For a number of years I wrote frequently on Sparrow Chat about the farce that is the National Rifle Association, and its inept and wantonly untruthful slogan: “Guns Save Lives”.
From the website of WAND TV, a local station serving the town of Decatur in Central Illinois:
DECATUR, IL- A Decatur couple arrested in connection with last weekend’s stray bullet shooting death of a Decatur man went before a judge for the first time Friday morning
Quincy Houston, 27, did not enter a plea on involuntary manslaughter charges. He was appointed a public defender.
His wife, 22 year-old Mattisha Houston, entered a not guilty plea on the same manslaughter charges.
Police say the couple was shooting a pistol at a tree in their back yard early last Saturday morning.
One shot missed and the bullet went through the apartment window of 30 year-old Joseph Wells, hitting him in the head and killing him.”[1]
I thank the gods I don’t live in that hellhole of a town anymore.
One day I will write more about Decatur, Illinois. The town that is owned by the Archer Daniel Midland Corporation.
Living in one of the more remote regions of the United States, as I do, it would be so easy to turn one’s back on the whole polito/corporate scene and pretend it no longer existed. After all, waking up in the morning to soft sunshine and gentle birdsong, taking a stroll through woodland, or whittling pine at the workbench in the garage, can persuade the mind that nothing outside one’s own little world matters very much.
Yet to do so would be selfish, for there are so many unfortunate folk in the world falling at the wayside, cast adrift by society, for no better reason than the greed of others, whose bank balances are already overflowing. To turn one’s back on what’s happening in the world today, is to also rebuff them.
The problem is not confined to America. Only this week we hear from the UK of journalistic obscenities perpetrated by high-up employees of Murdoch’s News Corporation – the phone of a murdered thirteen year old girl hacked to obtain sordid headlines for a Sunday newspaper; similar hacking of phones belonging to members of the royal family; payments to police officials for underhand information.
The then editor of the News of the World paper, Rebekah Brooks, is protected by the Murdochs while hundreds of innocent employees are thrown out onto the street as Murdoch junior announces the closure of the 168-year-old tabloid.
It’s the easy way out for Murdoch and his tribe. Never mind the hundreds thrown out of work, the suffering to families suddenly finding themselves on the breadline. They don’t matter. They’re unimportant. All that matters to the Murdochs is protecting themselves and those close to them. People like Rebekah Brooks. For her they’ll sacrifice a whole newspaper.
Brooks and her ilk – those with way too much money and a false sense of ego superiority – revolve around the various ‘sets’ cozily ensconced in such high-end areas of Britain as the county of Oxfordshire. It’s where you’ll find the likes of Jeremy Clarkson, James (son of Rupert) and Kathryn Murdoch, Elizabeth Murdoch (daughter of Rupert), and of course Britain’s present prime minister, David Cameron.
Rebekah Brooks’s second husband, Charlie Brooks, is an old friend of Cameron’s from their Eton days. According to a July 2009 issue of Tatler magazine (no reference, it’s not available online):
When Charlie Brooks wakes up in the mornings at his barn in Oxfordshire, he likes nothing better than to fly to Venice from Oxford airport with his soon-to-be-wife Rebekah Wade, the dazzling redhead editor of The Sun, for lunch at Harry’s Bar.
Later in the day, after shopping and sightseeing, the couple fly back to London for dinner at Wiltons in Jermyn Street………When they’re not in Venice, Charlie and Rebekah go on holiday with the Freuds [Matthew Freud and wife, Elizabeth Murdoch] on their boat… the Oppenheim Turners at their house in St Tropez… and with the Daventrys in the country.
They spend their weekdays at their flat in Chelsea Harbour… and weekends at their two-bedroom taupe-painted barn outside Chipping Norton… [where] a portrait of Rebekah by artist Jonathan Yeo, flame-haired and smiling, sits almost forgotten against a side wall…
Their weekend routine includes shopping at Daylesford, the most extravagant supermarket in England. They call it ‘the mothership’… On Sundays they throw the occasional lunch for 20.”
It’s all very jolly and posh and they’re welcome to it. Frankly, I’d sooner cut my throat today than have to live that lifestyle, surrounded by a load of cardboard cutout people with hoighty-toighty accents and a view of the world where no-one else matters but them.
And that’s the bit that really gets to me. Let them play their silly games and lounge around all day in the Med on their fancy yachts with their cocktails and cocaine. After all, they know no different. But to regard the rest of us as though we’ve just crawled out from under a stone and soiled their designer-label boots; to play at being ‘business executives’ and chuck real working people onto the dole out of a whim, just to protect one of their own, makes them less than scum in my eyes.
Come the revolution, brother! Come the revolution!
As a long term fan of the 1980’s BBC series, ‘Red Dwarf’, one of my favorite moments was when the crew were marooned on a planetoid inhabited by brain-sucking psirens. Lister went outside and was immediately accosted by a psiren masquerading as a long-lusted-after, voluptuous beauty, from Dave’s youth.
“How long has it been since you made love to a woman, Dave?” asked the blonde bombshell, curling her fingers into the crewman’s hair. “Three million years?”
Lister winced, knowing the psiren was only interested in sucking out his brains, but still finding her irresistible. “I prefer to think of it in terms of ice-ages,” he gasped, “that way it’s only six.”
It seems almost that long since I last posted on Sparrow Chat. Not that I’ve been lured into the arms of some raving beauty – Mrs Adams excepted, of course. The chaos of moving house has made any chance of writing impossible.
First, you need a computer.
“It’s in the bathroom. I think it’s in that box marked ‘toilet rolls’. No, not that one. The one on top of the one marked, ‘Christmas Lights’. You’ll need the stepladders. No, I don’t know where they are. I think the moving man borrowed them when he was charging his cell phone. What? No, I haven’t a clue why he needed the stepladders to charge his cell phone, I…..darling, can’t you see I’m busy? Go and find them yourself.”
Admittedly, it only took a few days to locate one of our four computers, but then there was the vexed question of internet access.
The local communications company had already retreated from their previous blase assertions that dsl broadband was available in our area, (everywhere in ‘our area’ apart from ‘our area’, it seemed) and a week of ‘dial-up’ using the oldest laptop in our possession because it was the only one equipped with a telephone modem, created such friction in the Adams’ household as to demand a call to the satellite company and to hell with the exorbitant expense of satellite broadband.
I have to say the technician who installed it did a very good job. It worked a treat, and I spent the whole of that evening setting up LANs, and siting my workstation. It was to be upstairs in the only room that wasn’t attic.
For the next three days it blew a gale and poured with rain. The satellite dish sat morosely on the back wall of the house, feeble and virtually useless against the onslaught of weather accompanying the Canadian low pressure area that traversed across Lake Superior.
Five hundred dollars to install, a hundred a month to run, and the bloody thing gives up the ghost at the hint of a rain shower. So much for modern technology!
Admittedly, the weather was unusually bad, even for the Upper Peninsula. Finally, it cleared away and the internet returned. But by that time I had two acres of lawn to mow.
Dave Lister finally escaped the clutches of the psiren and returned to the spaceship, only to find another psiren was already on board masquerading as him. The other crew members demanded they both play the guitar and when the psiren Lister played it really well they immediately shot it.
Demanding to know how they knew it wasn’t really him, Lister got mad when they all announced, “Because that dude could play, Bud.”
I feel great sympathy for Lister. My guitar is hidden away somewhere in this house and I doubt Mrs Adams would be too upset if it took me three million years to find it.
Hopefully, though, it won’t be another six ice ages before I manage to post again on Sparrow Chat.
Company town
The Greed Set
We’re in!