I grow up and drag along in my suitcase...

With all the Is A Crisis, Is Not A Crisis* going on in Belgium the last couple of months, I figured it must be a really strange country young Belgians live in. Literally all of their life they've been seeing politicians shout and behave like adolescent shitheads or have talks that seem to go nowhere about things only politicians comprehend. They grow up in a Belgium where politicians continually polarize any problem in the country into something from one or the other side of the language barrier.

* sung on the melody of Soul Coughing's Is Chicago, Is Not Chicago

That train of thought got me thinking about what subjects from Belgium or international politics pierced the shell of my oblivious childhood years to leave a lasting influence on my then naive, nay, unformed view on the world outside.

World politics were incomprehensible. Absolutely. Bernard Benson's Peacebook offered a solution quite as simple as letting a little boy ask why big mean old people don't kiss and make up and then have them realize the kid is right. Can I have a collective "Awww that's so kewt"

And while harbouring that Peacebook dream all warm and fuzzy inside, I notice people digging out nuclear shelters in their backyards, even in little old Belgium. Mad Max beyond Thunderdome (1985) only fuels the easily titillated imagination of a child: this is what the end of the world looks like!

Then, 1986, cherry on the pie: spending lunchbreaks at school looking at the sky to see if you can see the poisonous cloud that's blowing in from Chernobyl.
Wait for the icing on this childhood's cake, darling digiblips: SEEING WHEN THE WIND BLOWS DOES NOT HELP OKAY??!!

Damn the world was a scary place back then!
But it did prepare me for whatever shit the world throws me now, from tsunamis in faraway countries to global warming and being an actual jinx for England whenever I visit (terrorist attacks, major strikes), to the End of Belgium. Nothing short of the true Apocalypse can rattle my cage, heh.

On the smaller--Belgian--scale, politics were zzzzzz boring, and televised debates were a contest in conservative fashions and nasal mumblings.
Nonetheless there was some scary shit going on!

Scariest mofos from childhood are the Nijvel Gang/Brabant Massacres, brutal gangsters active from 1982 to 1985, killing, torturing and plundering whatever they came across. The news speaks of pursuits and shootouts with police but on television it still looks like a contest in conservative fashions and nasal mumblings instead of CHIPS. The only exciting piece is the getaway car: a white Golf GTI. Suddenly, EVERYBODY wants a GTI. Dude, the cops can't catch up!

Then there's the very confusing (for kiddies) terrorism of the Cellules Communistes Combattantes, CCC in short. They were EVIL, I mean communist, bombs, links to all those other and certainly more deadly redski terrorists like Rote Armee Fraktion and Action Directe. But let's be honest: if you're turning in your own bombs, and giving the public services enough time to clear the area, you're way nicer than the *real* European terrorists. In the end the only deaths involving a CCC bombing occurred after an error in communication between public services, and this error may or may not have been deliberate, given the unexplained issues that surround both cases.

Good horror only functions if some of it is unresolved and left to fester.
Growing out of '80s childhood I find myself nearly trapped in that nightmare scene from American Werewolf in London: with the Gulf War the Mad Max reality can't be far behind, Chernobyl is on fire, and
legal prying and journalist investigations into unexplained issue and mysteries surrounding the CCC as well as the Nijvel Gang offer links with US stay-behind politics against communist influence. This brings the idea home of what a Cold WAR means. Nothing can be proven, though; it's all out there in the same fuzzball as Gladio, P2 and the fuzzpluzz which may or may not be named Echelon.


All in all, I guess my cold-hearted, cool-headed and sometimes acidly sarcastic worldview is not a surprise after all. Seeing all the truths and lies and love&rockets going on on my TV screen, I wonder what the world will look like to them kids when they're all grown up...