(Thus spake my Great Aunt Lizzie)

Great Aunt Lizzie was my mother's guardian. A humble Lancashire mill-girl with wild and crazy social ambitions, she met Great Uncle Francis Mellor at a Whitsunday social outing in 1911. Francis was on the outer rings of the Manchester De Trafford planet for Gentlefolk: he went to school as a kid in a coach and four. His family cut off his inheritance when he married Lizzie (sometimes known as Lilly) in 2015, and after The Great War became a skilled, much-sought-after cabinet maker. Together, they ensured my mother and her three sisters could enter "polite society" with their heads held high. Lizzie had a parrot who said nothing beyond "Hitler's a bugger". Her word was her bond...but she hated empty words.

On May 13 1999, George Carlin gave a memorable speech to the Washington Press Corps lunch. It was called, simply, "Words". The last Great American Hero railed with measured hilarity against pc, euphemism, political insincerity, spin and the incredible willingness of ordinary citizens to suck it up.

I probably learned as much about how to write with genuine emotions from Carlin (left) than all the other influences put together. I didn't actually discover the bloke until 2005 (although I'd seen him in movie guest appearances without awareness of his career) but once I did so, it became a compulsive acivity for me to hoover up every insight, routine and parody he'd ever performed. Words - their use and misuse - have, after all, dominated my life.

A word we all seem to be saddled with in 2021 is Hate. If you're pink, yellow or light brown, this is something of which you are highly likely to be accused....up to and including the point where the idea is to hate yourself.

Criticise the way in which the George Floyd case was handled, and you're guilty of hating black folks. Suggest that the January 6th Trump love-in at the Congress wasn't an insurrection, and you're guilty of hating democratic institutions. Question the nursery school conclusions of the Covid vaccinators, and it's "obvious" you hate your granny, the NHS, and your neighbours.

As a cultural methodology, it's only ever likely to produce hatred of everyone who criticises, suggests and questions the Party Line. Well now, isn't that a great basis for free speech democracy?

Now let's deconstruct another form of hate: movie violence. I'm sure you know what I mean. Go into any shop selling TVs, and you will see a bank of screens all showing exploitative features wherein people are variously blown away by Kalashnikovs, flame-throwers, napalm, vengeful demons and Rambo XIX.

Is there anyone out there trying to tell me this isn't hate film? I mean, c'mon - isn't all of that an approval of Might is Right? And I have to say, a lot of that crap seems to star Tom Cruise....the man who walks off studio sets if the lighting cameraman isn't vaxxed and the clapper boy isn't wearing a mask.

Cruise, the squeaky clean purveyor of All-American scientology? Yeh, right. He's just another Useful Idiot.

But let's stick with the subject of words. Today, we are all assailed by predictive text. Anyone care to have a bet about how long it'll be before you write a sentence beginning, 'The main conclusion one reaches with these mRNA drugs is" and the predictive text app completes it for you with, "they seem to be highly effective for most people"?

Now, what you had in mind was, "they seem just as likely to kill as to cure", but the app isn't having that. So you highlight the app's approved version in Dayglo yellow, and type underneath, 'Define "most"'....which the app replaces with, "Just imagine how many millions of lives this is going to save".

So you delete that OS software and go for a compatible version...but that one has failed the ESG investment test, and thus been fire-sold to Microsoft. The next one you think about has been the subject of trial by media, and been suspended while undergoing an FBI investigation into "Insurrectionist Homeland Extremism".

Eventually, you try a Swiss system - and that allows you to express an opinion....at which moment, your ISP decides to deplatform you on the grounds of "fake sensitive content under the Vaccination Enabling Act 2022".

Checkmate.

This will be life under the New Normal. A "no going back" piece of plonky propaganda has been emanating from the BBC's Educational Channel for over a year now:

Clearly, it's aimed at immigrants who are at the miming and hand-signals stage of English, but I think one still has to ask why it deals with a politicised term as if trying to indoctrinate a chimp.

"In the New Normal, very nice well-meaning billionaires will come to take away all those horrid responsibilities that stress you out..."

"We know a song about that don't we boys and girls?"

Cut to slightly altered song lyric, "We're taking your money away ha-haa/To our Funny Farm where life is beautiful all the time/ We're taking your money - no fuss/The Farm's not for you, it's only for us".

If you go to the timeline of @EliseiNicole on Twitter, there's an excellent compilation of ridiculous assertions by WHO, Klaus Schwab and the UN about there being No Way Back to the Old Normal. I tweeted in reply as follows:

As an open-minded philosophical but grounded bloke, I look at Fatso Schwab - spluttering through blubbery lips at the camera - and almost immediately think to myself, 'That is the most pathetic, full-of-holes moth eaten skimpy excuse for a transhuman inhuman future I could ever imagine'.

But somehow, it convinces seven out of eight people in the West.

I'm sorry if this sounds like familiar territory, but the One in Eight are still far too overconfident. It's certainly true that (finally) some formerly compliant citizens are having doubts, that some eminent rock musicians are beginning to write and perform songs calling out the scam, and the "vaccine" joke narrative is looking increasingly like a debut sci-fi novel gone badly wrong.

But the unholy alliance of neoliberal financialised globalist greed with Red, Green, Silicone and Grey interests has a veritable panoply of fake-fear pouring out of its sleeves.....climate extinctionism, cyber-war bogey men, vaccine-shedding disguised as mutant Covid....et al, et al.

Scared people stop using both brain hemispheres as thinking aids...a dominant Right hemisphere takes over with Unthinking obedience. Hence the old joke about the Moonies mission statement: 'We do the thinking, so you don't have to'.

Here's the bottom line: one could try forever to persuade the fearful 7/8ths and get nowhere. The only way to vapourise their fear is to remove those broadcasting it from power.

As a pacifist, accepting that premise is a challenge for me. But on the other hand, it makes total sense. As Billy Joel sang, "We didn't start the fire".

I don't want anyone to get hurt: life has taught me to be free of murderous intent, because a propensity to murder is habit forming. But for God's sake people, get real: there is no 15th century Mayflower to take us to The Promised land of 1620. There is no 1942 Pearl Harbor to rescue us from the obscenity that was Nazism. There is, instead, a techno-surveillance dystopia bidding for the chance to imprison us forever in our own Covid19 apathy.

Enjoy your weekend.