THE SHAPE OF THINGS
October 2001

This is not your world. It is not my world. We are prisoners. Trapped inside a world not of our making. The planet is the biggest prison there is. There is nowhere else to go. You cannot go outside of it. This world, the one that we were forced into, is everywhere.

There is no escape. But we try. We all do. We all try to carve out a world we can tolerate, out of a world we cannot. Products bring us happiness - or more accurately, feed the desire, temporarily, for unhappiness not to exist. And at the heart of it all, our souls exist like parasites, addicts, forever hungry. Yet never full. Always unsatisfied. perfect happiness is just that silver plated 4DVD player away.

Someone dies of starvation every 36 seconds. Whilst you sleep blissfully every night, eight hundred people starve to death. Every night. Tonight.

We didn’t make things this way. There is no law. No order. No control. All, is vague chaos that we try to force into order. The human brain forces random shapes into something it can recognise. The Rosharch inkblot test is proof of that.

Our lives are random. Chaos. Unordered. And so, we try to create sense from something that is inherently senseless. We shave and force random events into order. We try to give our lives a plot, a narrative, a happy ending, with love interest in the middle. But really what we find, when we peel teh artifice away, the fake ideologies, the crutch of religion, is nothing. Nothing but biological fact of semen and old age. Blank.

There is nothing to hold up our morals, our belief systems. Nothing but a void that we fill with junk so that the emptiness cannot be recognised. But like a black hole, it sucks it in, gives nothing back, and leave us with a Blank.

The blank page. The most terrifying thing on earth on to a writer. Whenever they ask someone “What is your biggest fear?” - normally in the back pages of faded yellowing newspaper gossip columns, Q&A’s for people you don’t care about and can’t remember - its normally something big. Armageddon. Or for the more self-interested something bland like someone hurting my child.

Now, far be it from me to incite violence upon children, but your children aren’t special. Nobody’s out to get your child. There’s loads of children to choose from, if someone was going to harm some children, they aren’t going to single yours out worthy of special attention.

The world is full of children. Too many of them in fact. Rampant overpopulation is just one of the multitude of problems facing the world today. And we’re all gobbling up the planets decreasing resources at an ever-increasing rate.

Soon there might very well be no more pages left to be written. The blank page stares at me. It taunts me. It is part of human nature to fill the emptiness with something. What that something is, really is irrelevant in a lot of respects. People expand their lives to fill the holes in them. What previously was trivial - for some music, for others sport, or the elusive love/sex/companionship issue - becomes all important. Happiness cannot be achieved without fufilling that goal, whatever it is. The pubs and clubs are full on Friday and Saturday nights of people who are looking to fill that hole. There’s a double entendre in there, but it wasn’t necessarily intentional. They go out to celebrate life, and being alive, but also look to find the mysterious, media-fed Significant Other, the missing link that can complete their lives.

Saturday mornings are the same. Routine even. Like all our days. The gift of life is wasted in minutes spent waiting for trains, minutes wasted waiting for adverts to subsume and television to commence, in hours sat behind desks. Five days a week, we rise early, and curse the fact that 225 days a year most of us spend performing menial tasks in order to afford to continue going to work. Moving cursors from one part of a small screen to another and then finally having a cup of tea or coffee. Saturdays, I wake up late. But not too late. Years of being gainfully misemployed have resulted in rising early, even when there is no real reason to. And, as the years progress, there’s a feeling, ever increasing in pressure, that time is slipping away. That those second, those minutes, those years, will never come back. They are gone. All gone.

Everything will be history. And that is irrelevant - or at least that‘s what we are told. History, its the past, its so over, yesterdays news. And so it doesn‘t matter. Does it? Well of course it does. History is what we will be remembered by. The very foundations of our civilisation rest upon history. Without history, the shape of our countries, the blood of our wars would be radically different. Without history, American troops could be invading France right now. And if Archemedes writings had been discovered, mankind could now be 200 further years down the road of technological development.

And incidentally, History is always written by the victors. The very nature of human beings is self-justifying. We always believe that what we are doing is Right. If Right is of course, self-serving. Because preservation is the first primary instinct of all human beings. There is a fundamental human need for order amongst chaos. Hence the need for tidying up, God, and History. The concept of human history being essentially rudderless and without narrative, order, or justice is too big a concept for most people to acknowledge as a possibility, let alone a reality. Good guys don’t always win. In fact they rarely do - those are “ungood” (and what is that, evil? corrupt?) - tend to play dirty. Concepts of equality and fairness don’t apply, only power and exploitation of it. There is no such reasoning of should I do this? only a reasoning of can I do this?

The fact that good guys don’t win should be evident by the fact that the principle champions of democracy aren’t essentially believers in the democratic process. All of us, in every country, live in a dictatorship. The very notion of a dictatorship is that of a place where leaders go against the wishes of the majority. A democracy is a place where the largest minority - which is very different from a majority - has power. That’s the first basic premise to accept that every country is a dictatorship.

Some countries yes, have economic and social advantages over others, as well as more apparent freedoms. But a choice between Pepsi or Coke isn’t a choice. Doesn’t necessarily make it a democracy. The President, a man whose role as a figurehead fronting a corrupt and incestous powerbase of rich businessmen and corporate interests is becoming increasingly apparent, didn’t even win the biggest vote in the so-called most democratic country in the world. A country that seeks to impose its form of democracy upon others by force doesn’t even practice what it preaches.

Still, this should be no surprise. Since when has America stood for anything even near to “Truth, Justice and the American Way”? Incidentally, rhetorical questions require no answer. But then again, the nature of the so-called First World is that you don’t actually have to think. Education is done in such a fashion as to indoctrinate children into accepting everything they are presented without considering an alternative point of view.

Since when, incidentally did religious education, involve teaching the Creationist theory exclusively? Education should be about teaching facts to people to make their own decisions about issues. Teaching people how to survive. For example, where proven facts are passed onto children to ensure that they are equipped with enough facts to survive in the world. Quite where indoctrination into belief in a so-called Grand Deity that has not been factually proven, and the death of whose son is celebrated by a giant bunny delivering eggs filled with sweets, has in a School eludes me. Or that some all powerful being that there is no conclusive proof of the existence of created everything in seven short days. Even though there are Dinosaurs, and geology, and archaeology to disprove this theory - you just got to remember that all that is there to test the faith of the faithful and provide distractions and hoaxes for scientists. So some prankster God is going around planting Dinosaur bones in soil to fool archaeologists in 160 million years time.

Heaven should be fairly full soon. There’s only 144,000 seats in there. But I’m fairly sure that The President will be filling it up with his very own crack squad of Black Secret Special Ops Commandos, who valiantly died in the pursuit of a man with a beard that they think ordered some terrorist attacks.

When the Towers fell, when Nostradmus falsified prediction came true, when the world became Black Smoke for a day, was the start of the end of my belief in anything. Not because the Towers fell, not because we were living in a world where the Good Guys no longer triumphed. I long ago realised that.

and when two brothers shall be rent apart, the sky shall scream, and black rain shall fall My belief started to collapse when The President ordered War. The assault upon those Towers was, undoubtedly, an act of War. But a hidden act. By people with no country, no base, no flag, no government. And the Global Policeman must act. Self-defence. Self-righteous. Self-deluded. Choose a foreign country where they look funny and have a different ideology. And blow the shit out of it.

If you’re not with us, you’re against us. This is no time for debate. This is no time for democracy. If you disagree with us bombing thousands upon thousands of civilians, you’re a terrorist. I thought if you bombed thousands upon thousands of civilians you were a terrorist. There’s a Boeing 757 that disappeared into the pentagon yet there’s not one scrap of wreckage out of a 6,000 tonne plane. There’s hidden oil tanks in buildings that combust. There’s a man with a beard we were going in to get and kill. Because that’s going to bring 2,880 people back from the Dead.

Still, Creationist Theory and Anti-Abortionists rule. Who needs facts when you’ve got belief? They said they’d ban foxhunting. They didn’t. They said they’d sort out hospitals. They didn’t.

I didn’t vote for this. I voted for freedom, and opportunity. I didn’t vote for lies and disappointment. I didn’t vote for a all-cases scenario Nuclear Deployment Policy with lowered Implementation Criteria. Or, in English, using Nuclear Weapons against anyone they feel like. I didn’t vote for the World’s last remaining stocks of Anthrax in a New York laboratory. I didn’t vote for Corporate Rule. I didn’t vote for Creationist Theory to taken precedence over fact. I didn’t vote for the abolition of Abortion. I didn’t vote for Imaginary Conflicts - for government engineered was between nations to fuel military spending.

All of this is being done in our name. Apparently, we elected these people to do these things on our behalf. Not my behalf. Nor the behalf of anyone I know. I voted for the current ruling party once. Five years ago now. I know. I’m sorry. I genuinely thought that it was a good thing. I didn’t realise he would order more military conflicts that any other leader since the Second World War.

Still, if The Government had any say in the matter they’d dissolve the people and elect a new one. The problem is, a revolution is impossible in a country like this. We’re fed just enough not to go hungry. Paid just enough not to break down the doors of the banks. Told just enough to think we know whats going on. We have TV and children to distract us. Films to watch, commuting to do, work to earn our keep.

This is not the World we wanted. This is not the world we voted for. You think that just by giving us DVD Players and children that we’re going to be happy? That we’re not going to understand what you’re doing to us? And the world?

Mankind is being sold short. The people who are murdering the world are not anonymous, faceless. They have names. They have addresses. They breathe the same air we do. Eat the same food. Shop in the same supermarkets. Although they themselves probably don’t. They probably send a maid along.

We’re told we’re powerless. We’re just one voice in millions. A Statistic. A marketing demographic. We are nothing, except consumers. But even millions of small people can make a crowd. Even the smallest wound can leave a scar.

That’s where we are. That’s who I am. That’s what I do.