Idiot Joy Showland

It was inevitable, really. We’ve done so much to drain politics of all ideology, to leave it in the hands of bloodless administrative technocrats; it only follows that the ideologues should, enantiodromiatically, take over the business of day-to-day administration. I say: good! Pity it had to be the fucking Nazis, of course – but as Hezbollah’s reconstruction efforts in Lebanon and even the Occupy movement’s brief stint moving homeless families into foreclosed houses have shown, it’s not just fascists who can take over the duties of a wheezing, liver-spotted State. Long may it continue! I dream of a world where the boring gutless liberal politicians are left alone to gurn platitudes in the mutually masturbatory ouroboros of the mass media, so the rest of us can do something a bit more interesting. A world where disappointed housewives get an email from the BNP delivery company informing them that, as their convoy was overwhelmed by anti-racist militants, the new dinner service won’t be arriving until at least Thursday. Where supermarket till attendants give you your receipt with an enforced smile and a cheery “in Hell or in Communism!” Where surgeons in criticism sessions denounce each other for failing to apply the praxis of dialectical materialism to the relationship between scalpel and gall-bladder. Where deconstructivist construction firms, in unpacking the contradictions between ‘built’ and ‘unbuilt’, dot the landscape with strange assemblages of brick and mortar that are hermeneutically – if not structurally – sound. Where airliners crash into the ground, burning with the tragic glory of the collective Will. Where estate agents happily proclaim their properties to have been thoroughly exorcised and guaranteed demon-free. Where school curricula centre on the exhaustive study of crop circles and PE is replaced by astral projection. Where zoological gardens exhort their visitors to ponder the beauties of Allah’s creation (but not too hard). Where the Army fights bloodily and tirelessly to reinstate absolute monarchy, the Navy pounds coastal towns to drive out negative thetans, and the RAF launches a barrage of airstrikes for every day that the Time Cube’s four simultaneous days in one Earth rotation are not universally recognised. A better world. It’s unlikely that many of us will make it out from the polyglot ransacking of late capitalism alive, but at least it would be fun.