A Modest Proposal

Saturday 12th February, 2005

The onset of insanity, I imagine, is often presaged by feelings of social isolation, of a gradual increase in pity or contempt or just simple disbelief of the mores and habits of the milieu surrounding the victim. By this measure I have long since plunged into the refreshingly clear crystal pool of madness, and dove so deep as to see no hope of ever surfacing. Thank god, or Lenin, or some other sceptical soul who first granted me the beautiful and horrifying vision to penetrate the multiple veils that most of us wear, most of the time, gently easing ourselves over the lemming-smeared lip of destruction, depravity, deep-sea rising to overwhelm almost every shore of every country, but excluding, of course, (and now you begin to glimpse the method in the affliction), the high hills of fair Sheffield, blessed by the new warmth and totally imune to the encroaching flood-borne disaster. Perhaps I can blame the parents. Perhaps they should be proud.

In any case, to compare us to lemmings is to insult the beasts: we have the native wit to know that we are shitting on our own doorstep, but still we squat there day after day, averting our eyes from the street and pretending that no one can see or smell the fresh turds, the tons of carbon, the rape of Palestine, the blood of the Iraqis, the rampantly encroaching emptiness of Hollywood, and the manic gleam in the Prime Minister's eyes as he tells us he would have invaded anyway, even if he'd known that all the reasons he professed to believe in back then were, as is now commonly accepted as fact, a weapon of masses distraction.

Swift should really return to us and propose something less modest than a cuisine based on Irish infants, escaped from the fire of famine into the frying pan of outraged satire. The progress of the world since his day, ever vaster riches piled beside ever vaster mounds of effluent, might drive him as mad as me. For now, I'll continue to rattle around in the cage of normality, pursuing sanity in the rejection of this suffocating blanket of "rationality" we're wrapped in, and looking for the outline of the hidden door in all these walls.

Please send some pills, should you have any.