Fuck You! - The Crystal Spirit

It's another birthday and I'm too old for comfort. And I'm nobody much, especially after the night I had last night. But I don't care because I've never felt bigger and brighter and bolder in all my life. Because that's the way the world seems to feel, and it makes me feel the same way.
For the first time I can remember, people are simply saying Fuck You (Anglo-Saxon is always best) at the tops of their voices to an entire regiment of steam-age dictators who have ruled through a combination of steam-age weapons and insanity for generations. Their weapons are now obsolete. - the tank is not the weapon of the Information Age. And the people are terribly sane. So sane they have run the figures on the amount of blood needed to win freedom, and the audit is favourable. The Workers Flag really is deepest red. And until recently, we never realised just how much the balance of the historic freedom Account, paid into regularly over the mellenia, was in credit. And so we want to draw out our Freedom, thank you very much. No more jam tomorrow. Jam Today. Or Fuck You, in other words. The Fuckocracy has arrived, and there is no negotiation, no pussyfooting forward with caution. The creaking diplomatic Ghost-train designed to scare children away from change, with its lurching moth-eaten bogeymen, always relied on generous suspension of disbelief to stay in business at all. We stopped being afraid of it about the same time we stopped believing in Santa Claus.

The Old Bastards

The Old Bastard Ghadaffi may still be able to pay his mercenaries to mortar the people while he hides in his bunker in Tripoli, but everywhere else the Old Bastards are out, and the people are in. And all Old Bastards from The Bank of America to Mik Il Jong will have to mend their ways, or go. Chaos and Rampaging Bloodlust and the rumble of tumbrils? Mob Rule as predicted by the vermin press and the liberal wankers? Not at all. 
The same weapons which provided the courage to ged rid of the Old Bastards will be just as effective in sorting out any New Bastards who fancy taking those freedoms away again. And without the obscene human cost of destroying the Old Bastards. Even clever New Bastards, who think that they can dominate by running companies called Facebook or Google. 

It's A Living

All over the middle east, nice Muslim girls, whose elder sisters could only dream of a profession as an accountant married to a richer accountant are now dreaming of careers as professional revolutionaries. As bloggers for freedom. To be a revolutionary is now a genuine profession, and one which many parents can now take genuine, unreserved pride in. I'm sure even Gigi Ibrahim's parents are pleased as punch (really) at their little girl's achievements. And so they should be. And the attraction is not merely the noble objective, or even the temporary fame, but the fact that the revolutionary, at whatever level, is simply more alive than the conformist, who is possibly not alive at all. People do want to love each other more than they want to hate each other, and through that simple mental revolution they are more alive than any money-chaser. As the greatest optimist of the C20th says, all you need is love:

'Men use up their lives in heart-breaking political struggles, or get themselves killed in civil wars, or tortured in the secret prisons of the Gestapo, not in order to establish some central-heated, air-conditioned, strip-lighted Paradise, but because they want a world in which human beings love one another instead of swindling and murdering one another. And they want that world as a first step. Where they go from there is not so certain, and the attempt to foresee it in detail merely confuses the issue.'

Bread and Roses

The choice will come soon enough between the air-conditioned, dead-end Consumerist paradise - and love. But the bond forged between those now changing the world will make that choice much easier and responsible.
Bless the heroes and martyrs of Tunisia and Egypt and Libya. Happy Birthday to You all, the living and murdered. My other birthday presents were nice, but your Crystal Spirit is the greatest possible gift, even if it was the most expensive. Happy Birthday to us all.

                                            '... the thing that I saw in your face
                                           No power can disinherit:
                                           No bomb that ever burst
                                           Shatters the crystal spirit.'    - George Orwell, 1942

FUCK YOU!

FUCK OFF!