I Vow to Thee My Country

Orgreave Estate

Only cowards steal from the poor

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Drowning in debt?

Jeff Bezos vs. a Storage Shed Full of Beanie Babies

Hi. Greyhoos, here. Longtime listener, first-time caller.

While I've had things to contribute to the other two decades blogs, I don't think I've ever found reason to pop up here. Maybe because I was so aloof from a lot of things that were going on in the '90s, was too distracted of had so little invested in it and so many of its cultural trends, that it leaves me short of material for this here venue.

Reason being that throughout most of the 1990s, I was just finding my own way -- scrambling at it, basically. Finally digging my way out of a provincial cultural sinkhole and to the big city, eventually into graduate school where I was immersed in my studies, and then eventually defaulting into an industry that seemed like a fairly reliable safety net at the time, only to watch that industry get demolished in the decade that followed.

Which means that in the 1990s, in the course of all that scrounging, there were a number of things I missed out on -- tbig cultural trends and whathaveyou.

Such as stock options. Because at the time I didn't have a highly marketable tech skill that would make me a prime hiree at a startup. Where I would then agree to work 35 hours of overtime per week for free, doing so because I'd agreed to what my visionary entrepreneurial uber-lords had promised me. That promise being that I should forego proper pay for the would-be company's stock options, because one day -- very soon! -- down the road they were going to go public; because it was all going to be MASSIVE, and then I would be stinking rich and set for life, at which point my prior issues about working myself into chronic exhaustion for free would seem like mere pettiness and small-thinking on my part, since money would cease to be a concern for me thereafter. It was all gonna be worthwhile, many times over. Just you wait.

But I wasn't so unattuned that I didn't hear about when the dot-com bubble burst. And can remember it all seemed so unsurprising when I heard why it had done so.

Which means I also managed to get through the decade without ever owning a fucking ferret.

People have found the lo-fi nature of the murders quite shocking

 'They were kind of atrocities but they'd gone unnoticied, unrecognized, they'd been done in the name of leisure almost.'

'The NoW reveals that the video has a further two minutes of footage shot at various intervals. In one sequence, the cameraman is shown an Iraqi corpse and proceeds to kick the dead man in the face twice, whilst a soldier sniggers: “He’s been a bad mother****er.”'

There's a parallel between the charcter of Richard in Dead Man's Shoes (2004) being a soldier, and the film being released a year after Iraq, three after Afghanistan. Like Northern Ireland there is a lot of horror waiting to come out: nobody talks about Northen Ireland today, and barely anyone talks about Afghanistan or Iraq. The topic is taboo. There are no comforting myths to emerge from the War on Terror: in a great act of collective memory it has been entirely forgotten. The BBC have rewritten their history in an attempt to reinforce the commonsense "nobody could have wanted this" storyline that will eventually become the true story, if any story at all. In Dead Man's Shoes (2004) Richard visits supernatural, violent justice on the lowlifes who killed his brother. It is a film about the importance of taking responsibility: slaying the guilty, and once becoming guilty yourself in the process, seeking self-terminarion. Richard's justice is moral: his enemies are the lowest degenerates of the working class, druggies and immoral scum. They even listen to the wrong music, hip hop rather than the tasteful alt-Americana or wistful folk supplied by Warp. Whatever the intention a trawl of youtube comments reveals commenters seem to have incorporated the film directly alongside the likes of Death Wish and Dirty Harry: they deserve it, every one. The post-apocalyptic state of Britain is well described, casual violence, isolation, and no future, propaganda for any leftist reading; the solutions however, a culling of the irressponsible and devolved, is straight out of the right's playbook. The old embers of political struggle were fading out in the early 2000s, a strange period when the organizations and individuals the left assumed were allies began advocated wars they knew could only have the consequences they did if they had any idea of history. Even the BBC couldn't be trusted anymore. The feedback can be observed in popular militarism (which will likely die with the wars) and the stark reactions to send in the army in response to 2011's riots.

The prediction buried within Edge of Darkness (1985) and GBH (1990) was that Britain (England particularly) had become occupied territory: an alien colonizing force was manipulating what seemed like organic commonsense developments for the good of the colonizer's. Dead Man's Shoes is a depiction, along with elements of GBH, about how the colony should be policed and what should make up the policeman. Detatchment, responsibility, and a calm repose are what is required. After a time, as in Kenya, the Congo, or elsewhere, the violence flows naturally. The battles of the 80s and 90s dramas are done with, more history than ever in the wake of the totem of that era's death: with the natives broken and scattered, what becomes of us next?

He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.

How she left us

"Transformed Britain, made us Great again, restored order etc"

Well this was Britain the year the Blessed Margaret left us. Police provocation, baton charges, snatch squads, arson, looting.




She didn't give a shit about this by then: didn't need to give a shit. Riots and a million non-payers would have brought down a Labour Government. This should have been the Tories 'Winter of Discontent'. But by now they could just change the figure heads and keep sailing on.