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Nerve 9 Letters Page

‘Dear’ Nerve,
I read the latest issue of Nerve magazine with the usual mixture of hilarity and disbelief. You people really haven’t got it into your skulls yet, have you? The time for you bunch of moaners and your slave morality is past. Nietzsche was right. I won’t take the time to tell you who Nietzsche was, but he was right. The world belongs to the true nobleman, to the great blond beasts, to the non-compromisers, to the yes-sayers. Tony Blair has done a decent job, but what we really need is a full-blown dictatorship to crush your pathetic protests! Embrace the future, ‘Nerve’ magazine, or evolution has no place for you!
So you don’t like the Capital of Culture, eh? Artists are upset they’re not getting any funding? Ever thought that might be because they are no good, and that the people of Liverpool will be grateful when right-wing strongmen like Bono line up in 2008? Who’s that Jamie Reid? He did one thing thirty years ago and yet you still bang on about him! The police are too tough for you are they? Well run on home to your mummy and she’ll kiss it all better! And as for that flyposting rant, can you people seriously not see that the reason you are not allowed to advertise is that you are small and poor. The strong and rich became strong and rich through hard work!
I hope Liverpool will soon be a city fit for the likes of my Ruth and me – with gated communities, private parks and a Tesco on every corner. Not that we’d ever shop there of course; it’s full of poor people.

Yours Successfully,
Martin Eden

Dear Nerve,
I could comment on every page of the current issue (issue 8), but will keep it to two.
1. Police should “rule by example”. They do set an example; an appalling one. Who is above traffic laws? (Who parks on double yellow lines to buy a sandwich? Who drives through pedestrian areas – often the wrong way?) Who, when I had a bullet through my window, ignored 14 requests for assistance? Who is not about “caring and protecting”, but is actually an army in reserve to put down “civil unrest”?
2. “Posh shops”. The man behind “The Metropolitan Quarter” said he gave out a hundred cameras and asked people to “photograph what excited them”. I tried to take a photograph in “The Met. Quarter”, and immediately one of his private police was there forbidding me. These are not public places, but foretastes of the coming fascist state.
But who is to blame? Whilst the brainless flock into the boring TMQ and the Gostins Arcade is empty, it will keep going and while idiots patronise Whitbread – the fake “Italian” Costa, the fake “French” Café Rouge, and everything else – the last few real cafés, the last few independent shops, owned by real people not corporations, and staffed by ditto, not conditioned robots – will disappear. You are building their world.
I can’t – won’t – give an address: I don’t want to be on the L’pool KGB–SS list for a 2am knock and accident in the cells. (Yes – I’ve seen it: it isn’t myth.)

Toby