I’ve been pissed for a week solid and you know the reason why; we’re trailing a goal behind the Wal-Mart wallahs and they’re getting all giddy, and I mean really giddy. I’m talking a level of excitement akin to that an ugly ape presented with the chance to shag Rosie Webster might experience. There’s nothing remotely good about any of it. I just want it to go away and soon. And tonight it will, for it is finally the second leg.
But there are more serious distractions, more important issues afoot than our tiny little neighbour with the megaphone; it is here, the time for action and it’s no secret affair. The final push against Malcolm Glazer and his chinless brood. And what is the battle-plan? Tennis balls on the pitch? Gobstoppers at the directors’ box? Golf balls at the Megastore? Beach balls in the penalty area? No, the alleged plan of action is, “let’s all buy gold and green scarves – once we’ve made our minds up between bar scarves and “student style” lengthways-running stripes – and we’ll all wear ‘em to the match and Glazer will fucking shit himself and give the club away right there on the spot!”
Hmmm, gold and green scarves. Sounds like a pile of horse-drawn steam engine excrement, doesn’t it? But it looks like the media are noticing it, and the centurions are not allowed to throw people out for wearing gold and green. Will it reverse the trend and return us to the swaying envelope that football once was? Not quite, because the trend is unstoppable. The world is being sanitised, not just British football; ever since they pedestrianised Market Street and other cities back in the olden days, when they took the lead out of petrol and removed the junkies from Times Square, when hordes of council knobheads hit Orlando, when Turkey became popular and package tours to the pyramids commonplace. And you, yes you, started going to all those Euro away nights like you were some woe-merchant latter-day Tony Christie but with decent weed and clothes. In the avenues and alleyways around OT these days there are blokes selling green and gold scarves and laughing at what a lot of harlequin shitehawks everyone looks. But it’s green and gold till they die or fold, according to the word on the street, or on the web forums. It seemed to make sense in the beginning and it’s got to be worth a try if it raises the profile and earns attention.
And then there’s this sudden backlash against Lord Ferguson. The man has gone from King to King Cunt overnight. The Horse Spunk Dossier has finally been pinpointed as the beginning, and our stale squad (of losers, goons, puppets, queers, ogres, dog-eaters, catastrophic foodies, Scouse Dwarves, duck-faced-drug-test-dodgers, plastic Ronnies, be-‘tached scruffy twats from Bury, identical twinglet merchants, lazy Draculas, Rastafarians, Redhead Kingpins, goat-boys, lesbians, Amazonian wildmen and ethnic cleansers) identified as the final straw in a disgraceful run that has seen us go three consecutive seasons playing worse than Chelsea but somehow nicking it every time. Christ, if we’d made it 3-2 in the dying seconds in Rome we’d have had a mutiny on our hands before now. And that’s why I love United; even when we’re winning cups we fucking hate it if the way we win ‘em is wrong. There’s a lot of bollocks talked these days by the Thought Police, that you’re a “spoilt brat” if you ever say anything negative about the team. United fans want to win, but when we shade it undeservingly, or certain players (and I’m talking CERTAIN players here) put in a poor performance, we have every right to an opinion. Beautiful attacking football, creative spontaneous moves, heart and soul, etc. They are the qualities we want to see in our teams. An array of honours is just numbers. We need flesh and blood and snot and skill. So if I want to moan because the peoples’ choice misses too many chances I will.
But back to the Glazers. Lord Ferguson must have a real opinion on this. He’s spent the past couple of decades building something here. That something will amount to a castle built on sand and not an ongoing dynasty if these buccaneers drag us down. Maybe Ferg wants it all to go to shit. After all, it will make him look better in the long run. But if the fans turn on him now he might be forced to reconsider his silence. I’d soil myself if he came out for the next game with half his face painted yellow and the other half green, wouldn’t you? Especially if he gave a press conference afterwards (at someone else’s ground, while their pissed wet through team had to wait in the cold until he’d finished, to get past him into their OWN dressing room) and said something like, “If you don’t like the Glazers you can fuck right off! I’m on a million pound commission for every five million I add to a player’s worth between buying and selling. We paid 12.24 million for Cristiano and got 81 back for him. I made almost 14 million on that little beauty. Nearly as good as the horses!”
Ferg and Glazer and Gill and the rest of them up at the top are candid fearless men in their own ways. They wouldn’t be gobbling in the executive trough with giant balls strapped on if they weren’t. Words have been exchanged across the banquet table Queerbeast, you know that. Don’t tell me there hasn’t been at least some good-natured banter about how the Horse Spunk Dossier opened the door for the Buccaneer. That’s how these pirates work. They don’t float aimlessly in the seaweed like a bunch of factory workers from Ashton. They offload the equine barbs, let fly with belittlement of Tampa’s NFL record. Gotta have a thick skin if you’re gonna sup with the pterodactyls. Cut and thrust, thrust and cut. Going places, knowhatImean, Tatlock? Fergie lost his horses, so he needed a new plaything to spur him on. Hence a commission on his works-in-progress, be it Keiran Richardson or some other flip-job hounded out of Old Trafford by the Thought Police and their baying hordes.
And don’t look at me; I have no idea whose side I’m on. What’s more, there’s more than two sides to this issue of how to fight the Glazers. There’s millions of sides…well, maybe not millions but fucking loads. There’s the “what took you so long, we’ve been at it since ‘05” mob (self-congratulatory cunts that appear to be glad the club is foundering). Then there’s the “Kill Glazer” psychos, people who obviously lack the ability to empathise with the Glazer siblings, who, since they were kids always wanted to own the biggest football club in the world. That they actually settled for United should elicit our pity. Then again, Real Madrid isn’t owned by “The People” who think that “Republic of Mancunia” banners can keep the wolf from the door. There’s also annoying bastards like me who live thousands of miles away but think we have a right to an opinion about everything; from whether the Ambassador Bingo hall at the top of Langworthy Road should’ve been demolished, to the quality of the black olives in a Sedgley Park deli, to the fact that, despite all the fluffing and strutting and eeh by gummin’, we haven’t had more than three real world-class players simultaneously at Old Trafford since, well, 1999. There. I’ve said it. Can you honestly imagine how much money and what an assemblage of top-notch players we’d have in the stable now if not for the debt? Or is that just another myth? You can point at Ronaldo and Rooney as two of the last big (successful) signings prior to mid-2005, but Evra and Vidic were brought in on the other side of the balance to cancel them out. And smack in the middle of the whole takeover is Van der Sar, who came to OT in June ’05. VDS cost a reputed 2 million though, hardly a fortune. And since then we have seen Ronaldo go and 80 million quid evaporate like city’s firm on Derby Day.
Which brings me to the next order of business; this second leg against the Bittermen. It’s happening right now and I am on pins, watching on telly, live. We’ve just had sixty eight corners in the first four minutes but not a goal to show for it. Then we scored and scored again and then that little determined Argie managed a snide weird one. All square. And then moonhead Roonhead steamed in and butted the ball through the back of the net and laughed his bollocks off on global satellite. The losers are still losers. Sad bitter cunts are destined to win nothing ever again, I swear. But back to the fight against the Glazers.
Green and yellow tennis balls are the answer, I have concluded, after discussions with people online: Continual bombardment throughout the game until it has to be stopped. If everyone can smuggle 10 to 20 balls each in, we’ve cracked it. The game will be abandoned, then the banners come out and the media get what they want. Were the “splitters” of 2005 the canary in the coal mine, or did it have to get this bad before real numbers began the revolt? You know the answer to that; the acid test is in this January transfer window. I’m looking through it and I’m seeing no activity apart from some bloke called Smalling – not exactly the surprise acquisition designed to sooth the savage goat, as many predicted…Even if we win a few things this season, if that 80 million doesn’t materialise it’s time we went to town, Manchester-style. And you know what that means: Evict the bastards. Before they finally remove the word “Manchester” from the club crest altogether and replace it with “Tickets” or [sponsored by] or “Soccer”. It’s the time for action. The time to be seen. In gold and in green…

I’m here, waiting for the match against Leeds to kick off. It’s the night before and I’m lashing the Carib lager like a good ‘un. Can I stay up all night I wonder? Sit here and ruminate on my childhood. How I was made to hear it, the full treatment; McShane, Finney, Kingsley, Jesus Powell, John Thaw, Frazier’s dad, all of them, plus 10CC, Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders, Freddie and the Dreamers and on and on and on. The list of names that puffs up the breast of Tatlockville. It goes a lot further back than that an’ all. And now that pride will be harnessed against an old enemy. One of the biggest rivalries in British football, come back to life at last. Everyone knows United’ll win, the question is by how much? The War of the Roses they’re calling it. Very romantic and dramatic and obvious. For those who are proud of their roots it’s a choice cut. A choice cut of (police) horsemeat for men old enough to know better. Britain is a giant knacker’s yard populated by elves with crippled minds. The elves are preoccupied by silly titles, and I don’t mean “Chancellor of the Exchequer” or “The Fourth Earl of Lincoln” either. I mean, “Biggest council estate in Europe” or “hardest city” or “tallest building outside London”. Seriously, have you EVER stopped to ask yourself exactly where or how some of these preposterous claims could be verified? Yeah, you heard me right, you fackin’ muppet. You of “The first Marks and Spencer’s was in Manchester” (it was a market stall in Leeds, actually). You of “The Arndale was the biggest shopping mall in Europe when it was built”, and your nephew, he of “the Trafford Centre was the blah blah blah”. You of (give me strength) “Manchester was the first nuclear-free city”. It is this last meaningless claim that pains me the most. A nuclear-free city? What does that even mean? You don’t think that aeroplanes carrying warheads, or trains loaded with horrible glowing shite from Sellafield haven’t moved through Manchester airspace or along its train tracks recently? Or that the Chinese will take note should it ever come to World Barney Three. Wake up and smell the Irwell, people. This decay of pride and ideas has been gathering pace since the mid-60s, since they started filming Top of the Pops in Manchester. Yeah, honest, Top of the Pops was fil- oh, shit, now I’m at it. There was once a time when splitting the atom was a thing to be proud of. Or building and operating the machine that opened the fabled Dead Sea Copper Scroll. Or the wonderful contraptions developed by Messrs. Crompton and Arkwright that transformed fabrics forever. Or the nation’s first free public library. Or the first gas street lighting…To be fair, the Marks and Spencer’s thing also goes way back, but it was in Leeds anyway, so let ‘em have it. They deserve a little something. And that’s pretty little next to the first passenger railway.
A mate of mine once told me, “They were actually gonna create the Gay Village in Leeds, but Leeds wasn’t, er, y’know..” “Cosmopolitan enough?” I ventured. “That’s right!” he replied, as we strolled along chuffed to fuck for, as Syd Barrett once said, “It takes two to know”. And we all know Syd was firmly rooted in reality wasn’t he? Needless to say that conversation occurred in 1992, when our pride was the size of United’s current season ticket waiting list, i.e. nonexistent. We’ve been to heaven and back with the reds since then.
I don’t want to knock Manchester too much. But it’s hard not to. Standards and expectations have slip-slided away. Last time I was there (to see Liverpool hammer us 1-4 at OT and a pathetic gaggle of 400 students sing “Bring ‘em out” to the laughing policemen on the forecourt after the match) I was forced to eat humble pie. Not because of the disaster with the Scousers. Because the city centre had been turned into a communist-era free-for-all designed by wankers. These were buildings – real buildings in a real city – that had apparently been contrived to resemble industrial units but were in fact condos or office blocks or worse. It was all Joy Division’s fault, I concluded. And Morrissey. Between the lot of them Manchester has been reduced to the status and mood of a sixteen year old Tatlock geek who lives vicariously through grey representations of morbid glories. The irony is that Morrissey and Co. actually had their heads screwed on right. It’s the architects and city planners who fucked it all up. D’you honestly think pop stars expected to have that degree of influence over a dirty big city? Somewhere along the Manchester timeline the sense of proportion went all to shit. I venture this period lasted from 1964 to about 1990. That’s right; Top of the Pops. You of “the Rolling Stones concert at Belle Vue in 1964 was the first ever concert riot”. You of “G-Mex is Europe’s largest indoor arena”. You are the ones who have spread the rot. The ones who caused the clock in St. Ann’s Square to stop dead, like a machine killed by lack of ideas and – wait a fucking minute, summat’s happened.

Leeds happened. Final whistle. Just gone. Nil-one. I sit here motionless. Horror struck and brain-dead. It should have been nil-two to be honest. And if you don’t like that why don’t you switch off your television and go and do something less boring instead, Tatlock? And now the feeding frenzy begins, on telly, on internet forums, in pubs and on buses. The fickle fannies (like me) who thought we’d murder ‘em 14-0 have once again turned on the reds and are slagging everyone, from Ferg to Roon to that geezer in the turban who isn’t actually part of the OT staff but sits close enough to them (and gets his mug on telly week in and week out) to cop some collateral damage. Fergie, Rooney, Turban Geezer, what the fuck were you playing at out there? This was Leeds. The white rose, the hated thug platoon of jackbooted cockheads! And they’ve just bummed us in style. Christ, I swear I was almost cheering the fuckers on by the 95th minute.
Anyway, back to the Manchester story. 1964. The first ever rock ‘n’ roll riot. Top o’t’ Pops. I bet the blokes who started the football league in the Royal Hotel in 1888 would have had summat to say about Top o’t’ Pops. I bet the lads present at the first general meeting of the Trade Union Congress in the Three Crowns pub in Salford in 1868 would have give them Rolling bloody Stones summat ter think about, eh, Tatlock? I actually remember the moment when I realised football was the best thing about Manchester – and red football, not blue. And that anything else of greatness was finished, replaced by shit titles and claims, not including the league title, of course. It happened coming out of Victoria bus station many years ago, on the top deck of a diesel spewer. I found myself sitting behind a lad with a neck ‘tache and his gormless mucker. Mucker, who must have been especially gormless, was getting the full treatment apparently for the very first time; “Highland House. Highest building outside London when it was built” (he actually said those very words). Mucker gormlessly gaped upwards as we sailed past the office block I personally robbed daft for years. Next it was the CIS, “tallest buildin’ TODAY outside London”, we were duly informed. I decided enough was enough and tapped the tour guide on the shoulder. He tried to ignore me so I slapped him on the neck ‘tache and he spun round. I said, dancing suggestively, “What we should do at Old Trafford is all start singing Donna Summer’s “Love to Love You, Baby” in a dead high-pitched voice, all of us, letting it build across K Stand and up United Road. Then someone turns a set of strobes on, set high in the cantilever and which lend a stop-start surrealism to the boogying crowd, the music becoming louder and louder and louder and we’re all gyrating and going totally off our crusts, and-!” he brought me to my senses with a firm slap across my gibbering chops. He had to do something; I was scaring Mucker, who by now was gaping at me, his rubbery slavering jowls resting on the stainless steel bar running along the back of the seat between us.
But I was incorrigible, on a mission. “I’ll bet a pound to a pinch of shit you pronounce ‘books’ different from how you pronounce ‘boots’ don’t yer?” I told him. “But I bet yer mam an’ dad pronounce ‘em the same though innit. And further to that I bet you say ‘room’ like you say ‘boom’ an’ yer fink it’s bang on. The word ‘RUME’, fer your information, Tatlock, is pro-fuckin’-nounced the same as ‘book’. Like ‘rum’, an’ I, you’ll be pleased to learn, am the first cunt in Manchester to work that out!” By now the tour guide was utterly speechless as the truth of my words sunk into his once-proud skull…so I carried on.
“Smokeless zones, Rolls Royces, what next, bleedin’ trams? (I was right!) UFO landing pads in Hulme?” (right again!).
In Manchester, football has replaced science and industry, after a gormless interval involving pseudo-tall buildings, pop groups and Urban Heritage Parks. It convinced us all we were still in that place, the one that led the world. But here, in the ruins of the defeat to the sheepshaggers, awaiting the trip to Bitterland, our 20-year legacy of footballing domination is threatened. In 1992 I had a bet with Bitter Keith Barry in the Commercial pub on Bury Old Road. I bet him that city would never again win a major trophy. It was a tenner bet. A tenner I couldn’t hope to collect but the satisfaction of knowing he mightn’t either made it OK. By the time you read this that tenner will be safe in my hands or a lot closer to his. Tomorrow we play the Bittermen at Wastelands. Home of the world’s biggest Wal-Mart…ooh-er, pass me the bucket, I can feel the nause comin’ on again…

When Patrice Evra said English food was “catastrophic”, he was serious. He is one of 26 brothers and sisters (two sadly deceased) but I’ll wager those numbers didn’t prevent his mam from knocking together a better tea than Neville’s, Rooney’s or Bryan Robson’s each and every night. This is a man raised in a culture where food was made from scratch, not out of a box from Morrison’s or a giant vat of boiling oil from the corner chippy. How does that make you feel, eh, Tatlock? That little Senegalese goat –my favourite United player for the past three seasons – contradicts his generalist qualities only in his pickiness for decent scran. In every other way he is an omnivorous devil-boy, an awesome attacking defender who is always involved in our sorties down the left, nibbling at the stubborn weeds of confidence in opposing defenders. I sometimes wonder what he thinks of Obertan’s head…(What’s French for “desiccated mummy cranium”? Come to that, what’s Cornish for “gobshite”?) I see scintillating music between the two in the future; the Beefheart of Evra and the Zappa of Mummy Head combining to produce dazzling concertos. Obertan has that same trickiness we saw in the young Ronaldo. The difference is, Obertan’s tricks actually caress and manipulate the ball, always mindfully pushing it towards the goal. Young Ronnie’s party piece consisted of 18 completely unnecessary stepovers that often preceded him being turned over by more experienced defenders…But he’s gone, so let’s get the Boddies in and not get bitter. Hopefully we’ll earn a pile off Madrid for Obertan once we’ve spent several years whipping him into shape. Makes it all worthwhile. It’s a shrinking globe in an expanding universe. We’ve preyed on the minnows, stripping them of their best talent for generations. Karma’s a bitch but it’s a bitch with cash.
Football has become a science. They’ve done their sums and presented the proofs. Taken an ultra-canny Scotsman and turned him into a financial futures manager. Sir Alex acquires developing blobs and hones them into footballing world-beaters. Madrid step in and do the deal and the dosh goes to the Glazers. Either that or he’s taking it up to the Inner Hebrides and giving it Wicker Man. It’s become a science and Fergie is the Newton, the Einstein, the big man with the skills to pay the bills – or slinging it down a bottomless hole covered by a heavy trapdoor under Glazer Towers. When Einstein first uttered those immortal words, “To be or not to be, that is the question,” he was talking about something important. He was talking about progress, and evolution and drama. He was proving that balls weren’t attached to chains, and that the whole field was exactly that – a field. A dynamic non-uniform region subject to the sub-fields within it. Ferguson understands this truth better than any other manager in the league and it’s evident nearly every time United play; when you see Scholes put it out to Evra and Evra in to Rooney and Rooney out to Giggs, etc (or Obertan determinedly charging it into the main stand), you’re watching a ball moving inside a field, not simply propelled along invisible connecting lines between players. Balls are funny things. Little balls are no less powerful than giant balls; the earth’s influence on the moon isn’t cancelled out by the sun’s influence on the earth – the overall sun-field yields to the micro-influences within it, down and down, all the way to Giggs interacting with Evra, who’s pouncing along the left touchline with the ball at his feet and a bellyful of catastrophic food.
But snapping up youngsters and belting sense into ‘em isn’t the be-all and end-all of it. Giggs, Sharpe, Hughes, the Nevilles, Beckham, Keane, Brown, O’ Shea, Fletcher, Rooney, Ronaldo – maybe I should add Wellbeck and Macheda – have been balanced by our more mature acquisitions, like McClair, Bruce, Schmeichel, Cantona, Sheringham and the mysteriously fading Ferdinand. Whether Scouse Mike will ever fall into this latter group is highly doubtful. After all, the dirty little scouse twat said he’d rather play for Liverpool for half what he gets paid at United, and Liverpool are fucking shite, so you do the math(s). Mike is the same age Anelka was when he joined Chelsea. Do you remember laughing at Anelka when, about to leave Bolton (yeah, that’s right, Bolton), he speculated that he might consider United. Me and the yank at work – the one who said Manchester was too far from civilisation – pissed ourselves. Who on earth did Anelka think he was? As if United would sign a legend-in-his-own- prima-donna-mind like him! We all make mistakes. Two more of Fergie’s not-so-fledglings are Evra and Carrick. Carrick has been occasionally lethal with his shooting, but some say that Evra equals Michael Carrick squared, he’s that good. Depends whether you like it down the middle or tickled around the left, I suppose. You poncey cunt.
Isaac Newton, the man who originally proclaimed “E equals MC squared”, was referring, not to United players, but to the time he spent living among the addled Bwiti tribe of West Africa (rum lad, was the young Isaac). Unfortunately, he was wrong; no way is an E equal to methoxycoronaridine squared. Methoxycoronaridine is a derivative of the root bark of the iboga shrub. I too spent time with the Bwiti and self-administered MC many times. If you were to square a clinical dose of that, you’d still be nowhere near the vibrant horror of a good pill. Natural highs are fucking wank, let’s face it. I’ll leave my natural high stories for later. MUCH later. I had more fun, aged 9, listening to me dad’s Andy Williams albums. But I digress.
The game – all games – are a science. When Pythagoras shouted “Eureka!” he was hysterical, running down the street in his dick-suit, babbling about “too many cocks spoiling the broth” (yeah, he invented that one, too; those Greek baths were rum places). According to Pythagoras, three types of men existed, illustrated by the three types of people who attended the ancient Greek Olympic Games. Those who sell, those who compete, and those who spectate. Football is the same today. From those selling snide gear and tickets, to wage-slaves like Ronaldo, to the starry-eyed pigs in the executive suite trough, nothing’s changed. Those three are the angles of the footballing triangle. So be there or be square, like Scouse Mike’s napper.
Football is like writing. Actually, it’s fuck all like writing, unless you write as part of a writing team. You could say that we who write for UWS are a team, but if you’ve ever been on the Groundside forum (and witnessed us ripping each other to shreds) that romantic notion would be instantly crushed. Do you write what you think is best or what the people want? Fergie knows the answer: true football, like true writing, divides people. That’s why we detest Chelsea’s brats; they are our polar opposites in attitude. They’re evil, scowling wind-up bastards. A bit like me when I’m on the Groundside forum. But why write something purely to please? There is no better feeling than to write something and have people say, “what the fuck were you doing there?” while others say, “that was brilliant, I really enjoyed that!” Like Fergie’s team selections. Sometimes it’s nebulous and outright queer, until the game starts and we realise what the old man is up to. Other times we’re drawing 0-0 against cack and it’s the 83rd minute and Scouse Mike’s doddering on the touchline with his fake tan and angular skull, and Berbatov’s sat sulking in a seat and it’s all going avocado-shaped in a horrible, green knobbly hurry. But avocados have no real shape, not when they’re properly ripe. That’s why we bail ourselves out of the pan so often. It’s the flex of the team. The field, in four-dimensional spacetime over which our indestructible scarlet captain – excuse me, boss – seems to have such masterful control. He instinctively recognises his moment, like a top chef in some swish organic supermarket giving a piece of fruit a good squeeze. He knows where the weak spots are, and whether we have the pace and power to open them up. But Ferg must get bored down there in the dugout sometimes. Probably thinks, “fuck it, if I bring so-and-so on he could make a run through the left channel and Giggsy’ll lay one off for him an’ we’ll score…balls to that…I think I’ll just do fuck all and tell some useless cunt to warm up for a laugh…” He’s a man that crushes overripe avocados for fun. Then he smears them all over that little bald Mexican dog sitting next to him on the bench until it’s completely green. The dog wanders away towards the technical area so he slowly draws a weird blue plastic claw from its sheath, a gripping talon attached to a long plastic tube with a chicken tendon running through it. He forcefully grabs the dog’s bald nuts dragging it back…then, showing no mercy he jumps on its slimy green hide and wrestles it silly, right there in the dugout….and it’s the 85th minute now and we’re goggle-eyed, going, “What is Fergie DOING?!” Oh, fuck…looks like I digressed again.
We’re the opposite of Chelsea for many reasons, most of which are about attitude. Chelsea play in a shed in swanky West London. They pretend it’s a place to be proud of. The Red Devils play on a glorified dockland croft on the edge of a smouldering city called Salford. We know it’s a place to be proud of. The goat and the flame are never far apart. The stench of human barbeque is ever-present, rarely quashed by the deep blue sea. It’s a heavenly thing when angels are passing that pill from man to man. But it’s a contest, and in May only one team will win. To be or not to be, that is the question. Will our lads be spewing champagne, courtesy of some over-stated nauseating sponsor whose branded ribbons hang from the premiership trophy like thick ropes of thoroughbred horse spunk? Or will we eventually, tragically, be barbecued at the stake like Florence Nightingale?

Imagine wearing a replica Newton Heath shirt and a fez, riding a giant tortoise along the top of an Inter-City 125 speeding across a gigantic suspension bridge over the English Channel, which has been polluted and is pure fire, and all this was contained inside a little mechanical peep-show, in an arcade at Liverpool’s Pier Head, itself part of a model village in a future controlled by robots, described in an old sci-fi book on a table beside a young lad’s hammock on a sailing ship, and the whole thing was just a graphic in the sidebar of an EBay page displayed on a laptop, where Lou Reed’s Adidas cock ring, the one he wore when he bummed Bowie, is being bid for £246 from a not-at-all-gay football casual hard man such as yerself – hang on, is this getting on your tits? I’ll stop, then.
I know what you’re thinking; why doesn’t that cunt fuck off with his shit accounts of soiled sex toys and Scousers? Well, I’ll tell you why – because you’re an ignorant twat who needs some intellectual nutrition in his or her life, that’s why. Otherwise you’d exist on a diet of Windbag Manifesto and House of fucking Style, and you know how I feel about that, here in my tracky bottoms.
Fashion and danger are what it’s all about. Why are young people drawn so strongly to such things? I don’t know about you but my journey has meshed inextricably with childish fads, gang violence and substance abuse that very nearly killed me on several occasions. I’ve died in ambulances, been saved from a vomit-choked death in a midnight doorway by a barking dog. Infected by fish that saw me delirious in filthy alleyways and frontier hospitals. Bowling ball blisters shuddering on my leg, loaded with dead cells. Mind it doesn’t burst and ruin yer Diadora sandals, eh?
The allure of childish fads began when the dress code was murky and undefined. We kids taking over stolen cars abandoned by older thieves. Driving in mad circles on Drinkwater Park footy pitches. Launching them off the cliff into the Irwell, diving out at the last second. Full-on replications of the latest blazing American blockbuster. It was a magic time. Even ice-lollies had their place in the scheme of things; the Big Two were Lord Toffingham and Fab. I know you’re gonna say, “what about Milk Maid and Funny Feet?” and you know what, you’re dead right, but Funny Feet were like Stan Smith and Toffingham were pure Korsika. But Fab, well, Fab is probably a Twinkletoe Pixie Dust Skecher. Back then, sew-on patches on khaki bush-hats were considered cool and bottle-green bags and feather cuts. Behind it all lurked the air-wear boot and there was only one choice: Dr. Klaus Märtens’ “bouncing soles”, the German cushioned heel that stomped on Major Domo’s, Sergeant Peppers and other snides. I never owned a pair of Docs. I made do with Peppers after mournfully patrolling Salford Precinct. Dad attempting repeatedly to palm shite boots off on me in shoe shops. I endeavoured to look my best, my scarves tied round my wrists and dangling from my belt-loops. Little plastic fool.
United scarves had a hierarchy all their own in the 70s. There was the basic red and white and then there were the three combinations. The “mostly red”, the red and white with a thin black stripe down the middle of the white one. Two variants of that existed, mostly black and mostly white. Then there were the ones with shit tassels whose stripes ran lengthways, or that one with the big round plastic United badge on. Or the silk scarves, many of which were tartan. How passionate were we back then, over a team that was basically shite?
Enter the 80s; habitual use of the class A’s, when the sulphate was very good. I remember being utterly twatted after an all-nighter. Lying before the gas fire having been awake well over 24 hours. Bloke knocked on the door and mumbled something about loft insulation. I left him to it. Next thing, my mother is kicking me awake, saying, “what the bleedin’ ‘ell are all these fellers doin’ sprayin’ stuff into the loft through tubes?!” Fortunately me ol’ man menaced them into giving us a massive discount. The same old man that administered CPR to me after I’d collapsed from alcoholic poisoning three years earlier, New Year’s Day, 1982. The same one who’d scraped me off the pavement after ingesting psychotropic compounds or pumped my chest and inserted airways down my throat on more than one occasion. And he wasn’t the only one. I’ve been a bad son in a bad world.
My version of going to college was dishevelled and desperate. Days spent prowling the shelves of Prestwich library, scouring the catalogue for scant information on shamanism, mysticism, LSD and UFOs; fantasising about winning the pools. Spending my days scuba diving off the Bahamas, investigating the source of Atlantean myths. It never occured to me that I didn’t do the pools and scuba diving required lessons of a quite disciplined nature. The few tomes I gleaned from library and shops amounted to fuck all in the mid-80s. A Carlos Castaneda here, a Timothy Leary there…whipped under my snorkel and home for a gander. Sad Times at Radgepot High. I had more books than Sherrat and Hughes until my dad made me build a bonfire in the Clough and burn the fucking lot. I’d been keeping the flame alive with those natty library books but I never saw Rave coming and didn’t see much United, either. I was too busy tripping when a team from Székesfehérvár booted us out of the UEFA Cup. Time wore on, the bad drug daze left far behind, or so I thought…
Somewhere between the hangover of the early eighties and the plastication of Madchester we revisited and revived the psychedelic ski-jump. At first acid was as hard to find as hippie books, but soon anyone with half an inkling had shelves packed with Amazonian witch-doctorism and New Age CDs…..Mancunians inexorably shunting towards the euphoric descent into Rave, like a gaggle of poignant hooligans boarding Belle Vue Bobs. KLF began pumping through the Precinct pubs, tower-blocks blazing all around in a grey Salford soup. One dark Saturday thumbing some magazine a kid had left…I recognised the language…tons of DJs, with unexpectedly clever names, shamanistic-mystic…why the fuck didn’t we think of this…..I’m looking round at the heads, thinking, deary, deary me…..Bruiser’s there, rolling cigs from his Blackpool tin…supping that bitter that I shan’t describe….the world was changing…what did the KLF know of the Cloughward bonfire, the wilful destruction of British government property..? The Time Lords got to burn one million quid long after I’d done in my pile of books…but which was the greater crime?…they were an infinitesimal group of young people emerging at the fountainhead of a new thing.
Remember the rush, the barmy push for substance, mush? The owl-faced need for speed and sound, when acid house was underground, when Ecstasy was little known it was Sputnik or it was home-grown. Jog yer swede indeed and heed the embryonic seed, don’t plead or expect my heart to bleed for them what never rode the steed. That’s right it’s shite and I am tight, no sympathy for someone’s plight when past encounters they’d delight in taking flight when out of sight, leaving early on Saturday nights so long ago but now they know to act like they are one top pro. You were either there or not when molecules went through your snot to enter deep and creep up high and send you loping through the sky to spires distant full of ghouls in glow-stick tents with dancing fools who water-drank from poison pools and thought that strobe-lit rain was jewels. Did you follow pilot cars along the motorway from bars and did they guide you into dust upon which theatres full of lust enacted play an easy lay and ecstasy it lit the way? The winding roads of blinding wits the spotlight studded skies and pits with DJs puttin’ on the Ritz or – hang on, is this getting on your tits?
The afterbirth of Rave and its fluorescent shower of amniotic fluid settled on Madchester 20 years ago – spawning a can-do-it-yourself attitude in the city. United We Stand’s 20th Anniversary last month reminded me of where I was when the mag first came out. Usually in a drunken stupor, risking arrest for various stupidities, regardless of the day. But stupidities are allowed when you’re young and on a mission from Lucifer. A mission to spawn a goat culture that danced on bent furry legs. That tapped its hooves against the shield on United’s crest like a fallen angel flying on MDMA.
Drug society is really social Darwinism gone awry. Instead of those who best manipulate an environment it centres on those best suited to escape it through the administration of chemicals. Did you ever stop to think about those who embarked on careers, who went to work every day? Those who looked down on you for the drug-addled freak you possibly were? Sensible people, wholesome people. People with a five-year plan? Fuck them; people like that want slapping to death, really they do. Imagine that, slapping someone to death? It’s funny, really, once you find yourself pondering it. Slapping some cunt to death. It’s poetic, with a hint of, well, slapstick, about it. I mean, it’d take ages, which might be fun, depending on who you were slapping. But it could be messy. Not the kind of job people’d want to take on. You’d have to make it look desirable. Like Tom Sawyer whitewashing the fence. Slapping someone to death could be hilarious, but it could also be very grim.
And there it is again; the violence. Part of the puzzle. The equation of love and fear that triangulates over working-class enclaves together with humour. That separates us poor demented folk from those with discipline, with structure; scuba divers and the career-driven. Professional shamen who made millions while the rest of us just got twatted on acid. Oh well…

It was late, cold. Through the Venetian blind I watched the cars crawl the boulevard. I licked my lips; thirsty time again. The faded pictures grinned down at me. Imprisoned behind dusty glass. Red shirts and white crew necks; Denis Law, Bobby Charlton, Georgie Best, Ralph Milne, Pat Crera- whoa, what the heck? Somethin’ definitely wasn’t right here so I figured I’d put it right the old fashioned way. I went to the mahogany liquor cabinet. Poured me a big stiff one. Blue neon winkin’ through the window an’ the mad reek of insanity. That’s when she walked in, large as life. Eyes like a monitor lizard, tits like a prehistoric kangaroo’s balls.

“Are you the private dick?” she gasped.

“I’m a dick, but that’s not so private in this town,” I told her. She sounded foreign to these parts. Irish, maybe. A looker. The kinda gal that could fall out of bed in Bumfuck, Idaho and be a millionaire in Beverly Hills by noon. Maybe from marryin’ some rich ogre or writing a book about wizards. Maybe not. The traffic was dying down and she sat on the leather couch without asking. I stood in shadow admiring the blue light playing over her facial contours; I’m a sucker for cheesy effects, and this was pure Mr. Spock-when-looking-into-his-viewfinder-on-the-bridge-of-the-Enterprise material.

“It’s my husband,” she gasped. Gasped a lot, this one. Face ablaze with metallic color. Then I noticed the belly on her. She was eatin’ for two. Another myth shattered, like acid flashbacks and wet dreams.

“Yeah? Doin’ what? Cheatin’? Divin’? Fowlin’? Time wastin’?” I hissed that last one out. Time wastin’, like I was accusin’ her of same. The tumbler was empty so I poured me another. Poured her one too, then remembered Junior. The Surgeon General wouldn’t approve. That gutless fuck.

“I dunno…he’s….acting all different.”

“Different how? Different I’m gonna come good this season, or different I wanna take off to Madrid and live happy ever after?”

“Why you! He’d never-!” She gasped again, or maybe panted under the weight of the ogre she was carryin’ inside.

“Oh, he kisses the badge, huh?” I asked her straight, gave her a wink.

She looked disgusted.

“That wasn’t no metaphor, lady. Is this guy loyal, or is he playin’ away?” I’d seen plenty of badge kissers come through this place. Always pledgin’ their lives, always leavin’ for Madrid when the fancy took ‘em. Broken hearted dames like this one in their wake. It was the way things were and not a damn thing you or me or Garry Birtles could do about it.

“No!” she said, “That’s not it at all!” That accent. It wasn’t Irish, it was somethin’ else. Sounded like John Lennon on coke. Good coke, the kind transsexuals sell to Nicaraguan ufologists at the Rio Carnival.

“So what is it, Dollface? C’mon, quit wastin’ my time here. I ain’t waitin’ till the ninety-seventh minute for a result. Spit it out.”

She chewed that over some and then said, “Well, he’s been sayin’ queer stuff. Like, he’s been sayin’ he’ll miss the-” She broke down, a mess, a big, sad, sexy Komodo dragon-eyed-with-massive-kangaroo-nuts mess. I poured some more medicine. Handed her a tumbler full. Loosen her up. She was startin’ to look and sound familiar, but I hoped I was wrong.

“He’s been sayin’ he’ll miss what, darlin’?” I asked, fightin’ to disguise the panic that was rising inside me. This whole thing stank of fish. And chips. Then the penny dropped. It was Wayne’s girl. It was Coleen. I grabbed her by the shoulders.

“Miss what, Coleen?!? What’s he bin sayin’?!”

“He’s sayin’ he’ll miss the vermin game to be with me if I go into labor!” she shrieked, disgusted and terrified by the game of life.

I sank to my knees and took a good hit of that cheap whiskey. These dames were like diamonds. They were hard but they always proved their value when the chips were down. And boy were they down. The color drained from my leathery mug and I held her some. Till the crying stopped. She was crying too. I hadn’t felt betrayed like this since my visit to the Doc last week. It was for a private matter so I won’t bore ya with details. The Doc didn’t like what he found, I can tell ya that. Gave me a thorough going over while I focused on his framed 1977 FA Cup Final photos to block out the pain. As I straightened up from off of the examination table he schlocked off his rubber glove and tossed me a box of Kleenex. “Here,” he said, “wipe the KY off with these and pull your pants back up. Don’t use too many. That’s all I got.” I could see he was appalled. I gave my cornhole a good wipe. Jeez, the Doc goes heavy on the jelly.

“You have ball cancer,” he said. “I’ll give you two, three weeks, tops.” The Doc tells it like it is.

“Christ, Doc, you serious?! I wanna second opinion,” I insisted, feelin’ plenty sore.

“OK. That’s one hairy asshole ya got there,” he said, pouting.

“I’m gonna be a goner before the Liverpool game, Doc?” I couldn’t believe this.

“It’s all that lead-based paint they used back in the 70s. Those railings you used to sit on in the Stretford End? Ball cancer.”

But that was yesterday and I had a job to do here. Wayne’s girl was in deep shit; I wasn’t the only one gonna miss the big showdown with the snakes. I had to save the day before I shuffled off this mortal coil. Maybe induce labor myself if I had to. I looked to my heroes for inspiration. Crerand smiled bitterly. Those sad lips and cheekbones silent and distracted. Charlton stared with goat eyes, taunting me. Law frowned like a polecat stalking a damn rat. Best…well, what can you say? Everything was a joke to that guy, even ball cancer. I looked at Coleen. She looked at me.

“What are we gonna do?!” Again with the gasping. She was scared. I was scared. Should I phone the Doc? Nah, better keep this in-house. Plus he’d want a cut of the action and a man dying of ball cancer needs all the dough he can get.

“Ya really would prefer Wayne plays at Anfield an’ him not bein’ there when you drop the rugrat?” It was a delicate question that needed asking. Women set these tests for guys and you can never be too careful.

“Those people are animals,” she gasped. “They’ve vandalized our families’ homes. That Peter Hooton is a complete wankeh! And they’ve used weapons of mass destruction on their own peop-!” I held up my hand to silence her.

“That’s goin’ too far Dollface. It was Saddam did that, not Hooton’s mob. Though the choice of box-cutters as weapons in the 9/11 business did make me wonder.”

This mixed-up scall gal was lookin’ for a white knight. All I had to offer was black turds from last night’s Guinness and a dose of Big C eatin’ away at my family jewels. I could split from this trip any minute and had to save the day before I went. If he’d been galavantin’ with loose dames that would have been easier to sort out. A slip of bromide in his half-time tea – but no, he’d lose his edge. Waste even more chances than usual. Plus, Fergie might launch the trolley at the whole team. That would be disastrous; a limp-dicked menagerie of gimps for the second half. My mind was wandering. This was going nowhere.

That’s when the door was smashed to smithereens and the man in question appeared, his moon head gleamin’ white like a peeled spud.

“Coleen! What’s goin’ on?!” He was blinded by rage.

“Siddown son, it’s like this,” I told him, passing a cracked mug of whiskey his way. “We’re concerned. You been talkin’ crazy talk. Sayin’ you’re gonna miss this big game…it’s a helluva thing, son, but Coleen here wants ya to play. What a gal, huh?”

“Bollocks! Scouse Mike can fill in for me. He’ll do the business like he did against the Bittermen. We’ll get fourteen minutes of injury time an’ one of the subsequent twenty eight corners we’re awarded will go in, deflected off Carragher’s napper!”

“This one’s at Anfield, son,” I reminded him. “And they get even more injury time there than we do at OT, but don’t be countin’ on a single decision goin’ our way this time. Not only that. Mike’s got a groin strain, but he makes it look like ball cancer. He’s fallin’ apart like a fake Rolex from a Bangkok market.”

His eyes rolled about like Ken Dodd on speed. “Whe- where’s Coleen, wharrave yer done wit’ ‘er?!” he demanded. I turned to look at her but there was only winkin’ blue neon on a cold leather couch. She’d vanished. And then we heard it…a wailing, coughing screeching bawl that only an ogre can produce. I looked out the window and I saw a huge bright star overhead. There were three men down on the sidewalk buzzin’ to be let in. I hit the button and resumed the search for the missin’ gal. The cry came again an’ then we saw it. Raised up in slime covered hands, dripping with the broth of life, gurgling and screamin’ like a banshee in the night. Coleen had startled when that door had gone in and pumped out the little milksucker through shock.

“Happy birthday, kid,” I said, through teeth clenched round a cigar and workin’ on a tumbler of whiskey. There was a knock at the door, well, what was left of it, anyway. It was the three men. They were bearing gifts and they looked familiar. One, a bit distracted by his private concerns, the other daring me to challenge his authority, the third amused but coiled like a predator. I sensed a fourth man had been with them, but he’d gone off for a drink. A wise move in my book. The little ‘un was screamin’ the joint down. Life is too short and a pain in the balls sometimes but it’s nice when things work out.

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.