A less than substantial follow through.

Very rarely – once in a blue moon really – a politician will tickle the ribs of the public enough to inspire giggles of hope in a multitude of people; these people (like the starving and depressed population of a country mired in total-war) are so weary of their circumstances they will lap up ambiguous promises of ‘change’, political or otherwise, like hungry orphans given their first small bowl of gruel after a week down t’ pits.

Obama rode this wave of optimism straight into the White House, a few years ago, though admirers and well wishers have long since been left feeling ripped off; not least because rumours abound of attendees at one rally in Washington, who’d been face to face and shaking hands with the great man, getting home to find their watches had been stolen, right off their optimistic wrists. In the UK things weren’t much better on the political stage, with Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg managing to gain a notable following during the first televised election debate; this was due chiefly to Clegg coming across as the only ‘straight’ man on the dais, leaving the other candidates to appear like a pair of bickering children, or Moe and Curly (of Three Stooges fame) stuck in an “It’s his fault” “No, it’s your fault” pastiche. Clegg promised a genuine chance of change, and led a platform aimed at recruiting younger voters – many of them experiencing their first general election – who would be keen on seeing an alternative to the old two party (read: old and boring) system. He backed his TV performance with promises to fight against education cuts and increases to tuition fees, he seemed sincere, and the young voters flocked to his banner; later, once he’d secured a position in government he turned around and punched them in the face.

‘Don’t hate me’ Nick was heard to cry afterwards, ‘that big kid over there’, he turns and points at David Cameron and his minions, ‘that big kid over there said he’d hit me if I didn’t do it’.

With the breakdown of the Alternative Voting referendum a mere days ago, Nick is only just seeing how badly his irresponsibility has damaged his party and it is not an easy truth for him to swallow. Claims have been made (The Guardian.co.uk) that the Lib Dems have actually had a much more prevalent success influencing the state of the coalition, and the fulfilling of their manifesto pledges, than the Conservatives have, at least to date, by a 15% margin. This may well be the case, but the British public has little stomach to acknowledge progress on piffling, insubstantial, and most likely outdated areas of domestic policy whilst the Conservative beast is wild eyed and snarling in their face, gripping them by the lapels.

Living by the sword.

Or more pertinently, the cane.

The Daily Express (living up to their reputation as a bastion of morality) are today claiming that over half of the adults in Britain - the Express claiming over two thirds of pupils themselves - are calling for the return of corporal punishment in the classroom, in an effort to curb the rampant disrespect and irritating mannerisms of the latest generation.

Let us be clear though. Whilst it would be a simple thing to think that stricter punishments will de facto equate to a deterrent against unruly behaviour, this is not, indeed cannot be as easy a subject to understand as that.

How many of you have parents, or know parents of friends, who teach? I do. They are all people who care about helping children progress themselves, in an effort to better the position they're in at the moment. In a microcosm of current social attitudes, teachers as a whole seem to believe that personal progression is key to achieving potential. Most of these people are moderate liberals and are nice, polite - if not usually middle class - people. I struggle to see my mother, or even some of the teachers I had at secondary school, raising their voices very much, let alone a cane. It is undoubtedly true that there is a marked difference between verbal warnings and and physical punishments. There is also a very serious question to be answered: Who will administer the punishment? Certainly not the hack journalists who're more interested in churning out tag-lines and causing consternation than they are in the actual outcome, nor the parents who have relinquished all responsibility for their demented off-spring.

These kind of measures would actually require the hiring of people who were specially recruited to mete out punishment, assuming of course that the current infra-structure of the education system was to remain untouched- merely built upon. Should of course the proposals for tougher teachers be enforced then it is entirely likely that the voices of moderation and empathy within our schools will be swept aside in a tide of rising aggression and borstal-like behaviour (on the part of teachers and pupils alike). Proponents of this kind of hare-brained scheme sound like they could do with being re-educated on the daily struggles in the class room, on both sides of it, before claiming that there can ever be such a simple answer to such a large and complex problem.

A doomed generation (and David Cameron's Horse)

‘Most smart people tend to feel queasy when the conversation turns to things like “certain death” and “total failure” and the idea of a “doomed generation”. But not me. I am comfortable with these themes.’ – Dr Hunter S. Thompson

A doomed generation indeed. As the wheel of history comes around, for another cheap shot in the back of the British public, it bears a different face, and yet bears the same cruel mark, high on the forehead, come straight from the Book of Revelation. Reagan and Thatcher may be gone, but their legacy of indifference towards a youth that they knew nothing of, and cared less about, continues. Thatcher broke the back of the Miners and the Print workers during the Eighties, in a series of decisive actions that left Britain with psychic scars which foment a range of explicit feelings to this very day; Cameron is too slick for that kind of crass action. The middle classes would never allow it. You could practically see the stink of fear, lying heavy upon him as soon as the threat of student protests began in earnest during the long, cold, December days. For the rest of us we felt a new sensation, a tingling, faltering sense of hope, hope that there was passion left in the British public - long thought to consist solely of Butlins RedCoats and sales executives – and that things may not be as bad as they seemed for most of the early 2000s, a decade mired in commercialism and blandness, in politics as in everything else.

We grew up with Tony Blair- a man who hid a war behind a smile and his decency behind a war. He led the way to the bland personality politics of our time; for all his faults, no one could accuse John Major of that. Cameron went one further though and hid himself behind two wars and another politician - the pasty white blob of Nick Clegg would do well to get back inside whatever cage Cameron keeps for him, in the dank underbelly of Number 10; whatever happens with the Alternative Voting (AV) referendum, Clegg needs to side-step the next volley of bloody stool that the country throws at the coalition; we need to see Cameron take a hit for once. The Liberal Democrats have yet to act as though they know that Cameron has turned their party into an enormous Trojan Horse; from here on in it’s only a matter of time before the raping and pillaging of middle England begins, but the Lib Dems are an active Horse, and want their share of the loot; the beating their credibility has taken over the last year has taken a heavy toll on their collective psyche.

We are amongst a whole generation of young adults left to languish under the cruel ministrations and voracious stupidity of the coalition government like rotten fruit lying beneath the fetid weight of a compost heap. This week in the United States, McDonalds, that bastion of integrity at the top of the service sector, had to turn down 938,000 people during a recruitment drive. Of the one million applicants for their part time, minimum wage jobs, only 62,000 were successful, but the question remains – why were one million people, in the prime of their mental health and faculties, applying for jobs that will see them flogged and debased by the general public within weeks of donning the grease laden apparel and hair nets?

The answer is a simple one. Desperation. This is what the bankers and politicians of the Western world have driven these people to, and the people know not whence they came to be here. Greed is a plum of a word to sum up the beginning of this debacle; ruin is all that awaits us at the end. This is a terrible state of affairs and one that needs correcting. A tide of crazed youth is hard to control when twice or thrice a week they aren’t forced to learn some kind of domesticity at the business end of a burger grill; dwell for a moment, on where we’ll be when even fast food ‘restaurants’ (and I use the term loosely) can’t afford to take on any more of the brutes, when off come the hairnets and stained aprons, and out they spill onto the streets, half starved and blinking in the light of the sun like mewling troglodytes. If the Millbank centre couldn’t hold them back will Canary Wharf be any different?

The age of restlessness.

I’m waiting. Nothing really happens, but since I’m not expecting anything to happen this doesn’t surprise me, though I am agitated. Restless.

I’ve begun to notice that everyone I know, with a job, hates their job. Everyone seems to hate their job, and the money they earn. These are people being paid to do, to behave, to (however temporarily) think, what, and how, someone else wants them to; this servitude (for what else must it be called?) makes them unhappy. The term ‘wage-slave’ is a little more succinct than I first realised, though that’s not the end of it; without a job, without a servile yoke- the civilised noose, if you will, to give meaning through its meaning, I spend time doing what I want to do, and yet I am unhappy with that. People rarely make themselves happy if they can help it.

A day spent reading American Psycho makes me feel strangely relieved, though it heightens my agitation; over the course of the day I have been accosted by ‘celebrities’, and I use the term loosely, affronting me on behalf of more companies than I care to remember. I miss hating things. I miss being passionate, even in that way towards something. Being passionate, even in a negative manner, was still to be passionate. Hate doesn’t come easily anymore, so I moan and complain, and dredge up excuses to create unease and dislike. Being negative means that I can hold onto that once bright spark, that spark which used to consume me ceaselessly, and keep me ticking and turning and burning over like a man possessed (or perhaps pre-possessed; a being destined to choose the wrong answers. Though at least I chose something) Burning like a man aflame- a man too busy to stop drop and roll.

Like a car in the desert I have no real destination, only endless expanses of dull potential waiting for me- open to me like the dark of a heavy night, like a door, like a tunnel- quixotic, promising, and yet eternally mundane. A dark potential like the mouth of a grave. This was to be the first time that I came to realise that there was no real, no tangible, difference between the two sides of the civilised coin: the ever-hungry career minded toads/ the jobless, feckless, unwashed masses of the unemployed. The lines within society had become blurred, and each side remained as fetid as the other.

The first day after she was gone I made sure I stayed busy; you couldn’t have paid me to make me come to terms with the roiling, rolling, awful, pit-of-the-stomach-is-so-empty-it’s-eating-itself feeling I had going on. Most of the time I found that I was beginning to enjoy the time I had to myself- not the time with myself; never by myself, for fear of my broken core realising just how broken it was, stamping its feet, impatient, why wasn’t I doing anything to sort it out? Love is a strange word. I was a broken person, but I don’t mean that I was a blob of rampant, despairing emotion, unable to hold back the lip quivering, bowel shaking, flood of tears and recriminations, oh no. I was a broken automaton, an ant, if you will, flailing berserkly, in a blind panic-rage as the routine of its life is ground to a halt by the errant leaf. I learned to tell the time by stomach, though often I would pretend to be too busy to eat; this helped assuage my objectionable conscience, irked as it was at my betrayal of social norms- my unwillingness to co-operate and advertise the good teeth, the fine musculature, and the damnable intellect of my own corporeal, bodily temple.

The danger of thinking in 'isms'

Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and other animals by John Gray.

Where to begin with this purile, hypocritical, book of opinionated one-up-man-ship. I'm just going to clarify that I feel perfectly valid writing this 'review' (read: trash-fest) after having only read the first five or so pages of the book. Hardly professional, but if I ever manage to keep down the rising feeling of nausea I experience whenever my eyes fall on the speciously academic pages of the book, I promise to write a full review after finishing it proper-like.
Until then: behold my sentient wrath- this book just ruined a perfectly good bath for me- the most heinous of crimes.

Guilty. Case closed. Appeal denied.

Firstly, as a man who seems dead set against anything that isn't his own opinion, Mr. Gray has used Darwin(ism) as the anchor by which his shoddy papier-mache canoe can stay moored on the sea of respectability. However. He's already fucked it up. In what can only be an effort to showcase his intellectual credentials Mr. Gray name-drops Darwin(ism) six times in a page and a half of text- 'Look at me! I found intelligent theories that help me assert my poorly constructed ones! Me is clever!'. Again, I must stress that he also does so poorly. From page one Gray tells us that Darwin(ism): '... teaches that species are only assemblies of genes, interacting at random with each other and their shifting environmments. Species cannot control their fates. Species do not exist.' [Emphasis mine] Still not too bad so far, until on the next page we see that he tries then to argue that: '... though human knowledge will very likely continue to grow and with it human power, the human animal will stay the same: a highly inventive *cough* species *cough* that is also one of the most predatory and destructive'. Sigh.

So beyond hypocritical hypothesis' what does Straw Dogs offer the astute reader? Plenty of conviction is evident, which... seems odd considering the manner by which Mr. Gray chides religious types for their unwavering belief and faith.

"You couldn't be hoisting yourself on your own petard, could you Mr. Gray? What's that? Sorry, I can't really hear you properly, what with your mouth being full of your own foot."

Oh, and it isn't only at the religious citizen that Mr. Gray manages to positively squirt disdain. From the beginning he sets up his foil- the (apprently abundant) Humanist. For those unused to the term it is defined, by the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, as:

'A system of thought that rejects religious beliefs and centers on humans and their values, capacities, and worth.'

JG: 'Humanism can mean many things, but for us it means belief in progress' Sorry, what? We just covered that. You're a little off by my count Mr. Gray... Fine, we'll just let that one slide, and allow you to carry on as if you know what you're doing... 'To believe in progress is to believe that, by using the powers given us by growing scientific knowledge, humans can free themselves from the limits that frame the lives of other animals. This is the hope of nearly everybody nowadays, but it is groundless' [Emphasis mine] Now, I'm sorry, but is the ability to extend our lives through the use of medicine and technology not sufficiently removing ourselves from the natural framework? How about the manner by which we can manufacture large quantities of food as and when we need it? Do you see people chasing gazelles on their lunch break Mr. Gray? No. No you bloody well do not. How about the ability to neutralise and destroy diseases which decimated entire generations? No? HOW ABOUT BEING ABLE TO MANUFACTURE DEVICES WHICH NEGATE THE NEED TO BASH ROCKS TOGETHER IF WE NEED FIRE OR LIGHT?!?

Ye Gods man.

Blood for the Blood God.

Headline reads: ‘Crazed man shoots girlfriend, her lover and a cop’

Old news. I guess ‘Culture of violence breeds new victims’ wouldn’t have cut it. This man wounded his ex-girlfriend WITH AN FUCKING SHOTGUN (because she dumped him while he was in jail, the reprehensible bitch), killed this woman’s new boyfriend, and then waited in ambush before shooting a policeman in his patrol car, presumably because he was bored waiting in a soggy bush for five hours.

“What bullshit! That isn’t news!” I hear you cry. What you want to hear about is the repercussions on the police force, the fines and levies, enquiries and debauched proceedings preceding the redundancies and ruinous terminations of various officers. All this- all this for having used an experimental weapon to stop a man with a twisted, and violent, a bestial soul; he was no better than a rabid animal. "What were the police doing...", I hear you cry, "... attempting to protect the lives of the men and women of Northumbria, putting the lives of those same men and women, and their own (Fascist) lives ahead of the life of such a fine, and good, man"? Was he bollocks.

If any one of us had been in their positions I'm pretty sure we wouldn't have had any qualms about using god-damn near everything we had on that DOG- he had shot three people to that point, and there was every indication that he would do so again, assuming the letter he sent to the police was genuine. It's a curious case that in a society more than happy to (routinely) put down dangerous/ overly-aggressive dogs we should be happy to make excuses for dangerous men.

The society of today seems to be on a collision course with reality. The hypocrisy of our culture (one of the most enlightened cultures in the world if you believe the rumours...) is massive; on the one hand is advocates violence across the board and on the other it demonises (albeit rightly) those who give in to it *Cough* Raoul Moat *Cough*.

Television and films have long been deplored by the faint hearted for consisting of very little, if not perpetual violence. Furthermore, the most popular video games - the icons of entire generations - have been dominated by First Person Shooters (FPSs) and Real Time Strategy (RTS) war simulators- games such as DOOM, Quake, Unreal Tournament, 007: Golden Eye, Perfect Dark, Total Annihilation, and Command & Conquer, to name but a few. I wonder why it is that entire sections of the populace begin to think that violent behaviour is nothing to be worried about? They are only exposed to it DAILY afterall. Perhaps we should bear in mind the advice of Roman philosopher Seneca the Younger (look at me being all inter-textual!), when he stated that 'Constant exposure to dangers will breed contempt for them'. In other words we've become so used to violence that we aren't instantly appalled by it any more; the thought of being violent is now easier to rationalise, thus it's easier to commit, hence the cycle continues ad nauseum.

Not only is this wave of aggression limited to fictional varieties. For some time now, violent sports have been on the rise in the West, and have enjoyed popularity for hundreds of years. American magazine 'USA Today' recently posted an online article stating that the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), an organiser & promoter of what is dubbed 'Mixed Martial Arts', has the second largest online fan base of ALL sports, worldwide; the UFC has been quoted as having '...an agressive social media strategy...'- riding the current wave of acceptance towards violence amongst Western youth groups. Despite only establishing itself in the early 1990s the UFC now has more online fans, and more of it's practioners (read: fighters) using sites like Facebook and Twitter, than any other sporting organisation- including the Premier League (though excluding the NBA).

The irony is, of course, that many of the people involved in perpetuating this culture of aggression and violence - the programmers of the games, the writers of the film scripts and the fighters of the sports - are not at all what you would expect. Usually the techies are meek individuals looking to harbour revenge fantasies because they can't look after themselves in the real world- they use their games as a form of escapism, so that they have a release for their own self loathing, that we don't routinely have to scrape brain matter from their unkempt apartments. Moving on, the fighting men involved in organisations like the UFC are usually very humble men, and yes they might come from rough backgrounds etc. etc. but they tend (for the most part) to be incredibly humble, and are just thankful that they have a chance to earn money in a constructive manner (usually by bleeding for our entertainment); they've been given a break by someone, and they know it, and are thankful for it. More than that, they can come to represent the pinnacles of incredibly important virtues- hard work, endurance (mental and physical), humility, and the importance of respect.

The problem lies in the marketing strategies, which play up the 'high impact nature of the sports, and the 'player vs. player' aspect of the games. It's not so much a case of 'ordinary' people (if there really is such a thing) being corrupted by these things, as it is a case of what will happen when corrupted people emerse themselves, or are emersed involuntarily (as many young people are) in this corrupted environment.

And let's not forget that, equally, quite a lot of the problem can be layed at the feet of public ignorance and bloodthirst creating a market for this kind of entertainment.

Stupid public. Shame on you.

Evolution theory.

So here we are, another fairly (in)glorius day of unemployment, graduate and all. Frankly, in this day and age that doesn't seem so special, perhaps I'm being melodramatic, but too much coffee, failure, and not enough sleep will do that to a man I suppose.

So far the days are recklessly colliding into each other- each one becomes a medley of job hunting, killing time and comfort eating/ drinking coffee. In our generation, studies have shown that lack of motivation and lack of structure are the biggest killers: Fuck Survival of the Fittest, we live in the age where Survival of the Least Lazy is the only credible ethos. I just spent three years of my life, and twenty thousand pounds, being twisted and pounded into a shape, only to find out that it was the wrong one- nobody wants to bash a (graduate) circle into their square little world. Fuck.

As for a career, what is there out there? What else are those bastards hiding from me? Probably not a lot; even the jobs at the Job Center are out of date when I try calling to apply. Maybe that's it? Maybe they're hiding the fact that there is nothing out there for us anymore...
The most obvious route is to go into Teaching, but MY GOD, teach what? All I've been trained to do is spot pretention at 200 yards, to go right for pedantic bastards, and the flaws in their logic (as opposed to the jugular- it's just as effective, and you get into less trouble with the police you see). The problem lies in the fact that in a world where people sell each other little pieces of the Great Televised Dream nobody wants you to snap them out of their vegetative devotions; nobody wants you to point out the small print that will wake them up- especially not the hucksters shilling it.

Here in the UK we don't have access to the American Dream, so we just make do with the Great British Lie.