Bully for you. Bauer. Gscene magazine. January 2015

Bully for you       Gscene Magazine.       January 2015

So, for the first time in years, I’ve decided to stay on-topic. 

Homophobic bullying is everywhere in the press and something we’ve been exposed to at some point or other. Thank god we can seek solace with our own community. But what happens (young and old) when someone is singled out within their own group, banned ostracized, shat on, lied to and ridiculed? Do you fight back in that spirit of queer perseverance we’ve been used to all these years? Do you feel stronger in a mass of queer radicals having spent a life on the ‘outside’ of so-called normalcy?

So, what exactly is happening when people judge, ridicule and despise from within the LGBTI community? (Hang on Queer people don’t do that, do they - with their history of all things oppressive?) When you witness those poor, depressed and suicidal Queer teens out there just spare a thought to the fact that their parents and wider society only make up a portion of the misery – their gay peer group makes up the rest. And since this will be the loving community of their future -  it will continue to do so forever. 

A life of sexual freedom on the gay scene will also encompass all the judgment, rejection and ridicule that exists for everyone else but on the gay circuit it’s more amplified, unmodified, self-regulated, bitchy and evil. And this fellow-hate goes on well into old age - should you identify with the scene for that long. That’s why people chose to duck and dive into it. How can it be this safe stronghold when the very yard-posts of being LGBTIQ on the scene are regulated by such hierarchical, narcissistic power freaks? But I have all these friends telling me I’m godlike???

Exactly why does bullying still go on in most aspects of the gay scene? At any age? At any time? I know, it goes on with straight people too, but they are not governed by the same banana republic autonomy that the gayers are. We may have been sold this as a freedom but it’s really just some plutocratic, gay industrial model. 

If people are, say, claiming homophobic bullying in the workplace, they cannot do the same from within their own community because it’s not regulated in the same manner. Straight society is terrified to police this (what they see as a white) minority, thus leaving us with the monstrous elders representing the likes of me. Me? The poster boy has now shifted from the likes of Tatchell to Massow (a political 180) in the time it takes to down a Lambrini Martini.

Anyway, count me out. No more sex shall I have as a definition of my sexuality - rather than be labeled as this LGBTI or whatever they are now. Part of the gay bullying politic today is that you just have to put up with the endless cliques and aging refusnics that all the Botox and fillers in the world can no longer support.

It’s time to seek cover again – it is now the time to become un-gay 

These are the ones getting their own back for being bullied at school by becoming the very same within their own middle-aged classrooms. Not forgetting that judgment and so-called ‘support’ can be just as bullying. And the now gay community via the clothes, drugs, music, alcohol, staying power, private club nights, venues, surgery, fast tanning, loft conversions, new bathrooms and culture does the exact same by raping the cash out of the young and newly out. But not in a powerful way against the constraining forces of that nasty heteronorm, but to themselves and each other in an endless game of narcissism and one uppersonship - while the rest of the world looks on, mystified at this ‘Gay’ model. The police, the law courts, the people who sleep with their own sex and others, the media, the world all look on horrified at the maquette of the supposed homosexual. So solipsistic, they are unable to see that their fabulousness is a pastiche, as they hold up the vaselined mirror of self-importance, blending away every edge and line into a mass of consumerism. This isn’t even the opposite of gay. There is no opposite of gay. In fact, there is no gay anymore - just this ersatz industrial model slowly panting for breath. 

Homophobia is over because we’ve all been nicely included into this comfy fiscal society. Financial bullying - the labels and the postcodes – the affluent, plutocratic autonomy against the rest of the people, is the typical hubris of a peacock republic about to crash. And those golden boys will drag all the good folk down with them. 

It’s time to seek cover again – it is now the time to become un-gay. Away from the down-your-throat gays who still believe that their brand of fabulousness isn’t without tragedy. That they believe themselves to have fought for their own right to be facile, that they have won the contest to live how they think they should, whist setting a wobbly demarcation for everybody else. One of media consumerism, shitting on the poorer people, irrespective of sexuality or gender. All in the name of fabulousness.

And here comes the sticky third prong of this dialectic - the likes of moi own self, replacing all that gay nonsense with the honor of being a complete outsider from it. Just like I was when I was growing up gay - scary - but feeling individual, creative and bloody marvelous in my own right, thank you Mary. Only, today the oppressors are no longer the Thatcher Government, James Anderton or AIDS but all those vile uber-class gays and their haute media consumptions masked as collective culture.

I just don’t want to be a part of any gay scene that would include me as a gayer. 

I loved you all.

How I murdered Matthew Shepard. Bauer. Gscene Magazine. December 2014

How I murdered Matthew Shepard

Here I am reading about the furor surrounding the ‘investigative journalist, TV producer and authority figure’, Stephen Jimenez, who has spent ten years interviewing people about the crucifixion of 21 year old Matthew Shepard. Spending all that time seemingly trying to prove that it even though Matthew was gay, he was not killed because of it.

Some coincidence, because last week, two young men - obviously gay because they were singing songs from Wicked on the back of a Manchester tram - were followed by fifteen thugs and beaten to a pulp. Had they been singing football songs they may have been spared - show tunes apparently a good gay reason to beat the crap out of someone. This follows a litany of supposed liberal-left bashing beginning with my broadcasting associate, Bill Maher. Gosh, the US neo-communists and UK terrafeminists are so frigging tetchy.

Matthew Shepard - who’s memory Obama signed the 2009 Matthew Shepard anti-hate Act for; Matthew Shepard whose legacy is about hate crime irrespective of gender; Matthew Shepard, who up until the recent publication of Stephen Jimenez’s, The Book of Matt: Hidden Truths about the Murder of Matthew Shepard, was the poster boy for homo hatred, having been both gay and crucified. This same book ‘uncovered’ that one of his executors was gay and there was, shock, drugs involved on all sides. (See how evil these male homos really are? Drugs!) That Matthew Shepard was from an affluent family, (he had it so good - what’s he doing sucking dodgy chode?) He was apparently gang raped by men in Morocco (not a potential for all gay men by virtue of the way some of us have sex?). And the beat goes on…

Coinky-dinky, this week I’m off to see Party Monster and the new documentary which highlights the life and the release from prison of gay male gay murderer Michael Alig, the original club kid, who killed his lover and drug dealer Angel Melendez in 1996. A ketamine death. A gay, male, sex drug, death. Tut tut.

But maybe it’s our lives as outsiders that are to blame - and I stand alongside my gay, male, murdering brothers here. Don’t forget that everyone’s equal in the sauna – so, whether Matthew Shepard was rich or whether he courted dangerous gay men or whether he took drugs is therefore not in question. It’s moot.

Just maybe it’s because he grew up gay, not male, that made him buy all the drugs in the first place and hang out with the degenerate low-lifers - and those degenerates with him. Perhaps, just perhaps, he had a crap life irrespective of the privilege - because he was gay. Maybe, it was his life as a gay man that lead to his murder by another gay man. Maybe it was Matthew’s closet life in Saudi and the lonely journey many gay men seem to have that lead to his execution. Because this is what both Matthew Shepard and Angel Melendez actually represent whether they had been executed by their assailants or by Aileen Wuornos (as tricks), Myra Hindley (as children) Karla Homolka (“It was my husband who killed my sister”) Rosemary West (“It was all my husband’s doing”) Mary Bell (But I’m still a child myself) Ruth Ellis (he deserved to die because he didn’t love me). Margaret Thatcher (Murderer of hope, perfectly placed to add more women to her cabinet…)

The mystery remains. Can women and homosexual men be as cruel and evil as heterosexual homophobic racist misogynists? Interesting? You decide. You can see with all the evidence above that we’re all somehow culpable…

I’m both Matthew and his murderer. Live with it.

Perhaps, just perhaps, given the permanent lack of acceptance of male homosexuality, Matthews death was the result of enduring drug use? Tsk - of course it was. Drugs are and have been a way of coping with the shackles of life sometimes before you even get a chance to live it. Matthew had that crucifix on his back the moment he knew he was gay. To reduce this tragedy into gender blame is an execution in itself.

This book and subsequent ‘free’ comment, states a plethora of terrible accusations that so many of my fellow gay travellers live with and refuse to deny. First that Gay men take significant sexual risks – yes to that. It states that Matthew was HIV+ at the time of his death. (Is this really still used as a hate salvo about gay men’s sexual practice?) OK, so he was a drug fuelled, disparate, HiFIve queer who courted danger. Yes, but there was apparently a shipment of Crystal Meth that the murderers wanted to steal from Matthew. Hang on, so, a drug fuelled, 21 year old, desperate HIV+, drug dealer supporting his habit? I’m sorry, this sounds like a place that so many of my gay brothers are, or have been in, at some point. This goes with the very fabric of many gay mens lives. Apparently, according to Jimenez, “This does not make the perfect poster boy for the gay-rights movement.” Oh, I think it does, Stevie.

All of this is the apparently justifiable reason why Matthew died. Because of his life as a gay man. Because of the trajectory so many gay men take during their sometimes shitty time on this planet. The price of being removed from the male and female heteronorm.

These lives (my life) according to some haters - both male and female, are good enough reason not to support advocating services for the protection of young gay men. Like not giving money to Band Aid because you’ve just found out that not every child in Africa is starving. Or perhaps that every recently dead Palestinian baby is, by definition, a dead jihadist.

I’m both Matthew and his murderer. Live with it.

www.matthewshepard.org/

PUBLISHED ARTICLE

How Downton Abbey shat on Social Reform. Bauer. Gscene magazine. November. 2014

Middle class Downtime  

I’ve managed to avoid most of that vile revisionist nonsense known as Downton Abbey. I mean – it isn’t even a proper Abbey and not really a stately home either. It’s not even a Television series - it’s been labeled as a soap with no hope. What it really is, is an exercise in lemon scented class driven romanticism, centered around the well- heeled Etonian canon-fodder stompers somewhere between World War One and the Abdication.

The carefully chosen narratives romanticize the working class as never before - I’m thinking Her Benny on diazepam here. Inadvertently, the writers remind us of the halcyon times when those awful suburbs hadn’t yet been invented – the ones that housed the gauche middle classes and their misplaced social views. Hurrah for the then halcyon period of English drama before social reform stole the hearts and drives of the subservient working class. Poor people dying and suffering had BIG currency up to this point - go read some Dickens - the finest literature before that awful Marxist ideology crept in …

Back then, the arrogant rich thought that they would never topple. The poor scumbags (my ancestors) had no intention of going anyplace in the foreseeable future - they’d been wedged up that same chimney of abject poverty since time began. Hell, the rich and the poor ‘got along’ back then according to all the revisionism - and ‘everyone knew their place’. A mythical marriage made in history.

But the invention of the middle class also gave way to a completely stand-alone brand of bitterness. They were desperate to be caring towards the poor and socially mobile, when all the time they knew that they could not be both. Of course they claimed they were Fabians and Socialists and the rest, but they would have loved to have a go on a real crown. Because the middle classes could not mobilise themselves upwards (they would have to marry into the aristocracy) they assisted the poor to spite the rich. They did this by rushing social reform through the house right under the noses of the Edwardian Lords who were still smarting from the prolapsed empire as it gradually slipped away. 

Today there is a feeling that the middle classes themselves are ebbing away. All those values and three story terraces on nicer streets are finally falling into disrepair. They've all over-extended themselves, and now all those tenured lectureships and socialworking posts are being offered to part timers who’ll do it up the back alley for a Mars bar and zilch pension rights.  In a way I’ll be so glad when they are once again extinct and the poor can just live out our Downton Abbey avatars and doff our caps at the squire all over again.

Downdraws Abbey skillfully reminds us that we (the born poor) used to know our place in the world. And we were once damn grateful to be around those baronial types in their palaces. Although, occasionally, a pikey would be asked for one’s opinion, but only when it could be used as some sort of reference tool or barometer for something grander, something to be considered then tossed aside as the feeling arose.

I wish the recently departed Debbo’ Mitford-Devonshire would have figured in the stream of things.  I would have loved to see Downton Abbey full of English Fascists and Blackshirts - taking high tea with Dowager countess of Grantham. With Grantham later to become Margaret Thatcher’s stomping ground. (nice heads-up there, Downton.) 

Of course today, Downton Abbey the building, would be an international business centre populated by the very ancestors of the same industrial capitalists - but this time as paying guests. It is to this class that the then middle classes migrated. A place where an economic slump has the same ring as losing a colony. Leaving only - yes the lower and the upper classes. With the monarch on the top of the pile and everyone below cow-towing upwards with their values as buffers of social consciousness, never again will they promise the poor things like education, health care; and culture.
 
Of course, the other side of the pond LOVES Downton. America responds to the feeling of something that is forbidden within a capitalist society. The feeling of entitlement and history they never had until they threw out the British. It’s a good way to imagine the whole race thing away for white American precolonialists. But they seem to love the curtseying and preening and references to the monarch. Perhaps they realise that within Downton, that their nation would soon take over the new world order and, for a while, kill off the arrogance of royal entitlement - only to reapply it on its own terms later in the century with government ‘agencies’.

The romanticism of this Edwardian system knows no bounds. Don’t forget, it was also a time when all those Harrovian/Sandhurstian/chinless nincompoops went over to Northern France - as clueless as everyone else as to what the First World War actually entailed. Once there, they endlessly sent lines of regional Tommies over the trench wall because they knew of nothing else to do. Had they been better prepared for a modern war, these chaps would have come up with a more effective way of protecting themselves and their class – something they are adept at only with the right preparation.

 Published version HERE

The Invention of Sanity, Bauer, October 2014

The Invention of Sanity 

Robin Williams’s passing has affected everyone within our ‘sane’ society. As a result, maybe those Victorian definitions of sanity really need to be re-questioned - after all the Victorians invented ‘sanity’. I consider myself to be bonkers, but I know that’s only measured by what the rest of the world sees as sane. And let’s face it Homosexuality was still considered a mental illness until the 1970’s – after that date, I have no excuse.

“Williams had everything and he was just so… funny... but I suppose depression is an unknown disease….” 

Roll on the great morality debate as the world continues to pathologize Williams’s mental state. This misunderstanding tells us more about the ignorance surrounding issues of ‘other’ mental states than a failure to recognize them within ourselves. Hence my refusal to personally cite “mental”, illness, disease or health.

Cocaine rots the brain and destroys the nervous system. Not the best way to die, but who cares when you’re approaching hypernormality? Let’s collectively condemn the evil users right now for screwing up the world. Phew, doesn’t that make you feel saner already?

But apparently this isn’t a legal or moral issue, so we’re still left with the questions of what ‘mental illness’ actually is.

Here’s the easiest scenario; Robin Williams had fallen off the wagon after 30 years sober. He didn’t want to go through that withdrawal again so he made the choice to die instead. A personal choice that he couldn’t disclose. And to fail is a felony.

Thirty years earlier he would have also been arrested for having a toot backstage to get him beyond the curtain where, after the first laugh, he would have been flying on adrenalin.

Brain frying drugs and criminality aside - lets go back even further. The chances are that Robin Williams was something of a show-off at school - making everyone laugh as a mini version of the buffoon he eventually became.

Today they call it ADHD or something or other but either way we were (and still are) forced to change. The biggest change happened when it became illegal for teachers to beat the crap out of kids, thus permitting the drug companies to step in and dish out amphetamines to hyperactive children like M&M’s.

My generation never had that that amount of Pharma intervention, so many self-medicated themselves into the world of sanity with rapid cyclicals – speed rather than weed. Of course it would have been easier to let everyone just be, (suggesting that we were sane to begin with) and to let us live our lives creatively while supporting the lows and the highs - the only real De facto currency of the creative. 

A raft of media personalities have spoken publically about their ‘mental health’ and bipolarity - Stephen Fry and his university mate Tony Slattery to name but a few. And I’m not throwing in all things gay here but we also have to include the ‘close to genius’ Alexander (Lee) McQueen into the same mix.

Stephen Fry has made television programmes about his bipolarity, interviewing the likes of Robbie Williams – someone else on the hit list – and someone else who has taken grandiose quantities of that evil cocaine stuff. But it’s not fair to say that they were merely ‘addicts’, or that they ‘repented’ via recovery - that’s just another Victorian package. And some say they deserve such a crash for being rich, successful and having more money than sense. But contrition aside, nobody still admits to ‘using’ as a product of their own self-regulated boyhood.

...nobody still admits to ‘using’ as a product of their own self-regulated boyhood...

Lee McQueen’s passing would not have been a knee jerk decision. Perhaps, like Robin Williams, he had been planning that departure for most of his adult life – perhaps also to be delivered from the isolation and pain of the imposter genius. A wandering child waiting in order to avoid the consequences of his actions on the one person he loved most, the protector who understood him as a child and even more so as an adult. It’s no coincidence that within a week of his mother’s passing Lee McQueen was also dead - the genius voided.

Let’s take Robin Williams, McQueen and everyone else I’ve mentioned back to kindergarten and watch them through the window unobserved. Do they look like normal kids? You bet your sweet ass they don’t. They look and act like kids that knew there were no barriers. Kids who believed they could do anything.

But not long afterwards, these naughty kids began to have their sanity questioned. As usual, because they knew them best, the parents fail to see anything wrong with their child and so defensively lock horns with the authorities - while maintaining a private discourse of support with their child.   
Nevertheless, in the big world the child begins to interpret their own creative behavior as disruptive and so begins a process of self-regulation to fit in with the ‘normal.’  Their lost identities now appearing before them as a self-neglect – as a lie to the self. It’s easy to jump forward to 2014 and observe the hugely wealthy, much loved comic genius Robin Williams feeling as if he’s been dying from the same neglect.

The ‘loony bin’, as a system of ordering the sane, creative or disruptive into boxes is no more. Maybe we should also abolish the Victorian labels and judgments surrounding ‘addicts’ while we're at it.  Or, for that matter, Pharmaceutical decisions by interventionists whose only real motor is a big payday.

A dressing down. Gscene Magazine August 2014

The ongoing end of privacy

The bastard brother of the ‘end of privacy’ (August 2013 article) seems to have become the new age of the 15-second celebrity. Everyone will be now be famous for as long as it takes to create a vine or write a response comment in a ‘Comments are free’ section of a national blather-reel. I mean, this is the breeding ground of dissent is it not? But while everyone purges their rhetoric away online, White Papers regarding privacy and corporate surveillance and tracking are slipping through parliament unnoticed. Not the first time. Thatcher did it with the Falklands war, just as Reagan followed with Grenada. Then they started their reelection campaigns to tally in with the assured victories. But as we post, while we all think that the readership are taking note of our well-crafted often hilarious comments and, while thinking that we’re contributing to a greater debate; ‘meta laws’ keep rolling on in the background.

Do you feel better now that you’ve vented in your favorite paper? Good. Well, you might as well treat it as therapy because unfortunately nobody is listening. Perhaps what your outpouring is actually doing, is keeping you away from any real engagement in the issues you care so deeply about. For example, across the spectrum of the main US recent news, and although the imagery of the occurrences in Gaza were exploited endlessly, they somehow failed to show the extent of the protests taking place around the world. This could mean that you are more likely to post a comment on a quasi-liberal digi-broadsheet than participate in any physical show of unity. Ah, well. Looks like another day I can stay at home on my own and view it all through the telescreen -yet still have my say. And be hilarious.

It’s amazing the catharsis we feel by just pressing the return key and heading for a celebratory cup of Horlicks.

Here’s an example of a permitted comment:

In a study of 397 gay, lesbian and bisexual men and women they discovered that problematic alcohol and substance use were positively related to shame and internalised heterosexism. There are probably other determinants of harmful use of alcohol and other drugs, but I'm guessing shame, poor self-esteem and lack of confidence play a significant part.

This is linked to an academic journal, which you will never read to check the data. This was probably written by the postee under a pseudonym and seen as a way to disseminate their own research. This example no doubt relies on cross sections of a banging gay bar culture in a major city, a random sample of which does not equate to gay culture unless all of ‘gay culture’ lives in the same gay bar.

But perhaps the worst crime from a government to its people is when they piggy-back terrorist acts in order to set an extreme agenda on the over-compensation of surveillance.  It is here that they cite that, all of us – yes, even that old lady in the care home - could be potential terrorists. Then as happens, every liberty is stripped and we are humiliated into these new ‘protective’ laws. 

Then, as happens, every liberty is stripped and we are ‘humiliated’ into these new ‘protective’ laws.

Only last month, at an international airport, I stood behind a woman accompanied by her twelve-year-old daughter. The girl was in tears as we waited in line at the newly installed full-body scanner. When it was her turn, the girl held up the line and the security guards grew restless, the mother lost her cool and dragged the now wailing girl up the steps to the scanner. The scene was quite odd. As the girl stood cruciform behind the Perspex shield she dropped her head in shame. Not only the ‘secret’ room who scanned her digitally naked body but the airport staff and customers did the same to the clothed version on the pedestal before them. After a few seconds she crept down from the booth, sobbing, to collect her iPod and the too-old for her holiday shoes from the plastic tray - with the weight of a hundred eyes upon her.  

But we have to concede, since there have apparently been jihadi much younger than this girl, I’m sure everybody felt a little more secure on the flight.

Here’s another post that proves my point:

…Any anti Surveillance law will be upheld by royal prerogative (as the dispossession of the Chagos islanders was). The stakeholders in the status quo need a Stasi to mitigate the risks of networked democracy; in the age when protests can go viral, it's vital that the security services are able to disperse protest movements and detect potential troublemakers before they can cause trouble and have the means to bring very precise amounts of force to bear against them as soon as they start doing something; hence mass surveillance.

Right track, wrong argument. The real issue here is that of Chagossian diaspora and their apparent treatment by the Queen. Nevertheless, since this person is only online packaging his real gripe into a collective dolly mixture of vent and anger, people still are still agreeing - tick the like box, they just forget it as a confirmation of their own views. And the postee has his 15 second fix of acceptance. 

As the world heats up, so do the unleashing of newer surveillance laws. France, home of Foucauldian Panopticism is objecting strongly as are many European countries - but not Britain and the US. They are passing legislation by stealth while we’re all Wikipedi-ing, WTF the Chagos Islanders actually were.

There, it's already midnight and we’ve all missed the protest.

A goodnight story for humanity. Gscene Magazine, August 2014. Charlie Bauer Phd

A Goodnight Story for Humanity

Long ago, in a land far away there was a young prince (James Murdoch) who was soon to be given his old fathers kingdom. But first there was a task he needed to do to prove himself worthy. He had to take a journey to a far away land and bring back the world’s biggest diamond (BBC) for the kings treasure chest. This huge diamond had been protected fiercely by the people of the land. They all knew - because of an old spell - that if it were ever taken away, they would all lose their voices and never be able to speak to one another again. 

So, the prince decided that he would go to the country peacefully and try to convince the people (MacTaggart lecture, 2009) that the diamond was too big and that they’d all be better off without it. The people, who believed anything a prince would ever tell them, thought long and hard. Maybe he had a point. They were, after all, paying taxes to keep the diamond in its glass case on a hill by the ocean. And even if they wanted to see it, it would cost them more than 2 shillings (License fee). But the prince deceived the people because he knew that once the king had the diamond he then owned all of the diamonds in the world. 

However, in the woods lived a bunch of merry men (The Guardian) who could see the prince’s cunning plan. They decided to let the people know that the prince was evil and that his father’s court did very bad things to poor people’s children (Milly Dowler’s voice mail). If there was anything the people didn’t like, it was if someone stole their secrets or if children were harmed in any way. Even local gossip could drive the people to seek revenge on innocent people (NOTW name and shame campaign: 2000). 

The merry men told the people that the king had a wizard (Andy Coulson) who could magically capture the people’s secrets (phone hacking) and when they were told this they turned their backs on the King and wouldn’t let him near their diamond. They captured the king’s princess (Rebekah Brooks) and threatened to banish all of his friends from the land. 

Defeated, the prince returned to his father’s kingdom. The king was very angry because the prince had not only failed in all his efforts to capture the diamond but he also had the princess thrown into jail. The prince was shamed and went to the dungeon to seek solace with his dukes. He would never get his fathers crown and felt he was a bad prince.
Later, around the campfire, one of the dukes said he remembered that there was someone who guarded the diamond who hated children (Jimmy Saville). Maybe if they could tell the people, they wouldn’t like the diamond anymore. 

The prince laughed heartily, for he knew that this news would greatly please the king. So, from his castle far away, (Australia) the prince began to gather all of the dukes information together and let all the people know about the evil guard. As he did this, other people told him there were even more guards who hated children. And because the prince was very rich (because he was, after all, a prince) he bought up all the secrets in the land. Eventually, the prince convinced the king that the princess would never be free unless he himself went to save her. The King agreed, finally glad that his son was in command of his own fortitude. 

Eventually, one by one, all of the guards of the diamond were unveiled as children haters - the thing that the people would never forgive. So, as the prince had prophesized, the people began to hate their diamond and even though it was not the diamonds fault because diamonds cannot talk - they turned their backs on it. 

On the day that the princess was going to be put to death by a poisonous snake, the prince rode into town with his dukes. He gave the judge a beautiful new robe and told both him and the poor people who would decide the princess’s fate, that the real enemy was the diamond. Then he gave them all the parchments that his dukes had given him and they were finally convinced.

When the princess’s life was spared, the prince sent word to his father that he had conquered the diamond, saved the princess and killed the guards all in one day.
And the people rejoiced because all the evil guards had gone and all of the children could finally live in peace again.
And the merry men, defeated, went back into the woods in shame because they’d been let down by the people they’d only wanted to help. They knew that if only they could afford to buy the judge a new robe they would never have been beaten by the prince. 

And, for the first time in a hundred and one years, the diamond grew dim and the king let it roll into the ocean.
‘But father, I thought the diamond was everything you’ve ever wanted?’ The Prince said.
‘No. That diamond was worthless to me all along,’ the king replied, ‘I can die happy now that you have learnt the value of things, my son - for that was your quest’. And the prince knelt and the king placed his crown (News International) onto his head. 

It came to pass that the king never wanted the diamond for his treasure chest after all; he just wanted all the people to follow him. And even though the people lost their voices and were unable to speak to one another again, they all lived happily ever after. 

Print version

KPFK. Hollywood. 2014