New Model Army

by Adam Roberts

Consider the Second World War. History tells us that war was a fight to see whether a democratic system could beat an authoritarian one.

Ahh so if the army is run in an authoritrian manner it undermines the argument for democracy's superiority.

We don’t have democracy, in the world of politics today; we have oligarchy punctuated by occasional contests to determine who has the most effective control of the media.

But who would want to spend the time voting on every little thing when there's tik toks to be scrolled through

The decision went with Crowley’s counterprop.

666 votes

At this the man began to cry like a child, ungainly gulping sobs. He clutched his rucksack close to his torso.

The narrator thought this was a grocer display of emotion

To spare you the tedium, I will not give a street-by-street account of the battle for Reading.

You won't be reading about Reading

because if the rights and wrongs could be easily sorted out then people wouldn’t have gone to war over them in the first place.

Wow, I really find this profound!!!

With, as the historians note, their bombs, and their guns, and their guns, and their bombs.

Cranberries?

Perhaps it seems that I am saying the root causes of this war are economic. Isn’t such a statement merely tautological?

I love that he used tautological as I just learned this word recently so I recognized it

A weight of grouse smashed into the windshield, the perspex broke and the inadvertent missile disabled the pilot. The machine crashed into a Scottish mountain top killing six of the eleven on board, the prince amongst them.

Sounds like a gross way to die, and Scotland gave the prince the Bird

his shirt was a Watchman design: a black ground and the sunlike yellow disc of a smiley, but with the red splatter minute hand showing four minutes past instead of four minutes to.

Alan Moore keeps popping up

‘Are you for real?’ I asked, in my Blade Runner snake-dancer voice.

I like p k d's work but I like it even more when people do their own take on it

‘because scientifiction

Ha!

The whole expanse was a field of spiky yellow flame: a hologram of Bart’s haircut on a Brobdingnagian scale.

That's a clever cultural reference...clever like a Fox, a Swift brown fox

The Parliament also insisted on what they called a border smackdown - a wrestling term,

Wrestling and ring go together so they're still all about finding the ringleaders

His neck was as wide as his head: as if someone had pushed a cannonball up through a pink membrane and drawn a face on the bulge. And he was rigid.

Is he describing his dad as a dick?

press the book against his face and then hammer the hardback as heavily as I could. I did it first to a boy called Tremain,

Tremain got trepanned

- offering me his trousers as a trophy if I liked and so on.

Take my trousers he panted

with another man called Daltrey. He claimed to be part of the same family that gave the world the notable last-century rock singer,

WHO was that?

We were a little over nine thousand individuals, and we never committed more than a third of our number to the big city; but that was more than enough to bring the whole of London to a halt.

Having already tied to Alan Moore this Is giving me V for Vendetta feels

But their knife had met only water.

The water knife was a great book

To his left a slideshow of images from London; below him the red tape wormed its way right-left, detailing casualties; damages in euros; Newcastle peace talks; dangerous malfunctions on the EU Aeroscaphe, up in Earth orbit.

I like how he phrases the red scroll as the red tape worming as it repeats the tapeworm image he used earlier for the scroll under the newscast.

bathetically

Typo?

‘[I can’t believe we’re jawing on about toes,]’ interjected a soldier called Wigley whom I did not know personally.

Well toes can be wiggly

‘Jonathan and David, queer as all get out.’

My great grandmother would have been furious at this

One jet overflew the town, low enough to show off the nodules and widgets on its underbelly, like Smaug.

The Soddit

But it was not until this moment that I understood which Jack Martin had meant to call me. The Giantkiller, of course.

I like this because I was thinking jack like a port into the firewall not the Jack of beanstalk fame

‘That is - some NMA,’ he said, in simple admiration, like the scene in Charlotte’s Web.

Fine book, made me cry

Sport, you see, was cracked out of the egg of war.

Team I want you to scramble for the ball

Chickenpox tiny white stars all over it.

Of course they were poxy stars with him being feverish

‘What’s that film, where Peter Sellars plays the Indian?’

Birdy num nums

We are always playing; whether we are talking about work or leisure, about being alone or being with others, we are addicted to play, play is our complete horizon.

I just listened to a speech Alan Watts have about not making the distinction between work and play