Psalm 12: ‘The wicked strut about on every side/When vileness is exalted among the sons of men.’ The Second Coming: ‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity’ Jesus Christ: ‘Do not give dogs what is holy; do not throw your pearls before swine. If you do, they may trample them under their feet, and then turn and tear you to pieces.’ Feed on. Take another rip from the nosebag.  In your barred and bolted stable. In the darkness sniff the hay; rancid, overkept, smelling mildewed: your daily food, your staple and your stipend.

When did you first learn to thrill at violence? Like a drug and you an addict? When did it become substitutionary for you? For real life.  When first did it grip you to want to emulate it; and to go about as if  a movie icon? When did you choose – indeed did you choose – to copy and use the smart sayings, the snappy words the thrillers and the iconic thugs portrayed in them use in their virtualised catechism of violence?  Tell me; go ahead, make my day?

When did you first learn to revel massively in massive wanton destructions - of cities, and planets, races, ecosystems, of worlds and worlds of thought?

The time when the ‘invisible worm that flies in the night’ first entered your thoughts and coloured them in your blood with red, red, Francis Bacon, or aghast Edvard Munch images; when it became your daily bread; it was when you were asleep and let life’s better potential slip by you.

Unsatiated with a saturation of urbane ad hoc daily violence, mayhem and destruction, caught-up, whirled, on the consumer wheel, ever-faster, ever after the greater then next big, bigger, thing, the studios and the presenters heard your calls and suited their own desires and answered, serving-up CGI and Marvel and a cavalcade, an avalanche of  death, violence, destruction, in your names.

What have you ever asked can you take away from a feast of this fighting and blood and demolition; having a daily diet of it and cramming it like an examination is up ahead, without let or hindrance, and in ample, surfeits of, portions?

You feel better about yourself. Your anxieties and stresses are quelled.  The pressures of the day have been vented somewhat; and someone somewhere in virtual reality is dead and a city destroyed, a family ruined.

The delectation, the taste, the appetite, the feast, is all for its own sake, and ever more so is it for its own sake as the next big, bigger thing has to trump the previous next big, bigger thing; and regardless; regardless of storyline, of scale, of depth of recklessness and sheer letting-go and welcome Armageddon!

It serves it purposes. It keeps you watching. It relives some cares of the day. It whets your appetite for the next time. It precludes any further consideration; and internal self-debate about the ethos of its provender; about the health of its fare; about the day to day world wherein violence, death and wanton destruction is going on for real in spades all day every day and it just happens to be like that and what can we do about it?

Thus the TV and the movies reflect it like it is; it just is and there’s a finish to the debate.

Out goes thought for killing, destruction, mayhem as a things to be tackled, to be able to be tackled, to want to tackle, to belief that they can be tackled, to hope and generous desire that things might be, can be, ought to be, and will be otherwise.

What sort of animal are we who is able to sit day after day in the company of our families and get entertainment value out of seeing what is plaguing our world in fact as a terrible cache of evils, being enacted and celebrated – for its own sake -as make-believe on the screen in our living rooms?

Are we more than what? Predators? Is it cannibalistic? Or is it just something, a mess of pottage or a shoulder of beast thrown to animals at a zoo, where the keepers eat of the best and the choicest and the most sumptuous and the rarest and allow the also-rans, the herded flocks and shoals to be kept quieted and anaesthetised by a format of bread and circuses?

Ask anyone. They want world peace. Except those wholly persuaded into depravity by their keepers and who like to think themselves smart and flippant when they say ‘I want McDonalds every day – oh yes, – and world peace’. (Ho-ho-ho)

Usually it’s human nature that we fight and enjoy fighting and get a charge out of watching fighting and destruction (even when it’s real it’s sensational fodder); usually we are ‘hard-wired’ for it or ‘genetically programmed’ for it; it has been done down the ages and humans have known nothing else but it.

Not usually it’s nurture and taking what were being offered unquestioningly; and being uncritical and having all our attention span held by it so that no alternative is thought possible, nothing is thought, nor considered or wanted to be considered, or even felt possible.  Pigs in shit? You decide.

This is not political, economic or sociological polemic; this is a real deal – as you have learned to say – and it is in fact - The Real Deal - being uploaded into your head now as you read and ponder these things.

Where ask yourself are the secrets of the universe? With Stephen Hawking? Or with Brian Cox no doubt?  In the spacestation? On the moons of Jupiter? Are there any? Is it all just – I don’t know? – I don’t really think about all that?

To reiterate – you never get space in your head from that barrage of 24/7 ordure being pumped into it by the hermetically-sealed social –media world which rarely sees or looks or thinks outside itself. That’s why you have nothing to say on it – no contribution – that is how you are wanted to be – required to be – advised to be - induced to be. There was a place, Now not (though sin, not time, first wrought the change) Where Tigris at the foot of Paradise Into a gulf shot underground till part Rose up a fountain by the Tree of Life. He’s a whacko! Isn’t he? This guy writing this. Let’s just say he is wholly convinced there is a way out of the constant attrition of everyday wall-to-wall violence with its dreadful pain and suffering which we in our Matrix absorb as fictional (sometimes it is factual, or even drama-documentary, or ‘reality’ TV) ‘family entertainment’.

What I am going to say now are The Pearls of my title citation as written above at the top; please do not consider this as if cast before swine; indeed consider it with some care and thought, and read it more than once to get what it is saying to you. Hang onto it. It is a Pearl above price. ‘Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!’

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