Weldean (same may say Wildean) Nights

You muppet Chip - let me relay to the good folk of the dotorg how it really was, from the only sober (and therefore only truly qualified to comment) person there.

Chip sat in his Henery the 8th mode, his stentorian voice attempting to order proceedings according to his royal liking, which included demanding I buy him a pint, even though I was drinking (free) soda. In order to pacify the Surrey behemoth, I of course obliged, but, using his money; an admirable socio-economic/emotional compromise RD Laing would have been proud of. The talk was voluble, amiable and wide-ranging. Both the bearded one and the dreadlocked one were in complete agreement with my assessment that a system that does not have the spiritual nature of man at its heart is necessarily a system of control, and where the spiritual and secular are splintered into government and religion, you have the perfect recipe for the divide and rule hegemony we poor deluded slaves live under.

Chip, of course, was chipping in with his 2 penneth's worth of attempted controversy, by trying to get (for example) the wonderful Mr Paul Curtis AKA PaulNYC to agree that my position that 9/11 was clearly a put-up job was absurd. Very interestingly, not only did Paul NOT agree with Chip, he also went on to say that the only officially cited debunk of the plethora of (incontrovertible) evidence against the 9/11 bullshit was from Popular Mechanics. We all (apart from Chip, who was non-plussed), laughed about this. Paul went on to say that he sincerely believed Radio Shack must in fact be a CIA front, since it makes absolutely no money whatsoever.

We also argued the toss about the individual rights versus the collective, in which Arbie stated his position that the individual right is sacrosanct, but I begged to differ, since we are not, in fact individuals, other than in perception, but clearly a part of a whole, whether that be a family, a tribe, a society or whatever. And therefore my argument was that you have to allow for a collective position in the intrinsic and enshrined rights of free humans, but Arbie didn't agree. Paul said that unions had the right to exist and quite rightly so, since in a society where the owners hold the power, the workers must have their needs and rights met through representation, union and collective bargaining. Arbie went purple at this and said unions were as bad as owners, since they also represented some form of totalitarian control. I said that was an absurd position, taking things to an extreme, an extreme that Paul pointed out, only had any kind of manifestation during a brief period between the end of WW2 and the 1970s.

Are you still with me? You see, being sober has many, many merits and advantages, and one is that I can remember just about every single fucking detail of that myriad and wonderful conversation.

Goofy, for example, said that he really didn't care enough abut anything to take a position about anything, but he was worried by this, as if he was somehow lacking in comparison to my strident and at times furious defence of my position, but I assured him I had deep admiration for his Taoist 'go with the flow' philosophy, which was surely more enlightened, ultimately, than my intensely researched advocacy, but nevertheless, I enjoy my advocacy so it's win win in the bigger picture and pints of free soda all round.

But Chip is right. It was an experience Wilde, Russell and Whistler, a similar collective of charming intellectuals and posturers would have been proud of. We also discussed football.

Pip pip Chip!

:)