I'd Like To Teach The World to Shut The Fuck Up By Silver Fox

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What with Wimbledon, Euro 2004, Hell's Kitchen, Big Brother 5, and the recent healing of the lesbian storyline on Emmerdale Farm, some of you may have noticed that actual news has been a bit thin on the ground lately. Oh, I'll admit that things have happened - it's not like the international movers and shakers have been taking their summer holidays - but it's all been more of the same, for the most part; the world ticking away on autopilot, so to speak.

More rumbling and diplomatic dildoism in the middle east, the odd murder trial, and stuff going on in the financial pages that only people who are far too busy making vast, tainted fortunes to actually read the damned things either fully understand or care about. For an Information Super-lay-by loiterer like myself, it's been thin stuff.

To be honest, it's hard to keep hashing over the same old ground week by week - there are only so many opprobrious epithets that you can apply even to the most corrupt and/or criminally incompetent US administrators, after all. There have been times when I've been tempted to condense this whole megillah into a big headline reading BASTARDS 1 - DECENT FOLK 0.

I could then repeat it until something happens that either provides some faint reassurance that the world isn't the hateful, poisonous wreckage that I've come to see it as or (more likely), something so ghastly and appalling crops up that I am stirred to further excesses of bile and spite.

Of course, I could always devote my little corner of cyberspace to tacky speculation on BB5 et al, but that would mean watching it, an endeavour which would take up time I could spend more constructively by playing Russian roulette with Mr Toggles, my imaginary cat. I think, on the whole, that I'll just carry on alluding tangentially to that sort of tat. It's a quick and easy way of providing context, after all.

Especially for any dimwits that get led up my digital cul-de-sac by search engines tuned to words like Fox and who might be under the impression that they're going to see somebody scantily (if at all) clad doing graphic things on or under glass-topped coffee tables. That, of course, I'm saving for a really slack week.

Ah, the disconsolate outpouring of a jaded columnist..not exactly compelling stuff, you may be thinking, and I'm right with you. I'm not simply bemoaning my lot, though; it's the wider implications of this current dearth of proper, sit-up-sharply-drop-the-paper-and-scream-fuck-my-old-boots news that concerns me. When there's nothing much doing - and even less worth saying about it - strange things start to happen.

Obscure people in obscure areas of government, bereft of the daily necessity to invent catchy sound-bites, draft important memos that dig their clueless superiors out of the shit, and what-not, begin to feel restless; they get twitchy; they even - and this is where it gets ugly - get ideas.

Weird, pipe-dream ideas that they have been nursing for years (along with worries about redundancy, departmental restructuring, and the homicidal thoughts they're having about co-workers), normally consigned to the wee small hours by weightier, more immediate concerns, these ideas never usually see the light of day.

At times like this though - silly season, call it what you like - these ideas begin to take shape. Some deputy-under-minister type finds himself with time on his hands..his mind wanders..he begins to scribble on a pad. Perhaps, in the darkened back-benches of his mind, a light is beginning to shine..this'll get my name into the papers, he thinks. Idly - still barely able to believe that he's serious about doing it - he submits a proposal to someone higher up the food chain..

I'd Like To Teach The World to Shut The Fuck Up continued..

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