"HISTORY IS A DODDLE!"

“Surrender your own narrative to an outside imagination you will always be a paying tourist on somebody else’s film-set. Some people are smarter than others, some better-looking than others, some more muscular than others, but as soon as they seek to exploit that simple good fortune of birth into a recipe for controlling other people, the seeds are sown for making this world a very unfortunate place for some people to live in. When a basic ethic of decency, compassion, respect for all living things and sharing of resources submits to personal pride and ambition, somebody has become compliant in an unjust world, riddled with conflict, corruption, criminal psychopathy and a carnal knowledge of rape, pillage and butchery.” (Steve Bellwood)

“History is a doddle!” He’d sweep into the classroom, all six-feet of him, briefcase tucked under his arm, in sporty jacket and corduroys, bow-tie beaming, with his Oscar Wilde comb-forward and bright-eyed determination, pull up a chair at the front of the class, doff his teacherly briefings and his soft-shoe-slip-ons, and with a magnanimously casual flourish plonk his plaid stockinged feet up on Kevin O’ Neill’s desk, idling back hands clasped behind his head and proclaim like some latter-day Socrates to the captive forum at large that “History is a doddle!” And I’d believe. him…Why wouldn’t I? He was the teacher and I was the pupil….

…One thing just follows another, as sure as hens lay eggs and chicken come forth and whoever runs fastest always comes first, it all makes perfect chronological sense, this happens so this happens so that happens and so on and so on… Just get all your dates right, all your kings and queens in order, who was fighting who. when and why somebody had to win and fortunately for us it was usually the English! Keep all this in your head and with gaiety in your heart come exam-time you can’t go wrong, you’ll be well on the right path to getting an A-plus and university awaits, further education, and after that the world is your cheese-and-pickle sandwich, you can choose your own garnish…”So tell us, Master.Bellwood, young sir, The Hundred Years’ War, when did it end??” The Treaty of Westphalia and all that, peace in our time, I’d say you’ve got at least five minutes…Cause let’s face it history telescopes time even as a re-balancing of power kaleidoscopes place, a few shakes of a cat’s tail and Constantinople is now Istanbul, New Amsterdam now Old New York, Siam Burma, Persia Iran, Yugoslavia has disappeared altogether Palestine is now Israel, America and the UK all over the place under various assumed names… History and geography unfolding even as I speak, you’ll need a smart-phone to keep up with it all, but that’s in the future, we’re dealing with the past which is etched in hard-cover curriculum… To the victor the spoils! Cause they’re the only ones can afford to publish it unspoiled, the rest be damned to whatever pulp is left over!

”So I want you to draw me a map of the world, highlighting the British Empire at its’ peak, before we generously decided to share our commonwealth, granting independence all over the place, though keeping our Queen as totem titular figurehead, so much of the world would always have royal visitations to look forward to, cause even the darkest Africans recognize royalty when they see it, witness this photograph of Her Majesty being cheered on by these rag-and-bone-in-the-nose natives!! Must be proof of something…??? Everybody wants to join in the fairy-tale…Makes a man proud to be English, no matter what the Bible says it’s being ashamed of being English that’s the real sin! We may be poor but so long as Brittania rules the waves, we can always be proud of our backwash! Our darkest hours will be our greatest victories, and there’ll always be bluebirds over the White Cliffs of Dover till we make the world free of any slaves not foreigners…Education is the key to keeping any door locked to any losers who refuse to have faith in our democratic aristocracy! There’s a loophole for every leap of faith, if we spend our whole life struggling to fathom the small-print we’ll never get the general gist, I mean Eisenhower wasn’t not nobody for nothing and Montgomery would never have become a Field Marshal if he hadn’t had an army cleaning up all the bullshit after him! Of course Eisenhower was American, but he spoke English, which must be proof of something? Is everybody with me> You’re either with me or against me!” Apparently history is all about destroying any historical evidence of a any history our victorious historians don’t approve of?

But History was a doddle, so I doddled through it, never imagining it might be a bit of a diddle as well…All this hard-cover curriculum diddley-doo? If history is written by the winners and everything I learned from was written in English I assumed we’d been victorious. let’s face it, only the winners could afford to publish such compendiums of facts and iconic figures, and the rest be damned to being foreigners! We had Grecian earned our democracy, one man one vote, and the Queen herself would vouch for our meritocracy, hers by divine right, ours by manufacturedly manifested destiny. Makes perfect sense, if you believe God speaks perfect English. There’s a loop-hole for every leap of faith, but if we spend our whole life trying to fathom the small-print we’ll never get the general gist : Eisenhower wasn’t not nobody for nothing and Montgomery would never have been a Field Marshal if he hadn’t had a whole army of believers cleaning up the bullshit after him…Of course Eisenhower was American, but he did speak English, which must prove something…??? If only that we were being diddled out of any real understanding of what might have been going on in those darkest hours and all those warriors, explorers, wealthy industrialists, politicians and empire-builders iconicized for emulation may or may not have been aware themselves of the true context they were operating in. As if propaganda, conspiracy , brain-washing, mind-control, genocide and man’s inhumanity to man was but the soul-less domain of evil others, undoubtedly non-English-speaking foreigners??? All the history-books, movies, newsreels, the BBC compounded the same facts, and any theories were limited to mathematicians and scientists. Civilization was progressing apace, the royal family at the heart of it and the Houses of Parliament its’ democratic mind. The only English conspiracy I was taught was the treacherously Papist Guy Fawkes, and we ritualistically burned him up every year on Bonfire Night, the aftertaste of treacle-toffee, hot-peas, fireworks and the morning embers proof that this world was exactly how it was presented to be….

When Jesus, Davy Crockett, Marylin Monroe, Winston Churchill, the Virgin Queen Mother, Enid Blyton, the Flowerpot men, Albert Einstein and John Wayne all get bundled into the same bag of tricks, an English baby-boomer can grow up with a headful of definedly fanciful ideas about his or her place in this world, filled with somebodies and nobodies. The names and titles may change but the tricks remain bundled into the same bag of history made and in the making, the only fake news was something that just wasn’t on the news, it was fiction, dreams and nightmares you could interchange simply by switching the channel. If you weren’t actually there at the time when it happened, what else could history be but somebody else’s movie playing itself out in your mind? Conspiring to entertain and educate you?

You want to produce your own movie, you’ll need to submit your proposal through proper industrial channels for evaluation. Just be aware those channels have a way of funneling you into their own estuary and out into an ocean of their own making. Maybe best to keep waffling in your own wind-break, untainted by material success which has a historical habit of compounding spiritual failure, so much blood on that red-carpet. If you’re not careful you may end up bowing to the Queen or at least deferring to Steven Speilberg, and deference without respect, respect without love, love without common-sense, education without common-sense is an empty barrel on your mental imaginative shelf!

Do you think Jesus thought he was starring in his own movie, The Greatest Story Ever Told, blockbuster to end all blockbusters. Went through hell learning all them lines. method-actor, refused to use stunt-men. Suffered for his art. A bit like Harvey Keitel, only Harvey made a lot of other people suffer with him. Would’ve won an Oscar if Hollywood had been around at the time, Harvey Keitel as Best Supporting Actor. Can anyone remember a villain winning an Oscar? maybe Anthony Hopkins, who at least devoured his prey didn’t just leave ‘em to the vultures… Usually it’s the hero, no matter how many people he’s killed, bodies and broken-hearts left in his wake, we know he or she did it for the right reasons, battling “real” evil, collateral damage but a poignant undercurrent, the Three Wise Men comic relief, their final gift to the world Stephen Colbert’s Christmas Special! If that’s not a tribute to the up-and-coming end-times, I don’t know what is!??? But, of course, I don’t know what is. Though in the end-times I do suspect it’ll be all in my mind, even if to all extant intents and purposes I may appear to have already lost it. I just hope what’s gone forever will be gone for good!

Postscript :

* An evil has been introduced into our midst, a conspiracy so ruthlessly, monstrously monolithic that demands universal ignorance of its’ very existence. Through covert machinations, infiltration, inversion, subversion and intimidation, conscripting all the resources of this planet in a tightly-knit tyranny of military, economic, scientific and political governance that will ultimately degrade, debase and destroy all that is virtuous, good and decent… I paraphrase JFK, J. Edgar Hoover and Samuel Adams, who were elevated high enough to see the darkness enshrouding the light at the end of our “officially proscribed” human history….