Fawkes That For A Load Of Symbolist Poppycock

Yes; that's two puns in the title - and shit ones, at that.  What do you expect, though? I don't really know what I'm doing here, to be honest; it's going to take a while for this thing to settle down to anything like a coherent format.  F - as they say - FS; titles are frightfully difficult, but you've got to have them, I know that much.  I could just number these screeds, but that's a short-term solution that smacks of laziness and doesn't really consider the students of tomorrow who'll doubtless be citing a lot of this stuff in theses and the like. They'll need some keywords to help them search these annals, won't they?  It's going to be dashed hard on them if they can't tell at a glance which piece is a bit of trenchant insight into prevailing attitudes to the NHS and which is merely some late-night, drunken musings on how the contestants on ITV gameshows all seem to look like failed genetic experiments and have all the apparent wit and charm of bacteria that key other bacteria's cars just for a laugh.  Think of the children, eh?  Even if the students of the future will all be rich entitled cuntslugs studying Management Science, they deserve at least a basic level of courtesy...
Though perhaps I'm being unduly pessimistic? The days of the super-rich élite may well be numbered if the Occupy movement's success in winning over the (at least tacit) support of the Church is anything to go by.  After all; they may be an almost total cultural irrelevance - and their idea to set up some kind of commission to look into the Ethics of Capitalism is kind of náive and clueless even by the standards of people who believe in God - but it's a kind of victory. It certainly shows something of an awareness of the urgency and sincerity of the cause amongst an institution that rarely does anything more than dole out soup and cough diffidently from the sidelines. No; the protests in London and New York are having an effect, it seems; it's just the masks I don't care for.
There; we're back on track - and it didn't take all that long, did it?  The Guy Fawkes mask that's been taken as a symbol by the Occupy movement is an odd choice, I reckon. I mean; I can see why they chose it - he was a dissident, and V For Vendetta was a pretty cool movie - but I can't imagine old Guido being terribly opposed to greed and capitalism. He was reasonably well-off - back in those days anybody who even knew what the House of Parilament was would have had a shilling or two.  Secondly, his Finest Hour was getting involved in a plot to kill the King and put a Catholic on the throne - and back those days, religious types didn't mess about. Had he succeeded, we might well to this day be enjoying the "freedom" of meatless Fridays, procreation-only sex, and even more priests running around with the cassocks twitching for little boys: magic stuff, Guido - what a pity it didn't work out, old sport...Even leaving aside the fact that unless a protestor photocopies the iconic fizzog onto some cardboard and makes eye-holes in it the heartless mask corporations are making a tidy bundle, I have to say that I don't care for masks; these are ordinary people who are righteously angry about the fiscal shitter they've been dumped into - they have no call to hide their faces.  Stone me; I don't have the most classic profile on Earth (those that know me seem to agree that I look like a Croatian paedophile or something, in fact), but were I to demonstrate or protest, I'd so so proudly, without hiding behind another man's face - especially not the face of a God-bothering nut-job.
Still; symbols are important to people, I suppose - to the point where they seem to matter more than the ideals and beliefs they embody.  Another symbol that comes in for a lot of coverage at this time of year is the British Legion Poppy: these distinctive paper flowers are reviled in some quarters as "glorifying" war; similarly, those that don't wear them - or choose the pacifist White Poppy - are decried as being monsters who are only prevented from pissing on the corpses of dead soldiers by laziness and a lack of moral fibre.  They're only symbols; it's not worth getting so riled up about them, really - their utter meaninglessness is underlined by the fact that MPs wear them. I always envisage a desperate scrum to be the first one in the House to pin one on and show just how committed they are to honouring the War Dead - and then trotting off to vote for a piece of legislation that ensures there will be plenty more of them.  A charity that seeks to help out old soldiers is a good cause; so is one that promotes education about peace - however impractical it may seem.  Donate whatever you want to either, and feel free to wear whichever colour poppy best matches your eyes - just don't think it says anything significant about you, any more than anyone else's says about them.  And shut the fuck up, because I've been hearing this inconclusive, squabbling nonsense off and on for forty years, and I'm as familiar with as I'm fed up with every self-righteous word.