FATHER FRANK’S RANTS - Pied Piper plays on

Rant Number 448 14 July 2011

The legend of the Pied Piper of Hamlyn is creepy. Dressed in many-coloured garb, a mysterious musician appears in a medieval German town. He lures hundreds of innocent children with his pipe up a nearby mountain, till they all vanish in a cave and are never seen again.

Yak! Ghastly tale. Gives me goose-flesh. But now the accursed piper is back. Groan, here in Britain, not contented with luring kids, he casts his evil spell over adults, too. Few are able to resist his diabolical strains: Domine libera nos!

‘This is a firestorm engulfing all, the media, politicians, etcetera’ dramatically orated PM David Cameron in Parliament today, as if he were William Gladstone. He meant the present fracas over phone-hacking. But it is not a firestorm. You could extinguish this piffling fire by peeing on it. In fact, it is all down to the Pied Piper. The impostor, the evil deceiver. He who leads the innocent and the gullible to destruction.

Eloquent gay columnist Matthew Parris in The Timeshas twigged it – in part. This whole hacking outrage is massively ‘overblown’, he observes. The shock, the indignation is largely phoney, synthetic, artificial. Hardly anything new in what has happened. The newspapers have been bugging people for ages in search of scoops. Only the gadgets have changed – from tape recorders to mobiles – the realities have not. But Parris, though fairly bright, has not quite got it. Or maybe he does not wish to. He fears to finger the Pied Piper whose hypnotic tunes are leading people on to the dance of death.

The Pied Piper’s job is to delude. To mesmerise decent folks into believing something epoch-making is happening, thanks to the exposing of the hacking scandal. Blown up over the bodies of some poor young girls. That was bad. (And yet, if the actual, terrible truth was known about the Soham murders, then really would the sky fall in. But only a kamikaze, a hero would dare say it, and the priest is no hero.) Yet children’s lives are ruined, blighted and destroyed daily in Britain by the wicked system called democracy. It spawns what sociologist Emile Durkheim called anomie, emptiness of rules and values. The devastations, the evils, the chaos the system effects daily are there for everyone who has eyes to see. But the Piper’s hypnotic music makes people blind, deaf and mute. They have eyes but cannot see.

Rupert Murdoch is not the piper. Sure, he is no angel - Tony Blair won the 1997 elections thanks to Rupert’s backing, remember. The Aussie-American’s domination of press and airwaves sucks but...since when are the BBC or Channel 4 any better? The Beeb is an outrageously biased, one-sided and partisan outfit. With its carefully selected and orchestrated programmes, journalists and commentators, it conveys a systematically distorted picture of reality. Open, impartial and objective? O naive ones! The Beeb is as one-dimensional, totalitarian and mendacious as the Third Reich! If Dr Goebbels was resurrected, he would join it. The Doc would know Nuremberg-style rallies are passé. The BBC does it more subtly. It narcotises the great unwashed into swallowing its world view more cleverly than any Qaddafi or Mugabe ever could.

In truth, the Beeb might fulfil the Pied Piper role pretty well. It cunningly confuses the real issues. The corruptors of youth, the sickos, the criminals are not a handful of journalists and bent coppers. The whole system is sick, sick, sick and the BBC is part of the sickness.

If you shut down the News of the World you should a fortiori close down the BBC. It does far more harm than the Murdoch empire. And it costs more. 145 quid annual licence fee. And what for? To be brainwashed. Shut it down, the priest begs!

The BBC has been gunning for David Cameron ever since the absurd hoo-hah started. Not that I care a jot for Bland Dave. Too insipid. I prefer Rottweil politicians. People with juicy, revolutionary ideologies, not free market apologists. But the cross-eyed, jinx-like, atheistic non-leader of the Labour Party makes Cameron look like Churchill. A Labour leader, elected thanks to Trade Unions vote, who tell workers that striking is wrong! What next? Priests preaching God does not exist? Doctors telling patients to smoke? Judges letting crooks off? (Alas, it happens...) Milliband should relocate to Brussels. There, on a fat EU salary, Dumb Dave would be in his comfy oyster as a neo-capitalist windbag.

‘Trust has been violated’ self-righteous drones drone on. What trust? That of journalism? But modern journalists are a creation of the Third Estate, of the French revolution. They were always a factious, mercenary and deceiving lot. Hacks and shysters to a man. Wasn’t Fleet Street popularly nicknamed ‘Street of Shame’? Journalists cheating and lying? Do me a favour! Not even the Piper should get away with this oxymoron. Too ludicrous.

A few bent cops, eh? Too bad. Sir Robert Peel, who created the Metropolitan Police, might turn over in grave but today’s bobbies are a different breed. I am sorry to say it but...how ugly they look! If they are crooked into the bargain...it fits.

But who are the real culprits? The gangsters the Pied Piper seeks to blind the masses too? A tricky one. Just to lift the hem of this filthy garment, let me tale my cue from brave Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stones. He indicts names like AIG, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley. Firms implicated in the financial crisis and in the most fiendish frauds and thefts. Obscene bankers and market speculators. I would add the George Soros of the financial world .In Britain, the list is too long, an embarrassment of riches – you fill in the blanks, take your pick.

A version of the Pied Piper tale has it that, before ensnaring kids, he exterminating Hamlyn’s rats. That was good. So the Piper is ambiguous. His music could play opposite ways. Wishful thinking, I know, but could he perhaps direct his magic pipe towards some of the humanoid rats about? Insh’allah.