The Angry Exile: I feel like hunting.

The Hangman

Into our town the Hangman came,
Smelling of gold and blood and flame.
And he paced our bricks with a diffident air,
And built his frame in the courthouse square.
The scaffold stood by the courthouse side,
Only as wide as the door was wide;
A frame as tall, or little more,
Than the capping sill of the courthouse door.
And we wondered, whenever we had the time,
Who the criminal, what the crime
That the Hangman judged with the yellow twist
of knotted hemp in his busy fist.
And innocent though we were, with dread,
We passed those eyes of buckshot lead --
Till one cried: "Hangman, who is he
For whom you raised the gallows-tree?"
Then a twinkle grew in the buckshot eye,
And he gave us a riddle instead of reply:
"He who serves me best," said he,
"Shall earn the rope of the gallows-tree."
And he stepped down, and laid his hand
On a man who came from another land.
And we breathed again, for another's grief
At the Hangman's hand was our relief
And the gallows-frame on the courthouse lawn
By tomorrow's sun would be struck and gone.
So we gave him way, and no one spoke,
Out of respect for his Hangman's cloak.
The next day's sun looked mildly down
On roof and street in our quiet town,
And stark and black in the morning air
Was the gallows-tree in the courthouse square.
And the Hangman stood at his usual stand
With the yellow hemp in his busy hand;
With his buckshot eye and his jaw like a pike
And his air so knowing and business-like.
And we cried, "Hangman, have you not done
Yesterday, with the foreign one?"
Then we fell silent, and stood amazed,
"Oh, not for him was the gallows raised."
He laughed a laugh as he looked at us:
"Did you think I'd gone to all this fuss
To hang one man? That's a thing I do
To stretch a rope when the rope is new."
Then one cried "Murder!" and one cried "Shame!"
And into our midst the Hangman came
To that man's place. "Do you hold," said he,
"with him that was meant for the gallows-tree?"
And he laid his hand on that one's arm.
And we shrank back in quick alarm!
And we gave him way, and no one spoke
Out of fear of his Hangman's cloak.
That night we saw with dread surprise
The Hangman's scaffold had grown in size.
Fed by the blood beneath the chute,
The gallows-tree had taken root;
Now as wide, or a little more,
Than the steps that led to the courthouse door,
As tall as the writing, or nearly as tall,
Halfway up on the courthouse wall.
The third he took -- we had all heard tell --
Was a usurer, and an infidel.
"What," said the Hangman "have you to do
With the gallows-bound, and he a Jew?"
And we cried out, "Is this one he
Who has served you well and faithfully?"
The Hangman smiled: "It's a clever scheme
to try the strength of the gallows-beam."
The fourth man's dark, accusing song
Had scratched our comfort hard and long;
"And what concern," he gave us back.
"Have you for the doomed -- the doomed and Black?"
The fifth. The sixth. And we cried again,
"Hangman, Hangman, is this the man?"
"It's a trick," he said. "that we hangmen know
For easing the trap when the trap springs slow."
And so we ceased, and asked no more,
As the Hangman tallied his bloody score.
And sun by sun, and night by night,
The gallows grew to monstrous height.
The wings of the scaffold opened wide
Till they covered the square from side to side;
And the monster cross-beam, looking down,
Cast its shadow across the town.
Then through the town the Hangman came,
Through the empty streets, and called my name --
And I looked at the gallows soaring tall,
And thought, "There is no one left at all
For hanging, and so he calls to me
To help pull down the gallows-tree."
So I went out with right good hope
To the Hangman's tree and the Hangman's rope.
He smiled at me as I came down
To the courthouse square through the silent town.
And supple and stretched in his busy hand
Was the yellow twist of the hempen strand.
And he whistled his tune as he tried the trap,
And it sprang down with a ready snap --
And then with a smile of awful command
He laid his hand upon my hand.
"You tricked me. Hangman!," I shouted then,
"That your scaffold was built for other men...
And I no henchman of yours," I cried,
"You lied to me, Hangman. Foully lied!"
Then a twinkle grew in the buckshot eye,
"Lied to you? Tricked you?" he said. "Not I.
For I answered straight and I told you true --
The scaffold was raised for none but you.
For who has served me more faithfully
Then you with your coward's hope?" said he,
"And where are the others who might have stood
Side by your side in the common good?"
"Dead," I whispered. And amiably
"Murdered," the Hangman corrected me:
"First the foreigner, then the Jew...
I did no more than you let me do."
Beneath the beam that blocked the sky
None had stood so alone as I.
The Hangman noosed me, and no voice there
Cried "Stop!" for me in the empty square.

Maurice Ogden

Thursday 25 June 2009

I feel like hunting.

And the reason why? This:

Sir Paul, Mary and Stella McCartney are leading the Meat Free Monday campaign to persuade people to avoid meat once a week. It is not an attempt to turn the world vegetarian, one day at a time...

Which I believed for about a picosecond...

...but a crucial step in the fight against climate change.

What a load of utter shit. Aside from the fact that the world's been cooling for a fucking decade now, and aside from the fact that CO2 levels have been far higher in the past while temperatures have simultaneously been lower, and aside from the chronic lack of reliability in the computer models which are being used to ~~predict~~ sorry, no, I mean ~~project~~ sorry, they're not using that one anymore either, I mean make ~~stuff up~~ scenarios, and aside from the colossal amount of green industry* bullshit being flung around to promote their agenda, a call to give up meat for one day a week seems suspiciously like another quasi-religious penance exercise designed to make you feel good about sacrifice and guilty about having a Sunday roast. Doubly so when it comes from, oooooh, the fucking President of the fucking Vegetarian Society.

The family is famously vegetarian, but Stella says for this particular debate, she wishes they weren’t. This is not an evangelical mission to make the world veggie but an attempt to do their bit to slow climate change. "It’s an environmental conversation, not a vegetarian one," says Stella. "It’s ok to just give up meat for one day, it doesn’t make you a vegetarian if you hate vegetarians, it doesn’t make you a cranky, hemp wearing pot smoker."

Yeah, good luck with that. Climate has been changing for over 4 billion years, and it does it at it's own pace. If you think one day a week of green salads is going to make any fucking difference - and I'm talking here about something you can see on a fucking thermometer - you probably are a hemp wearing pot smoker.

The campaign has some weighty research behind it, not least from the UN.

The UN? Well why the fuck didn't you say so to begin with. That's me converted.

Not.

This, I imagine, refers to the UN's Intergovernmental (and the G bit of that doesn't make for a promising start in my book) Panel on Climate Change, a body apparently intent on pushing an agenda on behalf of governments that want to tax and industries that want government subsidies, and therefore a body that I'd no more trust for impartial advice than I would an oil executive.

[Paul said,] "The UN, who are our appointed global watchdog...

Nope. Stop right there. SELF appointed global watchdog, if you don't mind. Carry on.

"...said 'hey, cattle rearing is more harmful than ALL transport.' That is the statistic I thought was shocking because until then I thought it was aeropolanes, cars and trucks…"
According to the report, livestock are responsible for 18 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, which is indeed a bigger share than that of transport which accounts for 13 per cent.

Well that just shows what a cock you are, doesn't it? You swallowed any old shit about cars and planes that was fed to you. Had you had a bit of curiosity you could have found out for yourself, just like I did years ago. Google is your friend, Paul. You might also have found out that construction is bigger than either of those. In fact at (going from memory**) 35-40% it's bigger than the two of them put together. Doesn't really support the one day vegetabalism that you're pushing though, does it? No, so why don't you ask every seventh family in the industrialised world to live in a mudhut instead? It'd achieve more (by your AGW based arguments that is - I'd expect to see fuck all difference), but of course neither you nor anyone else is actually suggesting it. You, I suspect because even if you've troubled yourself to find that out, which I'm not too optimistic about, it doesn't fit your anti-meat agenda. And everybody who already is aware of it because they know they'll be told to fuck off. Hence the promotion of feel good bullshit like Earth Hour and Monday vegetabalism.

It will, as I said above, achieve fuck all that you can see on a thermometer, but it's about changing people rather climate anyway. McCartney is a useful fool, an incredibly famous name with an (to me, inexplicably) large following across the world, who was guaranfuckingteed to leap aboard the bandwagon and get on message as soon as someone said global warming would be helped if people stopped eating meat. The response must have been fucking Pavlovian. Save the world by going veggie? He must have been priapic. I don't think it will last though. The Beatles/Wings?McCartney fans I know are not only all meat eaters but would cheerfully eat the face off a kitten if it was that or being hungry. On a side issue I'll be fucked by polar bears before I take eco-advice from some self righteous wanker whose enviro-hybrid pretentious twatwagon arrived on a plane from fucking Japan.

So for all those reasons I feel like hunting***. Because it would be nice to tuck into a delicious plate of grilled Skippy that I shot in the face over the weekend. And because it would, I very much hope, make Paul McCartney cry.

* Green industry? No, no, no, no, surely not. Industry are the bad guys who employ dodgy scientists as shills in order to justify digging up more coal and oil, right? Oh bollocks! The people who make wind turbines, wave and tidal generators, solar panels, even nuclear power stations, all want us to believe in global warming, and they're every bit as much industries as oil and coal. Fear of global warming sells their products, many of which are not very competitive and need government subsidies, which in turn are also 'sold' to the public on the grounds of global warming. Any extra cost to government can be dealt with by extra taxes for, you guessed it, global warming - ETS, emission tax bands for cars, carbon levies on gas bills and airline tickets... you name it, governments have thought of it, and global bloody warming is selling the need for it. With all that money involved you'd better believe that Big Oil and Big Coal aren't the only ones with an agenda to push and a motive to mislead.

** Yes, I could Google it, but so could Paul McCartney or anyone else. I probably will check it out for my own curiosity, but the point is that I have taken the trouble to use teh interwebs to find these things out. It doesn't look to me like Paul McCartney has.

*** UPDATE - But I won't go hunting because I don't shoot live animals for sport, and unless I've accidentally wasted an insect that sat on the wrong bit of a target or flew into the path of some shot I've never shot anything living anyway. The point is that I can and Paul McCartney is sorely tempting me, but the reality is that it's so much easier to go to the local butchers. He knows how to cut meat up properly for starters. Main courses as well, come to mention it****.

**** I'll get me coat.