RATTLER’S TALE – inc Thursday Thirteen #3

WELCOME TO RATTLER’S TALE - The magazine in a post
What’s on today: A post inspired by a Thursday Thirteen prompt … PLUS … Lots of links to recent posts to keep you reading. And Scribblers’ News mid-week update.
A VOYAGE OF THE IMAGINATION - The ultimate Wednesday magazine post

INTRODUCTION

After having so much fun last week, I’m back with another THursday THirteen on my Rattler’s Tale. This week I thought I’d have a little fun with the west’s present idea of a capitalist society.
Politically, I’m a capitalist. And whilst there is a lot of good in our society, I also think things go too far. In the list below I show how it happened. Some of the things we put up with today are perhaps deeper than we think.
I’ll leave it up to the reader to decide about my sanity. Other than that, there are lots of links to show you what a busy boy I’ve been this week. If you haven’t time now, come back again and take a look. You won’t be disappointed.

Anthony North

THIRTEEN HOWS TO RULING THE WORLD

13. Start a think tank. The Mont Pelerin conference did this in 1947, economists getting together to fight collectivism. The result was the ideology behind Thatcherism and Reaganomics, the smashing of collectivism, and today’s globalisation.

12. Convince all that big mortgage and fat pension plan is good for them. That way they give most of their money to you to build huge multi-nationals. Oh, don’t mention the word, serf.

11. Get banks to loan loads of money that doesn’t exist. This puts everyone in debt, even though it wasn’t there in the first place to borrow. This makes them feel rich, and they don’t complain.

10. Wait for fake wealth of multi-nationals to be greater than some nation’s economies. This puts you in control of world economy AND politicians. After all, if they upset you, you can wipe out their little country’s wealth.

9. Convince everyone this is not an ideology. Note: You’ll have to replace ideology with fear, though. Turn some reactionary or other into a demon. You can lock down society in lots of security them – for the ‘people’s’ sake, of course.

8. Advertising is important. Place ads in all media outlets and pay a lot for it. This then becomes their main source of income. Then, if they ever publish anything you disagree with, threaten to pull the ads. Media is yours then.

7. Add emotion to the news. This stops people thinking straight. Instread of acting rationally and doing something about things, they just get angry for a while, shed a tear, and forget about it.

6. Convince educators that education should be geared to preparing you for work. No need for silly things like a rounded education. Educated people might understand what you’re up to.

5. Allow liberals free reign in telling us what we should be like. Let political correctness go mad. This turns liberals into your agents, trashing everything traditional, degrading the nation state, and leaving people with no meaning. They’ll find meaning in buying things then. Great!

4. Just to nudge this process along, create lots of celebrity icons. The people will soon be buying even more to aspire to their ‘perfection’. This is a never-ending con, because as you know, perfection is unattainable.

3. Give people loads of human rights. On the one hand, this makes you look good. But on the other, the time comes when no one can do nothing without infringing someone’s human rights. This leads to a compliant society of sinners.

2. Just in case you missed anything, check your list off against Orwell’s 1984.

1. So that’s how to rule the world. We’re sold on the idea that WE rule our own world. But it’s as much a delusion as the dictators in jack-slippers above – if we said no.

(c) Anthony North, March 2008

WHY NOT COME BACK WHEN IT’S QUIET? THIS IS A MAGAZINE, NOT JUST A POST!

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Writers, get all the news! Have your say!

SCRIBBLERS’ NEWS

All the news, plus a writers’ prompt about writing
Posted every Saturday 9am GMT on this blog

MID-WEEK UPDATE

TotallyOptionalPrompts – It’s about Smoke and Mirrors this week folks.

ReadWritePoem – The prompt is up. Write a poem as a tree.

Three Word Wednesday – The words today are ‘apartment’, ‘began’ and ‘numb.’ Get writing.

Monday Mural – Still not too late to write a poem on this weeks picture.

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SOME OF MY RECENT POSTS

Doing Wrong – A short short story about? Well, click it and see.

How To Write Twisty Tales – What you need to know about twists, plus a twisty poem.

On Destiny – A short essay asking: is destiny real? And a poem about jealousy.

Dream Man – A poem about the intruder in YOUR dream.

Time To Get Off the Planet – An essay on space exploration – or, why it isn’t happening

A Couple of Stories – Self explanatory. Short stories from my Five Minute Fiction range.

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Have you tried my current affairs blog?

EYE ON THE WORLD

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Latest Posts:

Floods Not Due To Global Warming?

Cost of War

Live Long God

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DOING WRONG

This is a short story inspired by a Three Word Wednesday prompt. Have you had a go yet?

How did it come to this?
Well, stupid question. I’m stood in the apartment and it’s obvious. The signs are all around me – in the pictures, in the flowers, in the choice of furniture, of carpets, of curtains …
It began, I suppose, as soon as we were married. Some marriages are just not meant to be. Okay, we can think we know a person, but we don’t until we have to live with them – until we have to put up with them.
And of course it was all my fault:
‘You never pay me any attention,’ she’d say. ‘Look at me! What kind of clothes do I wear? What’s my hair like?’
She noted my blank stare. ‘You see? You haven’t a clue.’
And on and on it went, only lessened when she or I went out, or when her friend – that damned friend – came visiting.
I feel numb as I stand here, now, in the apartment. I see my wife all around me – in the ornaments, in the choice of books, in the lack of dirt or mess …
Except …
Except for the mess on the floor, and all over my clothes.
I’d had enough! I could take no more! So I waited for her, and as she walked through the door …
What to do now, however, I have no idea. If only I could just ignore it, but there was that body, face down, on the floor, the weapon I’d bludgeoned her with by my feet. And, of course, a final reminder.
She materialized soon after she was dead. I couldn’t look at the chair again. Not where SHE was.
And I suppose that was the biggest shock of all, seeing my wife’s friend’s face staring at me like that.
And now, of course, I’m stood here, waiting, for another, a ghostly stare my only company.

© Anthony North, March 2008

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Writers, get all the news! Have your say!

SCRIBBLERS’ NEWS

All the news, plus a writers’ prompt about writing
Posted every Saturday 9am GMT on this blog

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HOW TO WRITE TWISTY TALES

This is a post inspired by Totally Optional Prompts. Have you had a go yet?

HOW TO WRITE TWISTY TALES

No form of writing appeals to me more than short tales with a twist. I love to read them, and I love to write them. Poe was perhaps the first to define them in themselves, and writers such as Roald Dahl raised them to an art form.
Essential to such tales is the importance of a sense of humour. Indeed, I don’t think you can work out the important slants on life that make the twist without one. If, after you’ve written one, you don’t go ‘he he’ to yourself, then it maybe fails.

Which brings me to the second point.

That laugh will be pure sadism. And I suspect there must be a touch of this in the mind-set of the twisty tale writer.
Another essential ingredient of the twisty tale is that you must give hints of the twist somewhere in the storyline. Hence, when re-read, it becomes obvious. This is not always achievable, but the best tales have this ingredient.

This makes you, of course, a conman.

Which is what the twisty tale is all about – fooling the person into a wrong assumption, and then hitting them with the one you want. And to be successful in this is to give a buzz as good as any conman in other fields.
And this is best achieved by placing, in the story, a kind of ‘comfort zone’. Make the reader think they know what’s going on, and also make them comfortable within the narrative. Achieve this, and the twist at the end becomes a twist indeed.

© Anthony North, March 2008

SMOKE AND MIRRORS

The mirror stands for all to see,
but do you look and say ‘that’s me?’
Do you stare, vainly, as if a joke,
not noticing that, around you is smoke?
What is this ghostly, abstract form,
that looks so different from the norm?
It approaches as if from an ethereal lair,
forming this, forming that, for you to stare,
at the nightmares, made real around your life,
your treatment of all, from strangers to wife;
It chokes as it grasps out to you to touch,
you learn to fear it, Oh! so much;
This is the illusion of all our pride,
to the mirror we seem to always confide,
our innermost hopes and fears, too,
for the mirror is fate,
and the smoke?
That’s you!

(c) Anthony North, March 2008

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Writers, get all the news! Have your say!

SCRIBBLERS’ NEWS

All the news, plus a writers’ prompt about writing
Posted every Saturday 9am GMT on this blog

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DEFINING WITCHCRAFT

The French court of the Sun King, Louis XIV, was a flamboyant, extravagant place. But underneath the facade was a cauldron of hatred, deceit and social climbing. And underpinning the more unsavoury factors of the court was a conspiracy of murder and supposed witchcraft.
After the suspicious deaths of several of the French nobility, Louis ordered the Commissioner of Police, Nicholas de la Reynie, to investigate. Opening the Chambre Ardente, or Burning Court (a black draped room with candles), in 1677, over the following three years, 320 people were arrested and 36 were executed.

LA VOISON

Reynie’s investigation began with the arrest and torture of fortune teller Marie Bosse, who had boasted that she could be hired to kill husbands. Under torture she began a series
of confessions and namings of others.
Reaching right up to the heart of the French court, a Coven was unearthed. Practices described included using naked females as altars, and cutting the throats of babies to drink their blood.
At the centre of the Coven was Catherine Deshayes, a short, plump, but not unattractive ‘witch’ better known as La Voisin. Controlling her Coven from a Paris villa, she indulged in astrology and seances, and police found various poisonous potions, wax images and other paraphernalia.
But her speciality was alleged to be poisoning the husbands of those who wanted to climb socially, and give love potions to others. Towards the end of the affair, the King’s mistress, Madame de Montespan, was implicated in the Coven, though she escaped with her life.
La Voisin was not so lucky. She was burned alive in February 1680, popularly being associated with the Devil, but proclaiming her innocence to the end. But was La Voisin associated with the Devil?

DEVIL WORSHIPPERS?

Medieval theologian St Thomas Aquinas did much to associate witchcraft with the Devil, arguing that demons formed an evil army of lesser angels in league with Satan; demons who could lure humans to his service.
These humans were the witches who, as the mythology formulated, met at diabolical sabbats where much debauchery would be done, including blood sacrifice and showing allegiance to the Devil by kissing his anus.

ISOBEL GOWDIE

Typical of this is the case of Isobel Gowdie, one of the witches tried at Auldearne near Inverness in 1662. Isobel, an attractive redhead who entered into a boring marriage with a farmer, shocked the elders of her local kirk by admitting she had been a witch for some 15 years.
Such shock declarations and actions are often entered into by bored partners today, but in the times of the witchhunts, it was far more dangerous, as Isobel found out.
It is not recorded whether Isobel was executed, but, when her confession is taken into account, it is hard to believe that she survived. For Isobel declared that she had met the Devil, renounced Jesus, and given herself to him.
On his instructions she had killed several people with diabolical arrows and often met the Devil with other women where he had sucked her blood and copulated with her.
Describing the Devil as a big, black, hairy man, she would fly to see him on a little horse. Indeed, her descriptions of the debauchery that went on at these ’sabbats’ were most graphic, even though many commentators accept that they were really figments of a fantasising or disturbed mind.

TRADITIONAL WITCHCRAFT?

The reality of witchcraft was, though, very different. One popular term associated with it is the ’sabbat’. Still practiced by many witches today, the sabbats usually happen on the four great pagan festivals of Candlemas, Beltane, Lammas and Samhein, better known as Halloween. Covens will gather, perhaps in a forest glade, where the witches venerate nature.
Such covens are traditionally said to consist of 13 members headed by a priest or priestess. Usually they venerate nature through the Goddess, who is usually associated with the moon, and her consort the Horned God; a Godhead who predates Christianity and ideas concerning the Devil, and is widely associated with hunting.

WICCA

Nowadays witches prefer to call themselves Wiccans, a word associated with the old pagan fertility religions. Not all witches practice in covens, preferring to work alone. Indeed, there appears to be no formal religion involved in witchcraft. Rather, it is simply based on age old beliefs in latent powers associated with nature.
However, due to the power of the mass media, the above ‘mythologies’ still tend to be widespread. From silly fanatasising people, to someone who was most likely nothing more than a murderess, sensationalism must offer something more mysterious and macabre.
Alternatively, the Dianic tradition venerates the Goddess in the form of Diana, Goddess of Hunting. This tradition has attracted a distinctly feminist tradition and ideology. But contrary to popular beliefs, witches are far removed from associations with the Devil, and they do not, now, indulge in sacrifice.

LEFT AND RIGHT PATHS

As to the evil influences of witchcraft, the media has made much of the concept of Black and White witches. Yet even this is more a media creation than a reality.
Wiccan folklore does have the concept of the Left and Right Hand Path. The Left is seen as bad, whereas the Right is good. Clearly, as in all walks of life, there will be those who try to use the ritual of Witchcraft to do bad, but for the majority the golden rule of witchcraft is known as the Wiccan Rede:
And if it harm none, do what you will.

(c) Anthony North, March 2008

Click MYSTERIES at top of site for more posts on the unexplained

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