The world, of course, is quite properly fucked – and that annoys me sometimes. Dark evidence of our malignant decline is hard to avoid and can often simply overwhelm the fragile defences of the moral rearguard action being fought (and lost) by the dwindling armies of the sane. Or, as I like to call these heroic fighters - Me. The ingestion of super big quantities of Lexapro makes it that little bit easier to view myself in these starkly magnificent terms.
But it would appear that during the pre-Lexapro years - in which I busily tried to figure a way of getting myself all dead and still have weeping mourners say what a guy at my funeral - bad people snuck in and made the world grubby (whilst my eye was off the ball and lingering on the oven).
Osama Bin Laden, Ariel Sharon, Wayne Rooney, Lembit Opik, my dad, Tony Blair, men in their thirties who play computer games, Peter Mandelson, Bill O’Reilly, Fox News, foxes (just pass me a gun), supermodels who allow misogynists to dress them all the way to their anorexic graves, people who actually take fashion seriously, Darth Vader, “Ron” in the Harry Potter films, Russian neo-Nazis, Richard Littlejohn, Nazis, incandescent right-wing political commentators, Polly Toynbee, overtly idealist and sentimental left-wing commentators, people with their heads in the sand, me, Ross Kemp On Gangs (Sky One), the Taliban, Dick Cheney, Martha Stewart, John Pilger, Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, Ashley Cole, Homophobes, Muslim extremists, any extremists, Robert Mugabe, Saddam Hussein, the North Korean guy and Bryan (my former neighbour).
All of them, in their own way, make it near impossible to love the world. You really, really need to be drunk to bear them. The rot set in ages ago, however.
When William Shakespeare wrote Humpty Dumpty in 831 BC, people flocked to cinemas to read it. This piercing satire showed that ruling-class hysteria was already up and running in days of olden yore. Reacting with blind panic to news of the fall, the disastrous overreaction of the authorities is detailed with forensic malice by Shakespeare. I’m sorry – how many men did you say were sent to the recovery operation? Jesus. But they must have at least left some horses behind to, you know, keep an eye on things? WHAT? That’s just plain mad.
And unless I am very much mistaken – which I’m not, because I’m a keen amateur historian – this led directly to Adam and Eve and Manchester United. It became inevitable, and I’m not just saying this with the benefit of hindsight, that someone would have to invent speech and Europe. Noah did the former at Dunkirk when he swept in and saved the day, and Einstein invented Europe early yesterday. Unfortunately, this made human beings feel they could lord it over zebras and allowed the newly created Europeans to steal from Africans. The only solution was reality TV.
Thankfully, this stopped the rot. And anyone who saw the overwhelmingly uplifting victory of Mark Ramprakash in Strictly Come Dancing will recognise the truth of this statement.
I don’t wish to exaggerate the importance of his victory or to minimise the suffering of generations past, but I think it is fair to say that this is the single most important event ever and that the War On Terror is now all but won as a result of it. A simply breathtaking night for democracy and dancing.
So watch it.
