Get your cold dead hand off my dirty ape gun!

Nope. Not going to talk about it. Not any of the issues implied in Charlton Heston’s assertive ‘quote’ there. You can make a nice audio file if you want.  Be surprised if someone hadn’t and perhaps that’s how it came to appear in my mind. Wha-tev-ur! It’s yours now to do with as you will.  I would request that you treat Mr Heston’s memory with some respect as he was a tremendous cinema presence regardless of what you think of what he came to represent; firearms & stuff. It’s certainly not for me to say as I’ve never had any need to touch a gun. Of course, I can simply raise an eyebrow and make your testicles catch fire (and not in the good way) so it’s pretty much a mooot point.  Just show the ‘Hes’ some res-pect, hear! More than I have here anyway. 

Did I happen to mention that when I get bored I like to imagine that I’m an extra-dimensional  Sauropod deity? Yes well obviously one can see why you might tactfully not want to press the issue of why that would be. Well maybe you should have because the reason why I like to imagine that I’m an extra-dimensional Sauropod deity is, as it turns out, because I actually am an extra-dimensional Sauropod deity! I was surprised too, frankly, but there you go. All the evidence fell into place and in one of those slightly suspicious moments of revelation, all the falsehoods of terrestrial life were peeled away and the glittering rainbow ‘candy mountain’ reality of the multi-verse shone out in all its dubious glory. I was so over-come by this vision, I immediately beheld my task to birth a new religion of the light that is lovingly curled around the darkness, to confront and extinguish the authoritarian hierarchies and mental repression afoot on this world, to re-unite all life-kind in one consciousness and get a load of money off some loser feebs and spend it on drugs and ladies and generally having a good time before I drop dead which is likely to be soon; too soon anyway, for my liking. You may feel differently.

So -Thanks to the unknowing help of your foremost scholars, I’ve been able to reconstruct the ancient history of your species’ occupation of the surface of this planet and worked this into the religious narrative I’m erroneously constructing.  It goes like this:

Before you lot showed up, your world was a battleground between 2 factions- the lizard people and the amorphous deities. Their almost complete absence of matter makes the deities seem kind of ethereal and superior but really they’re not. Just like you and me they evolved from less complex organic forms, in their case from common unseen elemental forces like the ones you so often see kicking up piles of dry leaves in the woods and tossing them round in a little spiral for a bit,  generating  energy in the form of friction to sustain themselves. Well that’s all the deities do really - they harvest the energy they generate by getting people to do things for them.

Anyway these deities were an extended family group who won a terrible military encounter that all but extinguished the lizards on this planet and thus went setting themselves up as overlords of what had survived their apocalypse. As humanity emerged from the confusion and innocence of animalism, the deities directly enslaved them until agents from lizard faction were able to communicate to these wide-eyed naïve apelings the truth of their situation and henceforth all manner of chaos erupted. Firstly between the rebellious humanity and the deities then among the deities themselves, then among the humans and for a long time everyone was at war with everyone else and you couldn’t tell what was going on.  This would have carried on forever were it not for the intervention of the peaceful Fish People from Po Tolo who brokered a truce that has lasted ever since. Naturally the conflict continues beneath the surface on all sorts of subtle fronts and we all have our particular allies and enemies but outright meltdowns are rare or at least containable, most of the time.

 

Hey, while I’ve mentioned it I’ve got to tell you about Po Tolo. You must go, it’s a lovely place, hence the reason the fish people from there are so nice.  It’s an Earth-sized dwarf star in orbit around the star you know as Sirius but it’s as  heavy as your sun so all sorts of material ends up in its gravity-well creating the possibilities for a lush diversity of environment and life forms. The aquatic habitat, for example, where the fish-heads live is just about the best beach destination in the universe. The strong gravity has odd effects on time and light so that not only do the nice sunny days last longer due to time-stretching  but the bending of the light makes big old Sirius A look like a giant glowing Banana in the sky - or a big bright smile as some would have it. Yes it’s a great place, all sorts of funny creatures hail from Po Tolo. In fact Michael Portillo does, the clue’s in the name. Yes that’s why he has that funny walk. All us off-worlders have funny walks.

So yes, in the week where once again chemical weapons have been used on this planet down there in El Gabul’s old stomping ground it’s pretty apparent we need a new general settlement rather than the new proxy war we’re actually getting and this time there’s no sign the fish-heads are going to turn up and help out. Chances are they’ve been exterminated by the Heron people or just a bigger bunch of fish-people. That’s the problem with pacifism, when somebody isn’t in the slightest bit vulnerable to moral ju-jitsu it’s kind of rendered redundant. The same is actually true of Charlton Heston-style coercion as well of course. All your hardness is of no value to you if somebody much, much harder comes along and flattens you. There’s no easy answer. Never has been.

Did you spot the hidden cow? Here's a Stevie Wonder link from his best album: