Tag: god

Normal Is Another World

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It was just recently the one year anniversary of the massacre of three Mormon women and six of their children in Mexico. Their cars ambushed in the hills near their home at La Mora close to the US border. Caught up in local Cartel violence; the exact reasons and culprits are still unknown. They will likely never get real answers. It was a brutal event which understandably brought international attention and shock and just for a second it opened up a community to the eyes of the world.

With over seven billion people on earth there are over seven billion different ways of being raised to understand life and the world around. Mormons can be ridiculed for it, but they offer an example of another way of life. With my experience of growing up, understanding how people like these Mormons live their lives is not always easy. To begin with we view them through the narrow prism of our own conditioning and view their actions as if they thought as we do. But why would they, having grown up in a Mormon community in the north of Mexico, their experience in the large part is beyond my comprehension. Saying that having Anglo-European origins, they likely won’t be as far removed as we might first think.

I look at the women and struggle to understand how they could be happy with a husband who also has other wives. The young women growing up and ultimately being prepared for a life of baby making. The two women discussed in the BBC article have over one hundred children and grandchildren in total. That is simply remarkable. Or at least it’s remarkable for someone who comes from a country which will likely start to experience falling birth rates in the near future. The understanding of these women also comes from the experience of women with a very different attitude to sharing their men.

This isn’t to say all cultures are right in all their own ways and we need to respect people in their cultural sensitivities. If a culture is abusive of someone within it, then that is still wrong. It’s being able to identify the grey areas between what is abuse and what is simply misinterpretation because of your own cultural understanding of the world. There are plenty of examples throughout history which suggest we have at times got it very wrong. I look at the huge group of children in the pictures and think what a lovely childhood they must have growing up together, it’s just a shame it’s tinged with God and all that that entails. Many run away from Mormonism or don’t continue it’s practises, but someone growing up in that world will likely have a different perspective of God’s influence and all their brothers and sisters. Normal is always normal in our own eyes.

We can be critical too of people to don’t reject these worlds they grew up in. Unable to understand why they don’t walk away from what seems so obvious. With such sentiment all we do is miss the irony that we are unable to walk away from the more detrimental and destructive aspects of our own societies and ways of life. There are many and we vary in levels of obliviousness towards them. I can imagine a Mormon from this rural community finding all sorts of faults with the behaviour of the average city dwelling northern European.

This all simply comes from imagining growing up not as me but as a kid in this community. What a completely different understanding of the world, or of home they must have. Then imagine someone from Asia or Africa, or even southern Europe. It’s just important to remember sometimes that what we think isn’t necessarily the only way of thinking. How we experience a moment is not the only way of experiencing it. Normal is not always normal in others eyes after all.

BR#8 – One For The Road

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I still refer to these as book reviews when if we’re all honest they’re probably something else. What they actually are I’ll leave to the annuls of history to decide but in the meantime and for the sake of form they’ll continue to be book reviews. I am reviewing plays seemingly more regularly than books too, although a play is still arguably a book, but with One For The Road by Harold Pinter being a one act play, only sixteen pages long, it’s more of a pamphlet than anything else. It’s so short in fact that when I finished reading it I decided to read it again, just because, well, why not.

One For The Road is set in what I assume is some kind of headquarters of the secret police under a totalitarian regime. The man in charge refers to patriots so you can imagine nationalism plays a role but he refers to god more often which makes me believe this is some Christian fundamentalist regime on par with Margaret Atwood‘s The Handmaid’s Tale. That probably just exposes my ignorance of a better relatable example and a sign of my being lazy. It also ignores the general complicity of the Church in right wing totalitarian states in our history so it could just be a simple case of something along those lines.

The story revolves around what can be classed as interviews between someone of importance, potentially the head of the secret police, and individually the three members of a family taken in for interrogation. The father / husband, wife / mother and their son. The man is beaten and while he challenges his interrogator slightly he generally remains silent and passive. It is likely they have all been arrested because of his political activity. The woman talks more, although there are more direct questions and it is revealed she is being repeatedly raped. Her father is also revealed to be a national hero, a heroic soldier who fought and died in some war that presumably led to the establishment of this state. While the boy who is only seven we discover spat at and kicked the arresting soldiers when they came to his house. At the end he is referred to in the past tense. The interrogator is constantly pouring himself drinks and suggesting it’s one for the road but the implications are more that this will be one for the road before they are released. This of course doesn’t come and there is something chilling in this psychological torture too. That is basically the story, which I’ve now given away but in such a crude manner I’ve not gone near to doing it justice.

I know very little about Harold Pinter beyond his name. I did study Drama for my A-Levels at school but like everything was left incredibly unimpressed by any teachings provided, although my lack of effort and involvement mustn’t be discounted. It is only now as I get older that I start to understand that these things can actually be enjoyable. It is short and I would be curious how and in what circumstances the play would be performed. There are a lot of pauses so potentially they would make better use of them than I did but it was a good introduction to his work. I look forward to reading some more, maybe even a full length one next time. He certainly appears to be someone I could get into.

The Coors Family

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Today’s discovery revolves around the Coors family. For those unfamiliar with shit beer, they’re the ones who invented ‘Coors’ back in the nineteenth century and who still insist on pushing it on ignorant confused people who presumably don’t know any better. This is an episode of the podcast The Dollop, which I think I’ve mentioned before on here, but it’s premise is two comedians, one telling the history the other with no knowledge of the usually bizarre subject, making jokes and taking the piss. They’re quite long episodes which can put people off, this one is over one hundred minutes, but there’s worse you can and will do with your time.

There are a few companies I’ve boycotted over the years, from Nestle to Coco Cola to Amazon, and now after listening to this I can add Coors to the list. Thankfully I wouldn’t go near it as a drink anyway but now I have an ethical reason not to. The problem with that though is like any of these mega corporations they also own virtually everything else and while a lot of their range is equally mass produced crap there are a few beers I have enjoyed over the years such as Caffreys, Staropramen and Cobra, and when desperate Blue Moon – Coors own the Blue Moon Brewery itself. They also seem to own the old Mitchell and Butler brewery but I can’t find confirmation whether they also own the pub chain by the same name or whether they’re now two separate entities. Admittedly they’re not always great pubs but they can serve a purpose. Over the years my boycotts have never been one hundred percent successful but my beer purchasing habits will certainly now be affected.

What’s he talking about I hear you screaming. Yes this is such a long winded intro into the Coors family but I don’t really want to give too much away. Adolph Coors emigrated from what was Prussia to America and set up the Coors brewery in 1873. The family itself seemed to be loveless and hateful towards each other, and once his son Adolph II took charge he ruled the family through dictatorial fear. Some members of the family suffered from debilitating extreme right wingness, while others found God and became Christian extremists, or Evangelicals if you so desire. They lobby vehemently against women’s right, racial equality, LGTB rights, workers rights and so on. William Coors who ran the company in the latter part of the twentieth century once gave a speech to a room full of black businessmen on how the black mans brain was inferior and that they should be grateful their ancestors were brought across as slaves as it allowed them to become civilised. His brother Joseph was the right winger who he described as “being slightly to the right of Attila the Hun”, which coming from a racist is quite the statement. Joseph was also a special adviser to and part of Ronald Reagans ‘Kitchen Cabinet’. They were even involved with Oliver North and the Iran-Contra scandal. The family currently fund right wing think tanks and other organisations trying to challenge equality in all those forms mentioned. There is more but I both can’t remember everything and don’t want to give it all away. There were murders, suicides and such hatred that it does suggest there may be some truth in the idea that right wingers are just projecting their own self-loathing and anger onto the rest of us. The Coors Family are just vile, unfortunately very powerful, people. I’m amazed that I have never heard about them and all they get up to. Clearly it was a very informative podcast.

Most of the juicy stuff mention above comes towards the latter part of the podcast with earlier stuff just discussing the internal workings of the family itself. They seemed mainly to just do damage to each other and themselves until about the 1960s at which point all the above happened. Seriously, fuck them. The world doesn’t need people like that. They make the human race worse.

BR#5 – Frankenstein

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From time to time as adults we throw a little classic in to our reading. The kind of story that spawned others and has passed the test of time. The kind you could have studied at school. That last one in a way makes it sound unappealing considering we don’t always look back on the book we studied at school fondly. Frankenstein though isn’t one of them, it’s one of the ones you wish you had studied at school. It has so many of those moments you could see yourself analysing in a class, it has layers. It is also very simple and obvious. A main uncomplicated but unbelievable story. Take it at face value and that’s it.

The writing feels like it could be updated although it shouldn’t ever happen. When things are translated they are also updated in language and in a subtle way style. A book written in English will forever be ageing. I would love to know how Tolstoy sounds to a Russian than he is in the latest translation I read. In that sense I can tell it was written in the early nineteenth century. While that’s not a problem it will be one day.

Shelley approaches all sorts of ideas and concepts throughout the book. They are too numerous to go into detail in just five hundred words but she discusses justice, the role of god, she approaches ideas of personhood and what is is to be a person, our understanding of ethics, even existentialism but this was long before it had become an ism. This is an entire philosophy course for a year covered. There are many essays written on it. I imagine it’s a common understanding too that there is the potential schizophrenia angle which relates in a way to ideas of duality in the book. They need each other, the monster never tries to hurt him and when he dies the monster goes off to die too. Did Frankenstein give a part of himself in the creation of the monster. In a way the monster shows more of what we call humanity than Viktor Frankenstein who in the end becomes a monster himself in a sad way. In a contemporary sense we could think of the development of Artificial Intelligence. The monster has not only an ability to learn but has self-consciousness, the ultimate stage of creating free thinking robots. I could go on and on.

Quite interestingly the book has nearly as interesting a back story. Mary Shelley was the daughter of the revolutionary thinkers William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, and the wife of the poet Percy Shelley. In the ‘Year Without Summer’ of 1816 when they were visiting the exiled and infamous poet and writer amongst many things, Lord Byron in Switzerland, the weather forced them to stay indoors and Byron came up with the idea they all wrote horror stories. In a dream over the next few nights the story of Frankenstein and his monster came to Mary Shelley.

Along with all this and not to be forgotten it’s actually quite a good story. You don’t just read it to learn and look smart, you read it to enjoy. I assume they teach it in schools still and if they don’t can’t think why. It’s so full of everything it would be a waste. I ended it really feeling happy that I had just read a good book. We all should, we may just learn a little eloquence and humanity from a monster.

Strange Times

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We’re living in strange times. It’s Thursday today if anyones curious I discovered this earlier, I lost a day, somehow it isn’t Wednesday. Isn’t it great when we realise how little the structure of the week matters and how it isn’t actually real. Once Sunday needed to exist so we could all go to church and pretend we liked God, or use Sunday to rest from the drudgery of our failed work life balance. If God can rest then so can you. Then it appeared God developed a drinking habit because we all started needing it for enduring hangovers.

Some disgusting and healthy members of society of course love posing for photos with their dogs on hills but thankfully these freaks seem to keep to themselves whenever possible. Especially now the Police drones are after them, not to mention those machines they use to film them from the air. Now well, who knows, currently Sunday doesn’t really exist unless we take Don’t Call The Midwife or Dr Who seriously and I have no idea whether they’re even on anymore. I doubt anyone does now that we have tigers and murderers online. These days it’s anything and everything whenever we feel in the mood, porn at the drop of a hat.

And no football of course. Clubs, organisations and fans all trying to juggle the moral dilemma of how they can get the entertainment they want even though it will be like a shit training match in an empty stadium. One which must be shown as nobody wants to repay the billion pounds the sports channels pay to prop up the footballers lifestyles. Don’t forget social distancing. Two metres at all times. Gives a new meaning to contact sport.

Seventy-one year Prince Charles has recovered in a few days from his bout of the virus. It appears that while healthy twenty year old are keeling over, the old reptilian blood is still pumping. If madness, syphilis and inbreeding doesn’t take them down, you bet a little cough won’t even register. Doesn’t say much for his relationship with his wife Camilla though if she didn’t test positive. That or it doesn’t say much for this virus. I still fully admit to being completely confused by everything that is going on.

I have a healthy instinct to not trust the actions of my government or the bellowing of the media but people are dying. I don’t know how old they are because unless you’re young they don’t seem to report or give any kind of average age. For perspective people are still dying more from alcohol related illnesses each day but they insist the bottle shops are ‘essential’ and even more again are dying from smoking related illnesses but this is still highly legal. Let’s not even start on suicides, and don’t even dare mention the probable increase in suicides when people realise they have no future now that their businesses won’t stay open and they can’t feed their kids on £94 per week let alone pay off their toilet roll debts. But then the figures would be much worse if we didn’t have a lockdown and it has most likely stemmed the spread of the virus to a degree. I just don’t know anything. Everything is unknown right now. What an interesting moment in our evolutionary existence.

It is good to see the government admit after ten years of saying cuts are the only solution to saving the economy and society that no actually spending billions we don’t have apparently is instead. And don’t forget to clap your local nurse who you actively voted against by voting in this shower of incompetent, corrupt and dithering shite last December. Yes you fuckwit, you’re a hypocrite and you’re stupid. But anyway as I said strange times.

Teach Me O Wise Leader

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There once was a man called William T. Riker. He was a fictional character in Star Trek, quite a popular and well known one apparently. There was also another man called William E. Riker, he was less fictional and created his own city called ‘Holy City’. He was a cult leader who also happened to be a conman and a white supremacist. Now is not the time for his story, I recommend either you check out his wikipedia page if you’re boring or listen to the latest episode of ‘The Dollop’ if you have a spare one hundred and two minutes and like jokes. In short though the city itself was at it’s height in and around the 1920s, 30s and 40s. It became a white supremacist theme park of sorts, people gave up their wives to him and he seemed to thrive on people’s attention. It was based upon his teachings of God, his love of Cadillacs and the ability to make money from selling fuel and access to peep shows. He also ran for political office multiple times and failed miserably each time. To put it simply he was a total character and he died a grumpy old man at the age of ninety-six. The land still contains one of the original buildings and was sold recently to Robert and Patricia Duggan for six million dollars. Robert Duggan recently made three and a half billion dollars selling an oncology drug and is a very wealthy man. He also donated twenty million dollars to The Church of Scientology making him their largest financial donor.

What I don’t understand, amongst many things, is how someone can look at that land and it’s history, I assume recognise it was once owned by a crazy cult and then turn around without one iota of irony and give twenty million anything to what is also clearly a crazy cult. The Church Of Scientology is based upon a science fiction novel, my brain does not understand the complexities of the human mind sufficiently to understand what it is that allows people to ignore that overwhelming fact. At least the Bible has fear built into it and large enough numbers to give it credibility in the minds of pack animals. When people started believing in the Bible we barely had science and still believed the world was flat…he says with a hint of irony. It also tells you that while money might be useful it’s clearly not the answer as people embrace whatever it is that Scientology has to offer. Do people living in the niche bubble of the super wealthy really have such lives devoid of the reality that we know, they see truth in a cult like Scientology? All the money in the world and they’re still searching for answers and happiness. Saying that we can’t dismiss the possibility that Scientology actually is the answer and that they allow themselves to appear to anyone who wasn’t denied the contact of a mother as a baby as crazies to keep the riff raff out. It’s a possibility but I’m sticking to the laws of probability here. I’m sure were I to give myself more time and read some psychology papers, if anyone has any please email them to me, that point out the everyday things I most likely do that are comparative to the offerings in a cult. Money, celebrity, power would probably feature but I would love to know the things I’m completely unaware of, the things I’ve been brainwashed not only into believing but so brainwashed I am unaware they are even things. Isn’t the mind wonderful. Now believe in mine for it is God. And give me your wife if you have one.

Corona Krueger

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So we’re all going to die from the flu. Well not quite but this appears to be the latest exciting thing for people to get themselves into. I woke up this morning feeling a bit ill and I had a sore throat, perhaps something happened in my dreams. I thought I may have been infected with the Coronavirus. I suspect there’s a good chance I haven’t but it’s interesting to see how hysterical fear has managed to grip even the most disbelieving and disinterested of us. I am not saying it isn’t real, I am not saying it isn’t dangerous. I have seen the points made about how more people have died this year from the flu than Corona and I have also seen stories saying how those figures don’t reveal the whole story. Seemingly only older people are at serious risk but then also there seems to have been plenty of younger ones dying from it. I don’t really worry about catching it myself but I do worry about my parents and that last part is a real fear not just paranoia.

There are plenty of conspiracy theories out there about it being an accidental release from China’s only biological chemical disease laboratory which just happens to be in Wuhan where it originated. It is very tempting to find some credibility in this slightly coincidental event, just as it was coincidental that Britain’s only laboratory of similar ilk that happened to produce Novichok just happened to be very close to Salisbury where the Russians supposedly used it on their traitorous spies. There was once a time when I got excited and caught up with these kinds of things but I don’t now. Although let’s be honest there is something totally suspect about what happened on 9/11 or 11/9 as we call it here. Many believe these things to be true and if you’re inclined to there will always be plenty of evidence to back it up but also there will be plenty of evidence the other way if you’re not. It doesn’t really matter to me and it’s pointless getting excited about theories like this as you will simply never know and it doesn’t change anything anyway. People will live and die regardless. They did a good piece on the radio this morning about the conspiracy theorists pushing claims and it was the kind of dismissal that people would laugh along with if they didn’t believe conspiracies and if they did would be able to use as part of the propaganda cover up.

There was also quite an amusing piece on the same radio program in which they had loads of people talking about hygiene and what they are now doing. It was a wonderful opportunity for people to confess to the usual lunacy of their hygienic hypochondria because they had finally found a safe space to come out in. They all seemingly felt the need to stress they’re not crazies suffering from bacteria phobia even though they usually carry around hand sanitiser and never touch banisters or escalators without it, god forbid a lock in a toilet. A long list of potential bacteria filled opportunities was bowled out with not a single one ever thinking there may be no point to their behaviour because clearly it’s impossible to escape germs. I’m not sure if any of them have ever heard of an immune system.

Clearly I think this is all hysterical and am liable to have a laissez faire attitude to events. I also believe it is very real and people are liable to catch it and suffer, die even, so my aim is not to belittle something deadly. Scotland has just had it’s first patient with the papers rubbing their metaphorical hands in gleeful delight at what’s to come. I know I won’t be happy when I get stuck in lockdown somewhere and try to ignore the little monster at the back of my mind saying it’s all just a rehearsal for when they announce martial law and the death camps. It’s so easy to be distrusting of power especially when it has only ever represented reactionary morality in the past. Apparently they’re trying to calm everyone for the sake of the stock markets, isn’t it wonderful when priorities are exposed by emergencies.

It’s times like this that I’m reminded of a lovely childhood rhyme that was once culturally relevant –


One, two Corona’s coming for you,
Three, four you better lock your door,
Five, six grab a crucifix…

God will save the day, she always does.

Sunday

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Start with a wild assumption. For us Brits there really is something special about a Sunday. God’s official day of rest apparently and the one day of the week his minions get to join him. While the internet is a source of any fact desirable, accurate or not, the ninety seconds I half-dedicated to discovering the exact number of people not resting on Sundays wielded nothing, which means two conclusions can be drawn from what I have learnt so far. One being that people work on Sundays and two that I won’t be applying for any research positions anytime soon. From experience I can tell you there was a shop open this morning providing the newspaper to accompany my post-taking-the-dog-for-a-walk coffee. In that case while myself and God chilled out this morning, some of his devoted subjects, a certain number according to the internet, didn’t. Can we in that case really call it a day of rest? Is there such a thing anymore? Has there ever been?

A few years back I remember reading one of those ‘We’ve never had it so good…‘ articles which described the average work week of the average Victorian. Naturally any genuine point is long gone from my memory but as is the done thing I’ll paraphrase the ridiculous attempt at linking another time to the present with whatever my mind has made up about it since. Victorian workers used to work twelve hours a day seven days a week, or was it fourteen and six, but none the less they seemingly worked more than they didn’t. We are therefore lucky, don’t know how good we have it, should be grateful for being allowed the existence we’ve been gifted, and rude and ungrateful for desiring anymore liberty in our lives than we have been granted. That reminds me of a George Carlin sketch about rights, and I won’t quote him, more continue paraphrasing; they aren’t rights if they can be taken away and then something else which tied it all together and made it funny. But hopefully you get the point I’m very lazily attempting to make.

What a memory and work ethic I don’t have. Definitely not going to apply for any research jobs. I would never have survived in Victorian Britain. Anyway, isn’t it wonderful how technology has freed the people from drudgery and toil…I asked the lady as she gave me a newspaper in exchange for a handful of new gods.