A ~ Letterhead

I do not believe this document will be of much use to historians, or
to thrill seekers, so I must apologise, and you must burn it. I am
twenty now, and feel I should write more than I ever have before, even
when I was seventeen, so this is what I am doing. There is also a
strange comfort in my conversations with paper (which in itself is a
topic for one of those conversations.) It is perhaps like calling into
a cave and bottling the echo. It is also fundamentally more honest than
my conversations with other students, which I am beginning to suspect
are perverted by a selfish and impossible aim - that is, to sate my
outrageous hunger for praise!

I apologise, dear teacher - now, please, brandish your lighter in
preparation.

The aim:

'Twelve birds to hang a swine.'

That's what the headline reads in the gutterpress. With any luck.
'Swine,' because I am the pig of the show - I am good meat, and clever,
and covered in mud. 'Birds' because you want ordinary people to hang a
swine. Exotic lizards are not permitted on this jury.

Backtracking: I am imagining myself as the enemy in one of the new
interactive soap operas. I was put on this hotline by a friend of mine,
who in otherwise casual conversation asked, "Do you think it's true
that the world has got no worse, and that the media have just got
better?" I had no wisdom to hand, and I was not feeling witty (my
friend was not female,) so I just said that the world might seem to
have got worse from a particular removed point of view. In that there
are more weapons than ever before, and more powerful weapons, and more
suffering - even the rich claim to suffer. And as we all know, there
are less resources. It is human vulnerability that's being covered more
thoroughly, I supposed.

"Why?" he asked - and I was practically as cynical as my father,
though once more with muddied insight. I said, "Because it's worth
money. An insecure general public just loves to hear about people
horsing around, so professional journalists latch onto the idea of
writing about that. For money."

Which led me onto talking about the new interactive soap operas that
everyone's so mad about. The new interactive soap operas are
principally a method of selling newspapers. A news story is written so
as to have the qualities of an escapade - with your raving reporter as
hero and entry point, countless villains (or perhaps one ultra-villain
- an arch-demon,) and whole cast of ordinary birds moseying around and
occasionally getting killed. As more facts emerge, readers are
thoroughly drawn in by the excitement - the hero speculates madly and
begins to creep up to the highest horse - but this isn't fiction, as I
say. It's real life, so readers are invited onto the horse. It is a
horse with a very long back. Atop it rides a willing army in league
with the hero. The night grows tense. They all ride out - a taste of
war. Just enough to make it a habit. Hang the villains and sell, sell,
sell.

Of course, hanging isn't always appropriate. Jeering is the more
common practice, so perhaps I am thinking of a kind of pantomime show,
rather than a soap opera. If I were the flamboyant enemy, I'd be more
likely jeered than hanged. Hanging isn't even legal in England
anymore.

So I am being a little fantastical, certainly. And these days, because
I am a wounded youth in a bright city, my fantasies are grim Daily Mail
dreams. I have been reading far too many columns in the hope of
educating myself, and trying to keep politics out of my fantasies is
like sheltering from hail beneath a cocktail umbrella. Not only that -
I've just looked down at my hands and charged words are stuck to my
fingertips like black spots. I don't like 'em. I always have certain
words stuck to my fingers; words I've picked up around the house and
from the printed page. But we're usually talking symbol words, like
thigh, or image organisers, like sheaf. Daily Mail words are
nipple-blunt with overuse - slack labia you can wrap a full grown man
in. Excuse me, but in my fantasy this kind of metaphor is very much in
fashion - we must answer for feminism with our tongues.

Let me explain. My fantasy is set in the future when some of the men
who are sure what is true have got their deepest, dampest wishes. It's
back to hanging and the rigid class system, Sunday school, white man
rule, lobotomies for homosexuals and malcontents, and all hands to
rebuilding the Empire. I am waiting to hear if I'll ever be able to see
Delicatessen again. They're trying to decide if the death of the killer
is sufficiently morally redeeming, and makes up for the film being
French. My hopes are not too high.

They are also looking for the culprits behind all the changes that
made them feel so angry and despised back when they weren't in power.
They are convinced it is a faction called the ghost army of the Liberal
Elite. Where there is such a slack-labia phrase as that there's bound
to be a witch-hunt. So in order to try to save all the people - the
long, long list of people who have alternative plans and ideas for the
country - the mathematicians and philosophers, writers and teachers,
thinkers of all races, ages and both sexes who really did knead the
dough of British culture post-WW2 and will continue to plot feverishly
toward the greater elasticity of the human brain - in order to save
them from the terrors of the new social order, where deviancy and
flying deviancy would be outlawed, I come forward and confess it was
all my doing. I let the darkies in. I stoked the feminist fire. I
snatched the hand of the parent poised to spank their child good and
thereby stop him becoming the punk rock rioter who Cossack-danced on
Churchill's grave. I'm the man behind the BBC, Monty Python and the
Simpsons. I rewrote the Bible, then abolished it, along with Britain.
It was me, it was me.

I wish, boys. I wish.

And they believe me, most of them. I don't know why; perhaps because
their only concern is the lesson of death. The ones who imagined that
our culture had been in moral decline all the way from the sixties,
that is. I've no idea about the chartered astrologers who got those
notions out of the horse-trough and into Parliament. They're probably
off making more money, and will only have their keen senses reactivated
when someone gets in the way of that.

After taking part in my own interactive soap opera, as the flamboyant
villain, during which the gutterpress would turn a proportion of its
readers into flesh-eating orcs far more effectively than some video
game, I will stand trial, and my jury, if I am granted one, will be a
selection of ordinary British people. I don't believe I mean the same
as them when I say ordinary. When they say ordinary, they mean "a part
of my vision." By the same token, I myself deride and outcast all who
oppose me. But when I say 'ordinary', I mean unalien.

By a strange trick of fate, in my fantasy I am allowed to pick my own
jurors. This is the point of the exercise then: to pick them, and to
write a poem to each of them where I rake over old times and build them
a paper shrine - in the hope of winning a vote of innocence, of course.
I do not know why it has taken me all this time to come to my aim,
which I had in mind from the start, but the background story does
provide me with a sense of urgency that makes my fingers itch, and
keeps my room hot.

Come forward then, poem-pedestals. Come forward, jurors.