The Queen Ate My Hamster – I Like Icke
I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it on here before, but I have a strange amount of respect for David Icke. Now, don’t mistake respect for belief in any of the crazier end of what he says (there’s a lot of ‘just, like, be nice to everyone and stuff’ in his talks these days, from what I’ve seen), but I do respect him. It comes down to two distinct points:
1. He absolutely believes in what he’s talking about
2. He’s not really doing any harm
Taken on their own neither of those really garner my respect: there are lot of people who really believe in what they’re doing from shit artists to genocidal fuckheads and most people drift through their lives without doing any harm, but taken together he’s a strange figure who just sits in the corner telling those who are interested about his slightly strange view on the world before shaking a few hands and drifting off quietly into the night.
I saw a bit of documentary about him a couple of years back and the days of being the son of god and a lizard overlord obsessive are behind him. There are hints of lizards still present, but the documentary seems to suggest that he’s more interested in his message of peace and love these days, although it also showed his wife/manager knows what the crowd are after and deftly manoeuvring him back round to what the crowd had come to see. He’s a slightly comical figure and seems to know it, but still churns out books and does ridiculously punishing talking tours where he seems to play to packed out houses, with (I guess) a proportion of the crowd just there to see a formerly well respected personality talk crazy. That’s sort of where I’d be if I went, which makes me think.
Thoughts of The Icke don’t often cross my mind often these days, although every now and again I wish that I had something that I could go and evangelise about with the same level of lack of harm attached. Telling people how great eBooks are doesn’t really come close and the paper publishing market probably wouldn’t agree (yet…) on the harm element. However, I got an email from the folks over at the Brixton Academy today letting me know that due to popular demand another date had been added to see Icke talk. And when I say talk, I really mean it – the day runs from 11am to 9:30pm. Even with breaks that’s going to be a long day of fairly crazy talk and at £35 it’s about £3.18 per hour, which is top value for such high quality crazy. Add to that the date – September 11 – and all of a sudden you get an event that could kick off in unexpected ways.
If anything the date has put me off – I like the idea of a guy with crazy ideas going around and telling everyone his message of peace, love, mind expansion and lizard conspiracies, but if you start dropping serious and potential controversy causing reality into the mix then it stops being quite so fun. So, for now the chance of seeing David Icke lecture animatedly about the secret rulers of the world will sit in the back of my head for another day. Long may he continue.
It seems a chunk of his talk is online…time for some watching.
Random Posts
Posted: January 20th, 2010 under blog.
Tags: crazy, David Icke, lizards