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The Global Savage © 1999
The Global Savage © 1999
1 Lord Lytton was thinking not of Snoopy but of February 1848 and
extrapolating somewhat, but he didn’t elaborate to anyone (such as the narrator)
who supped below the salt.
2 Chief product of the National Tananarive Progressive Ant Farm but not
particularly nourishing. Readers will also note that the above scholarly reference
to Roman Jakobson was inspired by a casual peek into Language in Literature at
the University of the ACT Library on 25.7.97. Plagiarism and sloppy research,
foibles of the narrator, will not be tolerated by the author. And, if you didn’t ‘get’
the reference you obviously will never make a reader, let alone a writer on such
pressing questions as the Death of the Subject (sûjet), Majakovskij’s ‘fanatical
belief in tomorrow’ and anything to do with ‘heating up ice-cream’ or ‘shattering
the boundaries of the present’ (flounce).
3 See http://www.alphalink.com.au/~agp/poetry.htm.
One: Yes, God know what the neighbours think 2
more wealth than ever before, there would be no masters and servants, and all
humanity would be living in an earthly paradise on sixty pounds a year.
The praying-mantis angled its head and began a
disquisition, in a voice like that from Mr Edison’s American phonograph, on the
duty of a good Employé. Piper, stomach growling, surreptitiously squashed it.
Perhaps he should have eaten it.
“On such a night”, panted Lord Lytton, who’d expired
in 1893 and most of his many novels shortly thereafter, “a great White Saviour
shall erupt from beneath the earth, clad in a white sheet because we know they
all love dressing up.”
Now motionless and dwelling on Mr HG Wells’s
portentous story The Time Machine, Piper strove to suppress a snort of laughter,
suspecting that by the Millennium such a ‘saviour’ would instantly be replaced
by a machine. His Master sat again, wiped his dripping brow with a pale, well-
bred hand, and began to open his many letters of rejection from the great White
publishing houses.
(The telephone rang; it was Mr Alexander Graham
Bell, quite drunk, blustering about working class revolutionaries using
goddamned party lines to organise strikes. Lytton left him to the mercy of the
answering machine, a tweeny.)
“Of course, my Lord.” Piper thought of all those
layers of policy formation and decision-making that loomed above him, and for
a second was almost relieved that he was only a butler.
Lytton left his chair again, and went down on one
knee. Piper backed away, thinking his employer about to propose. (To be on the
safe side, he took up the diamond-encrusted letter-opener and dubbed him Sir
Edward.) The humorless literary aristocrat parried that, and, while humming a
popular snatch of The Ring cycle — the version by Offenpiszt — in counterpoint
with the groans of the starving homeless and the slosh of the circulating libraries
outside, devoured a sterling silver ice-bucket of locusts and wild honey (he had
strong teeth himself). He then turned three increasingly deeper shades of blue
and fulminated in copperplate:
2
One: Yes, God know what the neighbours think 3
4“ But what all the violence of the feudal institutions could never have effected, the silent and insensible
operation of foreign commerce and manufactures gradually brought about. These gradually
furnished the great proprietors [nobles, and landlords] with something for which they
could exchange the whole surplus produce of their lands, and which they could consume
themselves without sharing it either with tenants or retainers. All for ourselves and nothing for
other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of
mankind. As soon, therefore, as they could find a method of consuming the whole value of
their rents themselves, they had no disposition to share them with any other persons.” (Wealth of Nations,
[Smith 1776, III.iv.10, pp. 418-19].
What red-ragging crap from that dangerous socialist Adam Smith.
3
One: Yes, God know what the neighbours think 4
4
One: Yes, God know what the neighbours think 5
and his famous late-90s commercial craze. (Secretly, she’d have killed for a solid-
gold Maserati — you couldn’t drive it but who cares. Think of the pose value as
you were photographed by it outside Claridge’s, especially in a see-through
skirt.)
“Um — jolly good. I’m, er, P-peter.” (Mr Piper, he said
out of habit, under his breath as the cardboard boxes along the Embankment
shook with laughter.) “My Master is a — right bastard, you see. Won’t even let
me live in.”
“Really?” (She too loved The Nanny.) “So’s mine.
Worse than Arthur Koestler. That’s why I dumped the geezer.” She came into
the glow of the gas lamp (the only one that hadn’t lost out to electricity, and
smug about it) and he saw the great welts and bruises on her face. He quailed.
For all his prejudices, he had a soft heart. Memories of his miserable upbringing
permeated his consciousness. His Mam (a native of the Isle of Man and designer
of the famous Laxey wheel) spent her days and nights scrubbing the extensive
parquet floors of English coal proprietors while his Dada worked more hours
underground than a pit-pony. Revolution was a messy business, but patriarchal
capitalist repression was perhaps worse — look at the Slave Trade and other
forms of labour market flexibility.6
6Such as Nike, the Nazi Holocaust and even Uncle Joe to some interpreters of the
historical record.
5
One: Yes, God know what the neighbours think 6
Advertisement
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One: Yes, God know what the neighbours think 7
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One: Yes, God know what the neighbours think 8
12See ‘UN outlines plans for rebuilding Kosovo’, The Canberra Times, 16 June
1999, p5: ‘In Tokyo, a foreign ministry official said that Japan would participate in
the rebuilding of Kosovo …’.
8
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One: Yes, God know what the neighbours think 10
14Satan is the only person who can out-fiddle John Denver, and that while
trapped in a lake of ice. But he can’t sing ‘Any old Iron’. Ahem. ‘Any old iron,
any old iron, any any any old iron … you look sweet, you look a treat, you look
dapper from your napper to your feet, (something something) your fahver’s old
green tie on, I wouldn’t give you tuppence for your old watch chain, old iron, old
iron!’
10
One: Yes, God know what the neighbours think 11
Chapter 7
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One: Yes, God know what the neighbours think 12
of Ach-y-Fi and gone over the mountain with his worldly belongings (some
gunpowder, a compass and a printing press) tied in a handkerchief which hung
from a pole — I won’t of course resort to such peurile elaborations such as ‘a
pole that rested on a shoulder attached to his freezing body which stood upon
the earth spinning about a middle-aged star (Pat Boone — well it is 1899) in a
reckless manner on the edge of the known galaxy thanks to Mr Wells’. I
wouldn’t give my critics (Fie!) the pleasure.
‘Turn again Whittington’ were words he (though
making progress with Spinoza) waited in vain to hear.
Nor could he see anything remotely resembling a
time machine, whatever that might resemble — possibly an ophicleide on roller
skates. (Outside, a police box went errwoo errwoo and disappeared but he didn’t
notice.)
“Er — your, er, time machine … ?” As a boa
constrictor coiled round his neck and slithered out through a gaping hole in the
window — well, it was there after the thing had gone — he reflected that
perhaps he should never have adopted the English name Peter. Yet those who
did often did well, look at Peter Rabbit and Mr Pan. For too long he’d been
content to dree his weird.
“Yes! That’s it!” she said excitedly, slurping coarsely at
her own while lighting another cigar.
“What — the bicycle?”
“Yair. Just like in HG Wells.”
The native woman was plainly mad (though to tell the
truth he (plainly) couldn’t tell the difference between a Schizophrenic and a
Manic Depressive, not even by the way they walked down the street). He much
preferred Swinburne. The rain in Spain …
“No, I hain’t mad.” she said, deftly avoiding the
question in everyone’s minds as to whether Savage was wholly responsible for
his depredations or merely the pawn of capitalistic forces16 (he’d got the contract
for the Jubilee by getting his daughter to sleep with Queen Victoria). “You sits on
it, see, and rings the bell. You wanna go into the future, say to 2,008, you just
rings the bell Two Fahsend — well, 2,008 times. Ok, it could be more efficient but
this is 1899.”
He’d certainly — though certain that he was certain of
nothing — heard that line before. He never pinched gags; his were all paid for in
Swedish kronor and he hated to think what they’d cost in euros.
(A male-to female transsexual who hadn’t yet come
out but had developed Size D boobs after two years on oestregen that looked
odd on a person who was apparently a hyper-butch docker did not happen by at
that moment, nor ever will in this tale.)
“Er — and does it go back … ?” He’d always wanted
to meet Mr Julius Caesar the famous slaughterer of Celts, and warn him about
that treacherous, nasty and short Mr Brutus.
“Course not. That don’t make no sense.” she
protested, riffling through a stained copy of the Origin of Species and euchreing
16We wouldn’t want to make the Fundamental Attribution Error and bring
Social Psychology into disrepute, would we? (Well, we’ve all been to university…)
12
One: Yes, God know what the neighbours think 13
him thoroughly. “You’re not well up on Science, is yer? Occam’s Razor? Nature
abhors a vacuum? Early experiments on the Leyden Jar? Mesmerism? No such
thing as a failed Michelson-Morley experiment? Absence of evidence is not
evidence of absence? Chaos theory? Fermat’s Last Theorem (the one what killed
x
’im)?” She delivered a dissertation on and in Higher Mathematics, ! "ne =mc2
f u c k
n e o c
l a s s
e c o
i c a l
… ! "####### n o m. It didn’t make much sense (though a century later it
i c s
was discovered to be the key to the Unified Field Theory and the manufacturing
of the ideal McDonald’s potato which raised the hopes of so many starving
millions in Latin America, India, Africa etc, people crying out for fiscal and
monetary responsibility).
She picked up another book, one all too familiar. “And
of course, Karl Marx and all that?”
Piper shuddered faintly. That man — such long hair
(though he was fair-minded enough to think him a brilliant poet, his elegy about
the Falling Rate of Profit outshining anything Milton ever wrote — and why did
the latter go blind?). Piper’s secret life as a closet Communist in the privacy of his
own coal-hole was not something he could yet fully admit to himself. He well-
remembered the first night he’d read Marx, fighting against the notion that
Socialist Rays might emanate from the pages and contaminate him — and hadn’t
they? Yet for years he’d pretended to be a centre-reactionary.“Um — I suppose
not.” Science! The nearest he’d got to that was to arrange a list of the Bishops of
the Diocese of London since 1044 and the actual doges of Venice into alphabetical
order for an arthritic Mesopotamian cleric — his first job in the alienated labour
industry, in fact, and a challenge since it was all unaccountably in Japanese. (True,
he’d experimented with crystal sets and inadvertently invented the transistor 69
years before Schockley, but he and the rest of the world never became aware of
it.)
“B-but, why should one wish to travel into the
future?” The glorious triumph of Llewelyn y Llyw Olaf over Edward I could be
ensured with Maxim guns and a verse or two from Hillaire Belloc, thus changing
the entire course of History …
“Cor, lumme, that toffee-nosed accent’s really stuck to
the roof of your mahf, innit? You want a Scientific Socialist Revolution, right?
Well, there ain’t no point in ’avin’ one nah what wiv the colonies bestowin’ quasi-
aristocratic status upon the nice lily-white sons of Empire an’ all.” She took a
deep breath at the wooden dialogue that was to follow. “Look — the Russkies’ll
try it in 1917 and it’ll all go wrong, wiv much the same ’appenin’ in China in ’49.
Then there’ll be a bit of a lull, apart from Cuba and so on. But Australia, 2008 …”
The Venerable Bede couldn’t have faulted her cunning omission of his distinction
between ‘BC’ and ‘AD’ in the interests of political correctness.17
17Actually
a refinement of the scheme devised by the Scythian-born Roman
monk Dionysius Exiguus in c.527 (a year that didn’t exist until he’d cooked it up)
who possibly suffered from the ‘Scythian madness’.
13
One: Yes, God know what the neighbours think 14
18Nothing so crude as beer and moggies and folding bicycles will be entertained
here.
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One: Yes, God know what the neighbours think 15
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One: Yes, God know what the neighbours think 16
from match-heads. They caught fire momentarily and he winced, but Lytton
didn’t notice. “Er — I became entangled in my bedclothes this morning and it
took me an hour to fight my way out with the aid of the Welsh Fusiliers.”
(Leonie is suing.)
16
One: Yes, God know what the neighbours think 17
17
Chapter Two: The Time MachineChapter Two: The
Time Machine
21At the insistence of Dr Mike Savage of the Ministry of Black and White
Propaganda. The trahison des clercs is shocking these days. (We’ve all been on the
dole for quite some time too.)
22Though better than Michel Camdessus’s script for Russia.
Two: The Time Machine 19
19
Two: The Time Machine 20
20
Two: The Time Machine 21
could adapt reality to our own needs? Why be subservient to some criminal
overclass? Strong and free people have no need of leaders. He began to hum the
Internationale.
“Where the heel are we goin’?” voiced the
Scotswoman predictably as they coasted down to a bridge whose design she
immediately deplored.
Ruby pointed out the strange flagpole on a squat hill
across the lake, a flagpole which surmounted a vast whited sepulchre
surrounded by seething crowds.
“That’s their ’ahse o’ Parliament.”
“Arse of Parliament?” said Piper but was ignored.
Anno pulled out her tartan bodice and made puking
noises. “I mean, d’ye call that architecture? All it needs is a bloody cauldron
dangling from it.”
“I suppose you’d know all about that — and
democracy and — and Scotch mist. Undoubtedly you’d be an accomplished
Vexillologist.” flyted Piper unsuccessfully, though his enthusiasm for Revolution
was growing with every breath of shit-free, monoxide-rich air he took.
Anno glowered in the mirror and also stopped
pedalling. A dishevelled drug addict offered to wash their windscreen and she
floored him.
“Stupid little man. Fuckin’ parliament’s got no
relevance to democracy in a world with massive disparities in wealth and pooer.
It’s no more than a den of thieves, an executive committee for managin’ the
affairs of the whole bourgeoisie, a — .”
“I say, turn it up, that’s a bit strong, they’re surely
elected by the People … ” went Piper, his acquired English sense of Modernity
and Pragmatism offended. Yet the poetry of it all touched his heart. He thought
of Mr Christ (though the Chap had been a swarthy foreigner) and again wished
they could travel into the past. Those money-changers had a lot to answer for,
doves at 40 shekels a pop, a shocking instance of the illegal trade in rare birds …
He vented his spleen and gall-bladder.
Ruby talked over him, aware too that the present
government’s popularity had sunk to 15% of the 30% who bothered to vote:
“We need to scout around and look for radical dissidents. There’s bound to be
some trying to break into that place sooner or later.”
“Who are all those fuckers, then?” asked Anno
incredulously, farting. Piper had broken out in a sweat; now he coughed
violently.
“Oh, they’re no good to us. The Pope is visiting, see.
Everyone’s mad about Peter II and the triumph of Opus Dei.”
“Shyte. I was hopin’ it was the Beatles.”
“But, er, when we come to power we’ll need a red
flag.” spluttered Piper eagerly, clearly out of his depth again. He’d seen one
being borne in front of the early horseless carriages, and a damn good thing too.
“I dinna think that’ll improve the look of it.” said a
cynical Anno.
“Perhaps we can ’old a flag competition.” he
suggested to the cigar-chomping Ruby, secretly glad he’d changed his name.
21
Two: The Time Machine 22
22
Chapter Three: Three Who Made a Revolution?
24
Three: Three Who Made a Revolution?
25
To Piper, it was clear that the name ‘Peter’ had taken
on a sacred dimension. The butler, surveying the prospect of an unaccustomed
life without servility, began to wish his parents had never called him ‘Emlyn’ —
which, he realised suddenly, was a fact he must never disclose.
“But how?” said Piper, belatedly wincing at the
cheeky use of his first name. He’d always wanted a Revolution and dreamt of
the elysian conditions and square-dancing that would prevail after it, but never
given much thought to the question of how to bring it about. It could be
dangerous.
“Despite all the hoo-ha and a tax bribe or two, the
Government of National Unity have been going downhill for at least a year.
They could topple any day now, according to Josh.” explained Ben, his nails
having dried. “The People are ready to rise, or so Josh says. (I’m a Liberal myself
but I’m worried about Hanson’s Disease even though she lost her seat and
became a shark importer.) You’ve come at exactly the right time.”
Piper looked blank, Ruby conceited. In the two years
since she’d invented the time machine with the assistance of an itinerant alien
called ET who made a living out of appearing in cryptic crossword puzzles as a
clue, she’d made many trips to 2008, incognito that is. She’d selected them well
(though both had long sworn off fish).
“Don’t you see?” continued Josh, sitting under an
imaginary bo-tree. “They need something to unite them, a catalyst, a — ”
“A social lav — laboratory!” went Piper. Nobody
noticed the iridescent puce flying saucer hovering over the house and it doesn’t
come into the story in any case. Nor do the six hundred bowls of death-adder
soup which were presently being trundled down the street in a vain attempt to
stamp out youth unemployment, itself on 101% outside prison.
“Well, that’s a rather dated notion, but I guess you’ve
got the idea.” said Ben.
Piper got a bit huffy. Dated! It was right up to the
minute as far as he was concerned.
“I’ll make a speech.” Ruby struck a virtuous pose. “I
disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” she
boomed, striking a match on her heel and lighting a cigar. “That’ll do it. I got
pretty sharp-tongued on the streets of London.”
“And I’ll bash a few heads wi’ me pole.” said Anno,
hefting it.
“All we need is a forum.” said Ruby.
Piper put in, “But we aren’t in Rome, are we …?”
“Shut it, you half-baked bannock.” Anno warned him
with arattle of her claymore. “If ye were dyin’ fae lack o’ breath I wouldnae fart
in yer face.” She let go a beauty. Though his masculinity was impugned, he
clammed up mightily.
“A forum. A platform. A manifesto … The hustings …
great band … agit-prop … a secret society … a campaign of terror … or of letter-
writing … a Great Debate … radical comix … Ramparts … barricades … paving
stones … Brecht and Weil (not Simone) … the Bastille … Tim McVeigh … an
Aboriginal Embassy with people tooting and being pulled up by the sows for the
25
Three: Three Who Made a Revolution?
26
illegal use of a safety device … an Intifada … the Warsaw Ghetto … a National
Razor-Wire … an ad in the Canberra Times under ‘R’ … hmmm … ”
“Och, I can see that — ‘a Revolution will be held this
coming Sunday. Bring a plate and petrol bomb’.”
“I say, fach, that’s a bit violent. I don’t see myself as
some sort of thug. I’m not Irish you know.”
“Even a coal-faced Welsh arse-bandit can pull a fuckin’
trigger.” She passed the moments of his speechlessness by reading chapter one
of Spike Milligan’s rib-busting Lady Chatterly’s Lover According to Spike Milligan
(1994) in which that antique war-torn author and trumpet-player accidentally
brings back to life Clifford’s father in chapter one (bitch bitch).
Ruby chalked a few pink triangles on the rubber
coffee table in protest at this inappropriate homophobia. “Just let me think … ”
To tell the truth, even she wasn’t quite sure of the next
step. (The author has been publicly compared to James Joyce you know.24) She
brazened the moment out.
“Maybe — I know, we’ll hold a rally.”
Ben said, “Oh, goody. All those lovely racing drivers.”
Josh rebuked him sharply for being such a stereotype.
Ben tugged up his geeky white jeans.
(Yasser Arafat did this too but that was in the Gaza
Strip. At the same instant, white-trousered Islamic aliens landed on planet Yccch
in the middle of the solar system of Omicron Ceti, sadly trousers made of ‘smart’
materials which flew off rendering them embarrassingly debagged in mid-
conquest due to their own particular Y2K bug.25 And some people tell you
there’s no such thing as coincidence.
‘So’, said Coco la Salle the celebrated Gigglebusterían
cross-dresser, ‘all those maughty nen and hairy people can go and boil themselves, coz I
would never wear foobtall boots or nasty, hairy shorts. I never eat rump steak or pay for
my own meal in a restaurant. And I’n mot nean, eitherwise. I often get soo upset about all
of this that I demurely cry myself off to sleeps, coz I am a girl at the same time, forever and
evermore and a day. So night night, I am sleepsy now.’
Will you get this ancient twisted fuck out of here?
Sheesh!)
“A big rally in the town’s main square.” concluded
Ruby, not one to waste her intelligence on mere fribbles.
“Garema Place?” said Ben doubtfully, caressing the
rubber carpet. “I don’t see there’s much point in harangueing heroin addicts.
We’re not into cyberpunk.”
(They’d once cleaned them out but the area had gone
downhill a lot of late. In fact many of the buildings had slid into a great pile of
rubble at one end. The place was now about as attractive as Omagh Town
Square.)
The Great Discussion would drag on into the night.
26
Three: Three Who Made a Revolution?
27
“But they’re amongst the most Oppressed of people
…” Ruby was saying. Piper began to feel strange. Prostitutes, natives, lumpen
mobs, revolutionaries, and now heroin addicts. Where was his life heading?
Of course, he had heard of the drug and the Peace of Carlowitz. It (the former)
was Mr Savage’s finest product and in all his patent medicines. His mind drifted
back (as happens in quality novels where the author has been compared to
James Joyce) to the nineteenth century. As they went on excitedly discussing the
coming global triumph over what Josh and Ben called ‘economic rationalism’, he
slipped into a brown study of nostalgia fit to end the chapter.
27
Chapter Four: TreacheryChapter Four: Treachery
My cat needs a good fuck.
Dr Nato: I’m sorry, but your wife has an unexploded plastic land-mine in
her vagina, preventing the baby from exiting safely. They lay them everywhere you know. We want to go in with
a bombing mission.
29
Four: Treachery
30
“Heh heh.” said Josh. “Ben hates it when I give in to
profanity (especially since you can get two years in the jug for it these days). It
really fucks me off sometimes.” The resultant clunk of coins made Piper think of
Mr Francis J. Savage whom he trusted he would now never meet. He polished
his pince-nez on his cravat and seethed with hatred.
“I suppose he hates paying his half of the phone bill.”
sneered Anno cynically, beheading the rest of her zits while humming Le
Marseilleise. Madame Defarge knitted a few more shrouds.
“He was glorious in Bali last year.” Josh continued
primly. “Only rang his analyst in Pasadena twelve times.”
“That doesnae surprise me.”
“I guess it fucking wouldn’t. Oh, shit.”
Clunk, clunk.
“Och, what a little horseshit-artist he must be. Can he
no use fuckin’ e-mail? And no, you don’t think I’m going to be putting money in
that thing.” Anno waved her claymore and a sporran for emphasis.
“No, it’s just his love of Victorian Values.” A portrait
of Margaret Thatcher glowed like a tax-revolting icon on the wall.
Anno ran it through.
“Damn! Oh, sorry.” He deposited another coin. “That
was Ben’s favourite print. Still, you have made it look very ’90s. Might get onto
Ian at ANG …”
“Fuck Ian. Where are all the chicks?” went Anno.
“Too many fuckin’ Jocks in this production. Even Pauline Hanson’d look good
by comparison.” Piper wondered What Lesbians Did.
Josh, meanwhile, quailed at such un-pc language,
writing a cheque for $50 000 and slipping it unthatcheritely into the swearing-box
on her behalf.
There was a crash, one fit for 1929. It came from the
direction of the spare bedroom. It was not water hammer, nor a boilermakers’
convention, nor a wayzgoose or printers’ frolic.
“ ’ere, what do you mean by wakin’ me up at this
hour? Can’t the Revolution wait till I’ve ’ad me brekky?” It was Ruby, dressed in
a floral housecoat and fluffy slippers. Ben stumbled across the rubber behind her.
Josh turned and stared in dismay.
“It’s all right, ’e just wanted to know what it was like
to sleep chained to the bed-head in stilettoes.”
“You said you had to visit your sick aunt in
Wellington!” shrieked Josh, who by the way had never been over Niagara Falls
in a barrel. He belaboured Ben with curses and filed for bankruptcy.
The rogernomical New Zealander drove out the flock
of sheep that had crowded round him expectantly at that point.
“Don’t tell them all that I’m a Kiwi! They’ll cut me orf
the dole. How can I afford a mobile phone then?”
“Ask Winston Peters!” yelled Josh, sick of peters, for
the nonce. “He’s a traitor too.”
Piper shook his head, which was thick with the
preservatives and strychnine and radioactivity found in cheap red plonk. “Did
we decide on our next step, then?”
30
Four: Treachery
31
Ruby screwed up her dark, primitive face which Piper,
due to his compulsive reading, now knew she’d inherited from ancestors at least
40 000 years ago. (He was sure his own was far more modern.)
“Not exactly, but we can use the Time Machine.”
“What, not that old trick of goin’ into the future to see
what happened and then relyin’ on the 20-20 vision of hindsight if not Dr
Mahathir, och aye?”
“No, you can’t do that in socialist realism. The Machine
is limited in its ability to traverse the future, see.”
“Och, how bloody convenient. You ain’t a bloody
Formalist are ye?”
“No, I fucked the bell. All that ringin’”
Piper, with a dim memory of the night in her flat,
suddenly realised something of terrible significance.
“You — you said we couldn’t go back to the past
either. Does that mean …”
Ruby looked a bit sheepish. Ben gave her a come-
hither look but she ignored it. He was gay!
“Obviously I was ’avin’ you on since I’d been back and
forth more than you’ve ’ad ’ot dinners I can tell you. But now that I’ve gorn and
broke the bell … ”
They were stuck in this dreadful rubberised future. He
watched with nostalgia a much-recycled repeat of the Duchess of Duke Street on
WIN.
“Weel, can we no fix it?” said Anno, a woman of
action and thus speaking very much louder than all the others.
“We can try, but I doubt if the bicycle shops could deal
with such Advanced Technology even in 2008. But,” she brightened, “if we can
start a Revolution we can free the forces of Social Labour from the irrational
logic of Capital and then maybe the People can … ”
“ … fix our bike.” finished Piper.
“On yer bike.” said Anno and he ducked.
Ruby stroked the lamplighter’s enormous left bicep.
“He’s more or less right.”
Anno stroked her lamplighter’s pole. “I’m no’ so sure
I hold wi’ all this Advanced Technology. It’s nearly put me oot of a job.”
“Luddite! That’s under the still-existing order of
alienated labour …”
“The Luddites weren’t just machine-breakers! Some
would have been happy with steam-looms if they had o’ owned the fuckers.
Same with automeetion todee. Look at the solar-powered rowing-boat. ”
They began an argument which went over Piper’s
head and also visited the rubber step-pyramids of Tenochtitlan.
Josh cut in.
“We’re more into Tony Blair’s modern notions round
here. Re-skilling, flexibility of labour, outsourcing, equality of opportunity, an
avoidance of utopian Big Picture-type Grand Visions such as taxing the well-
heeled … ”
31
Four: Treachery
32
“And ex-President Clinton.” went Ben with a little
shudder of pleasure. “A Third Way between the other two or three Third Ways,
according to Thomas Aquinas26 and his Eurocommunist Party. So modern … if a
26 Ie, [FIX!]
The Argument
Some Definitions:
Criticisms:
I. What is it to be a necessary being having of itself its own necessity, and why
think that such a being is
God?
32
Four: Treachery
33
little hyperactive in certain quarters.” (The current President was Ruby Wax and
wore teeny-weeny skirts all the time to distract susceptible Blairheaded
bourgeois journalists from reality.)
None of their blathering sounded modern to Piper.
They sounded worse than (shudder) Fabians, who in his view made ‘revolution’
by watering down their policies till those matched existing reality, apparently
these days composed of rubber.
(3') There is a time t such that for every contingent being B, B fails to exist at
t.
(2*) For every person B there is a person A such that A is the mother of B.
(3*) There is a person A such that for every person B, A is the mother of B.
33
Chapter Five: Ruby Sees the LightChapter Five:
Ruby Laser Sees the Light
35
Five: Ruby Sees the Light
36
He had to stop watching re-runs of I Dream of Jeannie.
The hallucination, itself due to his consumption of
patent medicines, made a show of granting three wishes (a degree in
phrenology , women’s studies and the history of Latin American Marxist
revolutions foremost among them and damn useful for getting a job these days)
and vanished in some embarrassment.
“He’s a savage fellow.” Piper agreed in some
confusion.
“A Global Savage.” said Josh titularly and tittered
behind his hand. “There’s a lot of it about. If only they’d understand that with a
bit of labour market flexibility and re-training a stakeholder society could be — “
Now the pole landed on his head.
“Don’t talk so wet.” Anno jeered.
“Ow! Well, I’m not a dry.”
“He’s already made heaps from Bulwer-Lytton’s racist
book. He’s bought up the copyright and made it retrospective with a few bribes
in the right places. And he’s taken over One Nation Publishers.” said Ruby,
having finally lost her awful Cockney accent and adopted a Javanese one.
“How the heel d’ye know a’ that?” She hadn’t lost her
accent and didn’t intend to.
“I’m second-guessing with the aid of the Web. It’s the
sort of thing he’d do.”
“So, let’s unleash the Revolution.” roared Piper,
scenting a whiff of battle and the unemployed Lebanese family of 24 nextdoor
who were having lunch with all manner of foreign spices.
“Hey, Mahmoud, habibi, chuck us a slice of pita
bread.” yelled Anno out the kitchen window. Josh and Ben didn’t know where to
look. In flapped the bread, smeared in what to Piper was a revolting smelly
foreign sauce, and Anno devoured it.
“I love this Chinese food — the honeyed locusts are
awesome.” she chewed, sauce dribbling down her prominent chi’n.
“We all saw you down at Han Sen’s Takeaway in Peak
Hill last week.” said Ruby, raising her eyebrows as those rural towns Anno
didn’t visit shrivelled around the country.
Further servings flew in, including a bowl of falafel
and a threatening letter from Hezbollah.
“Well, you do overdo the freeloading.” said Ruby, as
Anno washed it all down with a Dewar’s.
“The Revolution … ” prompted Piper weakly,
possessed by a vision of central bankers dangling from lamp-posts in every
suburb.
“Oh, right. The trick, see,” Ruby said as they formed a
conspiratorial huddle, “is to get the People on side. Now what they want the
most?”
“Er, jobs?” said Piper without the stigma of an arts
degree, a little unnerved by the close proximity of female bosoms (there were
few male ones in sight).
“Yes, but more than that.”
“Consumer goods!” said Ben, and ducked.
36
Five: Ruby Sees the Light
37
“Love.” said Anno, and laughed till she almost
brought up her lunch.
“Respect, home and children.” said Piper and donned
a construction hat. (“It suits you reet feen.” said Anno, clocking him under the
chin.)
“No, no, no — what people need is a FUTURE!”
“Oh.” said Piper. “Is this where our Time Machine
comes in again? You know (if the reader doesn’t) that we haven’t been able to
get it fixed.”
“Put an argyle in it, wee mannie, wi’ all that
information-in-dialogue.” said Anno. “Let her finish.”
“A future that they have moulded themselves, not an
alien world they have to ‘adapt’ to.”
“But I was so looking forward to it.” wept Josh, who
cried easily and often wore cashmere jumpers. Even Mussolini cried when his pet
canary expired, he said in his defence. (Mine was eaten by the cat and I had to
bite my lip to keep from kacking myself with laughter.)
Ruby brushed this fatuous postmodernism aside. “A
future that isn’t gambled away on the Global Cock — sorry, Stock, Market, that
isn’t compromised by having predatory Capitalism — whether on the American
or Chinese model — squatting in its path. A future in which all people are equal!”
Josh and Ben, mirror-images of each other (save that
one voted Liberal and the other Labor), fainted in each other’s arms.
“Why don’t we just slit Savage’s gizzard?” said Anno,
unsheathing her claymore. It glowed blue.
“Must be Orcs about.” she said, and shrugged. One
tapped on the window with an armload of share certificates from the New York
Stock Exchange and she nipped outside and slew it, but that didn’t really advance
the plot. (But it happened, for Chrissakes! Pass that stack of Bibles …)
“And have him replaced by someone even worse?
Like Donald Trump? No, we must go to the grass roots of society, enjoining the
People in their homes and places of work to Rise … ”
“Don’t forget your Aboriginality.” said Anno,
staggering back in with the share certificates and wiping her sword on the
expensive carpet and thereby creating a tax-free cash profit for a local steam-
cleaning outfit.
“I haven’t. That’s where we’ll start. In Brewarrina, or
rather, just outside it.”
“But tha’ means the author — whoops, sorry, the
narrator — will ha’ to appropriate Aboriginal culture.”
“Or alternatively not write about Aboriginal people at
all, which’d be racist.” pointed out Josh as he revived.
“Same goes for Scotswomen.” added Anno
incomprehensibly. “And my old m-man is a speech therapist.”
“Pardon? Er — we know the narrator’s queer but we
all seem to be quite normal.” pointed out Piper, a bit slow on the uptake and in
every other direction.
“Speak fer yersel‘.”
Josh and Ben gave each other nervous looks.
37
Five: Ruby Sees the Light
38
Ausländer, raus! came from the street. A mob came
goose-stepping by, bearing banners with symbols Piper thought were Hindoo
and chucking rocks and firebombs at the house nextdoor.
“I think that this discussion’s getting a bit academic.
We’ll be on about words next.” said Ruby. “Don’t you see it’s time to act —
before it’s too late?”
Machine-gun fire erupted from the house’s kitchen
window. The crowd dispersed and re-formed out of range.
“Mahmoud’s not scared of a few rocks.” said Ben,
though it was actually his wife Fatima doing the shooting (she was rather plump
and hated Anno referring to her as ‘Fatty’).
The police were nowhere to be seen.
Ruby noticed a counter-protest coming from the other
direction, and decided it was, as the narrator says, ‘now or never’.
38
Chapter Six: The Revolution BeginsChapter Six: The
Revolution and Cryptic Crossword Begin
40
Chapter Seven: The Time Machine (ok, ok, I’m not
much with titles)Chapter Seven: The Time Machine (ok, ok, I’m not much with
titles)
The One Nation fish ‘n‘ chip shop was agog with talk
of the demonstration, reported on commercial Australian television complete
with irrelevant file footage of the ‘terrorist’ Lorenzo Ervin from 1968 and a
perhaps unwise re-enactment of the secret Nixon bombing of Cambodia:
And then this weird gin gets up on the roof like a chimp and
makes this fucken speech …
Fucken mad wog-Arabs started shootin’ …
Reckon they’re some new fucken Commo party …
It was some fucken poofters who let ’em move in. The Scotch
one who looks like a coon is a dyke.
Eh? Look, Jim, fucken cops got stuck into my boy. Thought
he was a fucken Commo poofter.
Told you no good’d come of unisex hairdressers.
Fucken BHP’s layin’ off another 1000 men.
Fucken Yid poofters … um, I ain’t got nothin’ t’do with the
League, fellas. Just Rugby League!
Well, we fucken have.
This new party sounds fab, Tom. Just what we need to beat
the One Nation crowd.
But they’re Communists, Emma. Their leader’s a radical
indigenous Australian terrorist. We should listen to Tony Blair and proceed with
caution. He’s got such a nice smile.
But people are suffering, Tom — they’re turning to the new
party in droves.
She poured them both a Royal Doulton cup of Vittoria
coffee — they had to drink from the same cup these days, times were tough.
But we’ve been tightening our belts and lowering our
expectations for decades now. I’ve even taken a package and you’ve sold your Porsche!
Things have to get better if we stick to fiscal and monetary discipline.
Why should they?
Well … I don’t know … look what it’s done for Chile and
Peru! Whereas Cuba and that decalogic dictator with his ruinous public health system
taking away the self-reliance of the sick, creating a culture of dependency inappropriate to
a Third World country (though the beaches and nightclubs were nice, weren’t they?) …
um … anyway, what’s it actually called, this new party?
They both manipulated straws like the streetwise
starvelings they’d become.
Uh, it says they haven’t thought of a name for it yet.
42
Seven: The Time Machine (ok, ok, I’m not much with titles) 43
43
Seven: The Time Machine (ok, ok, I’m not much with titles) 44
44
Seven: The Time Machine (ok, ok, I’m not much with titles) 45
heritage he had no sense of rhythm. He’d sit there with prospective percussion
virtuosos, showing them how to hold the sticks and work the hi-hat and toe the
bass-drum pedal at the same time.
“Now, just go tss-t t’tss-t and see-saw your left foot on
the pedal. Hold the sticks like this … No, no, no! That’s the snare drum, and that’s
the tom-tom!” he’d yell in exasperation. “And you may not use a drum machine!
5
Now try it in … ”
4
2008 was a bad year for the music business and social
Darwinism but a great one for the Left. Their investment in the bongo industry
of San Luis Potosi, Mexico, to the delight of the Institutional Revolutionary Party,
enabled them to equip an army of dedicated insurrectionaries and set up a web
page. They propagandised mightily, drawing supporters and the curious on
every street corner.
In a few months, dreadlocked crowds were banging
pots and pans outside Parliament House and the tree-blown city was in uproar.
ASIO agents mingling inconspicuously in trench-coats and fedoras among the
People feared the worst and decided without much literary imagination to nip
things in the bud.
Piper, by now very rich, clipped off the end of his
imported Havana cigar (imported by Lear jet as a one-off) and sipped at his
white rum by the kidney-shaped swimming pool. The others lolled about doing
much the same, the suntanned Josh and Ben (there was plenty of sun in Australia
but theirs came out of a little brown pot) having been happy to relocate to the
North Shore and buy a platinum Rolls-Royce.
He stared idly across the blue majesty of Sydney
Harbour. Why did they need to have a Revolution? This society was fair and
democratic and everyone, even the ghastly nouveau-riche, had but one vote. He
could stand for parliament and pursue a cautious Fabian course of economic
rationalism with re-training. Hmm … restraint with actors’ equity. (The President
of Actors’ Equity got up in his mind and gave a stirring ovation and laid a egg:
Rhubarb! Rhubarb! Rhubarb! Rhubarb … Piper turned off the Goon Show which
had been repeated on Radio National since 1856. At least it beat that radiophonic
emetic, commercial talk-back.) His shares in Sandline, Military Professional
Resources Inc and other capitalist terrorist multinational mafias were doing
fabulously. Yes, he would become a modern leader and create a post-colonial
stakeholder society based on workfare and endless training for nonexistent jobs,
a Third Way …
It was a shame indeed when he was kidnapped at
Double Bay shopping centre by ASIO while very conspicuously examining a 500
kg jar of ‘Uncle Chicka’s’ sun-dried truffles. Suddenly, he became a martyr.
45
Chapter Eight: Mr Savage’s RevengeChapter Eight:
Mr Savage’s Revenge
47
Eight: Mr Savage’s Revenge 48
48
Eight: Mr Savage’s Revenge 49
1. DiF
e a h nhoch
e diR
e eihen fest
geschlossen
2. Die Straße frei den braunen Battalionen
3. Zum letzen Mal wird nun Appell geblasen
4. DiF e a h nhoch
e diRe eihen fest
geschlossen
49
Eight: Mr Savage’s Revenge 50
27See the wilfully plagiarised speech by Adolf Hitler, ‘OnNational Socialism and
World Relations’, delivered in the GermanReichstag, January 30th 1937. Cf also
the following Romany gag: A young German tourist listens spellbound as the
old gypsy saws wildly at his fiddle. After he has finished, she goes up to him and
gushes, ‘I loved that! You are truly brilliant!’
‘Thank you.’ he says. ‘But I must confess that I couldn’t have done it without
German help.’
‘Really?’ she responds, intrigued. ‘What, you mean some famous German violin-
master taught you?’
‘No.’ he says dryly. ‘I mean I taught myself to play in Auschwitz!’
50
Eight: Mr Savage’s Revenge 51
51
Chapter Nine: The People’s ConferenceChapter
Nine: The People’s Conference
It was good to see Josh and Ben and Ruby and even
Anno again. Piper was paid off by Savage in return for sparing his life and so
now called the tune (naturally,The Red Flag ):
(Words: Jim Connell, Tune: Tannenbaum)
Chorus:
Chorus:
Chorus:
Chorus:
Chorus:
Chorus:
53
Nine: The People’s Conference 54
54
Nine: The People’s Conference 55
55
Nine: The People’s Conference 56
perhaps Ostrich or even Albatross would be more appropriate) and the USA-
China Alliance were recommending that Australia be bombed back into
pointless austerity.
“Haven’t we got any friends out there?” Piper asked,
feeling a bit queasy due to the expensive beetroot sauce.
“The new Islamic Republic of Bahrein is making
qualified friendly noises.” she replied with a glance at Mahmoud, who smirked
and blew on his own fingernails.
“Shit. No one else?”
“Fidel. But he’s been forced to bulldoze Havana and
grow sugar cane on the site for the US and Brazilian ethanol markets.” She
snaffled a samosa, imported by private spy plane from Nicaragua at a cost of
$US4 m each. The cut-price deli nextdoor had gone out of business.
“Gawd.” went Piper, trying out the honeyed sausage
rolls which they’d ordered from a planet of caterers on the edge of the lesser
Magellenic Cloud. “Then — we’re doomed. Savage is right — nothing can stand
against global capitalism … ” The star above his head creaked closer.
“Gorbals.” said Anno, chewing and rattling her
claymore. “No paserán! El pueblo … ”
“You couldn’t find that alien again, could you?” Piper
asked Ruby.
“Not bloody likely.”
Camera lights bathed them. Camera lights popped
and they all dived under the table.
“But — the People must not be betrayed.” barked
Piper as they sheepishly crawled back into their seats in a Christchurch eccent.
Josh and Ben (the latter surrounded inappropriately
by ewes clamouring for his autograph and pelting him with wet knickers) were
all for compromise.
“The Party is not a sewing-circle, Comrade.” Ruby
reminded them with impressive gravitas.
[The author was planning on giving the narrator
another set-piece tableau description of the room at this juncture29 but the star-
struck stagehands have downed tools due to the mocking of Actors’ Equity in
an earlier chapter. But you’ve already seen that it was a dead boring room
anyway, Canberra having nothing like the Kremlin in which you could leave
the office light on all night to prove you were working round the clock to save
the Revolution. Nor has ‘oyster’ been mentioned anywhere in this novel —
fuck! ]
“Ask some of the more enlightened business people
to come home.” suggested Ben, with no appreciation of the difficulties of
authoring and ideological purity. “You know, in the time-honoured fashion of
Laborite, well, ‘betrayal’ of the ‘working’ ‘class’. I mean, what’s wrong with
betrayal really — it’s human nature, surely, look at Judas and Christ, Brutus and
Caesar, Kerr and Whitlam, Bill and Monica … Yes, um, what is betrayal, anyway,
56
Nine: The People’s Conference 57
@#*@##%!~!!!@#*@##%!~!!!@#*@##%!!!!@#*@##
%!~!!!@#*@##%!!!!@#*@##%!~!!!@#*@##%!!!!@#*@##%!~!!!@#*@##%!~!
!!@#*@##%!~!!!@#*@##%!~!!!@#*@##%!~!!! …
Cheers,
Secretary,
57
Nine: The People’s Conference 58
Production Committee.
58
Nine: The People’s Conference 59
mine) of the gold and silver windfalls of the Spanish Empire. 43% of Americans,
he’d heard, owned a few shares like Karl Marx and shunned even a capital gains
tax, never mind a Revolution. Class war, like consumption, was dead as
democracy, and the big shareholders would just have to go on getting inevitably
richer at the expense of the said 43% and those (such as black people who didn’t
identify with Moesha, and various fatuous believers in social progress) who had
no financial savvy or job at all. There was nothing quite like free enterprise,
unless it was all those murder-suicides you hear about.
“But we can’t reply to this as the Internet and the
phone lines are down.” said the revolutionary columnist, cooking up her next
sparkling broadside for the New Yorker — an hagiographic history of the Ford
Motor Co. She helped herself to a piece of raisin toast and a Gold Star of the
Soviet Union they’d bought at Mancare with workers’ and peasants’ blood
imported from the Lima market, proletarian choices Piper deplored.
Flying bombs (financed by the proceeds of blood
futures) began to rocket down on the Harbour, some of them ridden by
collectors of old anti-war videos. Good thing they were in Canberra.
The Conference delegates were almost immediately
informed and the star hung by a thread.
“Saxon arseholes!” Anno now knew their
involvement in the blood trade had been a mistake.
“ ‘ … the blind and weeping bear whom the hunters
beat …’ ”
“Edith Sitwell?”
“We’ll sue!” No one was quoting Edith Sitwell at a
Communist Conference. The German Band — a hammerskin outfit called
Hakenkreuz — was bad enough.
“Swithering bally rotters!” said Ben, a fan of Ronald
Searle, though he’d never swithered in his life.
Someone else (the ‘someone else’ mentioned above,
an obscure Brisbane writer named Svetlana Fyodorovich Dinkididenko with
long white hair), quoted extensively from Swinburne and Piper leaned back in
his chair and sighed rapturously.
“Is it the Yanks?” Ruby asked, opening a brochure on
equatorial Finland. Piper sat up with a start and nearly ruptured himself. The
lowest point of the star grazed his nose.
“Coming in from New Zealand. Pilotless aircraft30 and
cruise missiles. They’ve just wiped out Dulwich Hill and 10 000 USAF jobs.” said a
panting and worried messenger, worried about being hanged. He’d just run all
the way from Sydney and been trampled by the fleeing fundamentalist and his
gormless pursuers.
“That hot-bed of rampant Capitalism.” growled Anno,
referring to New Zealand, a country run now by the dreaded Kiwi Mafia or
Carbonara led (according to the narrator’s detractors) by the hoodlum Al Dente.
There were more quotations, including that from a campy version of the Faerie
Queene by Herbert Spencer that went, essentially, ‘Betty! Betty!’. Marx and
Spencer didn’t get along too well.
30One later flew off into the sunset never to be seen again.
59
Nine: The People’s Conference 60
No? Who is the foe? Who has been the foe all this
century?” He got no answer. “Philistines. Ahem. Ok. Well — it’s like this. The
SPD-CDU-Greens-Nazi leadership (pant) is too busy stealing from the people on
behalf of the multinationals and the people — at least the upper layers of the
proletariat and petit bourgeoisie — too busy stealing from each other to finance
illegal cryptic crossword production. But (pant) 95% of the population (though
31Though Kohl had been thrown out of power some years back, he had never
been able to accept the fact and all Germans had humoured him ever since, to
the extent that they too had come to believe he was still in power, and one
election year re-elected him. A shame he had died by that stage.
60
Nine: The People’s Conference 61
32Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations,
(Beijing: LPF Press, 1998).
61
Nine: The People’s Conference 62
be a great embarrassment in Johannesburg and Tel Aviv. We’d better not invite
any of them over here at this stage. And the falafel — aagh … ”
He rubbed his stomach. Mahmoud left the room
hurriedly. The nibblies here were atrocious.“Oceania? Antarctica?” asked a
slurping Piper in seventh heaven, with no memories of the Great Leap Forward
or the Ukrainian Famine (merely of his own formerly straitened circumstances).
He was met with derisory looks and a further descending of the star which bears
no resemblance whatever to Leonie’s in that greatly neglected masterpiece Her
Brilliant Career.
“We need a Great Leap Sideways.” he said to further
unreprimanded groans all round. “Downwards?” he added feebly, wishing he
could sink through the floor.
“Hmm.” Ruby interposed. “Ok, Europe it is. They’ve
got the cash (zipping about the world somewhere), and maybe we can become
G7.0000000000000000000001 (oh, no, that’s Russia). I want to see the German and
French ambassadors immediately. Oh, and the Brits I suppose.”
She could hardly see the others as they’d all been
withdrawn and a shaky Economic Blockade had been set up jointly by the US
and the Tycoons’ Republic of China so that Australians were in severe
withdrawal due to the sudden shortage of Coke, moral relativism, McDonald’s
cardburgers and cheap junk from Clint’s. She stood, and the Conference was
adjourned for a week while they used the restored Internet in an attempt to
organise massive wildcat strikes in conjunction with the Progressive Labor Party
against US armaments corporations.
“All rise.” chaffed Anno, pole aloft, and Ruby shut her
up with a flood of giggles. Piper was a bit shocked at such frivolity but
maintained his stiff upper lip — the central heating had broken down.
Then the star, predictably, fell on their heads, but by
this time they were too tanked to care.
62
Chapter Ten: Defending the RevolutionChapter Ten:
Defending the Revolution
of the National Assembly, and who in turn to the Gates of Heaven, but no one
had listened.
Ruby read from a recycled document. “Well, the
Labor Party has split into six — Revolutionary Moderates, Revolutionary Fiscal
Responsibility Party, Alternative Tory Party, Revolutionary Democratic Socialist
Party, Revolutionary Non-Factionals and Revolutionary Working Class Tory
Party.”
“Crikey. And the Liberals?”
“Revolutionary Neo-Liberals a n d Counter-
Revolutionary Freedom League.”
“Any others?”
“Revolutionary Democrats, Anarchists, Mutualists,
Radicals, Greens, Pinks, Red-Greens, Green-Greens, Rainbow Coalition, One
Nation, Leek of Rights, Islamic Jihad, Party of Satan, Animal Party, Electronic
Women’s Party, Unemployed Alliance, Calvinist Work Ethic Party, Individualist
Country Party, Hate Party, Downsizing Techno-Whigs, Kids’ Party, Writers’ and
Artists’ Party, Beach Party, Robot Party, Bosses’ League, Criminals’ Coalition,
Wog Party, Christian Democrats, Christian Fascists, Christian Un-alligned
Totalitarians, Intersexed Party, Festival of Light, Monster Raving Loony Party,
Blackshirts, Pinkshirts (the remnant Beigeshirts all killed each other in a beerhall
brawl), Iron Guard, Ghibbelines, Girondins, Jacobins, Senderoso Luminoso … All
stand to win at least one seat.!I don’t think that a leftist version of the eurovote
would be a good idea”
“Can’t we put it off?” said Piper.
“Danger of civil war.” (She slung him a list of the
Regiments of the British Army from the Household Cavalry to the The Queen’s
Own Buffs.)
“Well, they had nothing more relevant in the
revolutionary op shop. Now, we could only counter this threat — Piper, wake
up — by becoming a Stalinist tyranny like the Yanks and Chinese want. And
then we might fail anyway. And then there’s the Drum Lesson Industry to think
about — shedding jobs ever more rapidly as it grows globally.” Piper, yawning
and having hypnopompic inspirations, resolved to overwhelm the author with
his independent character. He consulted his new Dictionary of Buzzwords and
Circumlocutions (it was his birthday after all):
“More than ever, it is absolutely necessary for the
Party to generate sufficient policy flexibility in our current inevitably globalising
conjuncture in order that we may promote a successful demotic confidence
enhancement which in turn must ipso facto result in a likelihood increment
tangential to the conditions of comprehensive acceptance of our neo-
oppositional and antinomian manifesto by the collectivised yet still undialectical
work units —” He’d often heard Sir Humphrey say such things and what really
scared him was that he understood them.
“Eh? Oh, belt up, duckie!” interjected Ruby. “The
country’ll be more ungovernable than Sicily! What about all my promises?”
“You made ’em!” said Piper, wondering if he could get
his old job back, or at least an equivalent position in this century. The Time
Machine definitely didn’t work. They were soon to get letters of complaint.
64
Ten: Defending the Revolution 65
65
Chapter Eleven: How it all EndedChapter Eleven:
How it all Ended
67
Eleven: How it all Ended 68
All right, they kept all their teeth (especially Piper) and
were hale in limb and elsewhere. They spent their days publishing the following
parochial rag on behalf of an extraterrestrial power:
!
Gigglebusteria Gazette
A magazine published under the auspices of the Australia-Gigglebusteria Friendship Association
Drytonsils P. Verdigris.
==================
The Gigglebusterían Minister for Foreign Affairs, His Grace Sir Diaphanous
Trumpetingtrousèrsete, has agreed to hold talks with his Australian counterpart on
ending the longstanding Gigglebusterían trade boycott of Australian goods. Sir
Diaphanous
68
Eleven: How it all Ended 69
69
Eleven: How it all Ended 70
70
Eleven: How it all Ended 71
71
Eleven: How it all Ended 72
“So what’s all this about ‘the Boss’?” said Anno. “Bit
hierarchical, isn’t it?”
“Well, S/he’s really only primus stove inter pares, if you
like, since we chucked out that reactionary old bastard Jehovah and his Witness
Party. But think of the great arguments you can have!”
After some (and possibly years of) heated discussion
and cryptic crossword solution, the singing resumed. A magnificent pair of
pearly gates loomed before them like an immense set of inverted teeth, and
swung open silently. An old man affecting a halo welcomed them in. (Peter II
was there too, but not Francis J. Savage.)
By the time they walked into the Elysian fields and
cloud-tops Above, to be greeted by their ancestors and lost loved ones, furiously
scribbling away at cryptic crosswords, they were all thoroughly plastered, and —
to Anno’s surprise — all agreed that it was time for a Revolution in Heaven.
But that’s another story, out soon.
The End?
72
Eleven: How it all Ended 74
74