Things Can Only Get Better

As I write, civilised men are driving tanks trying to kill me. The descendents of Tchaikovsky, Kropotkin and Solzhenitsyn no more want to do this than set fire to their vodka soaked nasal hair. I rather suspect that they’d rather stay in bed drinking and playing chess until their pants fall down. And yet, there they are driving across the land in an attempt to save the Russian Motherland from those who their boss calls nazis, while also being told to ‘fuck off’ by weather worn Ukrianian grandmothers driving tractors.

When I write that they are trying to kill me, this is meant metaphorically. I am not actually anywhere near Ukraine. But, I could have been. But for sheer accident of birth, and all that has since flowed from that simple fact, I could have been in Poland, Korea, Vietnam, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Palestine, Kuwait, Syria, Iraq, or Yemen. I could have been the Universal soldier being Universally fucked.

Trying to squeeze some humour from life right now isn’t easy, but let’s try before we breath in solid lungfuls of radioactive dust. So, let’s take a look at the guilty men who are gaily tripping down the garden path called oblivion towards the brick shithouse called apocalypse.

Vladimir Rat Face Putin, an ex cold war KGB foreign intelligence operative with as much of a sense of humour as a three week old putrifying corpse floating face down in the Volga while a duck picks at the weeds growing from between its buttocks. He doesn’t like homosexuals, jews or chocolate hobnobs. His mother left him to clean the shower blocks in the Gulags before he was born, setting up psychological trauma early in his life. His father was a lawnmower. In 1970, he was eighteen years of age and so spent some of the best years of his life in one of the worse countries in the world. If you think interior decor, haircuts and fashion was bad enough in Scunthorpe on a wet tuesday night, then think of Putin in some grey, damp, freezing tenement flat desperate for a wank but with zero access to back copies of Mayfair and only made worse by having to share a bedroom with his five younger brothers and sisters who loved to be sung Siberian folk songs at bedtime. You try playing with yourself while surrounded by a screeching chorus about the village cow being chased by crows.

I’m not trying to invoke sympathy here. Nor am I trying to explain his current decision making. I’m merely pointing out that if you’d lived through the 1970s in Soviet Russia, you too might greet impending nuclear oblivion with the same enthusiasm as a virgin bride greets her drunk tumesecent husband in the honeymoon suite – its going to happen, and its going to hurt, but it must be done. No worries though, you’ve already experienced worse, at least its not the goat.

Putin married a human being, in an attempt to develop a knowledge of how to have a relationship, to develop empathy and to care, to think of others needs before one’s own. This was as successful an attempt at being human as was Dr Frankenstein’s first prototype built out of bits of string, half a dead pig and a cabbage for the head. It doesn’t need to be said how the marriage worked out, suffice to say his wife disappeared not long after he had a large chest freezer delivered to his basement.

His career in the KGB saw him deployed to East Germany where his skills were put to good use in the ‘extraction of information’ department. At the interview he confessed to enjoying picking the wings off flies, cutting the legs off spiders and playing five a side with kittens in a hessian sack for a football. He was therefore perfect for the job of encouraging citizens to part with information along with their fingernails.

Hair loss was a particular setback. His emotional development didn’t just slow at that point, it went into a full on ‘Napoleonic Retreat fom Moscow’ type of reverse. His emotional intelligence was that of a half starved pit bull deciding if the cat should live while being poked in the anus with a red hot poker. Let’s just say moral reasoning needed some work. His lack of hair was not helped by a tiny ‘Jap’s eye’ birthmark on the top of his head that everyone said made him look like a prick when he bent forward. To this day he has to have it covered in make up before he goes out.

He speaks three languages though, all of them variations of Russian with a vocabulary consisting of references to snow, potatoes and falsehoods. His favourite proverbs are metaphorical references to abandonment, loss and revenge. He is particularly fond of saying “A bird in the hand is worth crushing to death”, “Look before you die”, and “Mummy, why did you leave me to be looked after by a lawmower, you heartless bastard!” (a Siberian favourite that one). He once tried speaking German to Angela Merkel borrowing a phrase from a history book in an attempt to impress her with his knowledge. He failed to pick up that the book was about the siege of Stalingrad and that the German phrase was not “pleased to meet you” but rather “Surrender communist pigs, we are the Waffen SS and we are going to make your bollocks smoke and your penis so black it’ll resemble a blutwurst!” Merkel for her part smiled diplomatically but vowed to start giving weapons secretly to Ukraine.

His translator was later found sitting on a bench in Gorky park, but without his head.

Which brings us nicely up to date. We now find ourselves confronting a nuclear armed insecure overachiever with a grudge. What could possibly go wrong?