Thinking about the Mekon…

So I sit here staring out the window with my one good eye, like Odin the other’s been sacrificed to wisdom ( well, hardly that I s’pose, to be truthful ). My thoughts, unexpectedly, turn to the Mekon…

I first encountered him in the pages of The Eagle comic as a boy – an encounter that also encompassed a first time acquaintanceship with gas chambers. At the time, I couldn’t get my head around the idea of specifically building a “chamber” in which people were to be killed.

It seemed absurd.

Madness.

Monstrous.

The chamber, I recall, was all gleaming stainless steel – a truly sterile affair, where execution, the murder of one individual by the state (or in this case the Mekon), could be conducted in a clean, methodical manner. The victim’s only input in to this ritual, of course, was to die quietly.

At the time we had a gas fire in the living room and the gas had a musty unpleasant stink to it. I imagined that small stainless steel chamber gradually filling with the stink of gas. Was it the smell that killed you?

Anyway, the Mekon was this small green super-scientist with a huge head (reflecting I guess the size of his brain, hence his mind warping IQ) whose atrophied limbs required him to utilize this little hoverdisc that resembled nothing more than a flying commode. He was Lord of the Treens, a race of green meanies inhabiting the northern hemisphere of Venus. The Mekon, unhappy with half a planet, desired all of Venus , the earth, the solar system, everything. The Mekon was a true, textbook megalomaniac…(only such a condition isn’t recognised medically)

He was the creation of Frank Hampson, the brilliant originator of the Dan Dare comic strip. The Dare strip was ingenious and to the mind of a young boy, it was the future!

In one strip the Mekon declares ‘We shall overcome any misguided resistance and later reduce your population (i.e. the earth’s population) to scientific limits’.

Ummm, with hindsight, perhaps the human race would have been better off if the Mekon had taken over? Perhaps we’d have had less problems today? Instead of breeding like…well, like Rabbits, we would have been forced to conform to “scientific limits” on our numbers?

But the Mekon was thwarted by Dan Dare. The world remained free. The earth’s population continued to multiply – and to pollute the planet that birthed it. Of course, we now see the “misguided resistance”, so shocking to the Mekon’s sensibilities, was nothing more than a display of human greed. The world government on Earth was full of Neo-Colonialists who wished to exploit the mineral wealth of Venus…as always exploitation was the name of the game.

Today, I find it interesting that the Mekon and the Treens were green. Green for healthy. Green as a lettuce leaf. Green as…well, if I were a cynic, green as gangrene, except the puss from that is yellowish. Perhaps Frank Hampson was ahead of his time in suggesting we should look after our environment? Unfortunately, it was a message not heard or understood by many.

Slightly more people heard and listened to Rachel Carson. Her book Silent Spring back in 1962 launched the environmental movement. One could almost say that Carson made ecology “subversive”, science (or a scientist) against industry ( or greedy capitalists), when she went head-to-head with the chemical industry.

Today the earth really has need of the Mekon. We’ve got plenty of Dan Dares – too many, probably. What we need is a big headed, bright-green, super-scientist on a flying shitter, putting everything to rights…instead we get a George Bush or a Tony Blair or a Gordon Brown or a Nicolas Sarkozy or a clone of one or all of them – did you notice Sarkozy recently launched an attack on immigrants in France? He is himself the child of immigrants. What madness the scramble for popularity engenders…

We need a Mekon to ensure we reduce the number of planes in the air – the whole damn world flies off to attended a meeting on Climate Change. Have these people not heard of Video Conferencing?

We need a Mekon to reverse globalisation, create intelligent urban design, oversee decentralisation with all power returning to local communities (very like the Swiss local communes).

We need to make better use of our water supplies– for example in new buildings we ensure the recycling of water from bath or shower to a reserve tank used for flushing the WC etc, simple but efficient and not expensive to do. All over Germany and Austria I recently saw home power solar panels – huge numbers of dwellings have them, and Germany has built more windmills than any other country in Europe. In the UK we’re still arguing about them, and you hardly ever see a solar panel, they’re too expensive for the average family to install…

In Europe huge amounts of goods are moved by barge on a network of canals, many of the barges holding the load of up to seventy commercial vehicles. In the UK, it mostly travels by road. We’ve even managed to price the majority of commercial goods off the railways…

We need a Mekon to introduce an element of common sense. In time (a lot of time granted ) the earth will become like that gleaming steel gas chamber. Human greed will have condemned the race to death. We will go out not with a bang but a whimper…

And now, deep in ennui, it’s started to rain. The sound of the rain is the saddest of sounds. I seem to remember the Mekon once said about human beings:

“STOP THEM! You fools STOP THEM!!”

That says it all, doesn’t it?

EU elections

The EU elections are fast approaching, hand-in-hand with the “silly season” , as Postman Trot, Olivier Besancenot, marshals his revolutionary, anticapitalist forces on the streets of France…there are those who believe this fierce critic of Nicolas Sarkozy may capture up to 10% of the vote!

Way to go, Ollie!

Geert Wilders, barred from entry to the UK earlier this year, is predicted to do particularly well with his Freedom Party in the Netherlands. The Dutch authorities are still seething that one of their elected MP’s was declined admission to our country by the Home Secretary…a major diplomatic balls-up incident played-down in the UK by the Government.

Then we have the man who likes kebabs…so much so he couldn’t possibly be a Nazi, Heinz-Christian Strache, heir to the late Jörg Haider, populist preacher of Austria first, has led a highly controversial campaign for the elections with the usual “Islam-baiting and anti-immigrant rhetoric”. His Freedom Party is expected to take between 15% and 20% of the vote…but might well take more!

Herr Strache says “there can be positive examples of immigration, but not if people refuse to integrate or drift into crime. It is not about keeping Austria white, just about protecting its traditional community. We see Europe as Christian, and we believe it’s at risk of Islamisation.”

Herr Strache continued “I have heard that every second name in some schools in Britain will soon be Mohammed, rather than John or Paul. Do you want the residents of Britain to become a minority and to have English as a minority language in a school?”

And, of course, in the UK the BNP are predicted to do well…to gain at least one seat, but maybe more..?

So, in many ways the EU elections increasingly appear to be about choices between extremes, the far right or far left gaining ground on the centre…what would happen I wonder if the EU Parliament came, in time, to be dominated by the far right (for example)? What would the UK’s position be then? With eighty percent of its legislation passed by the European Parliament, would Nu-labour leap to enforce anti-Islamic legislation passed by the EU parliament? Or (less likely perhaps) the extreme left gained control and began to systematically dismantle capitalism…

What about the current raft of potential legislation from the EU on monitoring and control of the banking sector? Haven’t heard much about that, have we? But it will impact on each and every one of us in time…watch this space…and your tax bill!

Immigration restrictions in EU and threat from the right in Britain

The world is a troubled place, no doubting it. In Britain the government have decided to pull out all the stops with regard to the forthcoming elections to the EU Parliament…they’re seriously concerned the BNP will win out over the other political parties! See HERE.

France is restricting visas for workers from outside the European Union in the face of rising unemployment, according to a policy directive by President Nicolas Sarkozy that was released Tuesday. While the EU is urging Libya to work to stop illegal immigration into Europe. Libya, of course, wants a payout to do so. See HERE.