irish graffiti

(Battle for the Soul of the Planet of the Jackanapes.)

 "What do you mean Tony Fauci approaching on a hawkman rocket cycle? Open fire. All weapons... Despatch war rocket Ajax to bring back his body."

My mild intellectual distaste for Doctor Anthony Fauci the head of the American National Institute of Health, famous for sponsoring frivolous torture experiments on animals in the name of his own perverse pseudo science and for creating the Covid 19 outbreak by sponsoring with similar pervisity the human race threatening adventurism of a renegade Chinese Communist Party laboratory at Wuhan, emerges at the oddest times.

This time it has emerged as I pick my way down a stairwell at the rear of a Castledermot Protestant Church preparatory to sloshing paint on the vulgarisms coating the door at the bottom of the stairwell.

The lines about opening fire are from the 1982 Flash Gordon movie except that in the movie it was Flash Gordon approaching on a hawkman rocket cycle not Tony Fauci.

I am reciting these movie lines with a contemporary twist as I pick my way through debris which I don't want to know about, towards the graffitied door. I am trying through inanity to keep my mind off the crackling of hard materials and glass beneath my feet in the stairwell which may just be drug paraphenalia. I think I saw a needle and a broken phial.

One thing is sure.

I ain't looking down again.

I pause to examine the vandalised door.

There are full names of people on it. Phone numbers. Promises of sexual activity for anyone ringing the numbers. Certain vague homages to penises generally. The name of a girl and pejorative remarks about her. Further generalised vulgarisms.

Well not any more.

If the demi monde of Castledermot wish to demean anyone from now on, they'll just have to use the internet like everyone else.

I start sloshing on the paint.

The work progresses rapidly.

I gauge what has been achieved.

It doesn't look great.

The curse words, the references to penises and fellatio. and the personal names and phone numbers are gone but frankly it's still not much to be proud of.

Picasso might have liked it because he couldn't paint either.

Otherwise I stand alone.

I am anxious to be off.

I can imagine a Protestant Vicar looking at me from some vantage point at the Manse nearby, possibly through binoculars, and murmuring with delicate disdain: "Oh. Oh. Oh good heavens. It's... it's... it's a Catholic."

True, my heart is in the right place. I have covered the graffiti. But from every aesthetic and professional standpoint, really in the best sense of an old fashioned phrase, it's a shite job.

I've never heard of anyone being arrested for vandalising graffiti on a church but in this beknighted country anything is possible and I am not keen to be the first.

I flee the scene.

Back in Kilcullen I pop into another church where a passing Padre calls me over.

"I've just received a forty page document from the Health Board telling us to insitute new protocols for the latest virus outbreak," quoth he.

"You should tell them to... Well, by jumping through hoops for them you're giving them an awful lot of power, that's all," quoth me.

"We have to do what we're told."

"Ah you don't really. We'll all have to stand up to them eventually. Why not start now?"

"Did you get the vaccine?"

"Have I been with you so long Reverend, and still you do not know me?"

"You did get it."

"No. As it happens I couldn't quite bring myself to ingest the aborted baby milk shake which the Health Board gauleiters call a vaccine. Nor will I be ingesting it now or in the future."

"That's all rubbish about aborted babies in the vaccines."

"I don't say it unless it's true. The pharmaceutical companies aren't even denying it. Oh they've tried to obscure it a bit by making a point of insisting that in some of the vaccines there are no actual cells from the aborted baby but if you enquire further you find out that the vaccine was tested against cells from the aborted baby whatever that means, or they'll say there's no cells from the aborted baby in the final form of the vaccine but when you enquire further you discover that the viral cultures for the vaccine initially were grown in cells from the aborted baby. Nuances. These are all abortion tainted vaccines. The baby swirling around in your innards by the way, is known to science as HEK 293, that's Human Embryonic Kidney 293. She was a little girl murdered by abortion in the Netherlands in 1973."

"I don't believe any of that. That's all rubbish."

"Okay... Oh. Do you know what happened on Monday? I came back to the church for the first time in ages for morning Mass. And some woman in a side aisle calls out to me: James, put on your mask. I was scarlet. I mean the nerve of some people. And I couldn't debate her here. And the masks don't even work. It's all madness Rev. No virus alive is stopped by something that doesn't stop air. And incidentally some of the scientists are saying that the vaccines are titrating the virus into deadlier forms."

"You shouldn't be in the church if you aren't wearing a mask."

"Et tu Padre? Then falls Heelers."

"Eh?"

"The claw of the gawdelpus gets us all in the end."

Well pleased with this life affirming badinage I drove to Naas.

There's an adoration chapel there.

Sitting in the real presence I realised rather happily that three out of the five people there were not wearing face masks.

As I savoured the moment, a woman with tied back promisingly lustrous looking black hair reached up and took off her mask.

Her hair kind of cascaded around her face. The promise was fulfilled. It was lustrous. It made me lust anyway.

I didn't know whether to be more thrilled by the way her hair suddenly framed her features in that shining, undulating mist, or by the fact that now four of us weren't wearing face masks.

Somewhat wryly I addressed the creator of the universe: "There is no way I can pray with your one sitting there looking like that."

I didn't leave or anything.

I just didn't want God to be wondering why I'd gone so quiet.

Back home that night an aunt accosted me.

"Have you heard there's a new Corona Virus variant."

"Of course there is."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean people were starting to stand up to the tyrants, and their lockdown face mask shenanigans, and their false statistics, and their artificially induced virus panic. Protests in Australia, the Netherlands, Austria. The police beating the tar out of peaceful protestors in Western countries and people still turning out to protest. Beautiful women taking off their face masks in adoration chapels. The Health Board gauleiters need a new virus to wrongfoot the citizenry back into quiescence."

Bidding the aunt adieu, I betook myself to a neighbour's computer to see what I could find out about the supposed new virus variant.

My brief researches reveal that a Doctor Angelique Coatzee who is styled Chairperson of the South African Medical Association claims to have discovered a new form of the flu virus formerly known to panic mongers, ie the governments of the Western world, as Covid 19.

So she's the front man for the latest fooboonery.

Some genius has named the supposed new form Omicron.

Ah.

Obviously trying to calm people down with that name,

For ****'s sake.

Doctor Coatzee's money quote is as follows: "So far all suspected cases are mild. We'll know more in two weeks... It's extremely mild... There is no reason to panic..."

No reason to panic.

I turn on the neighbour's TV and scan the major news stations of the planet earth.

A full scale panic inducement operation is underway on every channel.

Of course it is.