Clive Barker is one of my favourite writers. His stories of lost, haunted souls searching for salvation and redemption, but instead finding themselves in a dark cellar having their skin untimely ripped from their bones by inter-dimesional entities, what's left of their screaming bloody form veiled in barbed wire, whilst nails are driven into their skulls are always entertaining. He paints vivid pictures in a prose so deliciously sensual it somehow renders his grotesquerie both intoxicating and alluring.
I've even got a couple of books inscribed by him. The first is Hellbound Heart - which became the Hellraiser movie - in which he wrote "I wish you my darkest nightmares." The second is Imajica in which, at my mischievous prompting, he giggled like a school girl as he wrote "Get down with your bad self!"
There are those who feel he's - and I'm using the vernacular here - 'fallen off' since he got married (and certainly Gallilee reads like a meandering 582 page love letter to his new Black husband) validating the assertion that those in love disappoint us as they too closely resemble conquerors who have laid their heads to rest. I've got my fingers crossed that his long-awaited Scarlet Gospels novel featuring his two best-loved characters - Pinhead and Harry D'Amour - is a return to diabolical form.
So, my addiction to the alternative means I dig Clive Barker and the scary stuff he writes - like you didn't see that coming. However, as massive a fan as I am his twisted imaginings are as an episode of Dora The Explorer in comparison to The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein. Her previous works (No Logo and Fences and Windows) have concentrated their beam on the atramentous, sinister nature of Multi-National Corporations highlighting their rapaciousness. No Logo in particular was a significant jump off point for me: what's the truth behind a brand?
Does IBM creating the first ever barcode so that the Nazis could track inmates in their concentration camps bother you? Would you ever forego Hugo Boss accoutrements and vestments because he was the clothing designer of choice for the Third Reich? How about Caterpillar constructing and supplying specially armoured bulldozers for the Israeli Defence Forces, the better to destroy homes in Palestine? For my part, being teetotal may make the following an irrelevance, but if I ever slummed it with the other plebs and drank a beer it wouldn't be Heineken since their MD sent a memo to the makers of a TV programme they sponsored complaining that there was far "too high a proportion of negroes in the audience." Or Coors, whose owner infamously told a group of minority business leaders that the best thing slave traders did was “to drag your ancestors here in chains.”
The basic premise of The Shock Doctrine is the exploration of what is called 'Disaster Capitalism'. A philosophy which sprang fully formed from the loins of Milton Friedman - the Anti-Chomsky and the fella who gave Thatcher her best ideas. Essentially if you get in quickly enough after a natural disaster you have access to the sacred Tabula Rasa of Empire, an opportunity to change the very social fabric of a nation: bending the will of the people and their resources to private enterprise and profit. Acts of God or Acts of War As Decreed by God ((tm) Tony Blair) offer opportunities not just to rebuild, but to create new democratic and market-oriented client states. The 'reconstruction process' looks to sell off the government-owned businesses propping up idealistic and ineffective economies which couldn't possibly work in the either the free-market or the real world.
From Iraq to Afghanistan and then to Aceh, the cast of characters in this shadowy endeavour are always the same: international financial institutions, consulting firms, engineering companies, NGOs, government and UN aid agencies swarming like locusts looking to pick clean the broken bones of a damaged nation.
Fuck Candyman. These are the unearthly seeds of nightmares right here. Whilst Clive Barker creates chillingly fantastical worlds The Shock Doctrine meticulously picks through the entrails of our bleak reality. It is a true work of horror which bespeaks so eloquently of the evil that men do that I took an age to make it to the end of the book. It was a harrowing experience. I'd finish a chapter, rivulets of sweat kissing my furrowed brow, anxiety and panic beating an angry tattoo in my solar plexus. I would attempt to abandon the book in a darkened corner of my study and it would glint mockingly at me from the murk and gloom emitting a sweet siren song which was so hard to resist... I'm glad I made it to the end eventually, because it opened my eyes to the 'play book' now being employed in Haiti.
Surfing like a mofo I recently discovered the website of an influential American Conservative Policy think tank The Foundry whose mission is to "formulate and promote conservative public policies based on the principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defence."
As I write this their latest communication reads: "The world needs American leadership. The alternative to an America willing and able to lead is not a paradise of peace through engagement. It is a world where the undemocratic, the unsatisfied, and the illiberal powers of the world advance at the expense of American ideals, American interests." I don't know about you, but reading that makes me want to undergo a radical spinal procedure which would allow me to gnaw at the backs of my knees for comfort.
Last Wednesday and in the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti The Foundry reverted to type ignoring the human tragedy instead suggesting the catastrophe offers a chance to advance the Empire followed by what I swore was pure comedy gold when they advocated Bill Clinton and George W. Bush as frontmen alongside Barack Obama in a public diplomacy effort to help improve the perception of America. I actually laughed out loud in a manner not unlike like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day when Andie McDowell's character reveals she studied 19th Century French poetry in college.
But there it is, boys and girls. Announced today. George W. Bush and Bill Clinton flanking the current President of the United States of America for a photo opportunity signalling the march of the Venture Capitalists. It's like the overthrow of President Aristide, the diminution of Haiti to a sweatshop or the debacle in New Orleans never happened. The equivalent of employing your rapist as your Trauma Counsellor.
There's a bit right at the end of the movie Hellraiser when the agents of Hell return for an escaped prisoner. They suspend him from an elaborate series of chains, hooks and razors and tear him apart in a red plume of blood, flesh and sinew to exact retribution. Just before the grisly denouement the protagonist - a mask made from his dead Brother's skin slipping from his now mangled face - turns to the camera, licks his lips and intones in a dreamy rapture "Jesus wept." Not bad Mr Barker, not bad... But check out Obama, Clinton and Dubya posing together like some kind of freaky Busted reunion. Now that's scary.
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