Paperjam

If I Ran Hell, Part One

Rant // Jim // 18th November 2006

If I ran hell (and depending on who you talk to, it is only a matter of time) I would definitely make a few changes. If Dante is to be believed you can get in for pretty much anything. Even the non-baptised have to spend a few millennium in purgatory. If you’ve ever knocked one out, got upset in a traffic jam or sworn (perhaps even sneezed) near a church then it is unpleasant, fiery damnation for you. Oh yes.

This lax door policy has to stop, hell should be reserved for those that really deserve it, the absolute lowest of the low. Of course the worse they are, the deeper they go.

Circle 1: Murderers, Rapists, Paedophiles and Daily Mail Readers

Why? You’ve got to sort out all the really, really unpleasant elements of society “early doors”, as Ron Atkinson might say, if he wasn’t languishing somewhere further down.

The Punishment: The whole eternal pain and suffering angle while also being forced to appear on an endless episode of Tricia so that they can be boo’d at by demonic skeleton women with huge arses in fiery tracksuits.

Circle 2: Landlords, property speculators, mortgage advisors

Why? If one more person tells me that I “should really get on the property ladder” I am going to spew blood. The self-serving industry surrounding housing has falsely inflated prices to such a degree that if I actually wanted to buy and live in a house or flat I have few options beyond:

- Getting a massive mortgage that I can’t really afford and then worrying about it during every waking moment.
- Buy the cheapest place that that I can find, probably some disused toilet with half a soggy mattress in it for a couple of hundred grand.
- Moving to Stoke-on-Trent, not doing that again.
- Going on the game while dealing smack in order to make ends meet, not doing that again either.
- Combing my hair, putting a shirt on and marrying some 96 year-old rich baroness, hoping that the old girl snuffs it and I cop the cash before the moment where she pops out the false teeth and the issue of “getting jiggy” arises.

The whole thing is, of course, a massive con designed to make the rich richer and the rest of us even more financially indebted to them. The really unpleasant aspect is the way that, what used to be known as, the middle classes have been dragged into propping up the whole thing by having all manner of smug, aspirational, “lets flog houses for more than they are worth” programmes on TV.

The Punishment: All made to live in tiny, shitty, smelly bedsits that they can’t afford for the rest of eternity. Once a month a huge fiery demon in the form of Sarah Beeny off Property Ladder comes round to collect their rent by beating them relentlessly around the head with a “For Sale” sign and heartlessly criticising their choice of furniture and décor until they cry bitter, bitter tears.

Circle 3: People who go on The Apprentice

Why? Often I wish I was a touch more confident. Maybe then I’d have the nerve to actually ask out really nice women, apply for some well-paid and amazingly interesting jobs, get over my fear of air travel and go skinny-dipping in the River Leam (well maybe not the last one).

However, as I believe the great wit Oscar Wilde once wrote in one of his celebrated plays,

“…as I told the vicar at the last church meeting, an excess of self-confidence, while useful for getting ahead in life, unfortunately does tend to make one act like a total cunt, my dear boy. Would you please pass the scones?”.

The contestants who go on, or even apply to go on The Apprentice are absolute, conclusive proof of this.

So if a lack of confidence is going to confine me to the continued lifestyle of a reclusive, lonely, shut-in then get Joy Division on the stereo and paint my bedroom black. Cos I reckon that is preferable to any of the following:
- Being asked to sell lifejackets to people who are actually drowning at the time, yet somehow fucking it up and making a loss because your giant ego means that you wouldn’t back down when deciding on what colour to make the sign reading “Lifejackets £10”.
- Acting like selling your entire family to Dr. Gunther von Hagens, for his new Channel 4 programme entitled “Dr. Gunther dissects people while they are still alive”, in order to make a net profit of £2.60 for Sir Alan is really important and absolutely the right thing to do.
- Banging on about how working for some gruff cockney wide boy dwarf with the personality of a constipated bouncer would be “like, the most amazing opportunity, really… once in a lifetime stuff.”
- Thinking that having a posh watch, flash car and fancy threads is going to hide the fact that you don’t actually have any real friends or any interests in life beyond acquiring money and acting like a spoilt brat all the time.
- Mercilessly slagging off your rivals, to get even the mildest advantage. Then crying and hugging them when they get the boot, turning back to slagging them even more once they are in the taxi.

The Punishment: All put into a large room and made to argue as to which one of them should be horribly impaled on flaming tridents. As the argument reaches a crescendo of bratty whining and backstabbing unpleasantness, a spectral Sir Alan Sugar appears and shouts “Shut it. You’re all fired. Haaa haaa haaa haaa”. As he laughs evilly, every single one of them is horribly impaled on fiery tridents. And so on. You get the idea.

Circle 4: Marketing and advertising

Why? Bill Hicks once told an audience “By the way, if anyone here works in marketing or advertising – Kill yourselves”, he was only half-joking, or maybe not joking at all. Hicks died in 1994, just think how much more evil and pernicious advertising has become since then.

While already fairly cynical towards the marketing industry, my level of loathing stepped up a notch or two the other year when watching disturbing documentary, The Corporation. The bit in question involved Lucy Hughes, Vice President of some marketing organisation, who calmly outlined the deliberate way in which she helped companies market to children in such a way to make them nag their parents, creating guilt in order to shift more products. As if that wasn’t bad enough she then started banging on about the importance of exposing young kids to the right sort of brainwashing so that they will be good obedient consumers when they grow up.

This wasn’t the really evil bit though.

The really evil bit was the smug self-satisfied look on her face as she outlined this all, using the sort of bland corporate language and gestures that we usually get off Tony Blair. Shudder.

Couple this sort of practical stuff to the more shadowy aims of big business to create a philosophy of futility where people are increasingly insular and obsessed with the superficial (ie buying new things that they don’t actually need, but they feel that they want). It’s not pleasant is it?

In fact things are so bad that even boy/man indie guitar hero Graham Coxon’s second last album (Happiness in Magazines) was in part about the fake image of life we are being presented the whole time and how we seem to try to live up to it by buying new jeans.

So, if even Graham is getting upset, we need to sort things out, quick send the lot of them to circle 4.

The Punishment: Locked in a room with:
- A TV that can’t be turned off and shows nothing except those adverts that involve Michael Winner saying “Calm down, dear”.
- A telephone that rings at the precise moment you are just settling down to have a shit, after waddling to it with your pants round your ankles, you answer it to discover a pre-recorded voice asking you if you would like to switch electricity supplier.
- A computer that only sends you e-mails asking if you would like a bigger penis and showers the screen with a million pop-up adverts for low rate loans every time you click the mouse.
- A bookshelf consisting of nothing but local “Advertiser” newspapers where every advert is for a sale at the local lawnmower shop.

Circle 5: Holocaust deniers, NRA members, suicide bombers, BNP Councillors, UKIP, Islamic Jihad, generic bigots and racists etc etc etc.

Why? Because one of the most disturbing realisations in life is that the parties on either extreme of any age-old political, racial, religious or ideological conflict are all really as bad as each other. Carrying on the fight itself becomes the point, not the supposed reason for winning it. An extension of this is the use of fear and paranoia resulting from such conflicts as a tool for the rich and powerful to help keep the rest of us doing as we are told.

So bad news all round really. Best shove the lot of them in circle 5 and let the rest of us get on with moaning about things that actually deserve our hatred such as hangovers, fake nostalgia programmes on BBC2 and Monday mornings.

The Punishment: All forced to watch Adam Curtis’ The Power of Nightmares on an endless loop.