Carrion Porn

Fascinating article on Melvyn Bragg's radio 4 show today, all about the Münster Rebellion of 1534-5



Dovetailing nicely with the central themes of one of my favourite books, 'Q', by a posse of Italian know-it-alls masquerading - for knowingly ironic reasons I cannot fathom - under the name of former Watford association football player Luther Blisset, the article featured a trio of donnish types rattling through the mayhem that ensued when a motley crew of Anabaptists seized control of the German city duting the Reformation.

Prophecies, rebaptism, God's judgment, famine, warfare, unimaginable acts of cruelty, demagogue cocks having their cocks nailed to doors and some uber-loon running the show taking unto himself 16 wives* before it all went tits-up with terrible inevitability, segueing gently into insane acts of torture and the bodies of the ringleaders being hung from the church steeple in cages that are still there to this very day. The story really has it all: I don't know why nobody's made a movie out of it yet - perhaps a Bollywood version would suit, with lots of jolly singing and dancing. That Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall chap would do well to take note before making any more of his action-light carrion porn.



But the central message I take from all of this is that folk really will subscribe to any bug-eyed, batshit nonsense you can conceive of - and then some - in the name of religion. And once we've sorted out the world economy and developed a cure for swine flu and all the rest of it, we're still gonna be left with that one.



*He's alleged to have chopped one of their heads off in the market square, although such of his pals as survived the slaughter claimed this to be Papist propaganda, thus foreshadowing the antics of both Henry VIII and the population of Ulster.