Celebrity Death Camp
Prologue: ‘They took Paris to Paris, where the guillotine did its best work, making a Marie Antoinette for a new age, which we did not have to suffer any more.’
That was the day the light was sucked out of our world, and the reign of darkness began. The newspapers were suddenly moribund, the radio suddenly quiet, and the TV suddenly blind. The voice of the meaningless was silenced, and the image extirpated. We were saved. The world had turned around and was treading back down the path of time, following darkness into a new dream. There was no more light, was to be no more light. And the former children of the light were to follow where the darkness led. New circles in hell were opened especially for them: the mewling Actors and Actresses, the simpering Newsreaders, the fatuous Magazine Writers, the smug Journalists, the prancing Photographers, the addled Advertisers, the jingle-ridden Copyrighters, everyone who had sustained the empire of the trivial, the persistence of the image, the empty world of appearances. There were new circles in hell for them to reflect on the mirror of their own hollowness, to wallow in the pantomime of their pretences, to parade their pathetic self-regarding souls through the mockery of everything, as they had been doing all their pathetic, wasted, self-regarding lives, and ours. Our broken lives…
Everything false was gone, even the false blonde… Every lie was to die.
They continued in exile in their disgusting and insatiable triviality, slaves to their own celebrity, listening forever to the echoes of their own screaming inanity from the imprisoning walls of Celebrity Death Camp, endlessly watching and re-watching their own self-infatuated posturing on the world’s very latest and last cinema and TV screens. They were their own torment and their own torture. It was ingenious; they were their own hell. And they knew no better as they lay with rats and spiders, and feasted on worms, fattening themselves for the time the worms would feast on them. Surrounded by cameras they fed on their own vile image fed back to them, unaware that no one else in the world was watching, as they cannabalised themselves, piteously, joyfully. It was their last great but vain performance. And while they died their disgusting deaths, we did our best to forget them. As if they had never been.
We stood in the new darkness, waiting while a new dark voice rose over us. ‘I will take away the very language you use to describe your nothingness.’ We all stood in darkness, and listened. ‘This,’ we heard, ‘is a new Beginning!’