I'll need to explain this one a bit. This article is now six years out of date, but I always liked it and wanted it to go somewhere, anywhere.

Here on Waiheke Island, we used to have a (Sort of) monthly magazine called 'The Waihekean'. It was a strange publication to say the least. It ran stories that ranged from dippy Left wing to rabid Right wing.

When I met the editor for the first time, a small, rather bleary chap, I asked him what his editorial policy was. He peered at me and took a drag on his rollie. "Basically, I don't give a fuck." was his reply.

It certainly seemed that way. He certainly printed anything he got without seeming to even read it.His most unpleasant contributor was a dreadful man by the name of Arnold Kennedy. Every month this squalid person wrote great screeds full of hate and bile. He was one of those conspiracy theory types, convinced that Jews and Freemasons are running the world in secret. Well...I knew how to deal with his lame type. I began writing stuff on a fairly regular basis, pouring scorn and derision on his dreary nonsense.

Sadly, my finest attack on him was never to see the light of day. Kennedy had been working himself into a fine frenzy about Y2K etc and had clearly been neglecting whatever medication he was on. I wrote an article on the stupidity of the apocalyptic folks and submitted it just in time to see the Waihekian magazine go under. My article went unpublished.

So here it is.

APOCALYPSE NOT.



“It looks certain that we will find out soon enough about Y2K. What is more likely, is martial law and a chip implanted 666 fashion; these are said to be ready for implantation now”
Arnold Kennedy in The Waihekean, June 1998.

“....the passing of these dates, such as the artificial ‘Millennium’ we face in a month or two, always bring a feeling of relief as we climb sheepishly down from whatever mountain top we had chosen to sit out the apocalypse.”
Myself, in The Waihekean, late 1999.

Yes, I know. It’s not nice to brag about being right. Midnight rolled around on the 31st and the Millenialists, Hippies, Conspiracy theorists and other apocalyptic types suffered yet another in a long line of disappointments. United in their hatred of God and his creation and of Man and his achievements, they fouled the air with their embittered doomsaying until the last moment. Most are in hiding now and will stay that way for some time to come.

A forgiving nature tells us that most of these people have been punished enough already. But I take pride in the fact that I kicked them BEFORE they went down, and for old times sake I thought I’d take one more swipe with the old size elevens before moving on to happier subjects. Armed with a powerful truth serum and a baseball bat, I have roamed the land, extracting one or two apologies from people who would otherwise have mumbled some feeble excuse about the calendar being wrong.

My first stop was at the Coromandel based ‘Crystal Light Rainbow Breakfast Cereal Co-operative’ where I tracked down Ms Phoenix Moonchild Sensimillia, author of such texts as “Technology is a total Bummer’ and ‘Growing lentils in the Post Computer age’. Ms Sensimillia was in defiant mood when I arrived, “The Y2K bug will bring about the end of the Male dominated, Capitalist warmongering age!” She announced. “Society will revert overnight to a peaceful agrarian framework, with vegetarianism for all!”
I pointed out to her that the date was in fact January the second and that the new year had already begun. She sat up with a start, and glanced guiltily at the remains of a huge hand rolled “Nandor” in the pottery ashtray. “You mean I slept through it?” she shrieked, “To the fields everybody! Let’s get the New Age underway!”

I explained that the Y2K bug had failed to materialise and that nothing had changed. Besides, I added, the rest of the commune were last seen heading into town to enrol in college and salvage the rest of their lives. “Sell-outs! Fascists!” cried Ms Sensimillia, “Technology must give way to a better world! The.......Oh who am I trying to kid? It’s all been a waste hasn’t it? I should have done something with my life instead of sitting around fiddling with crystals and listening to Whale Music! It’s the macrobiotic diet that did this to me! All that food that tastes like sawdust! No wonder I’ve got no sense of humour! OK, the drugs didn’t help either. What have I done?!”My mission accomplished, I rose to leave, but Ms Sensimillia stopped me. “Before you go” she said, “Do you know where I could get a haircut and a job?”

My next stop was the church of St Prudes, headquarters of the Universal Intolerance Brotherhood. Their chief spokesman, the “Reverend” Barry Fraud was in bullish mood as we sat down to talk. “Yes I know the Apocalypse has been delayed” he insisted, “But this is a strategy of Satan to lure us into a sense of false security. He has pulled this trick before you know! My Great Grand Father, The “Reverend” Arbuthnot Fraud, prophesised the ending of the world in 1893 and gave away all his belongings before leading the faithful to the top of Mount Egmont to await the Rapture. He was proved absolutely right! Or at least he would have been if Satan had not intervened!” He paused and blinked as the truth drug I had slipped into his glass of water began to take effect.
“Oh all right” he said, “It’s all rubbish I admit. I just can’t be bothered to use the brains God gave me and assess the allegorical nature of the Scriptures in an intelligent way. It’s easier to just declare the whole thing to be literally true and yell and scream at anyone who disagrees.
What have I done with my life? I’m sorry, I’m just a bad tempered git, and the only reason I hate everybody having a good time is that I don’t have any fun myself”

My mission accomplished, I rose to leave but the “Reverend” stopped me.”Before you go” he said, “Do you know where I could get some of that ‘Viagra”?”

Finally, I arrived in the suburbs of Christchurch for a visit to the survivalist compound of Professor Murray Himmler, chairman of the Aryan Empire Loyalist Rate Payers Association. The compound seemed more dilapidated than on my last visit, and the carefully installed
Placemakers ‘Fuehrer Bunker’ in the garden seemed to have flooded during the rains of New Years Eve. I found the Professor trying to evict a family of frogs from the main living area. “This just goes to show the depths to which the Jewish Freemasons United Nations conspiracy will stoop,” he muttered, as he gingerly pulled a frog from his gumboot. “They even control the weather you know!”

We sat down in his study, lined with hundreds of unsold copies of the Professor’s books.
“Yes, I admit’” he said, “The enslavement of the world did not really pan out as I predicted. The secret plans of the Illuminati which I have dedicated my life to fearlessly exposing, turned out to be a front for the REAL conspiracy! I can now reveal that documents dating back to the middle ages and authenticated by no less an authority than my neighbour Mr St John Bad-Temper, show that the real power behind the scenes is none other than the Rotarians! Yes, you may laugh! But my researches have revealed that prominent Rotarians were orchestrating the Russian revolution, the Wall Street crash, both World Wars, the decline of New Zealand as a major World Power, AND were responsible for the sudden mysterious failure of the fan belt on my Morris Minor! I have photographic proof of that last one as well!

“You have evidence?” I said, “May I see?”
“No” replied the Professor, “The film is still at the chemist.”

I was keen to hear more, but the Professors eyes suddenly rolled back in his head, and with a low moan he began to beat his head on the desk. “The puzzles fit! It all adds up!” he babbled, “Leon Trotsky was known to have been a Rotarian! So was William Gladstone! They were all in it together! Those strange symbols on the back of the Albanian Bank Notes were Rotarian in origin! How could we have been so blind! YES! I see it all clearly now!”

He gave the desk a final crashing blow with his forehead and fell to the floor. I rose to leave but the Professor stopped me. “Before you go,” he said, “Do you know where I could find a good Psychiatrist?”

Right.
Here’s my sermon for today. If it doesn’t make perfect sense to you then you are a fool.

Decadence. Now there’s a word that’s gone right off course and exploded in all the wrong places. You hear it all the time nowadays and it really gets me irritated. Here’s what the excellent Wikipedia has to say about the word;
Decadence generally refers to the supposed decline of a society because of moral weakness. The favourite example of this is ancient Rome, where, the story has it, a great empire was laid low by wicked emperors like Nero. However, the more dissolute emperors (Nero, Caligula, etc) ruled hundreds of years before the end of the empire

Right. So, if you are bathing in liquids that you can’t afford, poisoning your close relations or appointing your domestic animals into positions of power, then there is just a possibility that you may be decadent and that your grandchildren will be paying the price. Or at least some very strange vet’s bills.

Steven Berkoff’s excellent play Decadence hits the spot. Here we see two couples, one a pair of pampered rich fools, eating, drinking and fucking themselves to death, the other a pair of brainless working class sluggards, too lazy and stupid to turn the TV off and go out and take what could be waiting for them.
In both cases, we see people who are going no place but downhill.

South Africa under the white regime was decadent. A stupid, brutal system based on vanity, greed and total disregard for reality. Deep down, the whites knew it couldn’t last. But they did it anyway. Now the bastards all live here in New Zealand, honking away in their horrible accents about how bad it is now they have to wash their own dishes and mow the lawn.

I first got a bee in my bonnet about the misuse of the word decadence when I hired the video of Restoration. It’s a half way decent movie about a doctor during the reign of Charles the 2nd. Because you can’t make a film about this particular monarch without touching on the fact that he had a lot of sex, (and I mean a LOT. He still holds the record for the greatest number of illigitimate children spawned by a British King) the film makers decided that here they had a great example of a decadent society to entertain us with. They even used the word on the cover.

Well, bollocks to that say I. What was so decadent about the Restoration? Not a lot as far as I can see. After Britain’s only attempt at having a Republic, which everyone was glad to see the back of, the country had a King who encouraged science, the arts, and a flowering of ideas and principles that remain with us to this day. Under his rule we saw the work of Hooke, Boyle and Newton in the sciences, as well as the architectural work of Christopher Wren.
So he got laid a lot! Who cares? Apart from letting his idiot younger brother inherit the throne, he left the country in better shape than he found it and there’s nothing decadent about that. Besides, the advances made in governance during his reign made it possible for said idiot younger brother to be tidily deposed.

Now, by this stage you are probably thinking; “Blimey! I only looked in on this site ‘cos I’ve got a couple of spare kidneys and the rent needs paying and here’s this bloke rambling on about decadence. What’s his problem?”

Good point. Lets get down to the real business in hand. What really annoys me about the frequent misuse of the word is how readily we accept that a spot of healthy excess is bad and that we are bad people for giving into it. Example;

Fatuous dullard scans dessert menu and lights upon description of Black Forest Gateau, complete with nice stuff involving fresh cream. Even if the menu doesn’t mention the word decadence, the fatuous dullard will. “Oooooh ! That sounds decadent!” they will blither.
No it doesn’t. It sounds like a fucking chocolate cake. Stop trying to lay the stupid guilt trip on yourself and just order the damn cake. Firstly, you’ll enjoy it. Secondly, the person who made it will get paid, and people who make Black Forest Gateau deserve to be rich. Society is not going to crumble because you ate a bit of cake. Now grow up.

The trouble is, that these days there is a creeping tide of Puritanism oozing over the civilised world and we need to wise up and stop it in it’s tracks. Every time we think about doing something fun the thought of all those thin lipped prudes that can always give you a reason for not doing things comes to mind.

Whether it’s some con man in a pulpit or a fraud in a doctor’s white coat wagging fingers at us about our behaviour, the answer should be the same. The big ‘Eff Off!’
Stop worrying about your bloody waistlines, your smoking or your drinking or any of a thousand other fun things that people you don’t even know seem so uptight about.
Here’s your homework for today. Drink booze. Eat enjoyable foods. By all means smoke if you wish. Get laid in the way that suits you best. By this time tomorrow, you’ll be happier for it.

Gosh.
My very own ‘Blog’.
Well, best get started. Hopefully I can piss someone off before too long.

I’d better start by thanking my dear friend Bill Kasper of Austin, Texas for setting this up in the first place. Bill is an all round good egg and certainly knows how to deal with a bottle of Famous Grouse late at night. Hopefully I can get him to add bits to this as we go on.

Well, I’ll try and balance this as much as possible. I won’t be able to resist flailing away at local topics, (For the record, I live on Waiheke Island, off the coast of Auckland New Zealand. If any Americans are reading this, I’d better point out that New Zealand is an English speaking country in the bottom half of the world. The one where they filmed Lord of the Rings! That’s right!)

But, there are plenty of other, more global topics I can drivel on about, and my views are no more half baked than the next man’s, so here we go………