Out-and-Out Liars;The Shoulders of a Giant Dung Heap. (Chapter 3, Part 2)

                                                                   2.

Way before the Britain’s Got Unpaid Talent! and The Mug Factor!, as a young man, Lenny Mulch who had already embraced the uselessness of adopting a high-minded attitude, made his first tentative step towards heights of universal mediocrity when he met an equally unremarkable lad called Sly Green. Green had been brought up surrounded by wonderfully creative hippies; he hated them. His progressive parents taught him from home. On a daily basis he daydreamed of becoming a mercenary and having them herded into one room and slaughtered. Green’s mother enrolled on an Open University course studying from home so that she might eventually make her own money.  Green cleverly fabricated an elaborate system whereby her laptop lid, spring-loaded, slammed shut when she hit the ‘save’ icon, breaking his mother’s beautifully tapered fingers and stopping her earning power, (and later that of others who might wish to work for a wage), forever.

Back in his village in Devon, Mulch was irritated by anyone he saw as intelligent which, thankfully wasn’t often.  His Ideation Quotient (IQ, a measure of which social and cultural group you aspire to belong to), compared with millions of people tested all over the planet in the last half decade, was non-existent. He did not see intelligence as a must. His Ideation Quotient level was no higher or lower than getting teenagers together and enrolling them in work placements, internships and other bogus apprenticeship schemes which ensured they would be no better than indentured slaves. Mulch would one day make us all sit fascinated and bewildered for hours and hours, mezmerised at his expertise for producing a show graduate unemployed contestants paid to appear in with the anti-climatic fanfare finale of life-long work experience as a road sweeper as the main prize.

In 2012 Mulch made a decision to shut himself away and make a life-long study of himself, which he thought, would be a gift to the world. Like middle-class Fringe theatres around the UK, he applied for grants by using photos of and pledges to include local ethnic minorities and when the money arrived, reverted to ‘jobs-for-the –boys-thinking’; in the case of the theatres i.e. those with a high Entitlement Ideation Quotient, and in Mulch’s case, himself.

The eminent social-anthropologist Professor Nohair sums up the phenomena he calls National Sleepwalking Ideation Quotient “The Ideation Quotient test among the English middle-classes is invariably not only off the scale class-wise but, increasingly, in the wrong time. When interviewed, ten percent revealed themselves to be urban-cyclist-with-wicker-baskets who not only went about London in a perpetual daze and fixed grin but had the amazing faculty to be able to edit out those they did not wish to see in particular and the city landscape in general and emerge, in their imagination, on an Edwardian country lane. A group of Nigerians re-imagined as a gaggle of geese, a drunk as a stray pony, a riot as swirling autumn leaves and the bloody of traces of that morning’s mugging could become a spilt punnet of strawberries if one’s Ideation Quotient was English Pastoral enough. By the end of testing the real Ideation Quotient of England and the English, it was  found that what lay beneath was an escapism on xenophobic proportions  ; 25 million people in England could only cope with its multicultural reality if their Ideation Quotient dial was tuned permanently to Downton Abbey. Another 30 million’s Ideation Quotient saw them submerged in the comforting world of the contemporary crime series Midsommer Murders; they were able to ignore the weekly genocide placed before them and focus lovingly on the thatched cottages, cricket lawns and privet hedges of a fictional racially-cleansed post bi-millennial village they yearned to believe was still here.”

"That this Halcyon England Ideation Quotient", Profressor Nohair observed, " initially a marketing tool to sell reruns of Agatha Christie’s England abroad, has backfired horribly and is now selling itself back to itself is still ignored, and remains clear only to those whose Ideation Quotient includes the anti-monarchist call ‘We’re-fed-up-living-in-a-fucking-museum!’ ".

At a low-impact environmentally friendly Levellers community’ in Totnes, Devon, at a Yard Sale advertised to raise travel money to send a daughter to New Zealand, a middle-aged, middle-class woman with an extremely high Above-Stairs Downton Abbey Ideation Quotient concealed by an Environmental Earth Mother  Ideation Quotient looked over her hand-crafted gypsy clothes pegs like a mother hen.; it was never realized how much the Ideation Quotient, or utter collective self-delusion was at play here. Yet not only had the community at the top of the hill bought into it with the fervour of ragged sleepwalkers in hand-crafted natural fibres, but so did the self-deluded town below. The fact is the yard sale was pure Greenwash; each member of the community had bought out-right their converted stable houses surrounding a grander house and like children were now playing poor on the lawn. The comment shouted out by a passerby regarding the money raised’ That’ll be enough for a few Cappuchinos at the airport!”, was ignored.

“There is nothing more telling about the morale of a nation than its Ideation Quotient”.  Continued Professor Nohair,“ Political correctness is a natural enemy of how one chooses to see oneself and National Displacement Ideation Quotient, where a whole nation side-steps this issue by identification with somewhere else, (like New Zealand’s appropriation of Tolkein’s Middle-Earth) allows long-haul flights of national fancy without offending anyone in the real world. That it is a major symptom of malaise is obvious; sub-titled Scandinavian crime dramas allows the English to escape into a racially pristine landscape without incurring the wrath of the Political Correct and from their sofas, quaff deeply at the well of an Aryan  idyll. It’s damage limitation really”.

Ideation Quotient is central to success, without the unseemly stampede of those who have been given the notion that they are elite, gift-aid for top private schools would be impossible to acquire, hence the IQ Test (Ideation Quotient test). High in the Texas Hills companies are using this test to sort the wheat from the chaff scrupulously measuring a perspective employee’s self-belief by asking. “How certain are you to reach the top?” The surprise second part to this question could make or break an applicant. “...of a giant dung heap?”

It would be a major miracle if any one could raise one’s Ideation Quotient above the rest of humanity. You would say that is impossible-divine right notwithstanding? You would be right by assuming that to get to the top we need to scramble up on the shoulders of giants; and when we hear about Chris Ofili our gut instinct is the same as Lenny Mulch's and Sly Green's; is he worth using to further my ascent? Out-and-out liars are indeed those whose no-holds-barred attitude to climbing up the backs and onto the shoulders of giants to succeed is nothing more than ingenuous.

Summarizing Out-and-Out Liars we have seen that an outstanding amount can be done without talent by opportunists. In this section, we will be sending a whole battalion of diggers out to solve the cases of what happened to those who slipped through the crust of their own private dung heap and disappeared into failure in its purest and concentrated form- social compost. How we have been tricked into running to our sofas cued by mass recession Shadenfreude into gawping at the They-Shoot-Horses-Don’t-They despair that is Britain’s Got Unpaid Talent! and the Mug Factor!, Mulch and Green may never rise to a level of intelligence to tell us. Had Lenny Mulch met the sixteen year old Chris Ofili it would be him, not Ofili cashing in, but he would have been cashing in on the same misunderstanding; Mulch does not understand what a true out-and-out liar is and that is a misunderstanding he will carry with him to the gargantuan mulch that will be his grave.