Wednesday, June 06, 2007

Thinking of Driving to Dundee - Seriously

I often say I live in a hole. I really do. I’ve spent weeks in melancholy peevishness and not left the house. (This is not literally true of course…)

…its strange that as far as freedom of speech and what you are allowed to see or hear goes I always thought there should be no limits – and now I’m not so sure.

My mate Andrew was a photographer in Belfast at the height of ‘the troubles’. He had a book full of images of corpses that until a bomb went off had been people. I wish he hadn’t let me see it. I wish I hadn’t seen the pictures of small dead children in the Lebannon and I wished I hadn’t overheard someone talking about some of the stuff going on in the Congo. I'm not even going to tell you what I heard because it haunted me for days. Makes ordinary rape and murder sound like a picnic.

I’m really pleased that when a ‘bandmate’ had one of those ‘westerner beheaded by Muslim radicals’ videos the rest of us said ‘no thanks’. Sometimes you don’t need to see stuff or hear the details – so long as you know what’s going on. It all shows how close to total depravity the human race is.

I think it’s called Liberal guilt and some people sneer at it. That’s one of the reasons I never really went for extreme left wing groups – they all have that cold hardness that makes them much closer to Nazis than they’d possibly like to think. Maybe they don’t care. Whatever…..They seem to use the word ‘Liberal’ as an insult in the USA sometimes. Mind you, they’re fighting for democracy and freedom for us all – or was it torturing and killing civilians for oil? Can’t remember which. Does anyone remember the days when they even admitted that our Osama had no connections with Iraq?

See, this is what happens when you don’t leave the house…the worst of the world seeps in through the walls.

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