Some thoughts about monsters, antifa and the magical power of a wiggled finger.

Posted by Pointman on September 16, 2017 · 7 Comments 

Unlike what we always tell our children, there actually are real monsters in the world, and they come in many shapes and forms. Increasingly, they don’t live under a child’s bed or hiding behind that ajar door of their bedroom closet just waiting to leap out at you unless you keep a wary eye out for them, but bask impudently in broad daylight, grinning at our stupidity like the pointy-eared bastards that they actually are.

Some are people and some are ideas and some are momentarily fashionable political vogues, but in my experience, they only come in two basic kinds, both of which come down to causality. The first is the worst. They’re basically evil people who are very good at cloaking themselves in convincing simulcra of bland and kindly normality.

You didn’t create them, you’d nothing to do with their coming into existence, but once you recognise them for the covert predators that they truly are, it’s your duty to expose them, to reveal them to the world at large as a warning, but in extreme cases to make an end of them to prevent the hurt they’ll surely go on to do. As I said, they’re not always individuals; sometimes they’re just ideas or malevolence invariably cloaked in the Sunday best clothes of moral superiority.

The learned by heart Catholic catechism of my early childhood described them well in its brutally simple form of questions and answers that you would be tested on by the bishop as you made your first communion. What is evil? Evil is a delight in cruelty. If you’ve ever seen deep into the heart of evil at work, you’ll know just how true that simple definition is.

I’m by no means a perfect man – who is? But even as a man who despaired of any sort of organised religion, but still retains a vague hankering after some form of redemption, I long ago drew some ethical, formerly known as moral guidelines around what I was prepared to do in extremis. As Eric Blair said, democracy is only preserved by the men who man the battlements around it against the barbarians at the gates and who are prepared to do the necessary violence required to maintain it while decadence flowers unpruned behind the backs of that hard sacrifice.

At some point, you are obliged to have that reluctant conversation with your children so they can be safeguarded against those they trust when you’re not around. There are a number of real monsters in the world. I feel that too many people have weaseled out of that conversation and we’re seeing the result of it in the growth of monsters previous generations long ago booted into the long grass.

The other type of monster is the one you create yourself. To my way of thinking, your involvement in its creation falls into one of three categories. The most basic is you made it because deep inside yourself, there is more than a bit of monster in you. At some point you have to make the decision to either let that monster off the leash or use that self-disgusted understanding of your own nature to hunt down monsters of a similar ilk.

As any cop will tell you, the line between a great copper and a criminal’s criminal is a finely drawn one. In whatever hell you’re in, there’s always a pecking order.

The second, and it is the majority of cases, is that you allowed its exponential growth in a Petrie dish of hate without ever once expressing your distaste of it, never mind actively doing something to fight it. It was that sort of don’t get involved disinterest that created monsters like the Nazi party.

The third is that you deliberately encouraged its growth for your own nefarious reasons by praising it however faintly or by refusing to condemn it and its excesses. The growth of the antifa movement in America is the perfect example of it. The mayors of various cities across America deliberately instructed their local police not to enforce the law when it came to antifa and their excesses.

Whether you like Trump or not, allowing hooligans to momentarily own the streets for no other reason than they hate him too is a bad idea. Telling cops to stand down is an even worse one. There isn’t a single man jack of them who doesn’t know from experience where that’ll lead but the swampers in Washington and some liberal mayors need a killing or two to serve their political ends.

The supposed Republican leader of the house springs to mind at this point, but there are others playing that doubtful game of running all sides against the middle and assuming they’ll somehow come out on top after all the smoke of battle between everyone else has cleared. Newsflash – nobody ever seized the throne by idly standing by on the sidelines of a battle and killing the survivors.

What has become apparent to even the politically desensitised idiots inside the Washington beltway is that the sight of some masked antifa hero pouring the contents of a can of coca cola containing a load of carefully hoarded urine over the head of an elderly crippled veteran in a wheelchair to the great applause from his similarly masked mates is not going down well with the election winning meat sandwiched between the beautiful people of the west coast and the oh so smart cuties on the eastern one.

It really isn’t. Quite the reverse actually.

There’s not a cop out there who doesn’t know that passing a simple city ordinance of no masks allowed at any demonstration would instantly kill antifa off, but too many people up there in city hall are too heavily invested in politics rather than policing. And as every cop out there will also tell you, if they’re not allowed to enforce the law and keep order on the streets, the vigilantes will eventually start doing it.

One of my brothers decided on a career in law enforcement. With that career choice, no two days are the same and every night is some sort of bull-fight, so you’ll never be short of a few stories to tell. He went in as a rookie and rose steadily to something interesting despite his protests to the contrary.

As with pretty much every police force around the world, your first few months on the job you’re always accompanied by someone senior, an older and wiser head who’s racked up a decade or two of service. He’s only there to prevent you getting yourself killed or more importantly, killing any innocent bystanders. Once the sergeant is confident you actually do know your arse from your elbow, he’ll sign you off to fly solo.

Since he was now considered to be reasonably safe, he got to have his own beat. There was one shout he had to do once or twice a week. A frail and elderly lady would require escorting out of her house and past a fierce brute of a mongrel that lived in her neighbour’s front garden. There was nothing between her and the vicious cur but a badly maintained picket fence towser looked to be able to smash his way through any day soon.

My bro had a word with the neighbours but they were the sort of upright citizens whose toilet flushes anytime they see a uniform approaching the front door. They were very accommodating and would take care of the situation immediately, which as everyone knows is actually code speak meaning they’d be doing bugger all about it.

The next stop was a call to the social services who conscientiously wrote down everything he’d said and were totally aware of his concerns, which also meant they’d be doing feck all as well, though that would be scrupulously written down so the carefully shredded remains of it could be fed into the maw of that week’s contribution to the paper dumpster.

In the end, he went to see his old sergeant who told him exactly what needed to be done. On his next callout to that address, he dutifully escorted her past Cerberus and assured her he’d be waiting there to see her back in when she returned from her local grocery shop. When she was safely out of sight, he leaned over the fence and wiggled his finger in that come to me sign. Towser dutifully charged straight at him like a Mk 48 torpedo bristling with extra teeth.

He hit it a mighty whack with the truncheon he’d been concealing behind his back as he leant over the fence. Any other dog rather than the cross-breed that towser was should have died instantly of a caved in skull. He recovered consciousness and once he’d regained his composure and with it his concomitant viciousness, he charged towards the once again wiggling finger of my brother, who once again promptly delivered him another mighty whack.

There might not have been many brain cells knocking around inside that mercifully thick skull, but two and two were slowly making their way towards four, but as always for the giftedly thick, it was always worth another try. For the third time, he went after my bro, who treated him to the same reward for bad behaviour he’d done on the two previous occasions.

The fourth time he had a come hither finger wiggled at him, towser retreated as far away as he possibly could get.

When the lady returned with her bag of shopping, towser had a go at his old game of scaring her by snarling threateningly. My bro explained to her to just fix him with a steely look, lean over the fence and wiggle your finger at him. She tried it. He bolted as far away from her as he could get. That’s marvelous! I’ve never heard of anything like that.

It’s a thing only us cops know he explained to her, don’t spread it around.

He always helped her carry the shopping home, but she never needed to call him about towser again.

We’re going to have to teach anew this rising generation not only how to recognise monsters, but also how to deal with them while they’re still relatively minor imps. Such small irritants are containable unless they are allowed to grow into real monsters.

©Pointman

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