Extracts from the novel which back in 1994 predicted 'Big Brother' reality TV, America's isolation, Africa's depopulation and the career of Osama bin Laden... |
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Smithers had spent ecupoundlet-billions setting the Everyone Channel up. It was, in fact, 100 million channels. One each for everyone. It showed the entire daily life of everyone in the country, except Mr. Smithers, of course - so the only way you would ever be off screen would be if you were in his company, in which case you'd probably be watching the Everyone Channel, because that was all he ever did. Privacy was allowed only in the bathroom, pleasy-do, which resulted in some shy souls living their entire lives in there. Later, this privacy rule was scrapped and nowhere in Britain could you evacuate your bowels without the chance of someone watching. There were those, I heard, who went about in a permanent disguise, in bear-suits even, to maintain their privacy. But how many people would be watching any one person, unless that person was doing something to bring attention on themselves? It should, I innocently thought to begin with, encourage people to live simpler, more ordered lives. But if you committed the sexual intercourse, still popular and quite legal in the 2020s, next morning you'd greet your every acqaintance awaiting a lascivious wink and a score out of ten...
Guru to a Chaffinch, p. 35 |
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But this New Age Council, backward child of our revolution, simply wasn't there one morning. Nextmost, elections were called, but somehow two of the building societies ignored the result and stepped in with the idea of running the country. Their boards of directors soon quarelled - over the queenly behaviour of some of their wives, was what I heard - and were followed by a right-wing backlash which resulted in a government of taxi-drivers. Well, try anything, indeedy-be! They kept up their taxi-driving jobs while at the same time running the country. It was they who executed the poor King in Whitehall on January 11th, 2026, and hanged almost everybody, including each other. Making speeches that never stopped, in their taxis and out, catsigating the government as was their tradition, even though they were now the government themselves...
The Revolting Chaffinches, p. 47 |
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Seve sat in silence for some moments. Then: 'Clone?'
'Uh? Yes, clone. We've had the technology for years. Too expensive for regular use. But if it's a serious case, where it's one man's word against the fencepost, where there's an execution involved... All done with DNA, you see. Every cell in your body contains everything about you, not just what colour your peekaboos are or how smelly your feet. In every cell is everything you've ever thought, seen or said during your entire life. So what they do, what in fact they have done, is take a bit of skin off your shaving razor, put it in a tank and overnight they've grown a full-sized clone of you to bring in here and testify against you this morning.' Sir Claude poured a bag of peanuts onto the shiny table and started eating the ones that skittered farthest away from the pile. 'Of course, you know these clone things can't lie. Impossible for them to tell lies. So if I were you and I were guilty, which of course you are, because if you haven't done whatever you're up for today they'll squeeze something even worse out of the clone and do you for that instead - although, dimmee, not that there's really anything much worse than golf!'
Severiano's Day in Court, p. 86 |
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This is not the Politico-Theologicus of Chaff Chaffinch, but as Tadese here doesn't know a despot from a teapot, I shall begin my sermonizing this morning with speech upon this subject. Despots. Not teapots.
There have always, Tadese, been despots! But in my time there have been more than ever before. Thinky-do, as a political movement it is a 21st century phenomenon. In the 2020s, when the democracies failed, there was no other political system waiting its turn. So began the drift to despotism. Smithers was a despot in all but name, was he not?
By the 2030s every country was run by its own despot, indeed it was. Mini-despots, assistant despots, local despots, everywhere there were despots and people who wanted to be despots. The despot's word was law. Big smiley men. Little runts with a grievance. Grim moralists with an obsession for detail. Straightforward blue-chinned gangsters. Stolid avuncular pals with a peaceful present but a violent past and more violent future, to whom you always owed money.
A despot, it was believed, got things DONE. No shilly-shally-do. If a problem arose, it was dealth with immediately, no worries about the Press or public opinion or opposition - what opposition?? People, anyone and everyone said: 'There's no stability without a good despot'. Absolute power corrupted absolutely everyone, not just the mad cherry in charge of the cake. Dreadfulmost times!'
Despot School, p. 123 |
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Rötenschwein was dead. His death was part of the worst crime of the 21st century. I cannot talk about it. My heart bleeds. He was recalled, and on Tixover's orders, they injected him with a virus, which they'd made years before but never used, cos no one evil enough had fizzed on the seat of power before. Tixover had found it in a forgotten report in the old Presidential Palace in Strasbourg. Rötenschwein and a very few others, only a dozen or so, returned to Africa on the same plane. A glum trip, for they knew what was happening to them - O Father of us all, they knew! The plane hopped across the continent, dropping one man off here, another there, to infect the whole of Africa. In some regions almost everyone died. Tribes, peoples, cultures, all lost and gone. Tadese, he weeps! Old friend! Yes there is a God - he loves you! Forgive me! I forgot that you did not know.
I forgot that I was one of the very few who knew this. Tixover wanted to expand the English population after the Scottish example. He decided to clear the whole of Africa to do it...
Nobby the Great, p. 151 |
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Then a silly-season of horrors when the Russian gangsters shot atomic bombs at each other and turned Russia into a burnt pudding. The direct results of this were that electricity all over the world stopped working from 2060 to 2062, and everybody's hair fell out.
Nothing was being made. Factories still and empty everywhere. Hardly a soul went to work. Everyone was unemployed. But after the IMF conference in Geneva in 2063, the clouds lifted. It was decided that sheep would be used as currency. Wilf had anticipated this, and Chaffinch Hall had been besieged by a woolly army for months. We were rich!
The 2060s were a sheepishlymost, sheep-niffing, three-bags-full, lambkin time, when a man fell asleep counting sheep and awoke to count more. There was no greater fear than the sound of a hoosey cough among the garden-nibbling fold, for a sick sheep could mean a dead herd, sheeplessness, bankruptcy and ruin. So it was that Bitchet's Diseases of Sheep became a best-seller.
This Chaffinch, he was delighted. I felt like Abraham with his flocks. Many tedious sermons did I give about 'good shepherds'...
Haha and Rainbow Enjoy the Riots, p.159 |
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In my youth, when America was open and busy in the world, it was our world's Babylon, a place where everything could happen and did, the home of youth and hope, where real life was lived, in energy and ease. The America of the 2060s had long ago closed its doors on the world. A few airships a week, were all it allowed in. America went isolationist in the 2020s. A series of disastrous interventions in world affairs, including their ludicrous invasion of Wales in 2022 to prevent Smithers from doing-in Welshmen, coincided with the break-up of the old United States of America.
The rise of the Arab league had as much to do with it as anything, and when the Grand Mufti stopped all oil reaching America in 2042 and the Americans had to abandon their beloved motor cars forever, the character of their continent changed dramatically. Everything was suddenly very far away from everywhere else. As far as most of the world was concerned, America disappeared in the 2040s, just as Belgium did in 2005.
The mid-West, the only region I ever visited, was administered by churchmen - a Biblical America, the forerunner of the theocracies of the 2070s. While non-Biblical America was boggly-falaa'ed with gang war and civil war between the 13 United States and the New Confederacy, the hymn-singing middle slice was sugary-poo, safe and quiet, where a fervent population genuflected in perfect peace under a succession of loony pastors...
America the Beautiful, p.191 |
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A mufti is a Moslem cleric who is a judge of Islamic law, who pronounces upon how a Moslem should conduct every aspect of his life. A Grand Mufti is a mufti-in-chief. There was one in the days of the Ottoman Empire, when the Sultan and his Wazir couldn't make a move without the Grand Mufti's okay-do. But 'twas a position only properlymost posible in times of empire, so when the Ottomans lost their empire, there were still plenty muftis but no Grand one. But when, in our own century, a big-cheese mufti cobbled together the Grand Alliance of Moslem States for himself, then there was an empire again, was there not, to be Grand Mufti of.
The modern Grand Mufti was the managing director of the new universal Mohammedanism which, much to our jowl-wagging befuddlement in England, was the dominant idea of the century - a passion and comfort, a beautiful friend, an ordersome ever-growing fraternity for over half the people on God's little blue ball.
Baba Jammaluddin, a Sufi of the Naqshbandi order, began his career as the Mufti of Sarawak. Soon he emerged as the leading Mufti of Indonesia, with its 300 million souls turning from their boomy-do economy to face Mecca seven times a day. China was turning Moslem and Jamaluddin consolidated his power by adding chunks of that to his muftidom. Not quite 'Grand' yet, but nearly so. In the 2030s he made pilgrimages in the Middle East, in Uzbekistan, Pakistan, and all the other Asiatic -stans. He made contacts, influenced people. The Arabs loved him - he was a prophet, a holy one! Wherever he went, ecstatic riots. Arab Leaders began consulting him - they had to! By 2040 he was Grand Mufti over the entire expanding Moslem world. His message was simple: join us and feel the freedom of the brotherhood, enlightenment is the gift of Allah and He is generous.
When some Christian countries proved stubbornly Christian, he was vexed but bided his time. Conversions were multitudinous in the Far East, stampede-ish in eastern Europe and among the Scots kingdoms. Eventually, he would have everything. But after the Middlesborough Crisis created a new political balance, he grew impatient - he was getting old and wanted to see his Grand Design complete. Meanwhile, strong new secular leaders had emerged who wanted rid of him. And other muftis wanted to be him. It is when a despot's power is waning that he is at his most dangerous. The Holy War was a card he was ready to play, and on February 13th, 2079, suddenly, to the surprise of everyone except himself, he played it...
The Gathering Storm, p. 287 |
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When the Grand Mufti destroyed Israel, that was the lowest point. We used to read aloud to each other from the Middlesborough Gazette all the brave things the Israeli army did. It was cheermost hootifilarious to read of those raids of theirs, thousands of miles from their home base, singeing the Mufti's beard. Israel itself was safe behind its forcefield - the strongest on Earth. The vaporizers zapped at it all day but hardly ever punched a hole. But all along the Mufti's agents had been constructing a vaporizer inside Israel, in Jerusalem, and when they set it off the whole country was hit in an intense widebeam. For weeks Jerusalem was a ghost city full of transparent people. They couldn't even strike a match to light candles. They walked through the Wailing Wall. They crowded into synagogues but there could be no crush. Some treated the whole thing as God's last joke on the Jews, calling out to everyone they passed: 'Are you still here? Thought you'd be long gone. Mazel tov!' In Jerusalem they gathered on rooftops, on the Mount of Olives, and dreamily watched the end of a dream. And so it came to pass that Israel disappeared, like Rome, like most of London, gone without trace.
The night it happened, I looked at the little map in the back of my Bible, speaking the names of the vanished places - Bethlehem, Nazareth, Jericho - and wondered was I still a prisoner of the Grand Mufti and was this some facetious dream he was churning through my head?
The Shapely Legs of September Chaffinch, p. 294 |
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