Scotland’s Jesus: The Only Officially Non-racist Comedian (28 page)

I hope Scotland gets its independence, largely because an annual Scottish Independence Day will look like the fucking D-Day landings. With less than a year to go to the independence referendum you have to wonder where the campaign is. Everybody in Britain claims devotion to the idea of democracy but most areas of life are run by elites. They view the idea of ordinary people making decisions about ‘their’ world like they’d view the prospect of their minds being colonised by a civilisation of telepathic ants. The people behind the independence campaign are really trying to give us an opportunity to swap elites. The mindset? Why should the English divvy up Scotland for their cronies when it could be divvied up for ours? Of course, Scottish people sound different in their internal monologue when no English are listening and they’ll actually be thinking, ‘Wha nacht split yon monees tween wir sleekit neebours?’, but the point stands.

I’m completely pro independence, but naturally the campaign so far has been a leg-wobbling tranquilliser dart of smirking insipidity and Alan Cumming. There’s been no attempt to engage with ordinary people, partly because to succeed it would have to draw a lot of non-voters into political action. That’s something that nobody in our political classes really wants. It could well be that politicians pushing for independence don’t want to succeed. That might sound ridiculous, but remember they’re politicians. They spend their whole lives lying to other people; why wouldn’t they be lying to themselves?

Scotland has provoked fear in British politicians since the days of the Red Clydesiders. It emerged a few years ago that deliberate underestimates of Glasgow’s population have been used to starve it of public funds since Churchill’s time. The reason being that it was seen, along with Liverpool, as the most likely starting point of a revolution.

It’s no coincidence that Scotland today is a sedated culture. BBC Scotland has quotas of programmes that have to be made here, so it transfers English shows up to Scotland in what seems to be a desperate and self-hating attempt to deny Scottish programme-makers a voice. Broadsheet newspapers in Scotland have a reading age in the early teens. The population is seen as volatile and so the culture presented to them is a clear soup of anaesthetising platitudes. I remember doing an interview once for the
Glasgow Herald
:

Interviewer:
How do you want to be remembered?

Me:
As a G.

Interviewer:
How do you spell that?

As far as the vote goes, Alex Salmond has a job on his hands as many Scots were hoping to be able to vote for even more dependence. He says independence will win because he’ll show a positive vision for the future. So the next two years will mainly involve gassing alcoholics like TB-ridden badgers.

The independence vote will be an interesting time for Scots, especially as for most it will be a novelty to fill in official forms while still being allowed to wear their own belt and shoe laces. It would be more amusing if on entering the polling booth you were just faced with the word ‘Freedom’ written on an arcade punch-bag machine and to register your support you’d have to headbutt it above ‘Superman’ level. Salmond described the decision about whether or not to stay in the UK as the most important Scots will have to make in three hundred years. But to put that into perspective, the second-most important decision is ‘Salt and sauce?’ Alex Salmond said if granted independence the Scots will cease to act like ‘surly lodgers’. I’ve never thought of myself as a surly lodger; I mean, at least not in anything outwith my marriage, but I finally understand why we had that hole drilled in Hadrian’s Wall – so we could watch our sexy English landlords when they take a bath.

It would be a terrible shame if we had different currencies. Not least as Scottish notes are easily the best way of getting into arguments with London cabbies, especially now that shoe polish has started bringing up that rash on my face. I think the average Scot is mature enough not to mind whether we keep the pound or have a new currency. Just as long as there’s a coin heavy enough to throw at a football match. If we get a new currency I’d still like to see the Queen on it. Pleading on her knees in front of a muscular, tartan-clad stud whose semi-mechanical cock is spouting oil.

David Cameron said he believes passionately that the Union must stay together, skilfully managing not to add, ‘At least till the oil runs out.’ There’s very little oil left. Most of it’s just used to lubricate the battered leathery chuffs of the knock-kneed escorts, sitting on packs of frozen peas as they wait in Aberdeen harbour to greet the next group of riggers coming off shift. Staying together because we’ve been together for ages isn’t an argument for not splitting. God knows, I’ve tried that. And she even ignored her subsequent independence referendum despite me and the cat both voting no. It’s just like any relationship that’s gone a bit stale – we just need to spice things up. Perhaps Scotland should go on top for bit, while Wales watches and fiddles with itself. I don’t know why I’m bothering – she doesn’t even read my books.

Or perhaps England will become energy-independent. A huge gas field has been discovered under Blackpool. It could help improve the lives of thousands of people, if the gas companies drill down and set a match to it.

Alistair Darling described Scottish independence as a ‘one-way ticket to nowhere’, which is coincidentally the exact phrase I use at the Virgin counter whenever I want to travel to Newcastle. I’m not surprised the Tories in Scotland are using this phrase, but I just thought it would be appearing as the slogan on the front of their manifesto.

Scotland’s easily as fucked as anywhere in Britain. In Edinburgh council bosses sacked seven staff by drawing their names from a cereal bowl. The workers who kept their jobs must have been delighted, until they were told their next job was to go and clean up seven human shits that had been left on the council building steps. There’s talk that we might introduce a 5p charge for carrier bags. It’s caused uproar here in Glasgow, what with it coming so soon after the hike in the price of glue.

Look at Rangers – skint, with no prospects, constantly living in fear that any day now the bailiffs will be kicking in their door. Finally, the club now knows what it’s like to be a fan. Things appear to be so bad that they’ll have to decide who kicks off at home matches by doing scissors, paper, stone. They’ve had some great players. Paul Gascoigne, of course, lured not just by the money but by the chance to live in the only place that would fail to put his horrific alcohol consumption into perspective.

The shame of a top British team being banned from Europe for insolvency – rather than the usual fan violence. It’s easy to say that Rangers and Celtic accomplish little when it comes to sectarian violence. That’s unfair. They’ve certainly provided a couple of top-class venues and some regular time slots. Ah, well, the good news for Rangers fans is that at least there’s another team in Glasgow that they can throw their support behind. After all, it’s all about football, right?

I actually quite like religion, as it vindicates my bored contempt of humanity. As a kid I used to really love this comic character called Darkseid. He was a big, brutal sort of ultra-villain who wanted to destroy all life and replace it with anti-life. He lived on this war-world, where he’d pretty much killed everything, and he wanted to get a hold of this thing called the anti-life equation that would enslave everybody to his will. As a little kid I just found him hilariously gloomily over-the-top.

My mate and I had an idea for a comic book years ago. It was going to be about a suburb where all these super-villains lived. They’d been captured by law enforcement and had their minds wiped, so they went to work every day and suffered the various indignities of their workaday lives, occasionally having a flash of insight into how they would have dealt with it back in the old days. They’d have bad days where they’d be taking some shit off their boss and briefly picture everybody in the office hacked to bits, or find themselves idly speculating on how they could use their kid’s Meccano to build a deathless robot ninja. Every time they got too close to the truth, gas would fill the room and they’d wake up, giving it hip-hip-hooray at a family birthday party. It was a kind of metaphor for frustrated human potential, and its own potential was well and truly frustrated when
The Incredibles
came out later that year.

I had an idea that one of the super-villains would be Darkseid. He’d have got picked up unconscious after failing to extinguish the sun or something, and to the FBI he wouldn’t be this immense cosmic force, he’d just be another guy in tights who’d get his head wiped and go have a job in the suburbs. I imagined his wife coming home one day to find that he’d been hosing the whole garden with a flamethrower, with just charred ash remaining.

Do you like it honey?

I pictured him going to group therapy, trying to open up.

I want to destroy all life and replace it with anti-life. Does that make me a bad person?

I suppose I think that not only does blindly following science have a religious element, the counter-movement that says science is a religion is
even more
religious. With ideas of constant progress and man’s higher purpose from one side, and singularities and leaps of consciousness from the other, it all smells like church to me.

Religion permeates everything. Atheism has always seemed deeply silly to me. ‘Atheism’ comes from the word ‘theism’, so it’s already defined by religion. You might as well say you are a Satanist. Not much harm ever came from someone believing things, except the occasional time when a guy believed that his hands were talons and a hitchhiker was his mother. The real trouble comes when you decide that other people have to believe. How is the idea of a leap in consciousness different from that? ‘Everybody needs to join me, everything they think is wrong.’ We’re so surrounded by religion that even the ways we think to escape it are religious. Maybe atheists were created by God to bore us into accepting his love.

I wish for a world in which the concept of religion doesn’t even exist. I think this is finite, your life, that’s all there is. That the human experience is finite, that everything will die, that there will be complete heat death of the universe and then nothing. It’s a hard thing to accept but when you do it makes every moment so much more vital to enjoy. I think it would be better to forget our civilised attempts to process death and embrace the brutal reality. I think people should accept death more, even the ultimate death of everything. Is that just my bleak religion? Or does that mean I just want to program everybody with the anti-life equation?
I want to destroy all life and replace it with anti-life. Does that make me a bad person?

The pope stepped down. It meant a billion Catholics were temporarily leaderless, unsure exactly why they should hate themselves. Benedict talked of turbulent winds and rough seas. He was obviously speaking figuratively: by turbulent winds he meant child-abuse scandals, and by rough seas he meant child-abuse scandals. He left St Peter’s with the words that he was now just a simple pilgrim, before being flown by helicopter to his cliff-top castle. Many criticised Benedict’s anti-condom stance, but I suspect he just thought that if more kids are born HIV positive it might make priests a bit less inclined to shag them. I confess I’m no expert when it comes to popes, but surely the best one’s still Tom Baker.

When it came, the smoke from the papal conclave was created by a unique blend of fivers, witness statements and DNA evidence. As is traditional, Cardinal Bergoglio changed his name when he became pope. A tradition that dates back to when CRB checks began. Pope Francis was chosen to become the first ever South American pope, as they’ve got a history of shooting children rather than, well, you know.

The new pope always used to take the bus instead of a limo. Why? Well, would you want to turn up at your mistress’s house in a limo that has Church plates? Here’s my modernisation tip, if he wants it. Dips for those communion crackers. He’s going to try to improve the Catholic Church’s image, surely the religious equivalent of shampooing Ernst Stavro Blofeld’s cat. Buenos Aires’s priests love spending time in the slums. Well, if you think not many people take notice of kids, imagine how few bother listening to poor ones.

OK. Here’s a theory. Just a theory. After he’s elected, the new pope goes to that room in the Vatican and reads their biggest secret. It’s not priests that are horny for kids, it’s God that possesses the priests. Earth is nothing more than a sex farm for a malevolent, paedophile God. That’s what the pope compartmentalises that night. Why does Satan possess children? To make them spew bile; to be unattractive to the paedophile God. Satan is the good guy in all of this.

Or maybe it simply read:

Jesus came to us with an important message of hope. By his life he taught us that one in twelve people is a cunt. Fewer than you’d think. With Jesus dead for three days, Satan re-made the world in his image. Jesus ascended to heaven, defeated. Happy Easter
.

A lot of people have been asking me what I think about celibacy for priests? I think it would be a good idea. A scrap of parchment unearthed by scholars suggests Jesus might have taken a wife. I doubt it. If he were married and disappeared for three days he wouldn’t have dared to come back.

There were rumours a priest in the Vatican was caught watching transsexual films just last year, although it turned out that the man in the dress was just a reflection in the screen. The Vatican is keen to stamp this practice out or else priests’ urges could be so greatly reduced they’ll no longer bother turning up for choir practice.

Web firm TorrentFreak has revealed that computers in the Vatican have been used to download porn films. I suppose that explains why the former pope always had to hold on to someone as he walked. Perhaps a little more tolerance of bondage in religion would be a good thing. After all, the Middle East would be a much more tranquil place now if Moses hadn’t been so uptight and vanilla about Pharaoh being so into the whole master/slave thing. It’s sobering to think that if only the Egyptian leader had been into a different fetish fundamentalist Jews might nowadays break bread on the Sabbath not in skullcaps and ringlet sideburns, but in naughty-nurse outfits.