The Enemy

• At the pub or in his shop he asks me why those sorts of people come over here in the first place if they don't want to live like us. He's not a bigot but it winds him up when they force their lifestyles down his throat. It's not natural, is it? • Clutter, seductively packaged, ephemera, carefully hoarded. • Enemy's a tricky one. Marcuse would say it's that which seeks to prolong the stupefication of affluent society, his mate Adorno would say it's the economic system that refuses to exploit resources to abolish hunger in favour of making films. For Hitler it was Marxism, for Marx it was shoddy research. For Bush sr. it was Iraq, for Bush jr. it's suddenly switched from just China to pretty much anyone. • I remember being a kid and having a worst enemy but I can't remember his name. But even then it was worst, one of many, and utterly contingent. • Envy and greed. • I am my enemy: I demand too much of myself, can’t sleep and shout out loud to myself. • I am my own worst (and only) enemy. • I believe the enemy may be time! • Monday mornings and new shoes….rude waiters, television game shows and mobile phones. • My enemy asks what school I attended, but doesn't know the school I attended. Sneers at people who wear brown shoes. • My enemy has it all worked out. • My enemy has plenty of enemies, many more than me. More than I could ever have the energy for. A never-ending supply of liberals, intellectuals, politicians, young people, foreigners, women, milquetoasts, academics, arrivistes, carers, asylum seekers, singers, socialists, nobs, slobs, homosexualists and waverers. Perhaps I envy the simplicity of his world, his 'us and them'. • My enemy is a situation - a state of tension or great haste - which destroys all that has been achieved. • My enemy hangs around me and knows me better than anyone else. His repeated gestures of friendship have secured the approval and trust of my friends and acquaintances. He keeps his ambition hidden but at a critical moment will become an opponent. When he does so he will, of course, remain kind to me, and argue that I have made some kind of mistake. He will drain from me all the energy I have to argue with him or even fight him. But worst of all, I will be so busy defending myself that I will have nothing left to apply to the task of self reflection or acting as my own critic. • My enemy is polite. Will wait for you to finish speaking. But there's no need to listen when you already know what someone is like. • My enemy number one is myself. The Ich and the Uberich. Enemy number two is time. An enemy hard to catch. And three, there are a lot of enemies out there, all the baddies of all the James Bond movies. Top Baddie of the moment: Bush-Baddie. • My enemy opposes my freedom of thought or my freedom to feel and act: it may be a person I know or a person I have never met. • My enemy threatens my peace or undermines my energy and confidence • My enemy turns from me without uttering a word. • No-one else can see him. • Our enemy is our willingness to despair of love, goodness, and hope. • Our enemy is still class division. The fact that it is not the only enemy should not be used as a distraction from the need to dismantle the state. The state is always and everywhere the sanctioned mechanism by which one class rules over all others. We cannot abolish the state without first ridding society of class division. • Solicitors, time, teeth, knowledge, not in that order. • Someone who lies, but whose motive I am unable to discern. • Sometimes I don't realise how much he helps out his neighbours. He would put you up without a murmur. Sings racist songs when drunk. • The enemy is the bland, the mediocre, dumbing down, middle of the road, the average, safe corporate pap. Mind you shallow shock sensation has a lot to answer for too. think the 'f.c.u.k.' campaign for all of the above. • To look outside of oneself for an enemy is to fall victim to the fact that we project onto others those aspects of ourselves which remain unintegrated within our psyche and unacceptable to our sense of self. Lack of awareness of this process is the enemy within.

We are interested in hearing about your enemy and would like to display information about him/her/it/them on this website.

You can interpret the idea of enemy as widely as you like and you can present your story as you want: text, photos, short video, phone message.

If your enemy is an actual person and you feel bad about speaking about them behind their back or you simply don’t want everyone to know it's you who is confessing to a particular enemy you can disguise your identity.

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We are looking for a full spectrum of experiences and ways of telling your story. Thank you for your responses.

Date: September 19th, 2013

Category: Uncategorized

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