My contribution to the iconography of the Wild West. I designed this record cover in 1977 in homage to pulp westerns and played bass on this turkey, a rare record which fetches £250.00 in vinyl marts, largely because of its 'absurd' graphics.

In respect of his morals, JT was typical of any middle Englander –  because that’s precisely what he was. Born in Derbyshire, he spent much of his later life in Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire, home of the pork pie. An erstwhile postman and fish and chip shop owner when he wasn’t writing, like Dr. Johnson, he claimed he only did it for the money. The writer of ‘A Horse called Mogollon’ and ‘You’re a Texas Ranger, Alvin Fog’ was wary of horses and claimed to have no particular affinity with the United States, though he was a fierce advocate of Texan values, up to and including his generalisation that Texans were discriminated against, specifically in Kansas.

His Wild West was hewn from his imagination, the product of an overdose of Randolph Scott, John Wayne and Audie Murphy pictures when cooped up in barracks during his stint as an army attack dog trainer. His Wild West Weltenschauen was as valid as anyone else’s: John Ford was 2nd generation Irish from Maine, John Houston was Irish, the great Hollywood studio bosses were New York Jews. JT just didn’t stray far from the badlands of Coalville. That’s all she wrote.

Edson’s oeuvre was not confined to westerns.He was also an admirer/imitator/plagiarist of the great Edgar Rice Burroughs, science fiction writer best known for Tarzan, who described his start in writing, (after a stint as a pencil sharpener) thus:

“…if people were paid for writing rot such as I read in some of those magazines, I could write stories just as rotten. As a matter of fact, although I had never written a story, I knew absolutely that I could write stories just as entertaining and probably a whole lot more so than any I chanced to read in those magazines.”

So it came to pass that another JT hero, James Allenvale ‘Bunduki’ Gunn, was adopted by Tarzan after his parents were murdered by the Mau Mau. Bunduki married Tarzan’s great-granddaughter, Dawn, a Roedean-educated martial artist related to Bulldog Drummond and John Wesley Hardin. The happy couple were transported to the counter-earth planet Zillikian where they fought baddies, wild west style, in the grand tradition of Buck Rogers. Dawn’s weapon of choice was a Randall fighting knife.

My favourite JT title, ‘Wagons to Backsight’ was recommended to me by my first boss, the brilliant schlock publisher Brian Babani, who employed me to put captions on Marvel Comic strips. Working from From our dream factory above the Owl Bookshop on London’s Kentish Town Road, I was Captain Jack, agony uncle/letters editor in ‘Forces in Combat‘, a weekly compendium of particularly violent comic strips – Deathlock the Demolisher, Rom the Space Knight, Nick Fury, Agent of Shield et al – and production manager/editor/colourer-in for the first Dr Who Comic.

I wrote most, if not all the brilliant cover lines on Forces in Combat issue 8. No wonder I'm burnt out 30 years on.

I sat up late into the night, ruinously drunk, with comic artist legend, Paul Neary, letrasetting headlines such as ‘Together Again for the First Time’ to describe the merging of  SpiderMan and Incredible Hulk strips in frequent showcase editions. It was left to me to fend off the tiresome protests of the Dr Who Appreciation Society, who had the power to annoy the BBC into suspending our merchandising licence, which hung by a slender thread. “What’s wrong with describing the Krynoid as a giant alien cabbage? That’s what it is. Now fuck off and get a life before I drop the lot of you out of a high window,” I’d tell the Who groupies, conveying the spirit of Brian’s message but omitting the defenestration part. What better use of a First in American Studies? I was proof positive of the value to society of a liberal humanities education.

Why oh why did I stray from the shining path of churning out words for money? JT was right: liberals ARE wankers. Look at them today, ruining the country, nancing about marrying Tories and running off with former lesbians while allegedly getting off driving bans by pretending to be their wife. To think for a time I did their bidding, drank their vinho verde. JT never had a problem with writer’s block. Neither did I in those halcyon times.

I left Marvel Comics for The Economist and lost my way.  Since then, I have measured out my life with coffee spoons, writing economic and political analysis, indictments of savage regimes, describing ‘high level’ management malarky and penning books and arts reviews.

Belatedly, I now see all this as a lower category of war crime. Re-acquaintance with Edson has reminded me on which side of the line I stand. Henceforth, there will be more along the lines of robot shops, Yuri Gagarin, skull rings, Japanese esoteric Buddhism, whippet racing, the curse of the middle classes, aquarium kitsch, the folk art of ice cream vans. Maybe then I can write a title as compelling as ‘Hints on Self-Preservation when attacked by a War Dog,’ knock predictable flaneurs like Philip Roth off their perch and turn round the ailing fortunes of the British publishing industry.

John J Kelly

A scientist advises everyone to wear daft masks, except when entering a bank, government installation or standing in front of CCTV cameras, all of which may provoke symptoms of police-related fatality

Thus has belatedly contracted Clown Fever, a pandemonium of utter bollocks sweeping the globe, whose symptoms include jabbering about mutating viruses as though it was a done deal. I do confess myself awestruck by the ease in which overpaid Geneva NGO Strangelovess at the World Health Organisation can apply a Lickert scale to the improbable/impossible, add the word ‘pandemic’, create wholesale panic and be fulsomely praised for their efforts. It’s akin to paying outrageous sums to a bunch of wierdos in Lausanne for the privilege of convincing despotic regimes to run around bullying everyone with the Olympic flame, bankrupting cities building pointless velodromes and Tae Kwan Do mega dojos and creating hostage-taking scenarios in the name of sport. We all know it will end in tears, but we go along with it, because it gives us something to moan, pontificate and generally waffle about (as I’m doing now). Clown Fever and it will mutate into something else soon, so don’t put that mask on yet. Swine Flu – or H1N1 – the name has mutated to a more deadly James Bondy sounding acronym – has now been downgraded from deadly to a bit of a sniffle. This hides the really interesting part. Usually disasters grow in the telling. Estimates of earthquake deaths, for example, are usually improbably low. (I was on the edges of the 1998 Izmir earthquake and remember hearing initial estimates that only 110 were dead. Though no seismologist, it was clear that you needed to add a couple of noughts to get close). I hope it’s because we want to wish for the best possible outcome – think low and maybe it won’t be as bad as all that. But a pandemic – the widescale distribution of an  ’epidemic,‘ a disease whose virulence exceeds normal expectations behaves differently in the media, and quickly spreads to governments. Quarantine me if you like, but I’m not wearing a mask or sneezing into the crook of my elbow, however many trillions of leaflets Gordon Brown prints or mad scientists appear on the news interviewing jobsworths and showing crazy blowups of viruses. 

Call me cynical, but I didn’t believe that ‘up to a million’ would die in the UK, the majority from Ealing and Barnet, according to the Metro free newspaper that I unhygenically read over the shoulder of a passenger in the plague-friendly confines of the London Underground last week. Neither do I believe The Economist’s current cover story, that although it may be clever to sneer, the worst is yet to come and the WHO has done the right thing. They told us that invading Iraq was a good idea and their cartoons are simply not funny. 

The dead arose and appeared to many - the death toll has actually fallen in the current pandemic

There would be reason to be fearful if we weren’t arriving at the uncomfortable truth that far from the original 179 deaths in Mexico, the ‘real’ figure is now 101. That’s a 56% drop, spooky stuff even for the country that celebrates the Dia de los Muertos when the dead arise and lark about. Technically it’s an epidemic, given that the flu can be transmitted ‘human to human’ but so is virtually every form of virus and all forms of flu (which apparently kills up to 250,000 people worldwide every year, according to the same WHO – note the phrase ‘up to’ – another symptom of Clown Flu). Technically it’s a pandemic, in that it has spread to quite a few countries. We in Britain (naturally the most-prepared nation, according to Great Helmsman Gordon) isolated and hospitalised two Scottish honeymooners, recently returned from Mexico, who passed on the flu to their friend, who has also recovered. Other countries are rushing to produce victims. Lebanese folk has been forbidden to greet each other with kisses on both cheeks. Egypt has set about slaughtering all its 250,000 pig population for no scientific reason whatsoever and with no reported victims. Gordon Brown has spent £150 million of borrowed cash on masks and has visited a call centre. All symptoms of Clown Flu.

This flu, or any other, cannot be compared to ‘pandemics’ such as Spanish Flu, Asian Flu, Hong Kong Flu, Avian Flu (SARS) or, for that matter, Bubonic Plague. The circumstances and prevailing levels of health of those affected in all cases, not to mention medical aid available, all played a huge part in the mortality rates. I’m genuinely sorry for the poor Mexicans who died – I bet they were literally poor – but we haven’t heard that much about them thus far. The overwhelming majority of those who died from SARS were dirt poor agricultural/factory labourers in unhygenic conditions. The 1968 pandemic mostly killed old and infirm people (as did the unseasonal cold weather in continental Europe last year). The 1918 flu epidemic needs no explanation. Neither does the 1347 Black Death. 

Millions die every year of malaria and tuberculosis, eminently curable diseases, for the same reason: they are poor. A spot of flu isn’t going to kill us all. Clown Fever, whereby the media go berserk and governments run in circles, screaming and shouting like hysterics at a Dia de los Muertos festival, is an endemic global media condition affecting common sense: far more difficult to control, much less to eradicate. 

John J Kelly

A load of crystal balls but I like it and who am I to talk?

I was cloyingly complimentary about The Economist a few posts back, but need to put the record straight by sneering at the article by ‘editor-in-chief’ John Micklethwait in ‘The World in 2009.’ His sententious advice to Barack Obama uncharacteristically reeks of transatlantic cant. He observes that Obama will find it difficult to please the left wing of the Democrats and will need to work hard to combat impatience for change. Then he urges Obama to try not not to change too much at all. His assumption that continuing to wage war in Afghanistan and staying in Iraq are non-negotiable options is redolent of the specious neo-Liberal fence-sitting that allowed the last administration to wage war and wreak havoc at will. Obama needs to effect radical change to achieve escape velocity from the powerful dark gravity of the status quo. The first 90 days will shape the rest of his term. Hillary Clinton may represent reactionary interests. Maybe Barack walks that road too, under which circumstances John M. is right. But while the majority of Economist revenues and the largest group of subscribers are in North America, its editor, an expert on the US – see The Right Nation – does not have to try quite so hard, quite so soon, to appease its disgruntled conservatives, unless he is one himself, of course. 

On the other hand, Ann Wroe writes a playful obituary of the Presidency of George W Bush in the endpages of the same Brainiac’s Annual, which also contains an excellent section on the environment, a very good piece by John Peet about Europe’s unresolved conflicts and an unmissable piece by Laza Kekic: ‘Twenty years of capitalism: was it worth it?’ which debates whether former communist states in Central and Eastern Europe have necessarily progressed since the Berlin Wall came down.

My late and much-missed brother-in-law, FT writer Peter Martin invented The World in . . . series when running The Economist Intelligence Unit 23 years ago. Daniel Franklin has done his memory proud with this edition in particular. I disagree with much of it, especially Kissinger’s witterings (let’s whack Iran), but it takes all sorts and . . there I go again, liking The Economist. Tell me I’m not a Tory. Or a neocon. Or an economist.

Gloomy energy picture

Every now and again (actually most times) The Economist says something I wanted to say, better than I could. This week, the free market bible points out that posturing aside, the current UK government’s record on implementing effective climate change legislation leaves much to be desired. A new initiative, spearheaded by climate change Czar Adair Turner and sponsored by Ed Miliband, newly-appointed Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, aims to redress the imbalance between good intentions and inertia. The debate is whether we should have made hay while the sun shone and we had cash to invest (and money to burn) or whether straitened circumstances will accelerate the imperative to use energy more wisely. Moreover, the UK targets are not as ambitious or far-reaching as some of our European neighbours. Read this informative and balanced argument here. I can’t improve on it.