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In a
month where we've been forced to realise that Jim Davidson is
not merely still alive but allowed to speak in public at the
New Theatre, thanks are owed once again to the Pegasus for ushering
in a note of sanity.
Rob Newman,
appearing in what I've come to think of as the Mark Thomas slot,
covers similar ground, but in a very different style. His brain
fizzes with an extraordinary wealth of facts and quotes he's
memorized for us. He occasionally has to pause in neutral while
his mouth catches up.
His mission
tonight, sparked by a radio phone-in caller in America's deep
south, complaining about the number of local Vietnamese immigrants
("Howud they like it if weeyall went over there?"),
is to make us realise that the current global policy of making
the world safe for profit, regardless of who gets killed, has
been going on continuously for many hundreds of years.
In fact,
he tells us, if you don't count the years of the civil war,
throughout America's history, there has only been one year in
which America has not been engaged in aggression in another
country. It was 1892. What went wrong? Was it the publication
of the rules of basketball? The invention of the fig roll?
More
random facts that missed the history books:
The Bush
family bank had to be stopped from raising funds for Nazi Germany
in 1942 by a law passed specially for the occasion.
World
War One began, not because of the assassination of Archduke
Ferdinand (did we ever believe that?), but because Germany was
about to complete a railway to Baghdad.
Migrant
workers (and Indians) were being killed and tortured in Virginia
in 1610, some years before the Mayflower set sail, to keep up
the tobacco quotas.
If I
make the evening sound dry, I do him a great disservice. Mr
Newman is an excellent mimic and linguist, a manic stage presence,
and quite a reasonable banjo player and, ahem, body-popper.
One moment he's pointing out seriously that under the exact
rules of the Nuremberg Trials, Tony Blair would have been hung
as a war criminal for the recent war in Iraq. The next: a portrayal
of Bush Sr. & Jr. as Steptoe and Son, with voices spot on.
My favourite
quote: "Humanitarian intervention is the thin layer of
organic matter, cloaking the cyborg body of corporate profit,
such that it can walk among the people and only dogs bark"
He doesn't
tell us how to neutralise corporate power and set up a nice
world order where people matter. ("Block toilets with sponges.
Make hoax phone calls.")
But that's not his job. That's up to us.
Neil
Williams 24/10/03
P.S.
Big capitalist sell-out that he is, a double CD, recorded on
this tour, is available from his
website.
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