HERMAN MUNSTER

AFTER YEARS OF BEING PLAGIARISED by other publications, I am happy to take advantage of The Sun’s latest epithet for the good leader of the European Union, gormless goon Herman von Rumpoy.

 

UNELECTED VON RUMPOY SEEMS TO HAVE DECIDED that, in keeping with the practice adopted by other, more legitimate, political leaders, he should produce what looks like a New Year’s message. I haven’t had the patience to study the whole content, merely the parts which seem to be of interest to right-thinking intelligent folk such as myself and possibly several people who are reading this.

 

SHOWING A SURPRISING CAPACITY for independent thought, as well as an arrogance beyond his station as a showroom dummy, “Munster” has seen fit to “warn” David Cameron about the dangers of his actions and the consequences of them for the rest of Europe. When Cameron suggested recently that the UK should begin to reclaim some of the “powers” that have inexplicably been ceded to the EU over recent years, Munster declared: "If every member state were able to cherry-pick those parts of existing policies that they most like, and opt out of those that they least like, the union in general, and the single market in particular, would soon unravel”.

 

MUNSTER RUMPOY WENT ON to state that this might result in the UK being isolated from the “rest of Europe” (sic), thus living without the benefit of the close ties established over so many years; and he naturally believes that the end of the EU would be a bad thing, as it would be the end of him. Perhaps unelected politicians like Munster and Duran Duran Barroso, as well as the majority of the second-batters on the lists of their parties throughout Europe and who never needed to listen to an electorate should be told that today’s poll in Britain showed UKIP, the United Kingdom Independence Party, at 15%, hot on the heels of Cameron himself. Unlike in Europe, our elected politicians have to respond to the will of the people, and they are clearly geared towards forcing a referendum which will hopefully end up seeing Munster and his cohorts getting sent back to their desks in municipal libraries in Belgium and tax offices in provincial villages.

 

BUT THE MOST ALARMING ASPECT of all this remains the fact that Von Rumpoy thinks he has some authority, when most people in the European Union have no idea who he is. In these texts I am read by people in every country in Europe except Lithuania and Liechtenstein, the USA, Canada and Mexico, several countries in Asia, including Mongolia, China and Japan, about six countries in Africa and four or five in South America, as well as Australia and New Zealand. I thus believe that I deserve the right to present a New Year’s message much more that Humpty von Munster. I will be writing it over the next couple of days.

SO THIS IS CHRISTMAS

FOR THE MANY PEOPLE who accept the Mayan calendar prediction about the end of life on this planet, tomorrow is basically the end of life on Earth. Of course, as I write this, at 11.38 pm GMT, I imagine that the world must have ended somewhere on the other side of the globe.

 A CLEVER PERSON MIGHT THINK that the world could end in ripples, although, having looked at our planet on a big book of stuff about the universe, I think that such an event is impossible. We all end or stay in one go, it seems. But the clever chaps might have some sort of explanation for this. I do sort of get the impression that these people who come up with these ideas do not have the same outlook on life as I do: apart from the things I have to do in my professional life, I want nothing more than to spend all my time in the company of my beautiful, loving, adorable, elegant wife, and my world will end when she does or when she is no longer part of my world. I am not sure that the Mayan calendar had taken this into their calculations.

 

BUT THEY MUST HAVE understood that love and desire and compassion and hope and the will to cherish was not something you could put down into fractions. Because it isn't.

 

SO IF THIS WORLD ENDS, then that is what it is. If not, I wish you all the best of the best for this Christmas and Holiday season. And everything you wish for in the coming year. You may not think so, but, believe me, you deserve it.

 AND I MEAN THAT from the heart.

THIS IS PLANET EARTH

AS I WRITE THIS I AM FULLY AWARE of the fact that, given my recent record of publication of this web-log, this may be my last. Unlike many of those closest to me, I am not deeply upset about the idea of the “world” coming to an “end”. Instead, being someone interested in language, I would like to know what exactly this “world” which will “end” happens to be.

 

I HAVE, INCREDUOUSLY, READ about planets that are “hiding behind the Sun”, and will attack Earth on the 21st of December. This sounds rather worrying, at first, until one starts to think about how a “planet” (according to the faithful of this belief) can “hide” behind the Sun. Nevertheless, as some very strange things have happened in the past, there is always the chance that whatever planet or asteroid that these good people believe to be lurking out in the dark matter “behind” the small star we call our Sun may in fact come hurtling out of its hiding place and attack me at some moment during the day that we now call the 21st of December.

 

HOWEVER, WHEN I THINK ABOUT THESE ISSUES on a serious level, I have a certain difficulty in understanding how a planet “knows what day it is”, as it were, given that many of the people in my immediate reach are often not totally sure of this fact. Indeed, even this very morning, I snuggled up to my good lady wife in our conjugal bed and asked her whether it was Friday or Saturday. Unfortunately, it was, and still is, Friday.

 

SO THE KNOWLEDGE CONTAINED in whatever planet that has been hanging around for five thousand years in preparation to destroy us is phenomenal.

 

(My photo shows an impression of what the people who are going to destroy the Earth might look like. They are intergalactic criminals known as Duran Duran and Rumpoy von Rumpoy Dumpty)

MOURNING SICKNESS

 

WHEN SIR MICHAEL PHILIP JAGGER, better known to his ageing fans as “Mick”, said yesterday that (and I quote, albeit perhaps not ipsa verbissima) “you get into rock ’n’ roll in order to have sex and do drugs (…) and then later on you have to do drugs so that you can still have sex and play rock ‘n’ roll”, he was probably referring to cocaine and Viagra, a drug which may be of use to a sixty-seven year old man who wishes to behave like a thirty year old.

 

SIR MICHAEL PHILIP appears to have aged relatively gracefully, and, despite having been branded as a scruffy hooligan in his earlier years, has successfully managed to blend into the establishment and behave like a good chap all round.

 

THE SAME CANNOT BE SAID OF STEVEN PATRICK MORRISSEY, formerly of The Smiths, as his outrageous comments and erratic behavior seem to suggest that the drugs he is patently still on are not doing him any good. His rant yesterday that he did not believe that Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, née Middleton, was really suffering from excessive morning sickness is supposedly meant to be in the line of previous outbursts against Britain in general and the Royal Family in particular. Yet what Morrissey believes to be true based on utterly unfounded facts should not be seen in the same light as his (in my view absurd) statements that Britain should give the Falkland Islands and islanders to Argentina immediately.

 

HIS OPINION THAT THE ROYAL FAMILY are “responsible” for the death of the unfortunate lady who received and put through the hoax call from the two Australian radio headbangers who thought that such idiocy was some sort of a jolly prank should therefore be dismissed by anyone except those who still listen to his records in their student residences. And commenting upon this at a time when the family of the lady concerned are still grieving should be seen as sick.

 

“KATE”, NÉE MIDDLETON, IS INDEED responsible for a great many evil things in our society, as, is the Royal Family. Perhaps one of these evils involves the death of a lady fifteen years ago, but most of the ill done by the Windsor clan has to do with poor fashion choices, bad haircuts, boring speeches about climate change and outrageously outdated accents.

BIZARRE LOVE PENTAGON

DAVID HOWELL “BETRAYUS” PETRAEUS, former head of what the Americans call the CIA and the Four-Star General overseeing command of US operations in Afghanistan, as well as having been a PhD lecturer teaching International Relations at the United States Military Academy and Fellow of Georgetown University, ought to know that good strategy demands that one should not shit on one’s own doorstep.

 

YET THE GOOD GENERAL APPEARS not to have been aware of the fact that the chattering classes in the press and “on the wires”, as our colonial cousins in intelligence sometimes used to term it when I was involved in counter-espionage, would “dog”, “hound” and “nail” him if he was in a “compromise situation”.

 

IN A WAY THIS SHOWS THAT TRUE LOVE is still alive. Petraeus was apparently doing the naughty with muscular Paula Broadwell, ostensibly his biographer, unbeknown to his wife, in what would perhaps be acceptable behaviour for a military man of importance, somewhat similar to our ruling classes in Britain, where either one shags a girl from among one’s female serving staff or one is considered to be a bit of a wimp by one’s wife. In short, he thought he could get away with this triangle.

 

IN AMERICA, OF COURSE, THIS IS DONE in a more open and light-filled manner, as shown by the most important officer in the American forces throwing away the most successful career in American intelligence since the days of J. Edgar Hoover by getting the occasional sexual relief from a bulging trout-pouted underling in his wood-panelled office.

 

THIS LOVE TRIANGLE AT FIRST widened when Four-Star Marine General John Allen was brought into the mix, as a suspected element knowing that something was amiss after e-mails between him and Floridian socialite Jill Kelley had been revealed, suggesting that the good general, a married man, like Petraeus, and entrusted to upholding “truth, justice and the American way”, was somehow underhand in his activities.

 

THE LOVE PENTAGON WAS MADE COMPLETE as it became five-sided when it became known that Kelley, presumably Allen’s lover, was sending e-mails to Broadwell, now known as Petraeus’s mistress, threatening her and telling her to “stay away from my man”: this presumably being Petraeus, unless we wish this to become a love hexagon. In theory, Allen would become Petraeus’s successor, but common sense suggests that at the highest levels of intelligence activity among the Washington community it would be wiser just to hand over the reins of power to a new breed of highly trained clever young women who are, without wishing to be sexist, ”attractive”. They will not be drawn into pillow talk as easily as men of a certain age whose wives look like yesterday. Who knows where this will end?

BARACK TO THE FUTURE II

WINSTON CHURCHILL MAY HAVE had a point when he stated “Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”, (although in my opinion he might have added “and wearing military uniform”), but I would perhaps have something similar to state about our former colonial cousins the United States of America. The decision to elect Barack Hussein Obama for a second term reminds me of an example given to me many years ago by a Latin teacher of mine.

 

HAVING BEEN A DOCTOR in the British Army, which was why, I presume, he knew Latin, he presented us with an interesting analogy on the US presidential elections, usually a two-way contest. Imagine, he suggested, a group of one hundred people. About seventy of them are permanently falling ill, or are chronically ill, or were born ill. These people tend to ignore the advice of their doctor (when they bother to consult a doctor) and regularly indulge in behaviour that leads to their conditions getting worse, or at least not better.

 

THE SECOND GROUP is made of super-fit, active and energetic people, of around thirty in number. They live a healthy lifestyle, avoid the things that may be damaging to their health, and are generally prepared for anything that comes at them. When they come down with something, which everyone may do, they have it under control in hours.

 

FOR SOME REASON NEVER EXPLAINED TO ME by my Latin teacher (although I have vague memories of him talking about some ancient medical system in use in Japan), the people in this community have to elect a doctor.

 

COME ELECTION TIME THERE ARE TWO candidates, both promising to “bring good health to everyone”. One of the candidates is from the “sick” group and the other is from the healthy group. The result of the election is that the “chronically sick” doctor wins by a majority of one.

 

MY TEACHER NEVER WENT on to explain the future of the health of those involved under the sick doctor; he merely left it up to us to imagine. One of the things we would have to consider, I suppose, was the number of healthy people who voted for a sick doctor. And this brings me to another famous quotation by Winston Churchill: “The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.”

START SPREADING THE NEWS

“IT IS AN ILL WIND”, I am told by proverbial tradition, “that blows no one any good”. And perhaps there can have been no event in history to make us more mindful of the truth contained in this statement than the lamentable destruction of a great swathe of the US Eastern Seaboard by the unfortunately-named “Sandy” hurricane that has devastated much of the tri-state coastal area and particularly the city of New York.

 

ALMOST AS IF FORESEEN IN THE LYRICS to the song “New York, New York”, by Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, “Sandy” has “done the Sinatra thing” in fulfilling “I want to be a part of it”, and “I want to stray right through the very heart of it” and “I want to wake up in that city that doesn’t sleep”. Indeed many citizens of New York City, I am now seeing, have not been sleeping for a short while. And those of Hoboken, New Jersey, which is in fact the early stomping ground of Francis Albert Sinatra, will not be sleeping in their own beds for quite a while. If they can find them. Thus their “little town blues” will not be “melting away” for a time.

 

THE ADVANTAGE OF THIS, OF COURSE, is that everyone can make a “brand new start of it”, and thus put the US economy back on track through what was always its major source of employment, sales and investment: construction in the North East.

 

THE ILL WIND, HOWEVER, brings political good news to Barack Hussein Obama. Only a week ago the polls and surveys were suggesting that he was fighting for his political life against Romney the Mormon, also a dubious choice for the populace at large, but one who was in the money enough to launch a massive final week charge to the White House based on spreading out dollar largesse.

 

THUS STYMIED, ROMNEY KNOWS NOT HOW, to use the XVII century Mormon language of his mentor Joseph Smith, who was writing in the XIX century in texts that are obviously fake, to advance. His attempt yesterday to hand out five thousand dollars of “candy” to the homeless in a shelter was filmed on live NBC, ABC and Cable stations. When one “homeless” said that candy was no use, that they wanted money, Romney started doling out cash from his own pocket. All interpretations of this on every channel I have watched have stated he was being idiotic and that he is dead in the water.

 

DEAD IN THE WATER, HOWEVER, may apply to many things after “Sandy” has swept across the East coast and been shown nation- and worldwide.

 

OBAMA SUPPORTERS OBVIOUSLY THINK that “Sandy” is a home run. I am not so sure. For 80% of American voters Sandy means nothing. Many had already voted by post. And I am minded of the great 1977 movie “New York, New York”, with Liza Minelli and Robert De Niro. According to the producers, it was “box office gold”. Then the director, Martin Scorcese, changed just one line in the final cut, and turned a cert billion grosser into a turkey. One line at the end of this campaign could do the same.

 

(My photo shows Governor Romney "pissing in the wind" according to Democrats)