danger zone for too long, and it was only a matter of time before one of Glazer’s species made a bid on that vicious beach, and pulled Behemoth down into the depths of debt. By coincidence, Glazer’s a Hebrew (but I’m not sure if he’s a God) and he went to work on the herbivorous Behemoth, and consequently, with the help of John Magnier, came to own it.

There are people who actually blame Alex Ferguson for the Glazer takeover, citing the racehorse conflict with Magnier and his business partner JP McManus as the reason the so-called Coolmore Mafia unloaded their shares onto Glazer’s wagon train. What these people fail to realise is that without Ferguson at the helm the previous decade or two prior to this little argument, United may well have sunk deeper into the maelstrom of mediocrity they were destined for before he arrived at Old Trafford. We might have been competing with the unremarkable likes of pre-Abramovic Chelsea for honours supremacy, while Arsenal chased Liverpool’s lead, which by now would be utterly insurmountable for United. Everybody remembers Sir Alex’s statement that “knocking Liverpool off their fucking perch!” was his greatest triumph, and for this reason alone it is an insult to hold the man responsible for what was a vulnerable financial set-up all along.
It’s common knowledge that Magnier isn’t much of a football supporter, much less of one than Glazer’s own sons, and all these factors contributed to the privatisation of the United family. The truth is, Manchester United’s on the pitch activities weren’t in the least affected by the affair, and Glazer’s second season in charge saw a vast improvement in United’s performances. The predator hadn’t mangled his quarry, but had rather acquired it. Like the mother crocodile handling her eggs in those awesome jaws, Glazer intended to protect his little investment, not destroy it. Of course, it’s not about the footballing pedigree nor the sporting culture or country of origin of those who took us over. It’s about the debt. Glazer could have been born and raised in the heart of Manchester, supported United all his life, yet still been a cold-hearted businessman. This personality type is not confined to Americans or non-Mancunians, it is everywhere there is a market for anything that isn’t nailed down – and when you’ve got the know-how nothing is nailed down. Money is the root of all evil, and the Devil and the deep blue sea on the Manchester United crest of arms was never as appropriate as it is today. The shark from Tampa Bay had pulled us under, and the light was fading fast. In disgust and hope, FC United of Manchester was formed, and a few thousand lads peeled off from the sinking ship they loved and chose instead to frolic in their little home-made lifeboat. That lifeboat bounced and careered up through the lower divisions, like a miniscule behemoth sperm seeking the egg of fate with which it might fuse and create something of note. Many followers of FC rediscovered a Saturday that once more exuded freedom and fun, something which had been missing from English football since long before Glazer arrived on the scene. That sought-after egg may yet turn out to be the same one the mother croc is protecting in its own twisted fashion, should the two worlds of football ever collide somewhere down the road. After all, the egg of most species is many orders of magnitude larger than the sperm, and there are numerous plants which engage in self-fertilisation via an alternation of generations between an egg-and-bollocks-based gametophyte and a free-floating much larger sporophyte generation. This fusion remains the prayer of those partying in the lifeboat, the crazed, optimistic spirits who almost want to leave United behind completely but know they never can. Instead, they dance, drink, smoke, and make merry, on real football terraces, mobbing the boozers and tiny train stations of northwest villages and towns, drinking away that which haunts their cloven hearts.
We are from up north, and as such we do not like to be in debt. Much less so than other people. But being in debt is fast becoming the way to be, and in the new way of thinking the scale of the debt reflects the size of one’s town halls. Taking risks is part of the American mindset; it goes all the way back to those religious freaks, the Pilgrims, who went in search of the New Jerusalem and the dosh contained therein. Exploitation is at the back of it. Whether you’re pulling the land from the under the Indians (and building their reservations on disused uranium mines then forcing them to live there), or chopping down every tree in ten million acres, exploitation is the way to go if you’re a Yank. If you can sing, or paint, or write, or dance, or count, or run, or jump, or cook – whatever it is – you should exploit that, too. Exploit the environment, the people in it, and exploit yourself. That’s the American way. Discretion and responsibility are the traits of faggots in hardline America. Worrying about the future is for women, not men. Common-sense is measured by how much money you’ve got, not by whether you know how to fiddle an electric meter, fake an iron scorch on a dress for the insurance, or jib a train. They are different from us, and ne’er the twain shall meet. They are spoilt, and we are fucking destitute by comparison, however many portable tellies and microwaves our kids’ bedrooms might contain. With the exception of bears (used for baiting and betting) we killed all the large mammals in Europe a thousand years ago, and chopped down all the trees soon after. Some stuck-up Lord or what-have-you owns every square foot of earth here, and we pay ground rent to that effect. America’s huge forests, mountains, and deserts still swarm with large beasts, and there’s places where acres cost next to nothing, ‘cos it’s way out there, away from water and provisions. Some people claim that the frontier was officially closed a century ago, but a new frontier has opened up; the Plastic Frontier. Plastic is a byword for “false” and for “credit card”, and this is most appropriate. For the truth is, the frontier did close a century ago, and the resources dried up, but the stupid fucking yanks failed to notice. Being spoilt is about more than just owning trivial electronic devices, and common-sense is about more than how much beadage you’ve got. It’s about much bigger things than that. It’s about mass migration, ecological chemistry, and evolution.
We English were the recipients of thousands of years of development, and this migration of knowledge passed through us like an invisible wave, before moving westward, taking our contribution with it, to America. In a way, we have reached middle-age as a culture, as Mediterranean cultures reached it before us. What they must suffer in the form of drunken English jibbers and electric meter-fiddlers (sussed to fuck, aren’t we?), we must suffer in the form of spoilt yanks who can afford to literally buy United and use it as an entertaining side-bar, while United (whoever that is these days) foots the bill. When a youthful culture coincides with a supposed superabundance of natural resources, that’s a recipe for spoilt brattism. A very wise man in India once said “only change is constant”, and he was right. For in time, the children of Mamucium will grow jaded and the plight of the Behemoth will be irrelevant. The tide will turn as Great Satan moves back across the world like a vast plastic wall of filthy water, a child of millennia delivering the ultimate slap in the face to the parents who bore and raised him, the collective Western World. Don’t blame it on Fergie. Don’t blame it on the moonlight. Blame it on Behemoth, and hope that, when all that shite has washed away, a little lifeboat has fused to its target, a great lesson was learned, and a new beast is born. Until then…

There’s an argument over who started the global sportswear fetish, but I beg to differ. There’s no argument; it surfaced in northwest England in the late 1970s, having developed underground for long before that. But how did it begin? If you have 300 seconds to spare, I will tell you.
In early-70s Manchester, Northern Soul’s Modish disciples took to wearing Fred Perry polo shirts while dancing their brains out on amphetamine sulphate in the Northern Capital’s myriad clubs. These places were primeval; dance-floors pulsating with a collective accelerated biochemistry like a mass of quivering, stroboscopic protoplasm. The Manchester Northern Soul crowd were among the first to utilise a branding logo – the Fred Perry laurel wreath – which earned them the nickname “Perry Boys” (as opposed to the simpler “Soul Boys” in London and Liverpool). The Perry was matched with narrow cords and long-sleeved polo shirts or baggy chunky knit cardigans that reeked of opulence. On the feet went boat shoes and gym pumps. Their sartorial diet was a rare one, but they were made of the right stuff, and being made of the right stuff was most important. They performed unprecedented break-dance gymnastics in their underground havens, modelling the latest gear from Europe like a colony of luminescent microbes consuming but forced to remain a small population, hemmed in by useless materials like bri-nylon, crimplene, and acrylic. In other words, total shit for peasants. The original Perry Boys wore classic wedge hairstyles; huge fringes cut back at geometric angles perpendicular to their foreheads, parallel to their cheekbones, up over their ears toward a layered pile protruding backwards like a spinning top, energy-fed by the impulsive flicking of the fringe. The physicality of the dancing demanded well-cut clothes, preferably ones designed for swift directional change and arm swinging while retaining an essence of style.
This is where tennis came in. The Perries discovered sportswear for its dance-ability above all else, but as the 70s progressed, and their little brothers modelled replica Man United kits in the streets, two rivers of fashion coalesced and overflowed like a stream swarming with varicoloured specimens. Perry, Admiral, and Umbro were products of brand marketing, a strategy that the Soul- and footy-crazed Manc youth had no genetic resistance to; those specimens were hooked. Football kits were red or blue (with the odd interesting away strip causing a sensation) but Perry transcended terrace tribalism via multiple colourways. Though dovetailed to music more than football, Perry Boys enjoyed apex predator status in Manchester clubs. Perries equalled danger, the polo shirts, and girl’s haircuts functioning as a warning to would-be prey. Northern Soul gave way to Punk and New Wave between 1976 and 1978, and a hybrid species emerged from the sediment. The decomposition and riverine transport of previous life-forms is what provides fertile ground with its nutrients, and the global sportswear fetish has Manchester’s Perry Boys and replica football kits as its Tigris and Euphrates, the former being the originators, the latter the messengers.
When Adidas t-shirts and Kick training shoes first trickled across the Channel around 1978, the novelty of football-type sportswear not exclusively red or blue dawned in Manchester. But it is impossible to escape the grip of football in that city; however gay and fashion-conscious and addicted to club-life you are, football’s manic shadow will engulf and own you, like a black hole in black fabric. It’s a black thing, Soul, and when football and Soul collide, evolution is inevitable; Mancs spurned the ridiculous Punk fashions, preferring a hybrid sport and casual look, and by mid-1979 an army of baby bruvvers had transplanted the culture into the clamour of the football terraces via the grooves trammelled by Inter-City. Where the Mancs favoured plain but well-made textiles, Liverpool’s post-Punk scallies had donned big sasquatch jumpers, drainpipe jeans, and sandals, cos it looked cool and casual. Punk was too London for them. The scruffy, spiky Punk do spawned wild wedge variations on the electric Soul boy template. Underground clubs held secrets, but rampaging mobs of hundreds of kids wearing windswept wedge hairstyles and continental street- and sportswear cannot be ignored. And so the message was transmitted.
Adidas was the answer and Bowie and Roxy Music provided the soundtrack. But what did these creatures call themselves? Mancunians in the know in 1979 recognised Perries when they saw them, and the question “Anyone for Perry Boys?” was answered in the affirmative. But they were only half-right. It was a Nameless Thing, borne of disparate fragments that drifted together amid the chaos and ooze of late-70s natural selection. Natural selection is a non-random process. This was no accident; we knew what we liked, we liked how it made us feel, and animals whose pelt was the wrong design or material went extinct.
Compared to neighbouring Liverpool, Manchester’s gothic and industrial architecture looked brooding and oppressed, with a distinct lack of arabesques and other unnecessaries: Manchester cinemas and nightclubs resembled factories, and an underground record label cleverly adopted this camouflaged approach. Its sooty protagonists prowled Piccadilly Gardens like peppered moths, fusing with the Stanley-knife wielding Nameless Thing bouncing along in formation, becoming half hipster-half tennis icon. Music, fashion, and football hooliganism was an old trident, but this version turned Manchester’s credibility spotlight on in a new way.
In 1980, Scousers already had the superficial luxury of a national identity, plus physically beautiful buildings. Their chirpy accent lodged firmly in the popular imagination right next to the cockney sparrer, courtesy of four fab mopheads. In contrast, Mancs constructed an inner cityscape based on their collective architectural dissatisfaction. Man United were absolute wank, and Liverpool rampant in European campaigns. Addiction to labels and logos ripped through the primal northwest maze, and word had it that on the continent lay the mother lode; vastly superior forms spat out by the sexy design engines of Lacoste, Fila, Diadora, and Mr. Dassler himself. Scousers obtained the continental labels avidly on their football trips. It was no contest. On paper. Fortunately we are not discussing paper; the original Perries had made it one-nil to Manchester back in the early-70s, but things had shifted upward in scale. By 1980 the two rivers were two cities. One city had a reputation for technological discoveries and the other had produced a pop group. Pop culture had evaded Manchester thus far, but the city rapidly self-organised, with myriad shops substituting their entire stock for expensive sportswear from France, Italy, and Germany. From 1978 to 1979 Liverpudlians underwent their evolution from post-Punk electric Soul Boy variants to polo-shirted wedgeheads, and their travelling contingent was pure Nameless Thing. They totally outnumbered Mancs by early-1980, making it 1-1, but the game was by no means finished. Scousers now had two choices for fashion sources; travel to the continent or risky trips into Manchester, where growing hordes of predatory local taxmen waited, ears well-tuned to the Liverpool accent. Football became a fashion-based duality; teams from the northwest, and teams from elsewhere in the country. The former provided infinitely more excitement than the latter. Manchester’s retail manoeuvre created a bigger Nameless Thing population than Liverpool. And it was two-one before John Lennon was cold.
As we enter injury time (there were plenty on both sides), there is much scrambling and time-wasting. Manchester’s music scene, fuelled by ex and current disciples of The Nameless Thing, has led people to believe we really did invent casual culture. But Scousers claim absolute credit for the global designer fetish – citing 1977 as the beginning – and are quick to reference Robert Wade Smith as a pioneer of Adidas footwear when he opened his store in Liverpool. Alas, Wade-Smith’s Adidas store opened in 1982, years after the fact. Ironically, it is Wade Smith who delivers the knock-out blow to Liverpool, with the sales statistic for the Stan Smith, often referred to as the first shoe of the casual era. The Adidas Stan Smith sold a “phenomenal 2,000 pairs in the run-up to Christmas, 1979” in Liverpool, according to Wade Smith, the exact same period in which Kevin Sampson’s book Awaydays is set. Coincidence? 1977? I think not. So, it’s 3-1 to Manchester, which, funnily enough, was always my favourite footy score.

It was 1982, a late-summer’s evening. Three of us were roaming the streets and looking for laughs, not a good combination. I was accompanied by Mike-B-, who’d lately been released from a young offender’s institution in Nottinghamshire. It hadn’t done him any good. Apart from the access to weights, which he took advantage of and emerged as an even larger and more effective killing machine than before he went in, if that were possible. The other lad, Paul-B- was a beefy specimen who once rendered Mike-B- unconscious with a vice-like headlock. Fortunately they were only messing and Mike regained his faculties soon after. Paul and Mike were vigorous exponents of the sartorial arts and daily sported lambswool Adidas jumpers and French Connection t-shirts, with bleached FUs jeans and Kickers or Adidas Nastase on their feet. ABC and Haircut 100 was in the charts. And we were very bored.
Mike had enjoyed a recent earning spree with his brother Steve, when they went on a rampage with a sledgehammer. Telephone boxes were the target; a few well-placed smacks and the phones ruptured, sending rivers of coinage into your pocket. Mike and I used to go around the pubs in Prestwich with football cards. The cards featured a table containing a football team in each box. People would pick a team from the table and pay 50p for the honour. At the end of the night the winning team is revealed by scratching off the masked winner at top centre. We didn’t bother with that part of it. Instead we moved on to the next pub with a fresh card and continued raking it in. Occasionally, clever pissheads would suss us and we’d have a shower of semi-drunk man-beasts spewing from the pub door after us demanding their money back. Fools.
Paul I knew since I first moved to Prestwich from Salford. He grew into a fine figure of a man, capable of crushing a lion’s femur with thumb and forefinger. I once saw him kill five thousand Scousers with the jawbone of a hedgehog. And he loved animals; when a local busker fell under suspicion of abusing his Jack Russell, Paul paid him a visit in the middle of the night armed with a three-inch thick sapling he’d ripped from the ground outside the guy’s council flat. An attempt by the homesteader to defend himself with a two-by-four resulted in a violent crack between the shoulder blades with said weapon, knocking the guy out, naked on his kitchen floor. Not a pretty sight. Paul seemed to improve when his personal physician put him on drugs to calm him down, but that was much later.
But I digress. It was a summer’s evening in 1982. We unconsciously headed to the Borderland, the transition zone where Prestwich and Salford meet. It is called Rainsough in this case; a curious council estate perched on a ragged hill overlooking the Irwell Valley. In the distance, the towers of Salford Precinct swam in a haze, looking like Detroit or Houston. Thankfully we were beyond their reach. That hive maintained an army unrivalled anywhere in the County, to my knowledge.
The Rainsough lads liked to kick a ball about in a grassy bowl at the side of the busy main road known as Rainsough Brow (pronounced “brew”). They called the bowl “Wembley”. On this occasion there were about 20 kids volleying and chipping a pill to one another. We looked down upon them, our numbers having swelled to 8 by now; we’d picked up some strays along the way, other kids bored and looking for enchantment in the brickish maze that was Carr Clough estate. A couple of the kids playing football were from Kersal: Over the border. Two years or so earlier, the trouble between Prestwich and Kersal had begun. The timing couldn’t have been better; casual culture had recently exploded and everyone was crazy about Saint Etienne shirts, gold cords by Lois and Second Image and Aitch and dozens of other designers. We’d given a good account of ourselves back then but by 1982 Salford had taken a turn into twisted pastures.
In time, insults began to rain down on the Kersal boys and their herd thinned out. One or two remained while others went back and forth to the Staff of Life pub across the road (that pub was featured in The Cook Report, in an episode about gangsters from Kersal running protection rackets. My dad broke his ankle stumbling out of there in the 70s. It was a lovely place and performed the role of First Pub on my original all-day drinking session just a year or so later). It quickly became clear that there were more of them in the Staff. The insults were now a two-way street. Still we stood, refusing to be intimidated by the older Kersal lot clustered outside the Staff, staring pointedly at us. After 20 minutes a trickle began to appear in the cobbled, stepped alley next to the pub; reinforcements had arrived from down in the high-rise estate a ten-minute walk away. We stood firm and instructed the other 6 to do the same. They looked worried.
Eventually, the mob numbering about fifteen to twenty became pumped enough to start coming across the road. The traffic had petered out by now and it was dark. They came to the foot of Wembley and we began asking them, “What the fuck do you want?”
“Knobheads!” came the reply. “Where’s yer Boys?”
Bolstered by my psychopathic company I afforded myself a giggle, which was horribly aborted; suddenly, down the cobbled alley came a massive team. Like what you see at United when we played decent clubs. It looked like a fast moving river of baked beans – each of the Kersal lads sporting a skinhead in Salford fashion – and most terrifyingly it didn’t seem to end. I was utterly mesmerised at the size of this crew. There were at least 80 of them, if not twice that. My transfixion almost cost me my life. Between Mike growling, insanely, “Don’t fuckin’ run…” and my snapping out of my paralysis to recognise a lad at the front of their mob, now less than thirty feet away – a known psycho whose nickname was actually “Psycho” – I turned and began to flee. Mike and Paul did likewise. Psycho had an axe in his hand and an expression of such hatred that I was sure one of us would be murdered right there and then. We were chased through some tall grass, some of the lads jumping the wall into the Jewish cemetery next door and some tearing up Butterstile Lane propelled by adrenalin and little else. Paul was hit on the head by a flying brick but he kept on going, despite feeling like he was going to pass out.
We never took the piss at the Borderland again. In fact, we all became friends. That’s right; this one has a happy ending…

When the unexpected attacks on New York and Washington, on September 11th, 2001 occurred, the entire world took notice. Millions became privy to the most sensational non-military assault on a civilian population in media memory. As the dust and smoke made its acrid presence felt across Manhattan, people began to speculate on who could have been responsible for such an act. The name Al-Qaida bulleted from television sets and into the devastated minds of Americans and others around the globe. It was unprecedented in world history; could this type of massive loss be conceded to such an indefinable foe? Governments from all cultures offered condolences, but they seemed awkward in the absence of any concrete or enduring enemy. Within hours of the attacks, some people had suggested that America had brought them upon itself. As hours ground into weeks, the political Left became ever-more mobilised by the kaleidoscope of denial and anger that gripped the nation. They found evidence for their claim as others were outraged. Old alliances gushed in novel ways, while unbridled hate frothed with glee. They played “The Star-Spangled Banner” at Buckingham Palace – and danced in the streets on the West Bank. It was as though the world’s leaders had arrived at some kind of complex and very modern precipice. The question was: Which side of the precipice are you on?
The word “modern” conjures up images of technology, especially medical, agricultural, transportation, communications/information and weapons technology. The military-industrial complex of the United States sits at the hub of these technologies, feeding off scientific and engineering breakthroughs and growing stronger all the time, thanks to the billions of dollars that are pumped into research and politics in the wealthiest country the world has ever seen. People talk about America being the “one remaining global superpower”, drawing on myriad images of fighter-jets, aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines and their attendant communications and guidance systems. Nobody seems able to recall that the one weapon of mass destruction that truly qualifies a nation as a superpower found its niche as a deterrent.
When the U.S. government embarked on its “you’re either with us or against us” adventure, in the immediate wake of the September 11th attacks, there was a palpable undercurrent of apocalyptic gauntlet-throwing whose ripples spread through the Hub of Islam, supposedly sorting the wheat from the chaff. President Bush seemed to suggest that Muslim leaders would quake in their boots and melt at the feet of their Western opposites, or else die a horrible death. It looked very black and white, but there were grey areas. President Bush referred to nuclear-capable Pakistan as “our friend”, before a numb television audience, many of whom had no idea where or what Pakistan’s geographic location or political ideology was – what was important was that everybody got the black and white message. Nobody did; both the television audience and Pakistan were subjected to a deep, cold gulf of mixed signals, which carried them (and President Bush) into an uncertain future.
Academics, activists and “non-partisans” strutted and scoffed; the Pentagon had brought all this on itself, by manipulating and warmongering in areas that didn’t concern America. Their media declarations, of how Western hegemony wouldn’t rest until every last ounce of “authentic” culture had been purged from the lives of those who championed it resounded angrily at a volume not heard for decades. The difference now was that the people doing the shouting weren’t dancing around a camp-fire, or painting their faces, or taking mind-altering chemicals; that was a long time ago. These people had achieved respectability through qualifications and expertise in world affairs, and, next to the cowboy-style Bush administration, they provided a chilling contrast. That strange, modern precipice was suddenly among the American people, polarising them as it yawned, but yielding no answers. The debate raged in all media, but with no resolution in sight the sociological fissure simply became even more inflamed, and no amount of American flags or bumper stickers could salve the wound. The world’s one remaining global superpower was up against a new technological adversary; informational awareness.

* * * * * *

The Intelligence Agencies of America, Britain, France and others have all been extremely active, in one form or another, since the days of the horse and carriage. It could even be argued that prehistoric humans employed a form of intelligence-based warfare when members of one tribe stole the secret of fire from another. The objective has always been to grab as much of the world’s natural resources as possible, and use them to your advantage or sell them to your allies, preferably at a huge profit, the profit margin shrinking or growing on a perverse sliding scale depending upon exactly how your allies having these resources can most directly benefit you (your closest allies, if you’re a “superpower”, being almost as wealthy as you are able to pay more for what you have, as opposed to fresh converts from savagedom who are able to enjoy Budweiser or Coca-Cola for pennies a bottle, because it’s worth it in the long-run).
From archea-bacteria to fungus, to scavengers and predators, to chimpanzee society, cost-benefit budgets are worked out. Liberals see this truth as an intoxicating testament to the workings of evolution, ecology and sociology. Conservatives believe it to be so obvious that it is not worth discussing, and that those who do discuss it are incredibly näive.
The general Western public has spent the past five hundred years emerging from the Middle-Ages (and all of time), gradually shaking animal fears and biological constraints from its fevered brain-stem. The Industrial Revolution provided seemingly limitless possibilities for people in the cities of Europe and, later, America. The degrading conditions industry created gave rise to unions, which in turn spawned the dissemination of Socialist and other “progressive” doctrines, leading to an elevated public awareness of who the “haves” and “have-nots” actually were, enabling some plucky folks to realise that Who Dares Wins and go on to build private empires. The First and Second World Wars were fought largely by the “have-nots”, but the cause was a righteous one, and the enemy was most certainly evil and had to be quashed. There were no protests; there were only “heroes”. World War Two constituted a dynamic clash of industrial powers, with only the geographical isolation of America’s ordnance factories providing the edge. Germany was bombed to bits, Japan was vaporised, and the Allies triumphed. In post World War Two America, even the “have-nots” got to attend college and earn degrees. For free. America became flooded with educated, regimented corporate drones, all willing to do whatever it took to make the nut for their corporate superiors. The nation seemed to have become a utopian beehive, very busy and very happy. White picket-fences and vast, gleaming suburban tracts appeared overnight, like magic mushrooms. The words “please” and “thank you” were utilised as much as they were in the proto-culture, England. People truly had never had it so well, and it was interesting to see how the notorious Human Condition would fare in this fairytale environment.
The affluence and consequent boredom of the second-half of the 20th Century caused severe disorientation among the youth of America, and what might have been a small, directionless eddy in Western evolution suddenly exploded into purposefulness, when the government entered a war against a new “enemy” on the far side of the world. Protests, by the famous as well as the anonymous, erupted in the West, and the American government found itself fighting two enemies, one abroad, and one at home. This new enemy may or may not have been evil, but they were far beyond the natural curvature of the earth, and the Big Picture had to be viewed through a kind of political periscope to be fully appreciated; the younger generation refused to climb aboard this far-fetched torpedo, choosing instead to man the “Yellow Submarine”.

* * * * * *

Today, war protestors are an accepted player in any international conflict involving a Western nation. The opposite is the case in the World of Islam. Religious fundamentalism is seen there as a viable alternative to Westernisation. Westernisation is not the same as modernisation, however, and it is obvious that some regions of the world have been westernised without their benefiting technologically, such as certain African states. Existing simply as a consumer for Western commercial interests is a fate that the World of Islam wishes to avoid at all costs, and what has been termed the Islamic Resurgence is in large part the Muslim answer to Western hegemony. Muslims see themselves as victims of the technological, Western-dominated world of today, and mainstream acceptance of the values of the Resurgence has galvanised a billion Muslims, “from Morocco to Indonesia and from Nigeria to Kazakhstan”, in the words of Samuel Huntington, author of The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order. Huntington claims that world trends toward democratisation seen in recent decades were effectively damped in the Islamic world by the Resurgence, with the oil embargo of 1973 being perceived by Arabs as a crucial turning point in their asserting themselves internationally. The Muslims truly are the planet’s one remaining tribal superpower, fighting Abel’s war against his more organised brother, refusing alien access to the ancient Sumerian bitumen swamps, refusing to adopt superficial and destructive Western methodologies.
During the oil-embargo era, Muhammad bin Laden refurbished the two holy mosques in Mecca and Medina, in Saudi Arabia. The elder bin Laden was deeply affected on a spiritual level by his involvement in these projects, and these effects were absorbed by his son, Osama, facilitating a religious awakening in the younger bin Laden. Osama bin Laden was said to have been something of a reveller prior to his religious awakening, often spending time in 70’s Beirut, drinking and womanising. Something changed him; something made him turn to a different path – the same something that affected another man in the United States.
George W. Bush was also a drinker, a drunk-driver, a man who liked to “hang out” with his friends and become intoxicated on alcohol, on stories, on male braggadocio. He, too, underwent a severe psychological shift, one that was to win him popularity among the God-fearing people of the American Bible-Belt.
There is no question that Osama bin Laden chose a more humble and selfless existence than the one he would have enjoyed in his father’s mansions in Saudi Arabia, just as Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri – bin Laden’s right-hand man – also did, in a cave in Eastern Afghanistan, as a result of their spiritual awakening. Bush, meanwhile, ensconced in the velveteen, media-driven West, simply took his show on the road, seeing political office as just another business opportunity. Liberals discuss this development as a landmark indication of all that is wrong with the American mindset; conservatives, meanwhile, have no idea what all the fuss is about; this is the Free World, and no Euro-wannabe socialists are ever going to change that.

* * * * * *

The current world political perspective is extremely peculiar. There is a universal gulf, which seems to reflect the human condition on a planetary scale. On the one hand we have those with fundamental religious views – both in the Middle East and in the American Midwest – and on the other hand we have the moderates, such as those in New York City and London. The cowboy and the turbaned cave-dweller are deadlocked, while the rest are crying out for understanding and compromise. The cowboy has industry on his side, while the cave-dweller has communications technology (“the internets”). The world of Islam is engaged in numerous global conflicts simultaneously, while claiming itself to be the victim, and the United States is also in a similar situation, while claiming itself to be the dispenser of world “freedom”. There are those who declare that Islam is a convert-or-kill mindset, and that the conflicts they are experiencing spring directly from this fact, and there are those (not necessarily the same people) who claim that Western civilisation seeks merely to turn the Arab world into a sucker on the teat of McDonald’s, Wal-Mart, Coca-Cola, Nike, et al, stealing their oil while giving nothing in return. As “mainstream” opinion carves out its territory via television, a vast and silent “almost-majority” simmers in the wings. America’s naïve depictions of life, on network TV dramas, in Hollywood movies and even in small Midwestern towns, are being defended by those who still believe that a unique and fabulous kind of freedom is available here – and only here. Those who espouse this crooked view have no inkling of the equivalent freedoms which reign in places like Brussels, Belgium, or Sydney, Australia. They do not care that they have no inkling of these things; they are the rallying cry for this side of the precipice, and if lesser democracies want to get on board they are welcome – and if not they can expect Uncle Sam’s boot up their ass if and when they have something America needs. The “almost-majority” was defeated in November by what George W. Bush in his victory speech called “The Architect” – one Carl Rove. It is interesting that the Bush campaign director was praised for the concentrated burst of energy he injected into the Conservative bid for re-election; an ad campaign was the be-all and end-all of their political existence. John Kerry’s concession speech, in contrast, was heartfelt, and he used it as an opportunity to pour thanks back to all the people on his team for the socially just plans they had conceived. The ad campaign had defeated the Vietnam veteran, Captain Codpiece had strutted victoriously away from the contest, cocking his Stetson at the camera while Kerry fought to clear his name, mired in a swamp in the Far-East. The almost majority became embroiled in a conflict on their side of the precipice, many of them caught up in an avalanche of denial that swept them into unfamiliar territory; faith, religion, inflexible values. Finding themselves perched on the “wrong” side of the gulf; they convinced themselves that Mr Bush was probably the best man for the job, given the extreme nature of the Muslim terror threat. Prozac and apple pie prevailed. Wellness gave way to Western medicine (where cash is medicine). Time magazine became the well-source of Christian thought, as millions of Democrat “atheists” rethunk their position. People began to talk about the benefits of sticking to one’s guns, of being good Christians – the steam from this freshly-laid bullshit intoxicated those who possibly were truly wishy-washy Liberal…
There are those who claim that the Cold War was World War Three, and that September 11th was the beginning of World War Four. They are, of course, conservatives, people possessed of an incredibly subjective (they would not know what “subjective” meant, but they would be enormously pleased that there was a word that described them) perspective. There are those who claim that any belief system counter to Islam is delusion, that Islam will relieve people of this delusion and that it is imperative to convert as many people to Islam as possible, however long it takes. These people are essentially identical, despite superficial cultural differences. Part of the confusion lies in the fact that one side of the precipice involves conflict (the Conservative side), while the other entails cooperation (the Liberal side), but this discontinuity itself is a conflict, across the actual fault line. It composes a genetic difference in perspective. The so-called American Century has cleaved the atom, but it has also cleaved humanity, thanks to information. Humanity is a simple culture, apparently, capable of being divided in two like bacteria. Culture and cultism are little things, insignificant and piddling, there in the tiny Petri dish of American thought. America has long been victim to a particularly ugly form of personality cultism, one steeped in fear and pretence. The question is, which side are you on?