Arms Control Poseur

Death of a sense of humour
'N death of sense
How do you recover from this?

What do you fear?
Being found out
Then why do you always give yourself away?

What do you want to do?
Hide
Then why go out and make an exhibition of yourself?

What do you seek?
Oblivion (1)
And drugs walk the streets

What you want to be able to do 
Is worst advice
A Louse given in largesse (2)

Arms control 
Arms control poseur
Arms control (3)

Parliament connives a diseased access company
There's nothing much I can do about this
So I drink and recline with an acquaintance, sound

Spouse is talking on the phone
To well-armed arms control poseur

Arms control poseur

I found my home
I made a calendar that wasn't there
To find whether it was the first of December
Or not

Armed control poseur
In pity and envy
Dragged from the streets
I quite very very much enjoyed
His jovial lies (4)
Lying 

[The following two stanzas are separate, interwoven vocal lines by MES:]

Armoured car interior
Encrusted with bluebottles (5)
I even stoop to an icy vodka (6)
As I feel the inevitable 
battle creep nearer and nearer
Armed control poseur
As my great great great great great ?great great great
great ?familiar found out
?As my great great great great ?similar found out?
As my great great great great great ?great 
great grandfather found out

Sports car interior
Encrusted with bluebottles
Armoured car interior 
Encrusted with bluebottles
I even stoop to an icy vodka
As I feel the inevitable
battle creep nearer and nearer
Chip! Chip! (7)
Arms control poseur
Arms control poseur 

Arms control poseur
Arms control poseur
Arms control poseur

Get me a nice wooly polo neck 
With a red cardigan 
From Next 
Ideal summer wear (8)

Arms control poseur

1. In his biography of Mark E. Smith, Hip Priest, Simon Ford identifes this line as taken from Malcolm Lowry. It is known that Smith is a fan of Lowry's work:

One of the best writers I like is Malcolm Lowry, who was from bleeding Warrington, or somewhere. He's one of the best bloody writers, he wrote the best books: Under The Volcano. But some bratpack idiot writes a bloody book that is some complete rip-off of Under The Volcano, about a guy who goes to Mexico and gets fucked up, and he makes a million dollars.

I'm not sure what book this is; plausible candidates are hard to scare up, it seems...

The opening lyrics are adapted from Lowry's posthumous work, La Mordida, a novel that was in progress when Lowry died. On page 124 Lowry writes:

"Death of a sense of fun, ditto humor, ditto of sense. How do you recover from this? If you what you fear is being found out why do you always give yourself away? If you really want to hide why do you always go out and make an exhibition of yourself? And if it is oblivion that you seek, why do you drink in such a way as will inevitably cause the most agonized kind of remembrance in such a way in short as you will ever have to stop [sic]." 

^

2. This may also be an echo of Lowry, who writes in the posthumous novella Lunar Caustic, about a drunk who checks himself into a psychiatric ward, that the protagonist will "bleed, so that he will not have to hear the louse of conscience, not the groaning of imaginary men, nor see, on the window blind all night, the bad ghosts." Good advice, given in good faith, can indeed be like a reproach when the recipient knows it will not be followed. 

^

3. The song's title most likely has its source, Dan has discovered, in "an article in the New York Times of 14 October 1988, pA35, by Paul Warnke. It's titled 'Foreign Policy Fake, Arms Control Poseur.'"

This was, of course, during the 1988 presidential campaign which saw Vice President George Bush pitted against Michael Dukakis. The article begins:

"How George Bush maintains his campaign pose as a foreign policy and arms control expert is a bafflement. The fact is, he's more like the marginal baseball player who has a 'cup of coffee' in the major leagues than the Hall of Famer he'd like voters to think he is. For example, he fails to understand the limited role of nuclear weapons in national defense..."

The complaint seems to be, in part, that Bush seemed to have thought the US could "win" a nuclear war vs. the USSR...Bush is found to be too sanguine about nuclear weapons in general, and at the same time rather ignorant about the technology and its possible uses.

See More Information below for a reproduction of the article.

From the Fall fanclub newsletter, Jan/Feb 1991 (see More Information below):

Smith laughingly claims he predicted part of [the Gulf crisis] in [the] song "Arms Control Poseur" - "Arms Control Poseur" being the Washington "insider's" nickname for Pres. George Bush. Anyway, give the latter half of it a listen and see what you think.

It's not clear to what extent we can take this to suggest that the song's protagonist is meant to be Bush or a Bush-like figure, however. Absent the above context, and given a host of other lyrics and remarks by MES, one possible reading is that this is a jab at a hypocritical leftist who advocates arms control while privately harboring vicious tendencies. On the other hand, it is not at all clear that this is what is going on, given the verses and their depiction of a down-and-out drunk à la Lowry (see note 1 above).  Some of the lines seem to suggest that the arms control poseur may be a politician (or even a metonymic stand-in for a government) that publically promotes arms control but trades in arms. The narrator (who may or may not be the same person as the protagonist, in which case the opening lines are a kind of self-interview) takes great pleasure in the poseur's come-uppance, perhaps a result of popular anger at his "lies."

^

4. This line echoes Eugene O'Neill's "It's Great When You Get In" (the phrase in question is bolded below):

They told me the water was lovely, 
That I ought to go for a swim, 
The air was maybe a trifle cool, 
"You won't mind it when you get in" 
So I journeyed cheerfully beach-ward, 
And nobody put me wise, 
But everyone boosted my courage 
With an earful of jovial lies.

(Thanks to Dan)

^

5. Bluebottles are flies (they can also be wasps, which seems less likely in context, but not entirely implausible); a bluebottle also figures in "Don't Call Me Darling."

See the comment section below: Dan points out that bluebottles may indicate a corpse in the car (or not; see his link). Jevans on the other hand thinks it may just mean that the owner neglects the car.

^

6. There is actually a drink called a "Malcolm Lowry," although I'm not sure if it's something the author concocted or acutally drank. In any case, a Malcolm Lowry doesn't contain vodka, but is made with white rum, tequila, triple sec and lime juice.

^

7. The word "chip," in a very different context but in similarly inexplicable fashion, plays a central role in "Gut of the Quantifier."

^

8. Next is a seller of clothing and footwear in Britain and Europe.

^

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The Story of the Fall: 1990