If you’re not with us, you’re aghast at us

What follows is an intense experience. Matured in our oak-coloured sarcophagi for a fuller fervour, this special reserve kriegspiel is a unique blend of the finest schmaltz from the highgrounds of liberalism. This assault on your palate will remove that bitter and resentful taste in your mouth, unless you take it sour. Try it neat, or on the rocks, whichever is more comfortable to sit on.

Part 1 – Pre-rub Blues

Imagine my surprise, a lollipop in one hand, the other fingering down George W. Bush’s list of the 22 Most Wanted, to see my own name, Copernicus F. Forrester, leaping from the page into my rapidly awakened eyes like Nuryev on springs. I was number thirteen, unlucky for some, an international incident for others. After regaining consciousness, I struggled to my feet, and, sure of some mistake, picked up the telephone.

“Hello? Is that the White House?”

“Yeah honey,” came the response.

“Only, I think there’s been some mistake.”

“You’re not wrong there,” she said, adding “Woooph!” to the end of the sentence.

“It seems you’ve erroneously added my name to your Most Wanted list. I’m number thirteen.”

“Unlucky for you!” she barked hysterically.

“I’ve already made that joke,” I said, bringing a slight abstraction to the proceedings. “You see, I hate to trouble you with this, only I’ve never really done anything wrong. I don’t think I belong on the list.”

“That’s what they all say,” she scoffed. “What’s your excuse?”

“I’m English,” I said.

“Oh,” she said, knowingly, “never mind.”

I was getting somewhere.

“Which one are you? Bin Laden?”

“Er, no. Look, the name’s Forrester, Copernicus F. Forrester. Someone must be playing some sort of practical joke. Do you think you could remove it for me? For tax purposes, you know.”

“Well, I don’t think I’m qualified to do that sort of thing sugar,” she said, audibly doing her nails. “What d’you say the problem was again fruitcake?”

I’d lost her, and the tanks were likely to be rolling down my street within the minute. “Yes, I understand you’re busy,” I pleaded, “only this is rather urgent. Is there anyone else I can talk to?”

“I’m afraid everyone’s busy at the moment, fruit loop. The switchboard is alight. All the operators are presently engaged – in conversation with your neighbours.”

“What?” But it was too late. My front door came crashing down, narrowly missing my cat. Bursting through it, my neighbour Colin, panting.

“At last, I got you.”

And he had – in a headlock.

“Bet you thought I’d never notice,” Colin said, licking his lips as he pontificated at how the $5million reward for my capture would do wonders for his plans for a new conservatory.

Fortunately, CNN were running a poll: “Has the allied bombing of Afghanistan made you feel any safer? Yes/No” I summoned all my energy, leant towards the mouse and registered “No” as Colin proceeded to bite my ear off.

Then, like Judy Garland in a Kansas farmshack, I awoke. “There’s no place like home!” I lied, hurtling from my bed onto the floor. My coffee-maker/alarm clock (free with an annual subscription to Insomniacs Lifestyle magazine) had exploded exactly on time. “Of course,” I went on, for the benefit of the readership, and bringing to an end an impeccable impersonation of Stan Laurel, “it was all a dream. A dream! Thank God!” (I didn’t, but that’s another story). “How could I ever have doubted it? Who’d ever add my name to a list of the world’s most wanted? I didn’t even make it onto the pub quiz team. Besides, I haven’t used the name Copernicus F. Forrester since I was pulled over by the police that time and they impounded my horse and cart.”

But, and here’s the rub, this wasn’t my only encounter with deeply indefatigable gutlessness these past few weeks. Indeed, I myself am at a depth of twenty feet, and, with a regiment of White Russians dancing the troika in my brain, am sinking fast.

Part 2 – The Lion and the Wombat

As I write, highly civilised beings are walking overhead, releasing Big Macs from styrofoam cartons and spoiling their dinner.

Meanwhile, I am stacking tins of tomato soup in a self-decorated bunker within the roots of my braeburn tree, clasping Mills bombs to my chest, lest Colin or any other aggressor smokes me out (I, tragically, am out of smokes, and am forced to try burning wet apple leaves).

I am not alone, not yet anyway. In my panic I managed to secure my council’s permission to amass a new local group (well, amass might be overdoing it – there are five of us). We are called The Citizens Group for Unabated Cowardice in Time of War or Other Breeches of Comfort (CGUCTWOBC – not easy to say with your mouth full) or, more commonly, “The Fatuous Five”. We have all given up each other’s day jobs, and gathered a few absolute essentials before heading down to my bunker, hiding from the gruesome activities in the world above our hairlines.

From this home-made safe-house I plan to divide my time productively between mixing cocktails and trying my hand at old crosswords that I never got round to making a complete hash of. Fortunately, it is a particularly luxurious bunker (top of the range, the DIY manual promised, the 9 Series Ghia Cabriolet of bunkers), and sports a jacuzzi and tanning salon for those long winter months. It also has a twenty-four hour satellite link to Al-Jazeera. CNN was promised only on the cheaper bunkers.

But to be honest, this five star hibernation is doing little to calm my nerves. I have begun to prate to the others like a clinically depressed soothsayer. Once the toast of beau monde I am now reduced to an existence akin to a krill, reverting back to juvenile form in order to conserve energy. Nevertheless, I look all the better for it, and have begun to admire my reflection in the bubbling waters of the jacuzzi like a cataract-plagued Narcissus.

But the truth is undeniable. No amount of marsupial burrowing is going to save me. What I need is a religion, or its equivalent in unmarked banknotes. I chanced upon this thought when I took a straw poll (we used those straws shaped like helter-skelters, snazzy and great with Sea Breezes), and discovered that everyone in the bunker was “a liberal”. It worried me that one of them winked at me on announcing this, but for now, there are more immediate problems facing us. In short, we are all scared of death. Our minds have become great oceans of paranoia, our hearts misanthropic secularists. Hiding underground like a bevy of wombats is not going to save us from the bloody jaws of the lion. My own “flak rate” is exceptionally high – my mother won’t stop giving me flak, calling every thirty seconds or so to ask “Why don’t you go and fight for once?” Here is a typical conversation amongst the liberal bunker-dwellers:

Characters: Me, Sneezy, Sleepy, Bashful and Dopey (these, apart from Me, are not their real identities).

Sneezy: Pass the pepper.

Me: What for?

Sneezy: My Bloody Mary needs some pepper. What’s the big deal?

Me: Nothing. It’s just that you know what happens when you add pepper to your drink. The same thing every time. And I don’t want your cold, we’re almost out of echinacea, and we left Doc outside, remember?

Bashful (blushing): Look, I hate to intrude, and it pains me to say so, but has anyone here given any thought recently to the question of security?

Me (spitting): What do you think we are doing in a bunker you fool? Sunbathing?

Sleepy (sunbathing): Hey, it’s my turn on the sunbed. You’ll need a fish slice to get me off this thing.

Bashful: I mean, I don’t know about you lot, but being cramped up in this bunker only seems to be encouraging the butterflies in my stomach to multiply like coffee shops in a town centre. Are you sure this is the best way to confront a war?

Me (with harsh honesty): No.

Bashful: What? But it’s your bunker! What are you doing in here then?

Me (sheepishly): Well, I sold the house.

Sneezy (wearing nose plugs): You what?

Me: I had to. I couldn’t afford to keep the house and the bunker. The house had to go.

Sneezy (forcibly): You didn’t tell me about this?

Me: Well, you know, I didn’t want to alarm you any further. You were already beginning to tap-dance in your sleep.

Sneezy (jumping up and down): I can’t believe I’m hearing this. You sold the house! My God, what have you done? You complete dunderhead.

Sneezy begins to attack me with one of the helter-skelter straws.

Me: Calm down dear. We’ll discuss this later.

Sneezy: Oh yeah? Like where? And when? After the armageddon?

Me: Exactly! Selling it to some boneheads was quite clever when you think about it.

Sneezy: Who’s living there?

Me: Er, well, that’s the funny thing.

Sneezy (inserting a straw up my nostril): Come on, out with it.

Me: Well, it’s your parents actually. They were the first to put in an offer. I could hardly refuse.

Sneezy (lying flat on the ground with an ice pack on her forehead): Oh my God! Do they know we’re living under their garden?

Me: Well, I never got to tell them actually…

This goes on for some time and is really an aside to the main point in this story, so we will cut forward to the more relevant part.

Bashful: Don’t worry I’m sure surgery will remove it. Anyway, back to this question of security. Why do I feel so unconvinced by everything? Fighting. Surviving. Living. Dying. Hiding like a coward. None of it convinces me. What do I do? (He starts to cry, and plays the blues on a harmonica)

Me (patting him on the back and causing him to choke on the harmonica): My friend, it’s all part of being a liberal.

Sleepy: Hey, did anyone remember to bring the foie gras?

Me (handing Sleepy the vat): Don’t you all see? This is a waste of time. Until we ditch our liberal principles we are doomed to an existence of petrified progressiveness.

Sneezy (threatening me with an olive pitter): You’re not wrong there.

Me: Dwarfs, it’s time we learnt from Dopey.

Dopey looks up with his tongue protruding from the side of his mouth and two enormous diamonds in his eyes.

All: That’s our Dopey!

Dopey (using sign language): That’ll be five bucks each. I gotta make a living here.

Me (handing Dopey five bucks connected to my wrist with a piece of elastic): You’re worth every penny. Now, our problem is that we are all children of the enlightenment, and it does nothing for our fighting spirit. I know that many may call us sniveling little hedgehogs for holing up in here, the will-o’-the-wisps of western supremacy in modern warfare, but they forget: part of being a liberal means that you don’t believe in anything much, except being a liberal which allows you to keep your options open. What’s to fight and die for?

Sleepy: Oh, I don’t know, this foie gras is a knockout.

Me (ignoring Sleepy and ditching the core of my argument): In conclusion, we are too enlightened, and therefore too cowardly. Now, excuse me while I start to bite my toe nails.

Bashful: So that’s what’s wrong with me: my liberal tendencies. What do we do?

Sneezy: Good question. Find a God?

Sleepy: Give up democracy and the rights of man?

Dopey (using sign language): Become monomaniacal nihilists bent on the destruction of modernity and the indiscriminate massacre of infidels?

All (shifting away from Dopey): Er…

Me (down to the quick on my big toe): No, I’ve got a better idea. Has anyone got a pen and paper?

(Silence)

No? You’re telling me we remembered the Gentleman’s Relish and those small Indonesian wood carvings, but forgot to bring a pen and paper. What are we like?

Sneezy: Never mind dear, have a canapé. I’ll fix you a Singapore Sling. It’ll go well with your wet apple leaf cigarillo.

Part 3 – The Cowardly Crusade

And so a plan has been hatched, in my head. No longer will we confine ourselves to the bunker, however luxurious, serving only to feed our paranoias. From here on, we will form a new group of melancholic missionaries, spreading the neurotic word to the four corners of the globe. Soon, the world’s map will be predominantly yellow, testimony to our success in turning the human race into cringing cowards.

Deftly monickered The Bleeding-heart Crusades, our aim is simple: to build a new liberal empire with the use of fear. Our fear. We are almost certain that if we can just get everyone to fear death, believe in nothing in its entirety, and adopt a kind of depressive pessimism, then we will be safe and we will all be liberals. Our first move is to airdrop hundreds of copies of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther over Afghanistan and Florida. If this fails, we will send in the analysts. Freudians. No-one positive.

Want to join us? There are three criteria for entry. First, you must not believe in anything enough to die for it, other than the belief that you shouldn’t have to believe in anything enough to die for it. Second, you must be willing to pass onto others a sense of edginess, embodied in the phrase “If you don’t mind, I’ll just sit this one out”. Third, you must acknowledge that every now and then, you might be forced to fight for the right not to fight. This happens when someone who loves fighting aims their aggression towards you and your love of democratic systems, liberal society and creature comforts. The trick is to get someone interested in metaphysics and fill their minds with doubts, what-ifs and yeah-buts. “Have you ever wondered…?”can be a most deadly weapon.

So join us as we fire the question at all those who think there is only ever one question and only ever one answer. The truth will never be revealed. Let us celebrate our nothingness, as we cower in the cupboards under the stairs.

To sign up, simply complete the following sentence: “Dash it, I’m a liberal, couldn’t we just…” and drop it from twenty thousand feet. Further, there is currently an opportunity for five lucky people to join The Citizens Group for Unabated Cowardice in Time of War or Other Breeches of Comfort. Please email cowards@twentyfeetunder.net for more details.