'Goodnight silver star, goodnight angel eyes...'

I always feel a little ambiguous about taking the 'what I did yesterday' approach to blogging. For one thing, it seems to me that it intrudes a bit too obviously into the kind of territory better covered by Twitter; for another, I think it incumbent on bloggers to give a certain amount of bang for their (metaphorical) buck. True, I follow quite a few blogs by established writers which do simply give the reader an insight into the mundane details of their lives; but the reason for that is those writers are already people whose work I follow in other fields. Finding out what a novelist or poet I like is up to when they're not writing the books I buy is an easter egg, not the main point of my following them. I'm under no illusion that this blog is in a similarly comfortable position: anyone reading these words is presumably here because they like the blog itself, so I feel honour-bound to give them something more than an update on my activities when they come here.

Having said all that, I'm going through one of those phases in my writing life when my urge to stay in and write long complex posts, or labour away at poems for hours, goes into abeyance, and I instead revel in the opportunity to get out of the house and either perform myself or watch other people. My writing always seems to function in this in-out cycle: stay at home, internalise, brood, produce; then get out, talk, mingle, share. Of course, because I am actually going out more, and spending less time brooding, this means, I suppose, that the kind of lengthy, impassioned rants which readers are used to tend not to get written. On the other hand, given the all-encompassing nature of the kyriarchy, it's inevitably the case that if I myself can't get it together to skewer the injustices, I'll always be able to point you in the direction of people who can. Time, then, for another edition of that perenially popular feature, The Week in FAIL.

The biggest and most noteworthy FAIL of the week came from Sunday Times columnist and occassional baboon-murderer AA Gill, who demonstrated his trademark wit and savoir-faire by referring to horse-racing pundit and lesbian Clare Balding as a 'dyke on a bike.' Balding, not unreasonably, took offence at this legitimisation of a rather hateful slur, and complained: whereupon she received a staggeringly ill-mannered and boorish reply from Sunday Times editor John Witherow saying, essentially, that because Balding hadn't been lucky enough to have been born straight, she should basically shut up and take her lumps. At which point Balding decided to go public and allow everyone to see the hatefulness of Witheredcock's response for themselves (I'm sure Witherow won't mind my little jape with his surname. What with him having such a bang-on sense of humour and all. Oh, and having a penis so tiny and shrivelled it looks like a sun-dried tomato that's been left to go off on the windowsill of a house by the sewage works over the course of a particularly torrid summer. Still, serve him right for not having a privileged status, eh?)

Witherow's defence of Gill's unthinking homophobia suggests to me that, whatever David Cameron might say in his foreword to the Independent on Sunday's new Pink List (of which more in a coming post), there are sections of the right in this country who feel empowered, now that an essentially Tory government is in charge again, to behave towards those who lack their privileges with a staggering lack of basic decency and cloak it as a bold stand in defence of the misunderstood white male and Jeremy Clarkson's god-given right to wear badly-fitting trousers and have shit hair. One swallow doesn't make a summer, it's true; but then, as the Tabloid Watch blog points out, Gill's gaffe forms part of an ongoing trend of legitimising name-calling towards LGBTQ people in the media.

Despite what people like Witherednob might say, this is not about political correctness. It is not just an academic matter, and it is not about creating 'non-jobs' in council diversity departments. This stuff matters because it affects people at street level, and makes their lives a misery. The most moving thing I read this weekend was this blog from Helen at Bird of Paradox, about the suffering caused by being referred to as a 'tranny' and dehumanised as an 'it' rather than a real person, by a couple of people who probably eagerly lap up the Sun's homophobic headlines. If I had the power to do so I'd like to get those fuckwits, and the pricks who come up with headlines like 'Bender it like Beckham' and think calling Louie Spence 'Louise' is the height of sophisticated wit, into a very small room and bang their heads repeatedly against a stone slab engraved with Helen's words:

'It’s happened to me so often that it’s gone beyond being just upsetting. It fucking hurts. It hurts like hell. It makes me want to lock myself in the house and never leave it again. It makes me wish I lived somewhere I never had to interact with another cis person ever again. Increasingly it feeds my gathering depression and yes, I’ll say it: it makes me wish I was dead.'

There you have it, laid out in black and white. I doubt if Jeremy Clarkson goes home after yet another joke about his bad fashion choices and feels like locking himself in one of his big shiny penis substitutes, running a plastic pipe from the injection-moulded exhaust, turning on the powerful V6 engine and going from consciousness to cadaverdom in less than sixty seconds. But that's precisely because at the end of the day Clarkson can go home to a big house full of ridiculous overgrown boys' toys, to a relationship that is accepted by society, and to a world where he is the majority, and where any abuse he receives in the streets is hardly going to make a dent. But for those who lack Clarkson's privileged status, every slur is like a bullet, a reminder that you do not belong, that you are not in the majority, that there will always be people who hold you to a misogynistic ideal of femininity or a heteronormative form of masculinity; that there are people out there who will try to kill you because you don't conform; that, worse, there are people who won't give a shit; and, worst of all, there are people who will defend the people who make you feel this way because it's just a joke, innit?

My primary school teacher used to say that it isn't a joke if you're the only one who's laughing. It used to amaze me that an awful lot of people in the media still don't understand that. These days, it only disappoints me. And it makes me think that maybe, just maybe, the death of the English newspaper and the kind of professional scum who make a living writing for it might not be such an awful thing.

Bigotgate and the REAL 'political correctness' destroying Britain

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.

Express Columnist Admits To Not Checking Facts

Last night I went out for a night out with my old Borders compadres. It was pretty fun, as these things go, but I made a terrible mistake. We went to Lau's Buffet King on Stowell Street, and I ate far too much MSG-laden Chinese food. I loved it. Sweet & sour pork, cantonese chicken, spring rolls, egg-fried rice, lemon chicken...mmmmm. Yeah, I enjoyed it. Until the MSG gave me horrific indigestion and I had to go home early.

I sometimes think the tabloid papers are a bit like cheap chinese food in that respect. You decide to read one, you enjoy it for a bit, until suddenly it makes you sick.

I was a bit bored this afternoon; I'd just finished watching the England-Ireland rugby game and was toying with what to do, and I found myself flicking through a copy of the Sunday Express, where I found this gem of an article opening from Julia Hartley-Brewer:

'When I heard that a Jobcentre had banned an advert seeking "reliable and hardworking" staff because it would discriminate against unreliable and lazy applicants, I didn't bother checking the date to make sure it wasn't April Fool's Day. I knew it would be true.' (emphases mine)

This annoyed me, because, after seeing Michael Portillo trot this same already-hoary old chestnut out on This Week this thursday, I'd tweeted my opinion that I would bet the story had already been disproved. It took Megan Lucas from Feels Like Going Downhill less than five minutes to inform me that the story had already been disproved, by Tabloidwatch,  here.

It wasn't just the date which Hartley-Brewer couldn't be bothered to check. Less than five minutes' research would have turned up the fact that this particular story was just another crock of 'political correctness gone maaaaaaaaaaad' nonsense.

That amused me. And then I thought, hang on. She's done less research on that column than I do on a typical blog entry. And, as a newspaper columnist, she probably gets paid more money than I earn in a week (well, she definitely does at the minute, 'cause I'm unemployed; but even when I go back to work at my new job next week, I'll wager she'll still be earning more money than me).

And that, reader, is the point at which the Express fail which I found so LOLsome turned on me, and left me feeling sick.