So it seems they were right all along, those knuckle-dragging, phlegm-spitting, Littlejohn-regurgitating pricks at the end of the bar with bad hair and worse skin: there are things you can't say in Britain, because they won't let you. Who'da thunk it, eh?
Well, probably not the burps-n-BNP-bollocks tendency, because it actually turns out the things you can't say, and the people who won't let you, aren't the forces of 'political correctness' trying to stop us saying bad things about minorities. In fact it seems the one thing you can't say without people jumpin' dahn yer frote is that someone who, how to put this, comes across as a bit of a frickin' bigot is, well, a frickin' bigot.
Is she right? Is she wrong? Should he have left his chest-mike on? Who gives a rat's haemorrhoid? What is important about this affair is the way the right-wing media have jumped all over this. They're acting as if Brown roared like an enraged bull, pulled a steel folding chair out of his limo and dropped Gillian Duffy onto it with a tombstone pilderiver in his own personal tribute to veteran WWE Legend Mark 'The Undertaker' Calloway. In fact, Brown privately discussed strategy with his aide in a car, under the belief that his mike wasn't still on.
Do Sky News seriously expect us to believe Cameron doesn't come out with even worse when he thinks he's off the mike? I, for one, would be willing to bet that whenever he's finished bleating 'blah blah change rhubarb rhubarb big society blah fishcakes' and pressing the flesh after another meet-and-greet with the public, Cameron climbs into the back of his car and mewls like a newborn baby until his 109-year-old nanny can be persuaded to slip her nipple into his mouth for a calming spot of 'bitty' while the car speeds off to a top-secret biohazard shower in which Our Future Leader can be scrubbed raw until he 'gets their stench off him.'
Allegedly.
But even if Cameron were filmed tomorrow morning roasting children on an open fire while enjoying a hand-job from Robert Mugabe, you'd be hard-pressed to find mention of it in the media. It's already been well-documented that Cameron runs a party full of homophobes, backed by Christian fundamentalists who'd make Mary Whitehouse flinch, but the mainstream media don't concentrate on this because it doesn't fit their agenda.
And what is that agenda? It's one of dehumanising asylum seekers, spreading fear of anyone different, and propagating the lie that 'we can't have an honest discussion on immigration' because of the 'politically correct brigade'. I'm not going to give you chapter and verse here by way of example: rather, I'd point you in the direction of three excellent blogs: Tabloid Watch, Five Chinese Crackers, and Angry Mob, all of which do an amazing job ripping apart the daily diet of racist lies the tabs try to shove down our throats. But what I do want to talk about is the 'chilling effect' this constant repetition of racist crap has on discussion of immigration in this country. The whole reason Gordon Brown refused to call Gillian Duffy a bigot in public is because politicians are afraid to say anything that the Mail or the Sun could portray as being 'soft on immigration' or 'out of touch' with a bullshit 'national mood' that's entirely the creation of the tabloids and their constant lies.
And now, Gordon Brown's unguarded words in what he thought was his own private space and time are being used to further contribute to this climate of prejudice and misinformation, and the relentless, infantile, gossipy anti-Brown reporting is being deployed to try and ensure that Murdoch and Dacre's blue-eyed boy Cameron slimes his way into Downing Street.
Once there, Cameron will no longer have to worry about convincing us that he's an agent of change who really cares about us, and he can get on with turning Britain into a paradise for the kind of corporate 'leaders' who rallied to his side in the bold cause of rich people paying less tax, and Hell on Earth for ordinary British people: the very people the right-wing tabloids claim to be defending. People like you, people like me, people like Gillian Duffy.
Well, maybe not people like Gillian Duffy, who has, according to reports, been paid £50,000 for her story. Well, fair play to her. If she invests that carefully, she'll be able to enjoy a comfortable old age; maybe she can even pay some East Europeans to clean up after her. God knows, she'll need some home comforts after Cameron and his cronies have dismantled the welfare state.
Wednesday, 28 April 2010
Tuesday, 27 April 2010
Vote Cameron, Get Torquemada
So we've all seen this, haven't we?
As I pointed out here recently, any idea that David Cameron has brought real change to the Tory party is wishful thinking. Cameron says 'change' every chance he gets because he feels such contempt for the electorate he thinks they'll look at him, hear the c-word and immediately be convinced that a pudgy-faced, badly-shaved toff is in fact Barack Obama, but the fact is the Tories are every bit as hateful and bigoted as they were when they introduced Section 28 in the 80s. Oh, sure: they suspended Philip Lardner, but only because he got caught. In the background, the same dark forces that drove Thatcher's government - one of the most homophobic, racist, misogynist and authoritarian governments in UK history - are awaiting their chance to come back.
In my first anti-Cameron post I invoked the work of Pat Mills and compared the Tories to the Fomorians, the villains in Mills' 'thinking man's Conan' series, Slaine. But I now think a more apt comparison to Cameron's supposedly 'changed' Tory party would be Torquemada, the right-wing, alien-hating religious fanatic from Mills' sci-fi series Nemesis the Warlock:
As I pointed out here recently, any idea that David Cameron has brought real change to the Tory party is wishful thinking. Cameron says 'change' every chance he gets because he feels such contempt for the electorate he thinks they'll look at him, hear the c-word and immediately be convinced that a pudgy-faced, badly-shaved toff is in fact Barack Obama, but the fact is the Tories are every bit as hateful and bigoted as they were when they introduced Section 28 in the 80s. Oh, sure: they suspended Philip Lardner, but only because he got caught. In the background, the same dark forces that drove Thatcher's government - one of the most homophobic, racist, misogynist and authoritarian governments in UK history - are awaiting their chance to come back.
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In my first anti-Cameron post I invoked the work of Pat Mills and compared the Tories to the Fomorians, the villains in Mills' 'thinking man's Conan' series, Slaine. But I now think a more apt comparison to Cameron's supposedly 'changed' Tory party would be Torquemada, the right-wing, alien-hating religious fanatic from Mills' sci-fi series Nemesis the Warlock:
If, like me, you're far from pure, then you'd be advised to be vigilant about David Cameron and his allies. And if they do win on May 7th, this deviant certainly plans to misbehave.
Sunday, 25 April 2010
Bringing the war to the drawing room
I've read far too little of Alan Sillitoe's work - only really extracts from his two best-known books, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning - but in an odd way the fact that I haven't read a lot of Sillitoe and yet remained aware of him, and of his impact, testifies to his success.
'Social realism' was a concept I battled with for a long time as a writer. I saw it as grubby and lacking in aspiration. I wanted to create work that was fantastic and unusual and not like the boring surroundings I grew up in. For me, escape was revolution, and I devoted my time to imagining a better, more fabulous and glamourous life that the one I was living. It's only as I've grown older, and came up against the mundane obstacles that try to stop us creating worlds fab enough to live in, that I've came to appreciate the importance of social realism as a genre, and the multiplicity intrinsic to it.
Social realism emerged as a challenge to an orthodoxy in literature which said working class lives were unimportant. Playwrights like Joe Orton were writing against the tradition of drawing-room farce, novelists like Sillitoe were competing with the work of people like Waugh and Powell, to make the point that working class lives and experience counted for more than just comic relief in stories where the main characters were always drawn from the wealthy elites. Social realism wasn't restrictive: it was about creating more space for voices which weren't heard. It's little wonder that the first such expressions were howls of rage and pain.
Drawing the attention of the privileged to the lives they overlook or mock, and writing stories which reaffirm the experiences of those lives for those who live them, is the kind of thing all writers should be doing, whether the privilege they write against is straight, cis, male, abled, rich or white. Especially given that for the first time in years here in the UK, the Tories, a party which, more than anything else, stands for keeping the plebs/queers/cripples/darkies in their place, is actually looking like a serious electoral threat. Sillitoe would hate to see David Cameron smarm his way into government, because allowing the country to once again be ruled by a bunch of braying arseholes from Eton would represent the betrayal of his writing, and the triumph of all he'd been writing against.
Except that the Tories, just like every other privileged group, can never really triumph as long as people who don't belong to their insular little circle-jerk keep writing, and fighting, and going on, whether we get our stories onto a national stage and bring the war into the drawing room, or huddle round the fire and tell our stories to our own. There will always be voices raised in opposition to the dominant narrative, and we should honour those people who stick their heads above the parapet to draw attention to the lives that it leaves out. Alan Sillitoe was one such person and, whoever wins on May 6th, there will be many, many other British writers walking down the trail he blazed.
'Social realism' was a concept I battled with for a long time as a writer. I saw it as grubby and lacking in aspiration. I wanted to create work that was fantastic and unusual and not like the boring surroundings I grew up in. For me, escape was revolution, and I devoted my time to imagining a better, more fabulous and glamourous life that the one I was living. It's only as I've grown older, and came up against the mundane obstacles that try to stop us creating worlds fab enough to live in, that I've came to appreciate the importance of social realism as a genre, and the multiplicity intrinsic to it.
Social realism emerged as a challenge to an orthodoxy in literature which said working class lives were unimportant. Playwrights like Joe Orton were writing against the tradition of drawing-room farce, novelists like Sillitoe were competing with the work of people like Waugh and Powell, to make the point that working class lives and experience counted for more than just comic relief in stories where the main characters were always drawn from the wealthy elites. Social realism wasn't restrictive: it was about creating more space for voices which weren't heard. It's little wonder that the first such expressions were howls of rage and pain.
Drawing the attention of the privileged to the lives they overlook or mock, and writing stories which reaffirm the experiences of those lives for those who live them, is the kind of thing all writers should be doing, whether the privilege they write against is straight, cis, male, abled, rich or white. Especially given that for the first time in years here in the UK, the Tories, a party which, more than anything else, stands for keeping the plebs/queers/cripples/darkies in their place, is actually looking like a serious electoral threat. Sillitoe would hate to see David Cameron smarm his way into government, because allowing the country to once again be ruled by a bunch of braying arseholes from Eton would represent the betrayal of his writing, and the triumph of all he'd been writing against.
Except that the Tories, just like every other privileged group, can never really triumph as long as people who don't belong to their insular little circle-jerk keep writing, and fighting, and going on, whether we get our stories onto a national stage and bring the war into the drawing room, or huddle round the fire and tell our stories to our own. There will always be voices raised in opposition to the dominant narrative, and we should honour those people who stick their heads above the parapet to draw attention to the lives that it leaves out. Alan Sillitoe was one such person and, whoever wins on May 6th, there will be many, many other British writers walking down the trail he blazed.
Friday, 23 April 2010
Hangin' on the Telephone
Like what must be about 77% of the UK population, I now find myself working in a call centre. And it isn't exactly a bad job, and I'm reasonably good at it - working in the book shop gave me a chance to develop a certain manner with customers that's served me well, and my always charmingly weird voice seems to have a kind of beguiling effect on the callers - but it does mean that, about once a day, I find myself having the same recurring thought: if I'm going to spend my days talking pretty to people and occassionally being verbally abused, why not just work on a sex line?
Maybe the problem is that, while I'm good at selling stuff to people I'm a lot more service-oriented, and the job that I'm in - while providing a lot of opportunities to be of service - also involves having to make what are called 'add-on sales' i.e. having, at the end of the call, to try and sell the caller some additional product they don't yet have. People wouldn't buy the things we sell 'em if they didn't want them, obviously, but still, it can sometimes inject a certain sense of grubby commerciality into an otherwise pleasant transaction.
And, as filthy as you might consider the phone-sex industry, at least it's founded on a solid and honourable transaction: the customer phones up, you talk dirty to them until they make a funny noise, they leave happier (if somewhat wetter of trouser) and you pocket a slice of the 85p-a-nanosecond they've been paying for the privilege of wanking without the use of their own imagination. You say your goodbyes in a stilted and embarassing fashion, and you don't move in when they're at their most vulnerable with some kind of additional spiel.
Or do you? See, that's where my fantasy falls apart, crashing against the harsh rocks of reality. You see, I've never actually worked in the phone sex industry, nor, indeed, have I ever called a phone sex line myself (due not to some overly-developed sense of moral hygeine but because my mind is filthy enough already without me having to outsource my fantasising to somebody at the other end of a phone line). What if it is actually like working in a legitimate call centre? What if, at the end of the call, as the punter sits there, a shaking human battleground for the forces of relief, loneliness, pleasure and shame, you're expected to chime in and say 'now that I've brought you to orgasm, sir, I wonder if you'd be interested in buying our new DVD, Bukkakic Park: The Tossed World?'
That isn't even the worst possibility, though. You see, as part of the service we're expected to demonstrate, one thing we're supposed to do is summarise the call at the end. Imagine that: having to summarise a sex-line call before letting the customer go. 'Well, sir, let me just check on this for you: you called us shouting that you needed to come, dear fucking god we had to make you come, I've outlined a fantasy scenario in which I get on the floor and you fuck me hard in the ass with your big bad monster doomcock until I scream and call you 'daddy', and as a result of this erotic freestyling you've now reached a physical climax and are weeping gently on a soiled matress and wondering where it all went wrong. Would that be a fair summary of the situation? And is there anything else I can help you with?'
It's a terrifying thought. Perhaps, all things considered, it's best to stick to the respectable end of the phone biz, and content myself with slipping the odd innuendo into my customer conversations as I service them queerly...no sir, I said service your query. It's a bit of a crackly line.
Maybe the problem is that, while I'm good at selling stuff to people I'm a lot more service-oriented, and the job that I'm in - while providing a lot of opportunities to be of service - also involves having to make what are called 'add-on sales' i.e. having, at the end of the call, to try and sell the caller some additional product they don't yet have. People wouldn't buy the things we sell 'em if they didn't want them, obviously, but still, it can sometimes inject a certain sense of grubby commerciality into an otherwise pleasant transaction.
And, as filthy as you might consider the phone-sex industry, at least it's founded on a solid and honourable transaction: the customer phones up, you talk dirty to them until they make a funny noise, they leave happier (if somewhat wetter of trouser) and you pocket a slice of the 85p-a-nanosecond they've been paying for the privilege of wanking without the use of their own imagination. You say your goodbyes in a stilted and embarassing fashion, and you don't move in when they're at their most vulnerable with some kind of additional spiel.
Or do you? See, that's where my fantasy falls apart, crashing against the harsh rocks of reality. You see, I've never actually worked in the phone sex industry, nor, indeed, have I ever called a phone sex line myself (due not to some overly-developed sense of moral hygeine but because my mind is filthy enough already without me having to outsource my fantasising to somebody at the other end of a phone line). What if it is actually like working in a legitimate call centre? What if, at the end of the call, as the punter sits there, a shaking human battleground for the forces of relief, loneliness, pleasure and shame, you're expected to chime in and say 'now that I've brought you to orgasm, sir, I wonder if you'd be interested in buying our new DVD, Bukkakic Park: The Tossed World?'
That isn't even the worst possibility, though. You see, as part of the service we're expected to demonstrate, one thing we're supposed to do is summarise the call at the end. Imagine that: having to summarise a sex-line call before letting the customer go. 'Well, sir, let me just check on this for you: you called us shouting that you needed to come, dear fucking god we had to make you come, I've outlined a fantasy scenario in which I get on the floor and you fuck me hard in the ass with your big bad monster doomcock until I scream and call you 'daddy', and as a result of this erotic freestyling you've now reached a physical climax and are weeping gently on a soiled matress and wondering where it all went wrong. Would that be a fair summary of the situation? And is there anything else I can help you with?'
It's a terrifying thought. Perhaps, all things considered, it's best to stick to the respectable end of the phone biz, and content myself with slipping the odd innuendo into my customer conversations as I service them queerly...no sir, I said service your query. It's a bit of a crackly line.
Monday, 19 April 2010
Dead Mouse Duty
Note: after a fairly lean week in terms of getting any writing done, I've went back to my old practice of writing down observations of my everyday events in order to keep the writing muscles in trim. Because this has also been a fairly lean week in terms of blogging, I'll be posting these observational pieces up on here until I work up the strength to post something of slightly more heft. What follows concerns the fun activities which I and Michelle found ourselves engaged in yesterday afternoon as the result of a rather unwelcome visitor.
The gloves are half-opaque, half-transparent. I put on and take off three pairs in the course of clearing out the kitchen, and each time I do I enjoy the feeling of pulling the bottom of each glove into place, coiling and uncoiling my fingers to make sure they fit properly.
The kitchen has to be cleared out because of the mouse. Or mice. We're not sure if it's one that came in by accident - and even if it's just that, then there's the additional worry of how it got in, and how we stop anything else getting in in future - or if it's an actual infestation. Objectively speaking we have seen no mice. I did see a dead shrew left out front of the house on Friday night, a calling card from one of the increasing numbers of cats who've started visiting our garden recently. Well, at least now we know why that's happening.
We have seen no actual mice, but there is enough circumstantial evidence, in the form of chewed lap-trays and sandwich bags, and in the form of its (or their) droppings - tiny black commas of excrement scattered through the drawers like confetti - that we can deduce the existence in the cupboards of, at least for a certain period of time, at least one mouse. And so we begin the process of removing everything from the cupboards, throwing out any food left open, putting any food not left open in sealed plastic boxes, and disinfecting everfy inch of space thus cleared.
Michelle clears the upper cupboards. My job is to clear out the lower ones, under the sink, where most traces of the mouse (or mice) have been found. No point pretending otherwise: I've drawn this detail in case the bugger (or buggers) are still in there, either alive and squeaking or paws-up after chewing into one of the many bottles of bleach or detergent we store in the cupboards. Dead mouse duty. That's my job.
In the event, we didn't find any mice, dead or alive. The cupboards have now been clear for a day and my Ray Mears-like investigation of the cupboards to see if I can find any more mouse spoor has so far proven negative. Maybe it was that shrew the cats killed, after all.
The gloves are half-opaque, half-transparent. I put on and take off three pairs in the course of clearing out the kitchen, and each time I do I enjoy the feeling of pulling the bottom of each glove into place, coiling and uncoiling my fingers to make sure they fit properly.
The kitchen has to be cleared out because of the mouse. Or mice. We're not sure if it's one that came in by accident - and even if it's just that, then there's the additional worry of how it got in, and how we stop anything else getting in in future - or if it's an actual infestation. Objectively speaking we have seen no mice. I did see a dead shrew left out front of the house on Friday night, a calling card from one of the increasing numbers of cats who've started visiting our garden recently. Well, at least now we know why that's happening.
We have seen no actual mice, but there is enough circumstantial evidence, in the form of chewed lap-trays and sandwich bags, and in the form of its (or their) droppings - tiny black commas of excrement scattered through the drawers like confetti - that we can deduce the existence in the cupboards of, at least for a certain period of time, at least one mouse. And so we begin the process of removing everything from the cupboards, throwing out any food left open, putting any food not left open in sealed plastic boxes, and disinfecting everfy inch of space thus cleared.
Michelle clears the upper cupboards. My job is to clear out the lower ones, under the sink, where most traces of the mouse (or mice) have been found. No point pretending otherwise: I've drawn this detail in case the bugger (or buggers) are still in there, either alive and squeaking or paws-up after chewing into one of the many bottles of bleach or detergent we store in the cupboards. Dead mouse duty. That's my job.
In the event, we didn't find any mice, dead or alive. The cupboards have now been clear for a day and my Ray Mears-like investigation of the cupboards to see if I can find any more mouse spoor has so far proven negative. Maybe it was that shrew the cats killed, after all.
Sunday, 11 April 2010
Hear Hear
Gore Vidal once said that every time one of his friends succeeded, a little piece of him died. But, there again and let's be honest, Gore Vidal, though he may be a genius, is a tiny little bit of a prick. I have never quite been able to muster this level of antipathy towards those friends of mine who succeed, perhaps because I lack the killer instinct which beats in the heart of the true man of letters, or then again it may just be that I actually like my friends and would rather see life as a colaboration than a contest. From what I understand of ecology the idea of nature red in tooth and claw as some kind of Hobbesian war of all-against-all is a very selective view of affairs formed by people who only watch nature documentaries during Shark Week. It's the Spirit of the Blitz that rules down on the jungle floor. Even your own body is a collaboration between armies of bacteria which keep your digestive system ticking over.
All of which is a long-winded way of saying that one of my online friends, Helen G at Bird of Paradox, has won the Gender Trust's NICE (Not-offensive, Interesting, Clear and Educational) Award for Good Journalism on Trans Issues, and I couldn't be happier for her. If you aren't already reading Helen's blog, then you should be, because she's performing a vital role in drawing peoples' attention to the abuses being visited on the most marginalised people in the world on an almost-daily basis.
That isn't a pleasant job. It's not even Helen's job: like millions of bloggers, she does it in her spare time, because she knows it's the right thing to do. And it's a good thing she does, because when people try to report on the truth about trans issue in the mainstream, so-called 'professional' media, they can face heavy penalties.
Helen is exactly the kind of person who should be winning an award like this. She's reporting on an issue which too many people ignore, and she does it consistently, day-in, day-out, no matter how tired she is or whatever her emotional state. Allegedly 'proper' journalists are fond of looking down their noses at bloggers, but as far as I'm concerned, what Helen is doing is far closer to real journalism than the sort of churnalised crap or lazy, bigoted opinion which fills up the papers these days. So, Gore be damned, I'm happy for the girl.
All of which is a long-winded way of saying that one of my online friends, Helen G at Bird of Paradox, has won the Gender Trust's NICE (Not-offensive, Interesting, Clear and Educational) Award for Good Journalism on Trans Issues, and I couldn't be happier for her. If you aren't already reading Helen's blog, then you should be, because she's performing a vital role in drawing peoples' attention to the abuses being visited on the most marginalised people in the world on an almost-daily basis.
That isn't a pleasant job. It's not even Helen's job: like millions of bloggers, she does it in her spare time, because she knows it's the right thing to do. And it's a good thing she does, because when people try to report on the truth about trans issue in the mainstream, so-called 'professional' media, they can face heavy penalties.
Helen is exactly the kind of person who should be winning an award like this. She's reporting on an issue which too many people ignore, and she does it consistently, day-in, day-out, no matter how tired she is or whatever her emotional state. Allegedly 'proper' journalists are fond of looking down their noses at bloggers, but as far as I'm concerned, what Helen is doing is far closer to real journalism than the sort of churnalised crap or lazy, bigoted opinion which fills up the papers these days. So, Gore be damned, I'm happy for the girl.
Thursday, 8 April 2010
Kiss My Pencil
Pat Mills. Genius. Responsible for some of the greatest strips in the history of British comics (and Sex Warrior too), and also a guy with spot-on political views. Never better than in his landmark series Slaine, (basically a smarter version of the Conan meme)* in which the Pagans were the good guys, God was a woman, and - best of all - the baddies came from Tory Island. No accident, that: Slaine, like most of the other 2000AD classics, was written during the last period when this country was unfortunate enough to be saddled with a Conservative government. Mills was doing his patriotic duty to turn the geeks of the nation against the party then in government by linking them with a race of demons who oppressed the Celtic people and drank the tears of women. Some people might refer to this as allegory, but, as someone who grew up under the handbag of Thatcherite domination I feel it incumbent on me to remind younger folks reading this blog that this portrayal was in fact a matter of stark factual truth.
Winston Churchill famously said that if a man isn't a liberal before the age of thirty he had no heart, but that if he wasn't a conservative after the age of thirty he had no head. Sherry-sodden old buggers with a Churchill-fetish are fond of quoting that line, though they leave out the fact that Winston was probably all fucked-up on drugs when he said it. But like a lot of cliches it contains a kernel of truth: becoming a Tory is - unless you're some kind of freakish mutant - something that happens to you when you reach a certain age. It might not be thirty. It might not be forty. It might not even be fifty or sixty. But there comes a point in your life when it can happen. It doesn't mean that you've morphed from being a naieve innocent to being a hard-headed political realist, though. It means you've given up.
It's hard work, being good. It takes effort to commit yourself to trying to be a better person, not abusing your privilege and putting in the hours and time to defend the disadvantaged and create a world in which people are treated with equal respect regardless of skin colour, religion, sexuality, gender identity, or disability. Sometimes you want to give in to the hatred, to the fear, to the moral cowardice that tells you it's their fault: the asylum seekers, the Muslims, the gays. That it's people like you; normal people, not freaks, who are the real victims, and that it's about time you stopped fannying around with diversity initiatives and equality legislation and got down to the business of taking care of your own and fuck you, buddy. Sometimes you see the front cover of the Daily Mail and its icy talons of fear reach deep into your heart and you don't have the will to keep fighting it. You give in. And that's when you turn Tory.
The mainstream media are almost falling over themselves to tell us the Tories have changed, that it's all compassionate Conservatism and time for change and Dave's about to have a baby and SamCam - isn't she lovely? But this past week we've seen signs that the Tories aren't actualy as nice as all that. There's Chris Grayling, the Tory Shadow Home Secretary who chased the dragon of Mail-reader votes by supporting homophobic B&B owners. Here's Anastasia Beaumont-Bott, the lesbian former Tory activist so disgusted by the party's homophobia she's telling the media she now plans to vote Labour. Who's this? It's Wirral Tory councillor Denis Knowles, who made comments on his Facebook page about 'limp-wristed' Labour activists (and, for a bonus point, also described them as 'definitely not local' - regional xenophobia and anti-gay bigotry in one tight little package? You stay classy, Councillor Knowles.)
Here's another Tory councillor, Eddie Wake, who reckons rape prevention campaigns are something to joke about - even if his 'jokes' leave a woman in tears. And here's Michael Kaminski, Call-me-Dave's ally in the European Reformists and Conservatives group in the European Parliament - a man who refuses to apologise for an anti-Semitic pogrom, uses slogans like 'Poland for the Poles', tells foreign workers to go home and calls his opponents 'faggots.' Lest you think that Mr Kaminski is one bad apple spoiling an otherwise respectable coalition, vada Valdemar Tomasevski, another 'Reformist Conservative' who voted for a homophobic hate law in Lithuania. Here's the evidence that a vote for the Conservatives is a vote against a woman's right to choose.
I could go on, but by now you get the point. Forget all the crap about the superfecundity of Samantha, or how Dave is so much more presentable than dour old Gordon. Forget all the business leaders supporting Tory economic plans - those businessmen are backing Dave because they know he's their gateway to a golden age of ripping off the little guy. If David Cameron announced plans to lower the age of consent to three, paedophiles would write letters to papers supporting him. If you're a captain of industry, a Russian oligarch or a member of the landed aristocracy, David Cameron's tax plans will benefit you. But few of us are. Lots of us are gay, though. Lots of us are members of ethnic minorities. Lots of us are disabled, and a hell of a lot of us are women. And even if you aren't, I'm pretty sure you know people who are. Your mum, for a start.
David Cameron: the man who hates your mum. Keep that in mind, when you go into the voting booth on May 6th. And count yourself lucky. Slaine had to swing a massive great axe to get rid of the misogynist slimebags from Tory Island: all you have to wield is a stubby little pencil. Use it wisely.
* Admittedly, Slaine did occassionally get a bit 'never again the BURNING TIMES!' on occassion, but it was still great and chock full of fantastic sword-wielding muscle-chicks so it still rules, okay?
Winston Churchill famously said that if a man isn't a liberal before the age of thirty he had no heart, but that if he wasn't a conservative after the age of thirty he had no head. Sherry-sodden old buggers with a Churchill-fetish are fond of quoting that line, though they leave out the fact that Winston was probably all fucked-up on drugs when he said it. But like a lot of cliches it contains a kernel of truth: becoming a Tory is - unless you're some kind of freakish mutant - something that happens to you when you reach a certain age. It might not be thirty. It might not be forty. It might not even be fifty or sixty. But there comes a point in your life when it can happen. It doesn't mean that you've morphed from being a naieve innocent to being a hard-headed political realist, though. It means you've given up.
It's hard work, being good. It takes effort to commit yourself to trying to be a better person, not abusing your privilege and putting in the hours and time to defend the disadvantaged and create a world in which people are treated with equal respect regardless of skin colour, religion, sexuality, gender identity, or disability. Sometimes you want to give in to the hatred, to the fear, to the moral cowardice that tells you it's their fault: the asylum seekers, the Muslims, the gays. That it's people like you; normal people, not freaks, who are the real victims, and that it's about time you stopped fannying around with diversity initiatives and equality legislation and got down to the business of taking care of your own and fuck you, buddy. Sometimes you see the front cover of the Daily Mail and its icy talons of fear reach deep into your heart and you don't have the will to keep fighting it. You give in. And that's when you turn Tory.
The mainstream media are almost falling over themselves to tell us the Tories have changed, that it's all compassionate Conservatism and time for change and Dave's about to have a baby and SamCam - isn't she lovely? But this past week we've seen signs that the Tories aren't actualy as nice as all that. There's Chris Grayling, the Tory Shadow Home Secretary who chased the dragon of Mail-reader votes by supporting homophobic B&B owners. Here's Anastasia Beaumont-Bott, the lesbian former Tory activist so disgusted by the party's homophobia she's telling the media she now plans to vote Labour. Who's this? It's Wirral Tory councillor Denis Knowles, who made comments on his Facebook page about 'limp-wristed' Labour activists (and, for a bonus point, also described them as 'definitely not local' - regional xenophobia and anti-gay bigotry in one tight little package? You stay classy, Councillor Knowles.)
Here's another Tory councillor, Eddie Wake, who reckons rape prevention campaigns are something to joke about - even if his 'jokes' leave a woman in tears. And here's Michael Kaminski, Call-me-Dave's ally in the European Reformists and Conservatives group in the European Parliament - a man who refuses to apologise for an anti-Semitic pogrom, uses slogans like 'Poland for the Poles', tells foreign workers to go home and calls his opponents 'faggots.' Lest you think that Mr Kaminski is one bad apple spoiling an otherwise respectable coalition, vada Valdemar Tomasevski, another 'Reformist Conservative' who voted for a homophobic hate law in Lithuania. Here's the evidence that a vote for the Conservatives is a vote against a woman's right to choose.
I could go on, but by now you get the point. Forget all the crap about the superfecundity of Samantha, or how Dave is so much more presentable than dour old Gordon. Forget all the business leaders supporting Tory economic plans - those businessmen are backing Dave because they know he's their gateway to a golden age of ripping off the little guy. If David Cameron announced plans to lower the age of consent to three, paedophiles would write letters to papers supporting him. If you're a captain of industry, a Russian oligarch or a member of the landed aristocracy, David Cameron's tax plans will benefit you. But few of us are. Lots of us are gay, though. Lots of us are members of ethnic minorities. Lots of us are disabled, and a hell of a lot of us are women. And even if you aren't, I'm pretty sure you know people who are. Your mum, for a start.
David Cameron: the man who hates your mum. Keep that in mind, when you go into the voting booth on May 6th. And count yourself lucky. Slaine had to swing a massive great axe to get rid of the misogynist slimebags from Tory Island: all you have to wield is a stubby little pencil. Use it wisely.
* Admittedly, Slaine did occassionally get a bit 'never again the BURNING TIMES!' on occassion, but it was still great and chock full of fantastic sword-wielding muscle-chicks so it still rules, okay?
Monday, 5 April 2010
I Blame Glee
I blame Glee. I do. It's the only explanation that makes sense. Really, it's absolutely the only thing that can possibly explain the latest ruse on the part of Itawamba School District in their ongoing battle against both lesbian student Constance Mcmillen and the notion of basic human decency. Someone at the District has been watching too much Glee, probably at the same time as their weekly Oxycontin binge, and so, during the latest meeting of the Emergency Keep Out The Gays Committee, this member of staff, high on a cocktail of power ballads and hillbilly heroin, pipes up with:
'Like, why don't we just hold a fake prom?'
Because that's what they actually did. Held a fake prom to which Constance and her friends were invited, while the rest of the students partied the night away elsewhere. Like I say, I can only blame Glee - except that wouldn't really cut it, because even Sue Sylvester would regard this plan as somewhat outlandish. In fact, frankly, a Scooby Doo villain would take one look at this 'fake prom' idea and say 'for fuck's sake, you're not serious, are you? I mean, pretending to be a headless horseman haunting the school grounds might just about work with a decent special effects budget, but expecting to be able to hold an entire other prom without one person in the whole town blowing the gaff, pfffft, yeah right, don't even bother putting petrol in the Mystery Machine because Scrappy Doo could solve this fucker. You pesky meddling twats.'
And yet that's what Fulton High School and the Itawamba School District have been reduced to. And because of that, every single member of staff at that school, and every single member of that school district, should be fired immediately without pay, and be disbarred from having anything to do with education for the rest of their lives. This kind of excuse is not the kind of thing sane, rational adults do. This is the kind of thing the dumb husband does in a stupid American sitcom when he realises he's forgotten his wife's birthday. But real life isn't like that. Forget your wife's birthday and it doesn't matter how much shenanigating you engage in putting clocks back, gluing calendar pages back on and replacing every single copy of the local newspaper with yesterday's edition, you've dug your way into a vast pit of humiliation so deep that any attempt you make to dig yourself out short of the most grovelling, self-abasing, Maoist-self-criticism level of apology will merely strip you of what little dignity you have left.
This is the level of behaviour to which Fulton and Itawamba have been reduced. If this were a sitcom or a straight-to-DVD comedy movie they'd be played by Kevin James, and the closing scene would feature them frantically running around the party trying to convince Constance and her mates that what appears to be a teenage high school prom is in fact the annual meeting of the National Arab-American Proctologists Association (because Rob Schneider needs a chance to play more racist stereotypes), and it would all end with a ridiculous moment where Rob Schneider, dressed in a Saudi Prince's outfit, dry-humps James on a bucking bronco in a pool full of jello, and James would say something like 'I really made myself look like an ass this time!' and it would all be hilarious. And, you know, that's what it is. Hilarious.
Until you remember that these people are meant to be adults, they are meant to be teachers, and their bigotry and their intolerance and their craven refusal to act like grown-ups and admit they were wrong have ruined the biggest night of a young woman's life. That's when it stops looking hilarious and starts looking, frankly, pathetic.
'Like, why don't we just hold a fake prom?'
Because that's what they actually did. Held a fake prom to which Constance and her friends were invited, while the rest of the students partied the night away elsewhere. Like I say, I can only blame Glee - except that wouldn't really cut it, because even Sue Sylvester would regard this plan as somewhat outlandish. In fact, frankly, a Scooby Doo villain would take one look at this 'fake prom' idea and say 'for fuck's sake, you're not serious, are you? I mean, pretending to be a headless horseman haunting the school grounds might just about work with a decent special effects budget, but expecting to be able to hold an entire other prom without one person in the whole town blowing the gaff, pfffft, yeah right, don't even bother putting petrol in the Mystery Machine because Scrappy Doo could solve this fucker. You pesky meddling twats.'
And yet that's what Fulton High School and the Itawamba School District have been reduced to. And because of that, every single member of staff at that school, and every single member of that school district, should be fired immediately without pay, and be disbarred from having anything to do with education for the rest of their lives. This kind of excuse is not the kind of thing sane, rational adults do. This is the kind of thing the dumb husband does in a stupid American sitcom when he realises he's forgotten his wife's birthday. But real life isn't like that. Forget your wife's birthday and it doesn't matter how much shenanigating you engage in putting clocks back, gluing calendar pages back on and replacing every single copy of the local newspaper with yesterday's edition, you've dug your way into a vast pit of humiliation so deep that any attempt you make to dig yourself out short of the most grovelling, self-abasing, Maoist-self-criticism level of apology will merely strip you of what little dignity you have left.
This is the level of behaviour to which Fulton and Itawamba have been reduced. If this were a sitcom or a straight-to-DVD comedy movie they'd be played by Kevin James, and the closing scene would feature them frantically running around the party trying to convince Constance and her mates that what appears to be a teenage high school prom is in fact the annual meeting of the National Arab-American Proctologists Association (because Rob Schneider needs a chance to play more racist stereotypes), and it would all end with a ridiculous moment where Rob Schneider, dressed in a Saudi Prince's outfit, dry-humps James on a bucking bronco in a pool full of jello, and James would say something like 'I really made myself look like an ass this time!' and it would all be hilarious. And, you know, that's what it is. Hilarious.
Until you remember that these people are meant to be adults, they are meant to be teachers, and their bigotry and their intolerance and their craven refusal to act like grown-ups and admit they were wrong have ruined the biggest night of a young woman's life. That's when it stops looking hilarious and starts looking, frankly, pathetic.
Friday, 2 April 2010
Think you're a Big Man, Littlejohn? Suck on this:
*trigger warning: the following contains foul imaginings involving the sexual activities of a vile right-wing journalist. Fair warning*
So, if you watched Question Time last night, you no doubt saw the moment when that jowly fuck Littlejohn laid into some poor young fellow who had the temerity to come out with what he calls 'the lie' that he's 'the BNP's favourite columnist'.
I saw that moment after I'd had a long, relaxing bath with a Honey Bee bath bomb from Lush, then spent the better part of an hour rubbing Lemony Flutter into the rougher bits of my skin, attending to my regular facial skincare routine and doing my nails, and I'm glad I did, because this level of papmpering had fortunately left me relaxed enough that when I witnessed this outrage I merely went purple and spent the next ten minutes showering invective on Littlejohn, Dimbleby, the BBC, television in general and the astonishing number of foul racist pricks who apparently make up the politically-engaged population of Stevenage. If I was in a less relaxed state it's entirely possible that I would have exploded, and the morning's news reports would centre on how Washington had been destroyed by a teraton of thermonuclear rage.
Leaving aside the fact that it's a bit rich for Richard fucking Littlejohn to call other people liars, given that his entire ouevre consists of lie upon lie upon lie, what annoyed me was that I could predict, based on this little interaction, exactly what Littlejohn would do when he got back to his hotel room later. He would take off his ill-fitting suit and have a shower, then, without even properly towel-drying his lank, thinning hair, would throw himself down on his anonymous bed and set about wanking his tiny, shrivelling infra-cock into a froth of onanistic self-congratulation, endlessly frotting away at a mental image of himself as some kind of Chuck Norris-style hardman, a veritable rightwing cockney Terminator, all because he was rude to a callow youth. Big fucking man, Littlejohn. You're so fucking hard, you've got me quaking in my Airwalks. You're like Batman, baby.
Well, actually he's more like that scene in V for Vendetta where Roger Allam feels himself up in his wet room while looking at videos of his own Glenn Beck-style rants, except that Roger Allam has an odd sort of sexy old guy appeal while Littlejohn oozes all the raw sexuality of a festering dog turd. But, because I like playing Codename V to the Lewis Protheros of this world, and because I figure Littlejohn is such an egomaniac he probably spends hours sat in his Florida mansion googling his own name, so there's at least a chance he'll see this, I feel it's incumbent on me to sour Littlejohn's little victory-shuffle by reminding him of two people who threw him to the floor and made him their bitch.
First, Johann Hari: yes, he spends far too much of his time sticking up for his pal Julie Bindel out of a misplaced sense of loyalty, but you have to give him props for pwning Littletool all over the shop in the lions' den that is Sky News , to the extent, in fact, that Littleman felt the aerated husks of his testes withdrawing so far into his scrotal cavity he lost the ability to speak and had to cut to viewers' emails.
But the daddy of Littlejohn-pwnership is and always will be esteemed fabulist Mr William Self, who famously swashbuckled Littleprick into such a rhetorical corner he wound up declaring himself better than Tolstoy.
That sound you hear? That low, whipped-dog whimper you detect emanating from somewhere near the Florida Keys? That's Littlejohn, keening at the funeral of his hard-on. He could take to the streets of Miami and find a seventeen-year-old American boy to act the arse with, but, y'know, they carry guns and besides, he doesn't have an audience of idiots brainwashed by his right-wing bullshit who can back him up if things turn ugly. No, for Littlejohn it's another lonely night in his ex-pat mansion, blowing his nose into fistfuls of dishonestly-earned cash as he weeps for the fact that whenever he appears on TV and goes up against a grown-up, he ends up with his pants 'round his ankles and a bouquet of marigolds shoved up his arse.
Good night, Richard. Sleep well. Don't have nightmares.
*Edited: How could I forget Stewart Lee's awesome piss-take of Littlejohn and all the crap he stands for? Well, I did, but I've fixed it now. *
So, if you watched Question Time last night, you no doubt saw the moment when that jowly fuck Littlejohn laid into some poor young fellow who had the temerity to come out with what he calls 'the lie' that he's 'the BNP's favourite columnist'.
I saw that moment after I'd had a long, relaxing bath with a Honey Bee bath bomb from Lush, then spent the better part of an hour rubbing Lemony Flutter into the rougher bits of my skin, attending to my regular facial skincare routine and doing my nails, and I'm glad I did, because this level of papmpering had fortunately left me relaxed enough that when I witnessed this outrage I merely went purple and spent the next ten minutes showering invective on Littlejohn, Dimbleby, the BBC, television in general and the astonishing number of foul racist pricks who apparently make up the politically-engaged population of Stevenage. If I was in a less relaxed state it's entirely possible that I would have exploded, and the morning's news reports would centre on how Washington had been destroyed by a teraton of thermonuclear rage.
Leaving aside the fact that it's a bit rich for Richard fucking Littlejohn to call other people liars, given that his entire ouevre consists of lie upon lie upon lie, what annoyed me was that I could predict, based on this little interaction, exactly what Littlejohn would do when he got back to his hotel room later. He would take off his ill-fitting suit and have a shower, then, without even properly towel-drying his lank, thinning hair, would throw himself down on his anonymous bed and set about wanking his tiny, shrivelling infra-cock into a froth of onanistic self-congratulation, endlessly frotting away at a mental image of himself as some kind of Chuck Norris-style hardman, a veritable rightwing cockney Terminator, all because he was rude to a callow youth. Big fucking man, Littlejohn. You're so fucking hard, you've got me quaking in my Airwalks. You're like Batman, baby.
Well, actually he's more like that scene in V for Vendetta where Roger Allam feels himself up in his wet room while looking at videos of his own Glenn Beck-style rants, except that Roger Allam has an odd sort of sexy old guy appeal while Littlejohn oozes all the raw sexuality of a festering dog turd. But, because I like playing Codename V to the Lewis Protheros of this world, and because I figure Littlejohn is such an egomaniac he probably spends hours sat in his Florida mansion googling his own name, so there's at least a chance he'll see this, I feel it's incumbent on me to sour Littlejohn's little victory-shuffle by reminding him of two people who threw him to the floor and made him their bitch.
First, Johann Hari: yes, he spends far too much of his time sticking up for his pal Julie Bindel out of a misplaced sense of loyalty, but you have to give him props for pwning Littletool all over the shop in the lions' den that is Sky News , to the extent, in fact, that Littleman felt the aerated husks of his testes withdrawing so far into his scrotal cavity he lost the ability to speak and had to cut to viewers' emails.
But the daddy of Littlejohn-pwnership is and always will be esteemed fabulist Mr William Self, who famously swashbuckled Littleprick into such a rhetorical corner he wound up declaring himself better than Tolstoy.
That sound you hear? That low, whipped-dog whimper you detect emanating from somewhere near the Florida Keys? That's Littlejohn, keening at the funeral of his hard-on. He could take to the streets of Miami and find a seventeen-year-old American boy to act the arse with, but, y'know, they carry guns and besides, he doesn't have an audience of idiots brainwashed by his right-wing bullshit who can back him up if things turn ugly. No, for Littlejohn it's another lonely night in his ex-pat mansion, blowing his nose into fistfuls of dishonestly-earned cash as he weeps for the fact that whenever he appears on TV and goes up against a grown-up, he ends up with his pants 'round his ankles and a bouquet of marigolds shoved up his arse.
Good night, Richard. Sleep well. Don't have nightmares.
*Edited: How could I forget Stewart Lee's awesome piss-take of Littlejohn and all the crap he stands for? Well, I did, but I've fixed it now. *
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