Posthuman Blues

Rise of the lizard-slayer

I nominate David Icke as prototype 21st century man. He's got the necessary survival skills for today's post-X-Files zeitgeist. He's even politically correct inasmuch as his disdain for Jews is masked by a loathing for interdimensional reptiles. Icke, like John Edward, is a smarmy pseudoprophet who delights in smearing his own face across his publications. Image is everything; Icke knows this, realizes it with an acuity the politicians he despises only sense from a distance.

Icke knows how to package idiocy, and it's the package, not the contents, that is so eagerly swallowed. The covers of his books have all of the graphic subtlety of a box of laundry detergent. His audience is a reeling mass of paranoid media symbionts: the human aftermath of the Heaven's Wake suicides, late-night radio conspiracies and the shoot-out death of professional doom-monger Bill Cooper.