In defence of woolheads
Source: Independent - London
Publication date: 2001-06-17
Today's balaclava'd terrorist movement - or, should you approve the
cause propagated by its particular bullets and bombs, freedom- fighting
organisation - becomes tomorrow's party of besuited statesmen. This
follows as the night the day, the imago the chrysalis, or the mammoth
hangover the bender. It is the way of the world, this way that
orthodoxies with their gamut of certainties are overthrown by new
orthodoxies, only for their certainties in turn to be pushed aside.
There is no quarter of human endeavour or thought that is impervious to
fashion. The sacred analogue of the armed struggle's mutation into a
body supposedly fit to govern is the cult that becomes a religious
denomination.
Cult is an ugly little word when employed in such locutions as "cult
thrash metal band Rectal Haemorrhage" or "cult writer" (ie,
writer with
phenomenally poor sales). In an older sense, it signifies a congregation
of deluded losers being ripped off by a wackily dressed chancer who has
proclaimed his divinity, his visions, his freedom of their bank
accounts. It is this sort of cult - occluded, aggressively
proselytising, routinely denounced and thus fuelled by its collective
paranoia - that France is pushing through legislation to extinguish.
This is good news.
It is also bad news. As founder, not to mention First Magnificence,
Primal Purifier and Focalising Omni-et-Ubi of the Asterean Tabernacle of
Didodidi, I am affronted by the possible curtailment of countless
freedoms. I am talking, of course, of my freedom to include Fnan Martin
Bashir the Confessor and Fnan Henri Paul the Conductor to the Highest
Plane among the Nine Skeljns (prophets). No other branch of Didodidism -
impostors all - thus acknowledges them. No other celebrates the
eucharist with a small green salad without dressing and not eating it.
And what of my freedom to enjoy charitable status. What about my
merchandising opportunities?
As for the good news. Well, it's not that good. I, like just about
anyone of the babyboom generation, have lost friends - most of them,
thankfully, temporarily - to cults far more pernicious than my own:
Scientology, the Process, the Socialist Workers Party, International
Marxism, EST, New Voodoo, the Scottish aberration called New Labour.
Now, should Commissar Blunkett hear of the French initiative and be
minded, as was his predecessor, to ape it here, he ought to note just
what a cross-party consensus of French deputies has done. There was but
a single dissenter, a boondocksman from peninsular Britanny. These
people have decided - and such people only decide in their wisdom - that
a cult is a sect is a cult is a sect.
How dare they? At the Citroen Church of Andre the Hydraulicist, I came
close to buying an SM the other day - we recall what happened to
believers in the Clement-Panhard, that gas-guzzling dodo of the French
automobile industry, how they persistently failed to renew themselves.
And as for the Simcadins - swallowed up by General Motors. When the
French socialist deputy Philippe Vuilque spoke, he appropriated what he
believed was the tongue of Jose Bove: "The US administration is
clap-infected by Scientology."
Thus, cults are a further syphilitic American import: the McDos of the
soul. Dumping manure in fast-food dumps is an admirable thing. Excising
a levy on anglophone, ie Hollywood, movies, is another - and that money
goes straight to the native film industry so that it can mimic the
Hollywood of the day before yesterday. But ascribing a bent to cultism
to poor Dubya is simply wrongheaded. I mean, would that naif ever
countenance anything in which money came merely a close second?
France's de jure secularism is admirable. So, too, is its tolerance of
woolheads who believe their belief. The other day I made my frequent
pilgrimage (inapposite word) to Notre Dame de Fourviere in Lyon. Not out
of some Mariolatrous urge - I don't own one pietistic instinct. But I do
have a perverse taste for architectural grossness which is also quenched
by Vanbrugh, Galilei, the Brussels Palace of Justice and Bofil in
easternmost Paris. There, at this ludicrous basilica, was gathered the
entire Portuguese population of Lyon. Swarming doesn't start to get it.
Beerguts, hobbleskirts, janitor overalls, wimples, the lot. Ten men
carrying a paliasse with a 2m virgin on top.
What was this if not the public display of a cult? But does the Church
of Rome count as a cult? Apparently not. It's OK, then, to believe in
that load of established dreck but not in, say, the dicta of the
Expiatory Temple of Colonic Irrigation. Amen.
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