Yesterday I was at the Cafe of Lost Souls, i.e. the Piccolo Bar on Damnation Alley (Roslyn Street), and I was hyperventilating about my theory on chocolate Easter eggs and crucifixes when old Vitto, the Master of Ceremonies at that freak-show on Desolation Row, started frothing at the mouth in outrage at my sacrilege. He declared he was a good Catholic and believed in all the nonsense tho he hasn't been to church for 50 years and as an incorrigible old poof would be the first to be burnt at the stake if those mentally challenged Catholics ever went on their witch hunts again.
Old Vitto has been the front-man at the Cafe for those same fifty years taking on all-comers that trickle down from the red-light district of Kings Cross and has become addle-brained because of it. He has a giant framed photo of Mel Gibson up on the wall and was particularly outraged by my deconstruction of Mel's noxious film, "The Passion Fruit of Christ", him declaring it was a holy text unto itself. I assured Vitto he would be the first to be publicly stoned if Mel ever got his way and ruled the world and the film was just a piece of history-fiction, a fantastic piece of propaganda, like the Bible and every Hollywood movie made since, and to take it as literal history is to be moronic in the extreme. He squawked and spluttered and refused to give me some of his hoard of hot-cross buns so that I had to steal them when his back was turned.
About the only thing Marxist about me is that I agree that "religion is the opium of the masses", especially Christianity, such colossal stupidity, superstition and brainwashed nonsense it's hard to find it's historical equivalent. I thought we had graduated from the Age of Enlightenment to that of Science where humanity took responsibility for itself and the planet and would run the show rationally and compassionately. But no, it looks as if religion will be the motivation for the Third World War where everything will be wiped out by the same Science. Don't imagine from all these soapbox diatribes I'm a Marxist or a Communist, if there's one group who does NOT know how to throw a party, it's the Communists, another variation on the anti-fun brigade, (think of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro, urgggth, they give me the shivers!!!.)
I'm a pagan Libertarian if I have to have a label, who only wants to bliss out in ecstasy with no institution or power-group dictating my life, or destroying the world around me. Pathetically, I'm a bit like the Elloi in the garden of Utopia lazily picking fruit off trees provided by Morlocks who one day will consume me. OK, in a pluralist democracy, we all have free speech and can spout the nonsense we wish, but some of us have more power than others, like Mel Glibson His type of religio-madness appeals to the non-thinking 'believers' and he makes oodles of money to boot and thus rules the chicken roost, possibly with a well-fortified bunker to withstand the "apocalypse". And the rest of us plebs, like Vitto and I, will be ground into nuclear dust, for all our protestations or sanctimonious prayers.
