Work! Consume! Die!

by Frankie Boyle

  As I show them out, Paul gets up halfway as some sort of farewell and it ends up looking like a curtsy. They both shake my hand warmly and, as the younger cop heads out, the old guy grips me by the arm and forces something into my hand. He fixes me with the liquid eyes of a dying spaniel and leaves without a word.

  Half an hour later Paul and I are still smoking a joint on the couch, passing the picture back and forth. It’s a dressing room. I reckon it’s an ITV dressing room at LWT. In the foreground you can see part of a guy lying on the floor, his trousers off and a huge arse exposed. Is this Dom Joly? Is he fucking dead? Why would they take a photo while he was still unconscious? Did the rapist take it? On the wall is the real focus of the piece. Written in blood (presumably, we agree, Dom Joly’s arseblood) is a slogan in block capitals.

  ‘SHOWBUSINESS HAS NO BOTTOM.’

  Abu Ghraib was not simply a case of American arrogance towards a Third World people: in being submitted to humiliating tortures, the Iraqi prisoners were effectively initiated into American culture. They were given a taste of its obscene underside, which forms the necessary supplement to the public values of personal dignity, democracy and freedom. Bush was thus wrong: what we are getting when we see the photos of the humiliated Iraqi prisoners on our screens and front pages is precisely a direct insight into American values, into the very core of the obscene enjoyment that sustains the US way of life.

  Slavoj Žižek, Violence

  Chapter 01

  It’s interesting that war is the ultimate in reality television and yet the British public couldn’t be less interested. Remember when they used to have to persuade the country to go to war? Fake up a dossier? Remember when they even used to announce a war? Now, it’s just, ‘Hey, we’re bombing Libya!’ Soon they won’t even bother with that and we’ll only find out who we’re fighting when our friends send us a postcard saying that their hotel buffet just got destroyed by a pilotless attack drone, or when we accidentally read a tweet that Liam Fox has sent to Fearne Cotton.

  Of course, war to us seems so brutal, so unnecessary. That’s because we don’t own shares in arms companies. Those guys live in palatial penthouses full of shrunken heads and wank to the news. Still, we are members of our society, so we are complicit in what it does.

  Look at it this way. Personally, I think we should have much more open immigration arrangements, we should treat asylum seekers fairly, we shouldn’t imprison them and we particularly shouldn’t imprison their children. Perhaps I can hold that view because I live in a country that does the opposite. Because I have the security of knowing that it won’t happen. It’s the same with war. We might say, ‘Not in my name’, but it is in our name, and with our taxes.

  We are told we fight consequence-free wars. Drone missions are ‘targeted killings’, of people who have never stood trial. ‘Your judge is this flying bomb, your sentence is kaboom!’ We drop bombs from miles up in the sky and say they are surgical strikes. Ignoring the fact that there is no way to safely drop high explosives into urban areas. That surgeons don’t, for good reason, ever use explosives.

  In the UK, as bailiffs cleared out protestors at the peace camp outside parliament, one was filmed stamping on a protestor. And with that one vicious act of violence, the area was officially no longer a peace camp and just another London park. The area is now going to be used as a holding pen for Boris Johnson’s mistresses.

  I never understood why men go to war. Then I thought, men have children. The average length of a war is four or five years, which is also the amount of time it takes for a child to stop being really fucking annoying. Men are saying to themselves, ‘Do I want to be here, listening to this wee guy scream because I’ve cut his toast into triangles instead of squares? No, I’ll go join the army. I’ll send him a Christmas video message, when I’m beheaded on YouTube … screaming, ‘How do you want my head cut off then? In triangles or in fucking squares?!’

  Reading about Help for Heroes, I think it’s sad that that’s left to charity. Give it a couple of years and we’ll be getting hassled in the high street to adopt a para for £5 a month. There was a story that a legless war hero couldn’t get into a charity ball where he was guest of honour because it had no disabled access. Organisers apologised for the mix up, and invited him to have tea with the Queen – on a bouncy castle at the top of Blackpool Tower! How could we treat a man who lost so much for this country like that? Well, we sent him into an unnecessary war with inferior equipment and a breathtaking ignorance of historical precedent, so it was probably pretty easy.

  I really don’t understand the no-fly zone in Libya. How can we designate a no-fly zone and then whizz about it in our planes? It has all the logic of a parent in McDonald’s telling their kids they’re embarrassing them. Presumably the reason coalition forces have been blowing up tanks and buildings is because they’re worried they might take to the skies like migrating geese. Instead of a no-fly zone, Cameron should just parachute in whoever was running Britain’s transport network last winter. British Typhoons reduced some schools and hospitals to barely functioning messes. Not in Libya, over here – at a cost of £90 million each, they’re bound to have.

  William Hague said that Britain will stop bombing Libya when Gaddafi stops killing his own people. They’ve managed to turn a war into something akin to a loved-up couple not wanting to hang up the phone first.

  ‘No, you stop shooting first …’

  ‘No, you stop bombing first …’

  ‘No, you stop shooting first … Hello? … Hello? … Are you still shooting …’

  ‘Yeah …’

  ‘Oh, you!! OK, let’s both stop killing together … 3 … 2 … 1 …’

  ‘Are you still bombing? …’

  ‘Yeah.’

  The debate is whether the war is legal. It has brought pain, misery and desperation to hundreds of thousands of people. Does that sound legal to you? To me it sounds like the dictionary definition of the legal profession. Tony Blair phoned Gaddafi twice to urge him to stand down. Apparently, the delusional lunatic rambled on for hours about not being a war criminal before Gaddafi managed to get a word in.

  Hague confirmed that Britain is supplying the rebels with mobile phones. That’s incredibly useful. It seems that they’ve been texting us saying, ‘We’re dying. Send guns please.’ I hope we sent them iPhones. There’s a wonderful app for finding your legs in a bomb crater.

  People may be wondering where Britain is getting all these free mobile phones from that we are handing to the young radical Muslims in Libya. They’re mainly confiscated from the young radical Muslims that we put in Belmarsh.

  An American fighter plane crashed in a field near Benghazi. If you ask me, that was enforcing the no-fly zone a bit too strictly. What a laugh it would have been if it had landed on the house of Lockerbie bomber al-Megrahi. Not that he’d have been in; he spends most afternoons waterskiing.

  The Scottish Parliament still argue they did stringent checks that al-Megrahi definitely had a note from his mum asking for him to be excused from prison. The claim is that it was the Scottish Parliament acting compassionately. Scottish and compassionate? Those words go together about as well as ‘Premiership’ and ‘consensual’.

  BP lobbied over the Libyan prisoner-transfer scheme. If you’re one of those people who stick your finger in their ears and sing to themselves that Britain’s foreign policy is nothing to do with oil, that must be quite difficult to explain. It seems like the two have nothing in common. It’s like finding out that the manufacturers of Lynx shower gel had been demanding the release of Peter Sutcliffe.

  The RAF pilots who flew on a rescue mission to Libya used maps printed straight from Google. Why bother? When I need a map of Libya I use a sheet of sand paper. Apparently, we have been dropping in troops as ‘advisors’. It’s all perfectly fine under international law so long as when they shoot someone they say, ‘I advise you to die.’

  The public doesn’t seem to be behind the war in Libya. To engage them,
maybe we should tally up the number of civilian casualties and use them as the numbers for the EuroMillions. You’ll have Jenni Falconer in a morgue as Graham, the voice of the dead, reads the results. 6, 22, 11, 4, 9 and, because last night we hit a primary school, 40.

  David Cameron said he undertook military action because it’s ‘not acceptable to have a situation where Colonel Gaddafi can be murdering his own people using planes and helicopter gunships’. It also invalidates the warranties the British arms manufacturers sold them with. Amusingly, David Cameron was roaming around the Middle East with arms dealers trying to flog weapons while calling for an end to violence. He’s right. What these places need to solve their differences is more guns. The Tories see Gaddafi as a ‘legitimate target’ for them – after all he is elderly, Muslim and has children.

  Gaddafi’s also been accused of using human shields. He’s going to have to do better than that. Our bombs will simply rip through them. He should have opted for steel or concrete. And they say he’s a tactical genius! Yes, it’s horrible that protestors are being fired on by jets, but what a way to go! Fighting a plane! It must be like unlocking a secret level of Grand Theft Auto coded by Raoul Moat.

  Both sides have been accused of using rape as a weapon. The hardest part of using rape as a weapon is training the troops. The assault course is a very different thing at rape camp. You rarely see rape squads as part of military marches. You can hear David Dimbleby doing the voiceover at Trooping the Colour. ‘Visiting from Scotland we have the 4th Rape Squad. They’ve been raping for their country since 1935. They’re taking the salute from the Queen. Some of them have broken ranks, and are racing straight towards Her Majesty’s box. And from here, I think I can see a flicker of a smile come across her face.’

  NATO says Gaddafi’s reign of terror is near an end – because we will soon have bombed everybody he’s been trying to scare. It’s an interesting policy. We just keep bombing everything around him, but not actually him. I presume if he gets captured they’re going to execute him by knife thrower.

  We were told that military action helped to prevent a bloodbath in Benghazi. Thankfully, with our help the bloodbath happened five miles outside Benghazi. Libyans are gathering around military instillations, not to act as human shields but in the knowledge that it’s probably the last place that NATO bombs are going to land. Surprisingly, some people in Tripoli still support NATO. The undertakers. To most Scots, NATO’s just a description of their feet after suffering a decade of Type 2 diabetes.

  Is it wise to fill Libya with melting corpses while we look for Gaddafi? He’s increasingly blending in. Gaddafi has a lot of money at his disposal – it can’t have been cheap buying Michael Jackson’s face after he died. He looks like the last surviving balloon from a children’s party. If only he hadn’t hoarded £60 billion abroad. He could have kept say £10 billion, and used the rest to create an unbreachable defence. Right now, a colossal golden robot bear could be lapping up the protestors like ants, its tortured attempts to sing ‘Bear Necessities’ in machine code sounding, to Libyans, like a series of garbled sex threats.

  Our various wars are being fought purely to justify a £50 billion defence bill and maintain an army that is grossly oversized for the realistic needs of our country. Ours is the second largest military force in the EU. The last time Britain was successfully invaded was over a millennium ago in 1066. And our military is used to attack not to defend. Some critics of this will say that Britain has been attacked, by terrorists. But we didn’t need an army to prevent 7/7. We needed a bus conductor.

  The bombs we’re dropping cost more than the buildings we’re dropping them on. In financial terms they’re winning. First Sea Lord Admiral Sir Mark Stanhope says he’s sure if we’d had enough money to send another warship we’d have finished this conflict. Yes, Sir Mark, and if we had enough money for jobs people could feed their kids. Who’d have thought that a navy as powerful as ours would struggle to win a war in a desert? So we sold Gaddafi weapons and now he has more than we do. How do we get out of this sticky situation? Surely we could launch a product-recall notice?

  ‘An unfinished surface of the T-72 dashboard could cause a nasty cut. Please return, in person, to the nearest HM warship.’

  Why should we believe the opinions of the First Sea Lord? I haven’t trusted him since he told his daughter she couldn’t marry a human and she ended up selling her voice for legs. Also, maybe saying we’re running out of money to carry on isn’t the best way of getting Gaddafi to surrender. Is this the Big Society? We all work for free to save lives while special funding is ring-fenced to kill people? We got stuck in Iraq for eight years, we’ve been stuck in Afghanistan for ten years and, for some reason, we set the timetable for a conflict in Libya at 90 days. You can’t even get a sofa delivered in 90 days.

  Gaddafi shut down all internet communications in the country. Which is a pity, as there are always thousands of people trying to get on Freecycle to pick up a coffin. Libya operated tight state control over the media, that’s obvious. The rebels invited Britain to get involved in their war – they must have watched no television at all. Gaddafi banned the learning of the English language in Libyan schools, which is obviously why Libya did most of its diplomatic negotiations with the Scottish government. A succession of colourful noises was all the two parties needed to be understood.

  Trumping even Libya, Tunisia had the harshest internet censorship outside of China. I wonder why so few of us knew that? The Tunisian revolution started when a street vendor set fire to himself. Ian Tomlinson’s inquest ended and the British people were watching TV’s Most Shocking Talent Show Moments, which was a revolution in a way, as you didn’t get to vote on what won.

  Tunisia’s revolution inspired the uprisings across the Arab world, so maybe all the Arab refugees should go to Tunisia. Put all the exiled revolutionaries in one country and rename it ‘Spirited Arabia’. It will have a lovely climate and be very close by plane, but the customer service will consist of someone shouting, ‘Don’t tell me what to do!’ and shooting into the ceiling.

  These Arab states have had to fight with their lives to install a hastily-decided-upon, cobbled-together, temporary government. We did it simply by not bothering to vote last year. The Arab League. It’s not a patch on the Premiership. You just can’t get the ball control with sandals.

  It was reported that Leila Trabelsi, the wife of Tunisia’s ousted ruler, left the country with 1.5 tonnes of gold, worth more than £35 million. The joke’s on her, though, as she fled the country on easyJet. Her baggage allowance came to just over £40 million.

  Israel killed a bunch of civilians in international waters for trying to bring aid to the Palestinians. According to the Israelis, their troops started shooting because people on the boats threw stones. That sounds proportionate. It’s a bit like, well, someone throwing stones at you and you executing them in cold blood with a team of commandos. ‘20 soldiers airdropped onto the boat from a helicopter’ – what surprised me is, if you type that into Google, you get a Charlie Sheen sex tape.

  Israel still claims land rights based on the Bible. That’s a bit like me pitching a tent beside your house and saying I want your garden because it belonged to King Arthur. I pity the Palestinians, who didn’t do anything to deserve what happened to them. Israel should have been given some of Germany to start a country in. Anyway, I’d better leave it there. I get a lot of complaints when I write jokes about Israel, mainly from the Mossad agent who has to update my file.

  There’s a real sense of change taking place right across the Arab world as the old rulers are removed from power, making way for a whole new set of ruthless dictators. When will these corrupt rulers come to realise that guns cannot silence the people? Only reality television and talent shows can do that.

  The people of Yemen have also overthrown their ruler, and now Syria is trying. The young lesbian from Syria who wrote an online blog was actually a 40-year-old fat American. As I discovered after arranging to meet h
er in a Travelodge car park. Despite common perceptions, lesbianism is actually becoming a more popular lifestyle choice for young women in Syria, now that all the men are dead.

  What are all these Middle Eastern rulers going to do now they’ve been chucked out of a job? Become Northern Ireland peace envoys? Back home, people are asking why other Arab leaders haven’t got involved; given that most Arab countries are currently being ruled by an ‘out of office’ email, that might be a bit of a problem. The leader of the UN wants the world to have one clear opinion. The world won’t even buy the records of The X Factor winners they voted for – you expect consistency?

  For all that I in my middle-class, lefty reality tunnel imagine that people aren’t behind Britain’s wars, I sometimes wonder if that’s true. I look at the Top Gear-style news items about the rockets we use, the computer games where we symbolically join in, and I think maybe everybody is right fucking into this.

  Britain sent over new Apache helicopters and Typhoons to Libya. Are we just parading what they could have bought had they not decided to make things awkward? Our Tomahawk missiles have a camera on the front, which provides great clip-show footage worth £250 a go to help pad out the defence budget. There’s even talk of a couple of new ships if Channel 5’s controversial You’ve Been Maimed gets the go-ahead. They use the latest sat-nav guidance system, replacing an earlier model where two mice sat in a transparent nosecone yanking at a joystick as they bickered over a tiny map.

  Some of our troops are to be issued with special bomb-proof pants. Yes, I can think of nothing that will ease the pain and suffering of grief-stricken parents more after being informed of the death of their son than being handed his perfectly preserved cock and balls.

  Meanwhile, US soldiers have started using a futuristic rifle that fires radio-controlled bullets that can travel round corners. Now, they’ll be able to shoot British soldiers without even aiming at them. There are strict guidelines for their use and they’ll only be sold to rogue Middle Eastern states if they’re willing to pay more for them than their enemies.