Christians have been waiting for two thousand years for The Second Coming of their messiah whose legendary previous appearance ended in tears and an alleged promise to return before too long. More circumspect in matters of messianic madness, the Jews are still waiting for their saviour to descend for the first time. Others have succumbed more recently to self-deluding sightings, ranging from the tragic to the pathetic. In America a group of nutters, combined communally in a house with a fast-talker who convinced them that he was the messianic presence, committed collective Christian kamikaze, each taking with them a five-dollar bill to spend in heaven. The idea of heaven as a cross between a school tuck shop and the box office to Disneyland would be almost sweet in its infantile innocence were its consequences not so awful. Less dramatic in his barminess, a certain Mr B. Creme in this country has pursued a persistent campaign via the classified ad columns of various newspapers, intermittently informing the gullible that the messiah is on earth (currently residing in Brick Lane, east London, at the last announcement) and is soon to be interviewed on daytime TV.
Messianic delusions: the sigh of the oppressed in a heartless world. Hans Toch’s unequalled account of the social resilience of such aberrations remains, after several decades, the best book on the subject; for a less academic treatment, Monty Python's Life of Brian is as good a treatment as any of the meeting of despair with ignorance and the ensuing farcical-fatal divine comedy. With the fast-approaching millennium we might as well sit back and prepare for lots more of these fraudulent and fantastic heavenly portents, for they will come as sure as New Years eve lager turns to piss.
For the Independent, a newspaper not commonly associated with moments of messianic excitement (or excitement at all), the day after the election produced a moment of such embarrassing messiah-spotting that we can only hope that copies of its 3 May edition will be pulped to save the future blushes of writers and readers alike. (If you have a copy, keep it, and make the buggers blush in the days to come.) It began with a modest half-page colour photo of the saviour surrounded by wildly-enthusiastic crowds (supplied by the Archangel Mandelson) and a headline stating BRITAIN MEETS ITS FUTURE. For the future to be embodied in one disembodied smile seems a rather anticlimactic culmination to several thousand years of history. Nonetheless, the Independent had spotted "the future”, and, like the Webbs’ encounter with Stalin, who are mere people of reason to argue with them?
This was but the beginning of the messianic account. Polly Toynbee, a former candidate for the SDP, wrote a front-page story which owed unacknowledged inspiration to the North Korean press on the day that the latest dictator was appointed. Here are the quotes from the crowd with which she peppers her outstandingly stupid piece:"If I live to be 1200 there’ll never be another day like it! . . .”, "I know it’ll take a long time. It’ll be hard. He can’t do everything now. It may take years, but he'll look after the poor and the working class. I trust him ... ”, "I love him, oh I love him. I want to give him a big kiss!" (Toynbee attributes names and occupations to these deluded wretches, but we will not publish them here for the sake of their future embarrassment.) Quite what Polly would have written had David Owen won in 1987 defies the imagination. Next to this piece of propagandist garbage appeared another by Yvette Cooper, one of those elected for New Labour to assist the messiah in his earthly works. Her contribution informs us that "As I sit and try to write, on the morning after the election, I keep jumping out of my seat and hopping round the room. I keep grinning." Could this be the first possible defector to the Natural Law Party? In the presence of such joy surely nothing less than a few hours of yogic flying would be appropriate.
"The world has really changed" ends the piece by Ms Cooper. The world did not change. Just like every messianic moment in the sad history of such events, the world remains brutally indifferent to the cries of mass delusion. At the time of writing the new Prime Minister has just appointed as his "Minister of European Competitiveness” the chairman of BP. This man was not elected: he is to be offered a place in government via a seat in the House of Lords. He happens to head a company which stands condemned for contributing tens of millions of pounds to Colombian death squads paid to murder and rape indigenous peasants who are in the way of BP’s oil explorations in the land which they and their ancestors have inhabited for centuries. Even the Colombian government, whose soldiers are paid for this murderous service by BP, had admitted that its troops are out of control. But oil is oil, and profit is profit and capitalism is capitalism and . . . what was that about the world changing?
Steve Coleman
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