Sir Simon Cowell

In light of the outraged and indignant flurry of objection to the mention of a Simon Cowell knighthood, I am moved to comment.

Simon Cowell is an unusually talented businessman.  He has made millions upon millions on a simple premise.

You cant overestimate the public stupidity. 

Personally I am in awe of his achievements. Making people stupid enough to pay you in direct proportion to their stupidity. It has a beautiful symmetry to it. He is a true revolutionary capitalist. He has exposed with a surgeons precision the nations desperate need to feel superior to those even less talented than themselves. Making stupid people perform for stupid people in a self perpetuating ritual of mutual intellectual mould and moral abuse whilst demonstrating a quite brilliant ability to turn every aspect of the dumbing process into a personally remunerative opportunity. Record Companies pay TV for promotional time for their acts. He gets the TV to pay him to monopolize air time for his sole use. 

He embodies the spirit of capitalist greed better than anyone - expect perhaps the guy in the Michael Moore movie who put innocent kids in the Prison he owned for his personal gain- but give Simon a little more time and I'm sure he will come up with something even more tasteful than that. All in the name of ''Light relief'.

In terms of British excellence in a specific discipline - in this case Capitalist greed - he is without peer. Clearly, if Simon wanted to be made a peer, he could have made that happen with ease and no doubt he will decide when the timing is right for that to happen. He has the dumb vote and if we have learned anything from the Simon Cowell success story, it is the dumb who decide.

Spin gone mad

Just watched the John Pilger movie 'The war you don't see.' 

Of course it will really make no difference because nobody cares that we murdered all those Iraqi kids in cold blood. Why learn about the world when you can watch Eastenders and X Factor and pretend Blair is anything less than a mass murderer, immune to accountability through our collective indifference. 

By way of explanation:

In the mid 80's I met Kaveh Golestan, the fabulous Iranian photo journalist who covered the Iran/Iraq war for many major publications including Time magazine.  Over the next several years we enjoyed a good friendship. From 1980 until the end of the war in 1988 Kaveh would spend 6 months of the year in the war zone and 6 Months back in his Eton Terrace home, where I would join him and his lovely wife Hengameh for coffee, endless cigarettes and long conversations about the circumstances of his experiences on the Iranian front line. As a participant in war myself, I found our conversations to be especially insightful and rewarding. It was he who first made me aware of the Iranian military tactic of Human wave child sacrifice. Mothers so demented by the heady cocktail of Islamic belief and Nationalist rhetoric that they would drive their children to the front line to deliver them to certain death. (For a Paradise Key.)

One day in 1989 I found myself sitting in Kaveh's Eaton Terrace apartment when he asked me to review a book he intended to present for publication. I was seated in a drawing room and presented with a folder containing  some180 Black and white pictures. These were to form a pictorial record telling the story in a way no words could ever do. Kaveh's photos had featured regularly in the worlds leading publications reporting on the war and he had perhaps the most extensive photographic record of that war, having invested 8 years of his life in pursuit of that very thing. Over the course of an hour, I turned page after page, reviewing the pictures he had chosen to tell the story of the Iran/Iraq war. By the time I reached the end I felt I had seen the most powerful and insightful record of war and the horror it represents  that I had ever encountered. All told through the device of black and white photographs.

I was reminded of Lloyd George's famous quote to the Guardian editor during WW1.  

"If people really knew the truth the war would stop tomorrow. But of course they don't know and cant know." 

Unsurprisingly despite his enormous reputation and the incredible value of his work, Kaveh was not able to find any publisher willing to take on this extraordinary record of war.

"Nobody wants to know" is how he put it to me. And thats the sorry conclusion that I take from Pilger's excellent movie. Who cares. We live in an age where mass murdering ex-leaders collect tens of millions for consultancy whilst never being brought to account - because  "Nobody wants to know."

Our collective dumbness - designer dumbness emanating from a highly evolved scientifically designed psychological model for mass manipulation by media - the success of which can readily be demonstrated by the popularity of dumb-market television like X Factor - means the likelihood of anything changing toward making criminal leadership accountable and working towards a better world for all - is somewhere between very low and lower still. Where there is no will its hard to see the way, and through the mind-numbing mind-altering techniques emanating from Edward Bernays onward, the will to think has been steadily eroded. 

Designer delusion based on the understanding that a thought-disempowered conformist, living in fear of an almighty and under crippling economic pressure, cannot properly exercise independent thought which might challenge the controlling hegemony. 

17 Million British people invest an emotional hour of their lives watching this X Factor show - but, outside of a very small minority, none care enough about Iraq and their complicity in events there to even bother finding out what really happened. I doubt even 1% of that number will watch Pilgers challenging documentary. Blair remains free and happy to party with Cliff Richard, who, we must assume is equally indifferent to the brand of christian fair play Blair visited on the lives of an entire generation of Iraqis.

Thank heavens for John Pilger.