The northlondonhippy

As part of my never-ending quest to seek noth­ing but the truth, I’ve decided to pro­vide the only gen­uinely hon­est review the decade that’s nearly finished.

It fuck­ing sucked. Really, it did. I’ll be glad to see the back of it.

Besides iPods, name one good thing about the noughties? Even its nick­name is pathet­i­cally lame.

The decade started with the Mil­len­nium, which was sup­posed to be the biggest cel­e­bra­tion of all time. I spent the night in cen­tral Lon­don, on the River Thames, broad­cast­ing live to all over the world. Maybe you saw me there, I was in charge of a broad­cast tent near Lam­beth Bridge, block­ing people’s views of the fire­works and River of Fire.

Ha, the River of Fire was the first major dis­ap­point­ment of many in the noughties, a damp squib rather than spec­tac­u­lar and a giant let down for those who braved the cold to wit­ness it. I’ve never heard such a loud, col­lec­tive, “is that really it?” in my life.

Lon­don crowds can be drunken and angry and the night of the Mil­len­nium was no excep­tion. As the clock struck mid­night and I was trans­mit­ting live on behalf of four dif­fer­ent for­eign broad­cast­ers, some­one unplugged our gen­er­a­tor cable and every­thing went dark.  

Don’t worry, one of the tech­ni­cians man­aged to get it recon­nected and it all worked, though the cables were cov­ered with human urine, which wasn’t so pleas­ant for the engi­neer. On top of that, the crowd attacked us and tried to steal our expen­sive TV gear. I can remem­ber smack­ing peo­ples’ arms and hands away from tripods and lights as the fire­works began.

We were all ready for the Y2K bug, a pecu­liar glitch in some older com­put­ers that pre­vented it for han­dling 4-digit years, mean­ing some unpatched com­put­ers would think it was 1900, not the year 2000. We expected the tele­phone net­work to col­lapse, the power grid to crash, along with all the jumbo jets fly­ing overhead.

It didn’t hap­pen, noth­ing hap­pened, cri­sis averted.

But that didn’t mean the noughties were cri­sis free, because less than a year later, George W. (for What the fuck?) Bush stole the elec­tion and became the most pow­er­ful sub-normally intel­li­gent per­son in his­tory. His pres­i­dency dom­i­nated the decade and his poli­cies made the world a much shit­tier place.

Think for a sec­ond, if Al Gore had claimed the pres­i­dency instead. He should have won it, he did win it, but the Supreme Court had other ideas.

Do you think we’d be in Iraq if Gore had two terms in the White House? Prob­a­bly not, but then we most likely wouldn’t have Barack Obama now.

Who’s to say?

The Bush pres­i­dency was built on the foun­da­tion of the Neo-Conservative moment and the Project for a New Amer­i­can Cen­tury. How’d all that turn out?

Let’s see, the entire econ­omy melted down to near col­lapse and we seem to be engaged in George Orwell’s never-ending war while his Big Brother keeps track of our every thought and action.

Cool.

Bush was stu­pid, his advi­sors no smarter. They dug one stu­pid hole after another, each a lit­tle deeper than the last.

When the attacks of 11th Sep­tem­ber 2001 took place, you couldn’t imag­ine a worse com­man­der and chief to have at the helm, unless you enjoy children’s books about pet goats, in which case he would be your num­ber one choice.

9/11 changed every­thing, but the real shock and awe was how we felt as we watched the twin tow­ers come crash­ing to the ground.

I’m old enough to remem­ber when the World Trade Cen­tre was built. I’d been lucky enough to visit the obser­va­tion deck more than once, its a view you wouldn’t be able to dupli­cate again today with­out a helicopter.

We were dev­as­tated by those attacks, fiendishly sim­ple, yet exe­cuted to max­i­mum effect. I remem­ber think­ing that this was the begin­ning of the end of west­ern civil­i­sa­tion and soon we would all be crawl­ing through noth­ing but rub­ble, drink­ing brack­ish water from pud­dles in the streets.

How wrong I was!

9/11 was a blip, a lucky shot, a once in a life­time ter­ror strike from a group whose suc­cess exceeded even their own expec­ta­tions. I’m sure they didn’t think the entire world would change so rad­i­cally as a result of their actions, but change it did.

Keep­ing us secure became the num­ber one pri­or­ity, the cost being a dra­matic reduc­tion in our lib­erty and per­sonal free­doms. Any extreme, rad­i­cal action taken by a gov­ern­ment could and would be jus­ti­fied by tag­ging it with an anti-terror bent.

Do you want to mon­i­tor all tele­phone calls and email mes­sages? No problem.

Do you need my bank­ing and credit his­tory before I get on a plane? Sure thing!

How about my shoes, should I take them off too? Gosh, hope I don’t have holes in my socks!

Think how quickly we all sim­ply adapted to these new real­i­ties, we made hardly a peep as our civil lib­er­ties were sys­tem­at­i­cally stripped away.

Its become such a farce now, here in Lon­don you prac­ti­cally can’t even take a pho­to­graph in a pub­lic place with­out the police swoop­ing down on you like you’re Mohammed Atta, scop­ing out another attack.

Think that’s good for busi­ness and tourism? Think again?

Ter­ror is not the only thing that’s been scar­ing us in the last ten years, as the environment’s been on our minds too. You won’t see any gov­ern­ment declar­ing war on cli­mate change, even though its prob­a­bly more of a threat to more peo­ple than ter­ror­ism could ever be.

The effects of cli­mate change are appar­ent to any­one who can be both­ered to look, yet there are peo­ple out there in the world who try to deny this inevitabil­ity. If you tried to deny the threat of ter­ror, you would be labelled a trai­tor, but being a climate-change doubter will not earn you the same label.

Its prob­a­bly too late to slow down cli­mate change because we pissed away the last decade argu­ing about it. It would be funny, if it weren’t so damn tragic as the recent Copen­hagen Cli­mate Sum­mit heartily illustrated.

The wars in the last ten years have been quite tragic too, espe­cially the two major con­flicts insti­gated by the West, Iraq and Afghanistan.

The war in Iraq was jus­ti­fied with false pre­tences and bla­tant, pre-meditated lies. I knew there were no weapons of mass destruc­tion in Iraq and I had no access to any of the intel­li­gence avail­able to our lead­ers. They knew it too, but made up a bunch of non­sense any way.

I can remem­ber being the only idiot in the world who thought that Amer­ica and Britain wouldn’t go to war in Iraq. I gen­uinely believed they had no grounds to ini­ti­ate a con­flict and that they would back down at the last minute. I don’t think I’ve ever been more wrong, but not as wrong as launch­ing that ille­gal and point­less war.

George W (for War Crim­i­nal) Bush and Tony Blair should both be sit­ting in prison cells in The Hague, await­ing their tri­als for crimes against human­ity, but no one has the fuck­ing balls to send them both there. The Inter­na­tional Court should have charged them already, even if extra­di­tion would never hap­pen. They both should pay for their crimes and sins.

But they won’t.

How many inno­cent lives have been lost in that point­less war? Iraq was far from per­fect before the “allies” invaded, but the elec­tric­ity flowed, the streets were safe and Iraq still had an edu­cated, func­tional mid­dle class.

I’m not a Sad­dam Hus­sein apol­o­gist, the guy was a nasty piece of work, repres­sive, iron fisted, unpleas­ant and vicious. But so what? Lots of coun­tries are lead by shit­bags, we don’t invade them and impose regime change just because we feel like it.

Regime change on its own is not a valid rea­son for war. In the case of Iraq, it turns out it was the only reason.

Sad­dam Hus­sein got strung up in a hastily organ­ised hang­ing. There’s mobile phone video of it on the inter­net, that I’m sure you’ve seen by now. It was a very undig­ni­fied end for an odi­ous, hor­ri­ble man. Though back in the 1970s, Sad­dam was friendly with Amer­ica and funded by them, because he opposed Iran.

Things change, shit happens.

Afghanistan is a dif­fer­ent shade of grey.

After 9/11, there was some sense in going into Afghanistan since that’s where the ter­ror bases and train­ing camps were. That’s also where the leader of the bad guys lived, oh what’s his name again?

Osama some­thing or other.

They had the chance to cap­ture or kill him in Tora Bora and blew it. He’s still allegedly alive and on the run in the bor­der area between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The prob­lem with Afghanistan is after they chased Al Qaeda out, they were left fight­ing the Tal­iban. Big coun­tries like Amer­ica are crappy at fight­ing insur­gen­cies and guer­rilla wars, see Viet­nam for proof. They’ve been dragged deeper into a civil con­flict than they need to be.

Today, Afghanistan is a law­less basket-case of a nation, with a cor­rupt, inef­fec­tual gov­ern­ment at its cen­tre and pow­er­ful war lords scat­tered through­out the country.

Pres­i­dent Obama seems to think more troops will help and the decade is end­ing with him announc­ing fur­ther deployments.

When will they ever learn?

How’s never sound?

And speak­ing of America’s first black pres­i­dent, Barack Obama is one of the good things to come out of the noughties, but he wouldn’t have been pos­si­ble if it weren’t for George W. (Where’d he go?) Bush. Bush paved the way for Obama, with his stu­pid­ity, mis­takes and far right ideals.

Whether you agree with Obama’s poli­cies or not, hav­ing a mixed race pres­i­dent in Amer­ica is good for the entire world. I never thought I would see it in my life­time, and like most peo­ple I was moved deeply by his election.

Do I think he’s doing a good job? Its way too early to tell. He hasn’t even been in office for an entire year yet. We should give the guy a chance. Ask me again in 3–7 years, when he’s fin­ished and I’ll have enough infor­ma­tion to form an opin­ion. Clearly, I wasn’t a vot­ing mem­ber of the Nobel panel, because I never would have given the prize to Barack, at least not yet, anyway.

Per­son­ally, it wasn’t such a hot decade for me either. Both of my par­ents passed away, my father in 2004 and my mother in 2008. I miss them both every day.

This was the decade I well and truly entered mid­dle age. I’m going to be forty-fucking-seven next month. The last decade saw me diag­nosed with a stu­pid ill­ness and I had a sus­tained period of unem­ploy­ment while I was between jobs.

The ill­ness, Hashimoto’s Dis­ease, is allegedly under con­trol and I did man­age to secure gain­ful employ­ment, for which I am very thank­ful, but nei­ther period was par­tic­u­larly pleas­ant for me.

The progress of tech­nol­ogy is one good thing to come from the last decade, I’ve got the some of the coolest toys I’ve ever owned cur­rently in my possession.

I’m on my 3rd iMac, the lat­est a 27” beast with a quad-core proces­sor that is light­en­ing fast, its like hav­ing a styl­ish super­com­puter parked on my desk.

By far, the most amaz­ing thing I own is my iPhone 3GS, it is a gad­get of unri­valled beauty, power and use­ful­ness. If I had to choose one piece of kit that’s rev­o­lu­tionised my life, its my iPhone. It does more than I could have ever imag­ined and its abil­i­ties just keep grow­ing with every app I install.

Cit­i­zen jour­nal­ism came of age in the noughties, with web­sites sim­i­lar to this one spring­ing up at a rapid rate. The word “blog” didn’t even exist ten years ago and now there are mil­lions of them.

Blog­ging came along when I needed it most, I started this one nearly 6 years ago dur­ing my dark and depress­ing period of unemployment.

Blog­ging gave me some­thing to do, some­thing to focus on, some­thing to make me feel like I was still a func­tion­ing mem­ber of soci­ety. I had a way to con­tribute, a way to par­tic­i­pate. Some­how, I still mat­tered, even if I felt like I didn’t.

Blog­ging may have saved my life. I would have con­tin­ued to sink deeper had I not dis­cov­ered Blogspot back in 2004. 

And that’s where you all come in.

With­out an audi­ence, blog­ging is a bit point­less and while I am still not and will prob­a­bly never be main­stream, I’ve had a level of sup­port and inter­est that still astounds me. I’m thank­ful for every vis­i­tor I’ve ever had who has dropped by and hung out with me virtually.

With­out all of you, I’d just be some guy writ­ing long­winded essays for my own amuse­ment. Ok, even with you all around, that state­ment is true, but its still bet­ter for hav­ing you all here.

Thanks very much for stop­ping by, you’ll always find a warm wel­come here and I always put out on the first date.

I wish each and every one of you the very best of the hol­i­day sea­son. I hope the next decade sees all your hopes and dreams come true.

PS
I’m sure there’s plenty of stuff I left out of my review of the decade, but this short video review from Newsweek Mag­a­zine should fill in many of the gaps. Its quite US-centric, but its only 7 min­utes long, so enjoy!

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