the smell of reason 3 : viva le fear! 2000
(original uncut previously unseen Sleaze Nation column)
IS THIS THE SICKEST MAN IN BRITAIN?
”Bad news, I’m afraid: it’s inoperable bowel cancer...”
Can you feel it?
”We’ll need your help to identify her body...We think it was a gang
of paedophiles, yes...”
The stimulus starts in the thalamus, causing arousal of the primitive amygdala.
Thin film of sweat on the palms.
The
accelerating heartbeat.
”But I’ll be homeless! Oh god! Homeless on the streets!”
Within seconds the heart receives a chemical punch as adrenaline prepares the
system for Fight or Flight.
Responses
are triggered and usually suppressed, diverting toxins into the muscles.
”I don’t really think it’s anything but could you just check, love?
Like a lump just there.”
That’s exactly how daily life feels for the millions of people in this country
and all the others now addicted to Fear itself, according to a wildly prophetic
rant I found on the Internet and ate up like soup.
”Come on dad, it’s only a home. You won’t be here forever...”
In the age of post-ironica fear has a new face. But forget Smiley, THIS weird
bastard is smirking at your kids and he’s just a little bit too seedy and
suspicious for comfort.
The mindless grin tells of unspoken abuses at the deepest levels of
psychological torment. The saucery, glistening, changeling eyes recall those of
the evil Bulger murderer, 10 year old Robert Thompson.
Life
is becoming like ‘Repulsion’ with a laughtrack.
”Big Brother is watching you”
FIEND RAPED GIRL, 13, IN DAYLIGHT
How did it happen?
Where did it happen and when did the baggy, happy, hedonistic rainbow
tribe of bowl-eyed
(Underlines
represent alleged internet links.
None could be verified)
”The idea of turning Fear itself into the drug of choice for a paranoid,
post-e generation was the brainchild of a group of elite media names and top
civil servants.
Working in concrete tunnel-bunkers under the pointless towers of
Whitehall, with facelessly ‘interesting’ presenters we pinstriped
state drones are the people responsible for expediting
the production of popular culture.
We
pull the behavioural strings of nations. All for our gain.”
So begins the looping, self-referential manifesto of Abaddon’s Witness, one of
a number of new corporate ‘Luciferan’ groups popping up like black Goth
flowers all over www.com.
The Witness, like most of the new Luciferan tendency, claim control of
Government and media institutions and access to ‘Star Wars’ satellite and
surveillance technology.
They say they are prepared to enforce ‘transcendental materialism’ as
the central tenet of a New World Order well under way.
They are familiar with sophisticated NLP personality modification
techniques and demographic profile analysis.
Ultimately, they’d like to convince you to pay money to watch yourself
paying money to watch yourself. Because while you’re watching telly, they’re
taking over the world...
At least, according to twats who believe this stuff and let’s hope you’re
not one of them. Imagine being so stupid and scared of made up crap.
CRISIS OF OUR SLUM SCHOOLS
But ask yourself: just how much of that old-time fear HAVE I scored this week?
Maybe you thought you saw the local bachelor eying up the wee ones while
you were at the ice cream van?
Or is it you who’s been recognised, on the way to the dole, walking
through the playground, looking the way you do?
Are you scared you won’t make it past the zombies and vampiric
presences to Level Four?
Scared your plane will explode in mid-air for real?
Of never getting to Uni and ending up with mum and dad for another ten
years as you all just get weirder?
Scared the sexy teenage girl you¹ve been flirting with online might
really be a wanking old man in Illinois?
Scared of what might happen to your favourite ‘Eastender’?
Scared of the poor and the homeless and of refugees with mad faces and
sulks and the BIG ISSUE?
Scared that any show of sentiment will mark you as a poof or uncool?
Scared of the
brain-vaporising, ‘Omen’-style truth behind the Saatchi ‘Devil Eyes’
campaign? Scared of BSE, terrorists, going mad or never winning the Lottery?
Hannibal Lecter? Scared of anything real?
Tense up. That’s all perfectly
normal. Like me and like almost
everyone else in Western Consumer Culture you are hopelessly addicted to refined
sugar and caffeine. Both these
drugs are high-level stimulants and here are some of the clinical symptoms of
speed psychosis:
” ...user feels depressed, extremely anxious, irritable, hostile,
alienated, fearful, confused and paranoid.”
Imagine the Fear and the fever, spreading out from sweaty white skin to
everything it touches. Imagine an entire population sat on its
arse, superinjected 24 hours a day with anxiety-generating hypersounds and
high-speed images. Every light becomes a frantic manga blur, every face you look
at is cartooning into at least one of the Seven Deadly Sins.
Everyone’s out to get you but that¹s okay because you’re out to get
them. Road
Rage. Fast food.
Acid head execs and Silicon Valley stoners turning trailers and car ads
into perfect, screaming recreations of their hallucinogen-fuelled R&D
sessions and firing them at your living room.
Imagine all the symptoms cranked up to twelve as a way of life.
Now open your eyes and look around.
SOAP BLOODBATH
Abaddon’s Witness have this to say about the use of Fear as a narcotic.
With language more suited to sci-fi cultus than the corporate self-help
seminar, the Witness take flight into philo-paranoid realms of pure crushing
hopelessness.
Hold on tight, take a deep breath and join them in the depths of the new
corporate-materialist nightmare.
”The soulless bureauboffins of the Nine Underground Ministries saw it all
coming. It’s
not hard to use 11 year solar-magnetic cycles to predict cyclical pop cultural
trends and exploit them.
Just as the CIA saturated the
streets of Viet-Harlem with heroin and cocaine in the 70s and 80s so now
was the green light lit and the stage set
for the ultimate socio-narcotic experiment of our time.”
Need any more, soldier?
I know I do and The Witness continues in the same evangelic stylee.
”Ecstasy was perfect for a ‘baggy’ breed of 90s hedonists, partying as
Thatcherism died. MDMA and its derivatives was introduced to facilitate
artificial social bonding, and inspire oceanic and transcendental experiences
which could
be processed into new advertising strategies.
The new drug would have to simulate and incorporate the ‘comedown’
feeling, the delirious constricting, psychotic plunge of physical life in
a fragmenting mediasphere.
By promoting and
encouraging daily, culture-wide stimulant abuse, we incite mass paranoid
psychosis. Even
time itself seems to be
speeding up.
We were required to follow up the stimulant primer with a perfect
zeitgeist-drug.
Preferably one which
people could administer to themselves, without their knowledge.”
So far, so good. Let’s face it: who doesn’t like to sometimes squirt a
little bum-ink during a scary movie or a visit to a dying relative in hospice
care? These
Dark Side media scientists were apparently onto something and the Blair
administration provided the wad to see their bleak dream through to hideous
reality, according to the true believers.
IRA KILLERS GO ON SICK FUND RAISER
Media-busting spoof or genuine insight of the minds of people who run the world?
The ‘Witness’ brag that their researches ensured that a perfect
super-narcotic for the new millennium was ready for launch on August 31st 1987
The dual loss of Diana and Mother Teresa - both carefully-managed archetypes of
the nourishing, concerned mother - was set to open the floodgates for a
gleefully-catalogued tide of internet porn stories, killer kids, rampant
paedophobia, violated bodies.
The world seemed darker and more frightening as the Fear proliferated
and millions became addicted to regular adrenaline rushes without even realising
they were abusing a self-administered drug. Nerves were wired so tightly they
whined in the slightest breeze and Fear was to be a Beaufort scale hurricane
raging through the human Central Nervous System.
Later, according to Witness agitprop, adrenaline itself would be
declared Class A with 5 to 10 for possession. Regular testing and new police
powers ensuring that everyone could be locked up, with a wall around the
country.
But that could wait.
First came August 31st, when the new decade of Love careened to a
sickening stop against the thirteenth pillar under the Pont D’Alma.
The reign of terror and confusion could begin.
Sadly for the credibility of the sensationalist Witness worldview, crime and
drug abuse figures have actually been declining over the past couple of decades.
That’s no reason not to rejoice in the immense emotional arousal of the
counterfeit horrorshow that says otherwise, however.
Revel with the rest in the sick jokes of the New Brutalism, the chordless
howls of the New Rage.
Bask in the knowledge that only a society swapping dull old fears for
shiny new ones could find them so funny and so marketable.
”I’m afraid you might need a stoma, Naomi.”
With little left to vex us, except how to spend time in a world coddled by
loving machines, we can gorge safely on the pure undiluted aphrodisiac of Fear
‘they’ sent to daunt us.
Existential dread, body horror, social taboos are all cycled like manure
back into the luminous soil of our video games, late night comedy,
‘Panorama’ specials, blockbusters and daily papers.
”I cut my hand on this needle in the grass, mummy...”
With every camera that goes up, with every new star surveillance creates, even
the 20th century’s most haunting terror - loss of individuality, privacy and
personal sovereignty - is a joke and a flourishing cash cow.
Observe the nightmares of an existential culture, crawling from the ruins
of WW2, now prepackaged as fodder for office gossip. Everyone wants to be
noticed and like Orwell’s ultimate alt.authoritarian/bondage/fetish hero,
Winston Smith – crushed, demoralised and humiliated to the flattened, nadir of
all human spirit - we finally, hilariously love Big Brother.
”Your exam results are pathetic: you’ll never be rich or famous or
good-looking.”
TERROR AS GUNMAN SHOOTS 3 IN CITY BAR
The new culture of fear is an all-engulfing, immersive sickness, as hilarious as
it is horrible. Like the Tibetan initiate in the midst of chod meditation, who
watches his body torn limb from limb by demons, then becomes a demon and joins
in, to help devour himself like a bucket of guts, perhaps it’s best to dig in
while the meat’s still hot. Rejoice in the dismemberment of all that was Holy
for New Holies are surely on their murky way.
If, by sheer fucking million-to-one chance, these Witness people are
right and Fear itself has been somehow been distilled into a pure essence and
transmitted through every available media orifice direct to the avenues and
alleyways of Yourtown, who are we to turn down a few bowls of the hard stuff?
WIFE’S AFFAIR LED TO DRUG HORROR
Everything bad - up. Everything good, decent and humane - down.
That’s how it looks from the sofa and it¹s best just to keep the kids
indoors watching porn on the Net.
In the nauseating gut-clench of Lara Croft hyper-reality there need to be
tigers round every corner to remind us we’re alive.
It’s easy to see where the Witness might be coming from.
Only a world quivering in the claws of a serious Fear jones would put up
with this endless banquet of blood and unease, this Vincent Price style guignol
of the damned.
Only in a world where fuck all remains to raise the pulse could we so
eagerly crave the simulation of constant, unnerving dread: 3 o’clock telephone
rings, AIDS test results, the sweet surging panic-flood that tells our instincts
we just survived something, even if it’s only another day at work or a few
hours spaced at the Playstation.
Fear is good.
Fear is the new funny. Stay hip: learn to savour the icy spinal crawl as
another toddler surfaces in a ditch, scour the papers for fresh images of
atrocity and cut them out to make Christmas cards for friends, relish the clammy
delights of phobia and madness, laugh at decay, shame and failure ...or be
square.
VIVA LE FEAR!
