David Icke and the Locquacious Glaswegian in the jacuzzi
blogFour nights a week, I go to Gorbals gym and partake of my favourite winter indulgence: reading articles in the sauna. Rather than read on a screen at work, I print them off and read Theodore Dalrymple or Will Self or the New Yorker or whoever whilst being broiled at 100 degrees Centigrade.
I started reading because I find it difficult to understand the dialect of Glaswegian spoken by my fellow saunagoers. Also, the conversation tends to veer towards football or philosophy, both of which tend to bring out strong opinions and are thus not conducive to the kind of relaxation I like. Quite how much of the articles that I absorb is debatable, but I enjoy letting the words wash over me so who cares.
Of late there has been a fly in the ointment, a spanner in the works, and a loquacious Glaswegian in my jacuzzi. At first, I indulged him, he was a bit different to most, being curious and seemingly open to ideas. He intrigued me with his tales of a courtship gone wrong (the relationship foundered over the fact that she was into social networking sites like Bebo and Facebook, whereas he found them incomprehensible). Then I let him engage me in conversation about conspiracy theories. Now I have to endure him spouting on about David Icke, the Rothschilds, the Illuminati and all sorts of fanciful connections. According to this guy, we are all living in a matrix, universal love is at the centre of everything, it is the Illuminati who are orchestrating all the world’s wars. Human stupidity doesn’t come into it, apparently.
Like the chap at work who is into conspiracy theories, their eyes light up when they mention David Icke, because David Icke tells them that by listening to him and opening their minds to his mixture of outrageous facts and outrageous fiction, they understand reality better than 99.9% of the sheeple on the planet. Everyone likes to feel a bit superior, don’t they?
With this in mind, I decided to watch one of David Icke’s videos — no mean feat given that it clocks in at around 2 1/2 hours. He is a good speaker who flatters his audience, comparable perhaps to Hitler (to whom he often compares modern politicians) in the beer cellars of Berlin. The indisputable facts that he comes out with — that America sold weapons to Iraq and Afghanistan in the 80s and that there is a secretive Bilderberger group who don’t receive nearly as much media attention as it should — are important. However, when he follows this up with ideas about the Queen being a 7 foot humanoid lizard, one starts to lose sympathy.