Pond Scum: Lord of the Lies
By Steve Finbow
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Walking with Lola through Regent’s Park last week, I saw a young man collecting garbage from the Broadwalk: crisp packets, Coca-Cola cans, and the odd condom. He was wearing a light-blue beanie, baggy jeans, Timberland boots, and a puffer jacket infernally incarnadined with the legend: El Diablo – The Beast. I smiled and we walked on, dodging the joggers, Tai Chi practitioners, and squirrel ticklers, and then I asked myself, “Who, in our commodified postmodern society, would we think of as The Beast?”
By Nicholas Allanach
The first name that springs to mind when I think of The Beast is Aleister Crowley (1875-1947). When I was growing up, there were still reports about him and his disciples in newspapers such as The News of the World and The People. Crowley’s bestial career began with cat torture; he joined The Order of the Golden Dawn, which included Oscar Wilde and WB Yeats; and he adopted as his sign the number 666. His three main philosophical tenets were: Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law; Love Is The Law, Love Under Will; Every Man And Every Woman Is A Star – the first two sound rather hippyish, and the third prefigures both Andy Warhol and reality television. His two claims to fame: spelling “magic” “magick” and summoning Beelzebub – rather like George W Bush summoning Dick Cheney. Like most leaders of satanic groups, and of most cults satanic or not, Crowley’s raison d'être was to get as much sex as possible. Crowley died a peripatetic, heroin-addicted pauper. Crowley’s was a beastliness created by the media. He was about as scary as a haemophobic vampire hamster.
It amazes me that the British government of the time used the media to caricature Thomas Paine (1737-1809) as an ungodly anarchist, a drunken beast, and a wife-beater – did they really have Stella Artois in Georgian England? And the American government neglected a man who was an inspiration for its own revolution – see Paul Collins’s wonderful book The Trouble with Tom. I know Tom Paine was not the first person vilified by the media – his private life altered and exaggerated to the point of fiction, his name synonymous with evil – and he certainly was not the last. In its hypocritical furore, the media (mostly British) has made beasts and mini-beasts of people as diverse as David Beckham and Osama bin Laden. Liberal Democrats leader Charles Kennedy, accused of being an alcoholic by the media, felt the need to resign, yet Ted Kennedy, who has admitted problems with alcohol, has been a senator since 1963.
The media is a co-conspirator in the West’s attempt to eradicate evil, however slight that (apparent and so-called) evil is – adultery, alcohol abuse, or homosexuality. The moral universe has shrunk to the personal and the media believes it is the arbiter of an individual’s morals. The government, the media (in America the FCC), and right-wing pressure groups (the AFA) operate a dualistic morality outside of any humanistic concerns. The West, in attempting to impose its own version of good and evil on the rest of the world, is concomitantly institutionalising a perfidious anti-personalism. This is evident in everything from CCTV cameras to smoking bans in pubs and bars – I hate smoking but if I go out for a night, I would like to talk to some of my friends inside the pub.
The Beast takes many forms – from the terrorist to the paedophile, from federal government to Howard Stern. In our attempts to eradicate evil, to make The Beast extinct, we have multiplied his image. The Beast is an Islam clerk, be it Hassan Youssefi Eshkavari or Sheikh Abu Hamza. The Beast is an author, be it Salman Rushdie or Orhan Parmuk. The Beast is a politician, be it George W Bush or Tony Blair:
When they (politicians) describe themselves as servants of the
people and the nation, they do not know how right they are.
They are, in fact, the occupants of a servile – traditionally servile –
function: the administration of things. May God protect and keep them.– Jean Baudrillard
Hear! Hear! The calls for the impeachment of Bush and Blair are almost inquisition-like in their ferocity. The function of the politician is to do our will – and that sounds almost Crowleyesque. It is as if the postmodern world is reneging on the politics and philosophy of the Enlightenment. It is hello John Whitcomb and goodbye Isaac Newton. It is hello Richard Perle and goodbye Thomas Jefferson. And more importantly, it is hello the Patriot Act and goodbye the Declaration of Independence.
An aside: Impeachment – I know it means, “Brit. a committal by the House of Commons especially of a minister of the Crown, for trial by the House of Lords” – or “Chiefly U.S. a proceeding brought against a federal government official,” but my mind conjures up visions of George and Tony in the stocks under a fusillade of soft fruit with golden-pink tomentose skin and sweet-sweet flavescent flesh.
In an inutile attempt to redress the power balance between the rights of the individual and the federalisation and mediazation of morals, I would like to leave you with a list of books that have made me re-question my political and ethical viewpoints. The book I was carrying in my bag on that winter’s day in Regent’s Park was The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pack by Jean Baudrillard. To that I would add in non-fiction: Rising Up and Rising Down by William T Vollmann; The Armies of the Night by Norman Mailer; War, Evil and the End of History by Bernard-Henri Lévy; Black Hawk Down by Mark Bowden; and The Tom Paine Reader. And in fiction: Time’s Arrow by Martin Amis; Disgrace by JM Coetzee; The Man in My Basement by Walter Mosley; the Ripley books by Patricia Highsmith; and all of Cormac McCarthy.
Imagine if Aleister Crowley were alive today. He would not be a Jim Jones or a David Koresh – he was too much attracted to the dark side of self-publicity. He would be a Marilyn Manson or an Ozzy Osbourne. No, he would not. He would be a spotty Goth hanging around Camden Town trying to pick up Japanese girls. No. I know what he would be: he would be the guy picking up litter – El Diablo – the Prince of Parkness.
Click here to read previous Pond Scum columns.
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Click here for Steve Finbow's bio and a list of works published.
© 2005 Me Three
