Staunch though his championship may be of the popular hate figure Peter Mandelson, Sordel's defence budget also extends to chinooks for Simon Cowell. Cowell (in the popular imagination at least) is stricken this holiday season as a consequence of the bird flipped collectively in his direction by the people of Great Britain when they made "Killing in the Name" number one this Christmas.
"Fuck you," chorused the Facebook masses: "I won't do what you tell me!"
This is a pretty remarkable consensus given the fact that the bankers took their bonuses, the MPs refused to give back their swag (or the bags that it came in) and we are still (still!) prosecuting two unjust wars overseas. Way to go, People of Britain ... you really managed to focus out the Pervasive Evanescent this holiday season.
Cowell, if only because he scowls so much and wears a lot of black, is good casting for a pantomime villain, and - in the dim apprehension of a great many Rage downloaders - cheating him of the top of the festive chart is the equivalent of stick a large bomb down his underpants and running away chortling.
Apparently all that was needed to motivate the campaign against the harmless Joe McElderry and his largely pleasant single was the perception that Cowell's X Factor had locked up the "coveted" throne at the top of the hit parade and was preventing other musical acts (JLS, Cheryl Cole, Alexandra Buck, Leona Lewis and the X Factor Charity single, presumably) from getting their fair time in the spotlight. Next week the big chart showdown, for example, is scheduled to be Cole vs. McElderry. Assuming that the Facebook community is resting on its laurels and collecting its winnings from William Hill, you wouldn't need the National Weather Center's help to forecast business as usual for 2010.
Cowell, like the Formerly Red Baron, is with us so untiringly that the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse may as well advertise for a keyboardist & second drummer before heading into the coming decade as a sextet.
Before we bid a fond farewell to 2009, however, it is worth shunning the sherry long enough to remember with due sobriety the many British families bereaved this year as a consequence of the brace of conflicts continuing in the absence of an effective Facebook campaign to end them. Sordel will be remembering in his prayers also the families of the many Soviet troops killed and injured in Afghanistan as a consequence of the U.S.-backed insurgency there.
Killing In The Name indeed.
And on that cheerful note Sordel bids a Merry Xmas to all his reader.
