MARK FRANKLAND

I wear two hats when I write this blog of mine. First and foremost, I manage a small charity in a small Scottish town called Dumfries. Ours is a front door that opens onto the darker corners of the crumbling world that is Britain 2015. We hand out 5000 emergency food parcels a year in a town that is home to 50,000 souls. Then, as you can see from all of the book covers above, I am also a thriller writer. If you enjoy the blog, you might just enjoy the books. The link below takes you to the whole library in the Kindle store. They can be had for a couple of quid each.

Wednesday, October 19, 2016

POLITICIANS ARE SO OVER RATED - THE GOOD STUFF ALWAYS COMES FROM THE BOTTOM.

So, as you can see there are pictures of two women at the top of this blog. They are both American women in their late sixties. One of them will be all too familiar. I am pretty certain the second woman will be a complete unknown to the readers who make their way to these words of mine. Because of the old death and taxes thing, it is doubtful if either of these ladies will still be with us in twenty years time. In twenty years time they will have departed the stage for the final time leaving only memories of their lives and achievements.

And when they are both dead and gone, one of these women will have changed the world utterly and made a huge contribution to the whole of mankind. I am pretty sure you will know well enough where I am headed here. Well, I always was a bit obvious. And yes, you're absolutely right. It won't be the woman we have all heard of who will be remembered for doing something world changingly great. It will be the other one. The one none of us have ever heard of.

So where are we at. In the blue corner – literally – we have Hillary Rodham Clinton who is fighting like a spitting, cornered cat to get the nod to be the most powerful woman in the world. Or man for that matter. Human being number one. And of course it is hard to argue that particular fact. If she is indeed granted the keys to the Oval Office, she will also be granted the chance to let all those American nukes fly and thereby fulfill Robert Oppenheimer's prophetic words.

'Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.'

But if Hilary is to be the one to bring forth Armageddon, she won't really be able to claim all that much of the credit. Fair enough she will be the one to press the button, but the only reason there is a button in the first place has nothing to do with her. The fact the American President gets the chance to end civilisation as we know it is entirely down to the likes of Albert Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer and their outsized brains.

Of course Hillary isn't basing her campaign on claiming the right to turn the planet into an irradiated wilderness. Obviously. It wouldn't be much of a vote winner. Instead she is doing her damndest to focus American minds on the dreaded Donald getting a shot at using his fingers to do something rather more terminal than groping pussies. I guess it is hard to disagree with her on that particular point.

But Hillary is focusing on the positive stuff and all the big changes she will make to the lives of 300,000,000 Americans. This is a familiar story. It is told be every candidate who dreams of becoming the most powerful human being on the planet. And when the prize is so huge, it is hardly surprising the race gets a tad ferocious as the last two standing splash hundreds of millions of dollars to slag each other off.

In 2008 the prospect of the most powerful man in the world delivering huge, life enhancing change seemed like it might be genuine. Barack Obama looked like a man to change the world for the better. Well, he tried his best but it only took a couple of months to see that the most powerful man in the world wasn't actually so powerful at all. He reckoned his huge win gave him the right to try out big stuff like finally making sure poor Americans got the chance to see a doctor when they got sick. It would have been nice if the Senate and the Congress had agreed, but they didn't. Instead the Republicans chose to put superglue under his feet and he remained stuck and hopeless for eight long years.

Barack never got the chance to use his so called power for anything good. Instead all he was left with was the chance to be destructive. He was never going to be allowed to use the the most powerful economy in the world to treat poor people who had gotten sick, but he could have invaded Iran any time he liked. Firing off Hellfire Missiles from his drone fleet was on the table every single day. Bringing in new laws to stop headbangers walking into Walmart to buy semi automatic weapons was a complete pipe dream. I actually believe Barack would have dearly loved to change the world for the better. To leave a legacy. To genuinely earn a chance to get his mug up onto Mount Rushmore. But in reality it was never going to happen. And it didn't happen.

The same fate awaits Hillary Clinton when she ends her life time quest to reach the top of the ladder. She will have all the opportunities in the world to do bad and virtually no opportunity whatsoever to do good.

At times I wonder why we get so carried away when election time comes around. Those who are elected seldom manage to change anything. Well, not for the good at least. In 1997 Tony Blair was the great white hope as he bounced into Downing St like an over eager puppy dog. He was granted over ten years to make things happen with a massive majority behind him. Was that enough to leave a genuine legacy of making things better? Nope. Instead he will be remembered for being party to a historic mistake which left over a million Iraqis dead before their time.

Hillary Rodham Clinton knows all this of course. She has been round the block enough times to get real. There will be no point in wasting her time trying to make nice. What would be the point? Instead she will get her teeth into the nice juicy War on Terror. She is making it a big selling point. Wanna a safe pair of hands to bomb those ISIS long beards back into the Stone Age? Well, I'm your gal!

The future isn't so hard to read. Barring unimaginable miracles, Hillary will win and get the desk in the Oval Office. And she will spend a minimum of four years firing off hellfire missiles around the world. The Great War on Terror will drag on. Endless billions of tax payers dollars will be wasted and in four years time a new cast of characters will strut about the place and promise to be even tougher.

And all the while the real change will happen elsewhere. Which brings me to American lady number two. Loretta Mayer – the real change maker. A few years ago Loretta joined another long running war. Unlike the Great War on Terror, this is a war that has raged for thousands of years. It has been the most protracted and brutal war our planet has ever seen. Casualties on both sides make even the Second World War seem like a tea party.

Ladies and gentlemen, I am talking about the real war of the ages. Man versus rat.

As wars go, this one is a bit like Vietnam - times about a million. In Indochina it seemed like the Americans held all the high cards. They had jets and B52's and aircraft carriers off the coast. They had napalm and Agent Orange. They had the money and the finest weaponry money could buy and when it came to their treasured 'Kill Ratio' they won the thing hands down. The Americans lost just shy of 70,000 soldiers whilst the Vietnamese lost millions. But in the end, the sheer sticking power of the little guys won the day and the most powerful nation on the planet was sent back home tae think again.

Our war on the rats has always run on similar lines. We kill and kill and kill and yet they never go away. We trap them and poison them and do absolutely anything we can think of to get them, and yet they just keep on coming. Worst of all, we have always known they will win in the end no matter how hard we try. If Hillary succumbs to the temptation to let all of her nukes fly, the era of man will probably end as the radiation clouds roll across the earth. But our age old foe will soon find a way to deal with it. Radiation? So what's the big deal. We're rats. We can handle it. We can handle anything.

When it comes to industrial killing, no animal comes close to human beings. We really, really know how to kill and we get better at it with every year that passes. In the end we will kill ourselves. We just can't help ourselves. And when it comes to mega death, we have certainly killed our share of rats over the ages. Trillions of them. But we have never managed to kill enough. Because at the end of the day they are the ones who hold the real high card. We have the nukes but they are happy to play the long game because they will always outbreed us.

If you put a mummy rat and a daddy rat into a perfect safe place where there is plenty to eat and drink and no human beings to kill them, the results are utterly jaw dropping. Mummy rat and daddy rat will live for a about a year and during that time they will create a pretty large extended family.

As in 15,000.

As in fifteen bloody thousand! 

No wonder we can't kill them fast enough. A female rat ovulates every three days and copulates every hour or so. No wonder they evolve and adapt at such lightning speed. No wonder they can shrug their shoulders at the prospect of an irradiated world. They have always known one day they will inherit the world. For the whole of history they have known all they need to do is breed and wait.

And all the while they nip at our heels like the Viet Cong once upon a time nipped at the heels of the mighty US Marine Corps. They spread diseases and steal our food. Every year 30% of the Indonesian rice crop is eaten by rats. Once they have had their fill, we humans get the 75 million tonnes they have left for us. With no rats, the harvest would be well over 100 million tonnes. In a hungry world, 30 million tonnes of rice feeds and awful lot of mouths. If we were ever to find a way to win our long war against the rats the prospect of hunger and famine would be kicked a long way down the tracks.

And here is where Loretta Mayer steps onto the stage as a genuine game changing human being; as the kind of superhero to make Batman look distinctly second rate.

Loretta joined the war on rats a decade ago and after thousands of years of failure, she has found a way to turn the tide. Loretta's big thing is that she is a vegan who really likes animals and hates the idea of killing them. She took a step back and took a measured view of the great war. She took a look at the big guns in the respective armouries of the two combatants. Our biggest strength? We're smart. Their biggest strength? Their ability to breed. And from that starting point it didn't take her so very long to find a way to use our strength to finally find a way to win the war. She was smart enough to discover the means to stop them breeding. She has come up with a super sugary pink liquid that rats simply cannot resist. Once they slurp it down they don't keel over and die and the female rats are entirely unaffected. But the male rats lose their sperm count and all of a sudden the whole game is changed completely.

If a dish of Loretta's pink goo was added to the mummy rat, daddy rat scenario, the outcome is an extended family of zero after a year instead of a family of fifteen thousand. Finally it seems we are about to finally win our long war. And why? Because an animal loving vegan woke up to the fact that wholesale killing was never going to be the answer.

Over the coming years, millions upon millions of human beings will owe their lives to Loretta Mayer and the thousands of American fire fighters who have invested their pension funds into her genius. She is about to change the world for the better in a truly massive way. She is about to become one of the very greatest human beings ever to draw breath but we won't notice because we are all way too obsessed with the Hillary/Donald show.


And of course there is a moral to this particular tale. Politicians are hugely over rated. If we want real change we need to look to the the likes of Loretta Mayer and her firemen. The good stuff always comes from the bottom. Only bad stuff tends to come from the top. 

2 comments:

  1. If there is one thing that freaks me out it's rats. I've never been the same since I read James Herbert's 'Rats' and then, to top it all off, that scene in Orwell's 1984. I shudder to even think of it. It's as well you didn't mention rats until well into this piece or I'd have been gone. 15,000 from two in one year! I just can't. Loretta Mayer is now my hero.

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