LONDON CALLING!
FLISS USSHER
LONDON CALLING!
G21 SOUTH AMERICA THOMAS HARGROVE Testifies before U.S. House of Representatives - [For the non-frames version of Mr. Hargrove's testimony, click here.--- Ed.]A follow-up to our 3-Part Series on Narco-terrorism and Kidnapping!
FLISS USSHER's G21 EUROPE column LONDON CALLING! returns to the UK this week to kick off our special All Fools Issue.
STONEWALL VIEWS' PHIL MARTIN announces "CURE FOUND FOR HETEROSEXUALITY!"
TRIO THOMAS HART returns to tell "WHY I'M SO IMPORTANT"
POWERSBOOKS looks at a book which claims to prove Stephen Foster is the Father of Pop Music!
TRIO ROBIN MILLER makes the "CONFESSIONS OF A RESTAURANT BIGOT"
CULTURE CAST provides the formulae for true "Happiness"..
More meta-criticism of pomo American life.
ANOTHER Great Joke of the Day in THE HOUSE OF CARDS!
JENNIFER BLUE's PLANETARY MADNESS looks at YOUR influences!
VOX POPULI is updated, with your letters of the last week!
G21 ASIA new contributor RAOUL TESLA reports from Manila, Philippine Islands.
BARE KNUCKLES: JEFF WINBUSH won't be seeing "Titanic." Read why here.
TRIO: San Francisco's RON MORGAN on "Kurt & Courtney."
POWERSBOOKS talks with "Notorious Victoria" author Mary Gabriel! Another G21 Exclusive Interview!
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Two people sat facing each other across a vast chessboard. One was a monk, the other a nun. They had been there for hours, staring at the board, motionless."So, how about it?" came a voice, booming over the black and white squares, setting the nearby bushes reverberating. The nun shivered with anticipation but adjusted her hair primly.
"I really don't see how we can," she said. "I shall have to go and look for my chickens shortly. They must have laid by now and soon they will be all over the herbaceous borders." It was the verbal equivalent of three steps backwards and one to the left: the knight's move.
The monk's bishop came sweeping in along the diagonal. "Pah, chickens! From what I've heard, chicken droppings would do wonders for your herbaceous borders. Always makes them more fertile and luxuriant, what with those corpulent nitrates. But I'll come with you. We can look for the blasted chucks together."
"That really won't be necessary," she replied, hiding her queen behind her castle.
This was the third game of three and cracks were showing in the nun's defenses. She had won the first game and had forced the monk to shinny up all the drainpipes in the convent, clearing birds' nests and mending tiles. The monk had won the second after many days of play but had postponed his prize to play double-or-quits in this, the grand finale.
They had not just parlied over domestic matters such as chicken droppings and the relative incomprehensibility of Mother Superior' and Father Tony's prayers.
The monk, let's call him Neil, had used his pawns to demonstrate a parallel between the Chancellor's Welfare-to-Work schemes and employment opportunities for his own little man. The nun countered this beautifully by blocking each pawn, one by one, with her own, and announcing that the Job Centre was shut.
They certainly shared a solid grounding in current affairs, this monk and this nun. And not just the romantic variety. Experience in the public sphere was, in fact, the criterion for entry into Movers'n'Shakers Paradise. And what a paradise it was. At last, a place where ex-politicians could verbally spar and make strategic moves, with the only link between words and actions being their own twisted imaginations.
"For Christ's sake, Maggie, how many times to have to tell you - there IS such a thing as society!" said the monk, tearing out the remains of his ginger hair. "The very fact that we can play chess at all shows that there are people, there are relations between them and there is community. You were wrong, you know, so very wrong."
"Mr Kinnock," replied the Right Hon. Baroness Thatcher, all her coyness swept aside. "I am about to remove all your pieces from the board. Watch this."
He watched aghast as, over the next few moves, she mobilised her bishops, her knights and her castles. When she had swept the board clean, in came the queen from the sidelines, arriving face to face with his king. "I believe this is check mate," she said, adding with a toss of her shiny coiffure, "no prizes for you, honey."
"But your destruction of the social fabric is years out of date! Look at how my party is changing Britain these days - It's Labour, it's hardcore and it's cool!"
"It's about as hard core as a soft sausage, Neil, and the fact that Labour is in power right now is no thanks to you. Have you not realised what we're doing here? Do you not know why we have been forced to don these habits and sit about, with only each other and this blasted chess board for solace? We have been forced into a position of ridicule, Neil. We are the fighters, but the suffocating blanket of popular opinion has kicked us out!"
The former Labour leader looked at her, skeptically. He had been happy living in comfort, far from the world, pissing about with chickens and pitting his wits against Maggie in the hope of a little prize some day.
"I don't know why YOU accepted their offer to come here but, personally, they convinced me with their talk of shared intellectual vigour." She was off on one again. "WE created the polarity, the polemics and all the dynamics in between. But now they have made us the have-beens, the old and the dead. We have been fooled - look around you!"
The gardens spread for miles around over undulating hills and peaceful valleys. Every spare space was coated in the same chequered, black and white, crusty paint. Thatcher and Kinnock held the prime position, but Winston Churchill could be seen playing against the founder of CND, philosopher Bertrand Russell.
Newspaper tycoon Robert Maxwell was pitted against Lord Reith, the man behind the BBC. Harry Enfield's spoof character "loads'o'money" was about to topple Vivienne Westwood, who had brought Punk to the King's Road, and anti-immigrationist Enoch Powell and love-all Princess Diana had been at it for weeks.
All were engrossed in heated, abstract and ultimately insignificant arguments. Most pitiful of all was Sir Paul McCartney, all alone, insisting to his groovy, former self that 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds' was not about drugs.
Outside Chequers, the Prime Minister's country residence, mass consensus reigned over England. The advertisers and the politicians, the media, the lobbyists, the bureaucratists and the retailers had combined forces to do away with all extremes and so to fool a nation.