There was this interesting story, brought to my attention by my eagle-eyed buddy Adam.
What more can I add to this piece? My usual weapon of choice -blistering irony- is also the favourite of Mr Skelton, and he is a true artist with the hot poker. What I can point out (and point out with glee) is that this is NOT published on some underground blog, nor is this article's website a part of the American "bipartisan hoax machine" media apparatus. No, this is The Guardian, a major and respected news outfit, who claim to be "the world's leading liberal voice". Political ideology aside (can't stand it), I recall surfing upon articles (both humorous and interesting) in The Guardian while stationed at Fort Bragg, while stationed in Korea, while stationed in rural Japan. While I'm forced to take on faith their claim of massive readership above, I can indeed vouch for the ubiquity of their stories, which are found linked into sites and news organizations as diverse and disparate as pravda.ru and fark.com... My admiration for this particular bit of journalism was trebled as soon as I realized that it wasn't some crackpot blog whose only major internet neighbor is huffingtonpost. ;)
So as I cannot add anything but praise to this reportage, let me at least rehash some of my favorite bon mots.
I mean, no wonder the Bilderberg delegates are embarrassed. They're strategising to make the world a better place – who'd want to be seen doing that?
Indeed. Whenever I sit down and play Steve Jackson's "Illuminati" card game, I am struck by the shyness of these people. If I were a card-carrying member of the Ancient Illuminated Seers of Bavaria, I'd sure as heckfire bring that up at cocktail parties and cookouts. Just work it into conversation, all natural and subtle, you know: "Aw yeah, I know what you mean, man~ and if I had to worry about financing a mortgage AND paying for two kids' college, well, I'd just tell The Brothers to "Take Care of the Widow's Son' at the next ceremony --you know, at that ruined abbey on the seawall, where we meet up in dark robes every other New Moon and plan out fun events like group paintball outings and potlucks?-- yeah, I'd just ask for a couple hundred thou and then I'd stop worrying about it". Of course that would probably put me right over the conversational trapdoor where I'm forced to admit that I hold peerage in three European nations ("and not just Johnny-come-lately rubble heaps like Germany and Italy, but REAL nations", cough cough) and that my yearbook quote in the AISB Gold Owl (2008) was "Let them eat cake!"
Well, maybe they stay out of the backyard BBQ scene for a reason, maybe they avoid casual convos with the serfs for a reason.
But seriously, if you work on the foreign desk of a major news corporation and you're at the "Bilderberg what?" level of political awareness, you need to think about getting a different job. Take a sabbatical. Take up carpentry, or read a book. It's like calling yourself a porn star and not knowing the reverse cowgirl.
Where was this kind of jocular chutzpah in the American press for the past twenty years? Back in the 90s, we heard about scandals, were even given cute names for them: Travelgate, Whitewater, Lewinsky(gate), "that murdered lawyer Vincent Fostergate". Nothing was ever accomplished~ the Clintons were too damn clever, and too damn popular. Then the 00s hit, and something massive and reality-bending happened... all of a sudden the White House press corp became a trained poodle show, and to find a respectable journal with the nerve to criticize Team Bush you needed to go as far as Rolling Stone. C'mon, admit it-- YOU never read it for the album reviews, either.
But here's the first year of a new decade, and here's The Guardian, fearlessly interviewing border-jumpers, internationally-networked party crashers, and passionately angry people of all stripe and color of sleeping bag. Some of them, surely, have only enough political conviction to fight for truth; yet it's the seriously meaningful, "capital T" Truth. Their soul brethren that are content to simply watch and catalog, they're the ones camped out in saguaro and underbrush in a part of Nevada that doesn't get mapped, scanning the civil twilight for American-made UFOs. No, these anti-Bilderberg people have, if nothing else, purity of heart. What was that guy's name, the lead for the article? He sleeps in the mountains more than he sleeps in beds! Mr Skelton has some good fodder for heroic sympathies here, and for once it isn't a contrived Disneyesque storyline about kids from an inner-city ball club, fighting to escape from squalor and socio-economic doom with three point shots and good half court defense. Fuck that. These are people who are being detained, imprisoned, harassed by federal police agencies...
Or are they?
This year, the police have been deployed in the same extraordinary numbers, but they are smiling, rolling their eyes at the rigmarole; the riot police are giving the thumbs-up to protesters and honking their horns as they come round the "awareness roundabout" at the foot of the hotel.
"The police have been laughing and chatting," says Daniel Turon, a Spanish psycho-sociologist, here in Sitges to psycho-sociologise Bilderberg. "One of them said he had read a book about Bilderberg; another said, 'Yes, we understand.'" The Catalan police, he says, "have a different sensibility" from what you may expect. "They are Catalan. Their minds are independent."
That was the biggest surprise of this jarring story: the apparent rising solidarity between "the conspiracy theorists" (a term that neatly refers back to "whacko" and "wing nut" in the American Standard Dictionary of Mass Media) and the cops that are bullied about by the Bilderbergers so that they bully the whackos. It's scary if it's true. It's scary to realize that, much like in the final minutes of George Lucas's brilliant trilogy of good and evil, the twisted, lightning-slinging Emperors of the world CAN indeed be fought against, CAN be photographed, can be ridiculed in online news forums. If you carry the comparison too far (and you know how fond I am of that), you can even grab Queen Beatrix and hurl her down a bottomless power conduit, and burn the old hag forever.
This seems to be the general angle of Skelton's piece. I hope I didn't just imagine it. Was the ironic tone even there? Ah, this must have been one big put-on, or just a weird daydream brought on by watching Chinatown a few weeks ago, and drinking gin last night. Or was it?
I'd love to hear all of your thoughts on the article. As my friend Adam said, let's discuss and discourse.
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