Flectere si nequeo superos
Acheronta movebo
Textusa
NB. Because of its extreme reticence the Textusa persona presents more personal pronoun
problems for commentators than a newly trans-gendered school-lavatory door. The
rumours are that Textusa is feminine, the prose tends to be masculine, the
sensibility clinically asexual. We'll stick to "it."
Textusa is quite influential among critics of the McCanns.
Anne Guedes, to whom we all still owe a debt of gratitude, is an avid reader
and occasional comment maker. Its readers are fiercely loyal and, when
appropriately stimulated, are quick to leap to the defence of their leader.
Its theory about the case is straightforward: the child met an
accidental death that was covered up because a singing group was in residence at
the Ocean Club that didn’t wish to be identified. From that all else followed.
Who these singers were has not been established - there were rumours that it was Led Zeppelin - but Textusa
has over the years built up a formidable list of accessories to the conspiracy.
Present Activities
Around June 2018 Textusa suspended
its "investigative work" and abruptly changed the blog into a weird and rather wild anti-personnel machine. The space freed up by Grange's suppression of the fake news stories and the failure of any evidence to appear to develop its singing villains "theory" has been filled ever since with cut and pasted tweets and comments from all over the net, chiefly concerned with the personalities of others.
Reading it is now like listening to a row next door among a family you don't know. Voices are raised, furniture thrown or toppled, a cry or expletive sometimes penetrates the wall, harsh shrieks - of contempt, resentment, anger - rise up. Yet one can never work out quite what it's all about and whether the grievances are real or imaginary.
Present Stance
Textusa's most recent post runs to some six thousand words, about 10% of a short novel, split about 50-50 between its words, anonymous comments and other’s tweets. I found it completely incomprehensible. No doubt its fans will disagree. One of them, a Mr Albert Hall, will no doubt turn up to post “it was a relief to read something short and kogent for once instead of that Blacksmith
bullshit.”
Expertise
Self-educated. An autodidact.
Theory Category
Of all the many commentators on the McCann affair Textusa is
the most purely imagination-based. This has been illustrated by the way that its now-abandoned speculations about the case always resembled plum puddings or, more appropriately, Spotted Dick: a thick and spongy mass of rampant and uncontrolled imagination surrounds three or four tiny raisins of fact. But the famine that has left Textusa cutting, pasting, gossiping and fighting has made certain, shall we say, conceptual cracks widen into chasms.
One of it's recent gossip/fight columns featured a Mr N.
Townsend, a well-known researcher and McCann-supporting fanatic from Gosport. In what
many considered was one of Textusa's "jokes" it decided
to claim that Nick Townsend didn’t exist. It was a worthy variation on At Swim Two Birds by the immortal
Flann O’ Brian, a classic of high Modernism in which characters struggle against the various fates and
indignities that the author, a crazed pedant - sound familiar yet? - is inflicting on them.
For the first time in an unusually unmarked life Textusa became
known, a must-read. In a demonstration of the essential absurdity, the nobody-could-possibly-take-this-junk-seriously
craziness
of every single one of the Usual Suspects’ “theories”, Flannel O' Texty stated calmly that Mr Townsend does not exist and had never
existed, and then added several thousand words or so of detailed proof. The
proof’s method and mode of argument was identical
in every way to its “theories” about
the McCanns and their singing accomplices, except that it contained more factual raisins. It was one of the most brilliant
self-parodies imaginable.
And then it became
clear that this wasn’t a joke at all. Textusa, dense, convoluted, Bedlam-prose and all, was proving to readers that a known, living human being does not
exist. And continues to do so to this day, at great length.
At which point the readers clogged its site with abuse and disparagement and then gave up reading, either out of nausea or shame. No, we made that bit up: normal things like that don't happen in Usual Suspects land.
Townsend himself, whose latest post on his victim, the admirable dog-handler Mr Grime, can be found here
today https://stopthemyths.info/viewtopic.php?f=149&t=8899&start=50
is an exceptionally unattractive character, a slightly mad
libeller with an uncertain grasp on reality who’s been known to suffer from pre-senile
paranoia in the past, especially since some villains years ago registered a
bent car under his name and at his suburban address. What he has made of this science-fiction onslaught on his
existence, which Textusa has continued, regularly
and in detail, with additional "evidence", we do not know.
It won't do any good but here it is for the record. Your hero can't tell its arse from a hole in the ground. Worse, it can't tell the difference between a living person and a corpse. It cannot accept that it has invented, single-handedly the idea that Nick Townsend doesn't exist. When confronted with copious evidence, including the words of the man himself it is incapable of seeing it. Madeleine McCann is dead and cannot rise to bewail the lies told by rogues and mad people in her name. Nick Townsend is alive libelling and walking,a piece of show it to us! evidence, if ever there was one, you poor bemused fantasist. You have condemned yourself in your own words more conclusively than any enemy of yours could.
Solidarity With
Who knows? If it told me I wouldn't understand.
Any Development?
In the big theory? No, that's gone.
Assessment
Lost. No way back; no way forward. As we warned her.
