Riding With The Retards

Putting the excellent 1980s band to one side for a moment, there are no two words that strike fear into my heart quite like "General Public".

Hop on a bus, subway or train and within five minutes you'll truly appreciate what a slow process evolution is. The moron gene that seems to be carried by so many of our species shows no sign of mutating in a hurry - and for the misguided souls among us who believe in Intelligent Design, I challenge you to hop on the M15 bus with me on a Saturday and show me the intelligence.

I used to be a socialist many years ago - I was the guy marching for students/workers/single mothers/academics/litter pickers rights and it was something I believed passionately in. But then the crisis of confidence started.

You see the more people I encountered, the more convinced I became that humans simply haven't evolved enough to make socialism work. The idea is great and I desperately wanted to believe in it. But the General Public continued to give me a never ending stream of reasons to question the validity of the socialist dream that seemed to make so much sense in the text books.

Today's political kick in the radicals came on the Donwtown 6 train. It had been raining outside and as a result the subway was busy - standing room only and Italian tourist's elbow in the testicles busy.

As our burgeoning human cattle train left 59th street, the legend pictured above decided to pull his crappy Palm Treo from his bag and proceed to play Gangster Rap through the phone's speaker. This continued all the way down to 28th street.

I don't really understand what the mind-set is here, but it doesn't take an advanced degree in social dynamics to appreciate that a crowded subway car probably has no interest in listening to your iTunes library, especially through a tinny, piece of shit cell phone.

So if Fat Boy Dim can't appreciate this little point, I don't have very much incentive to re-distribute any of my wealth (my "wealth" consists of a guitar and a Ronco Showtime Rotisserie) or sip from a shared cup of solidarity.

The old cliche is that the older you get, the more conservative you get. On reflection, I think that's simply because the older you get, the more people you encounter. And the more people you encounter, the more you find yourself wishing Bird Flu would finally make that final species jump.

So in order for socialism to really work, we need to pick somewhere that's going to be free from the destructive drip drip effect of human encounters.

The People's Republic of Antarctica. Now that has a nice ring to it.