The Ballad Of The Naughty Noughties

By Euclides Montes @gatulino

What will be the feature that comes to define the ‘noughties’ whenever future generations cast their critical eye on us? Would it be perhaps the belligerence of our political and religious systems? Or, maybe, the Warholian accessibility yet ultimately transience of celebrity? Or, perhaps, we’ll be judged under a more positive light as the generation where the seeds of environmentalism finally took roots?

As this decade draws to a close, we’ve had lists aplenty organising in a neat order the greatest moments/songs/places/etc of the decade but I’ve been instead pondering about that one defining feature that will always be associated with the ‘noughties’. Regrettably I don’t have the advantage of a magic ball to look into the future but as an avid observer of the “western experience”, I personally believe that the feature that will define the ‘noughties’ generation will be its quasi-instinctual belief that everything they want is not only possible but easily achievable as soon as they want.

This Veruca Salt-like mind set has been the feature that has shaped most of this dying decade and I wonder where it will eventually lead us. The 'I Want It All, I Want It Now' mantra of the noughties reached its logical conclusion in the rather fitting financial crash that plunged us into an uncertain economic environment for the last part of the decade. What the crash also revealed was an almost caricaturised version of the inherent greedy nature of our society in the form of the fat cats bankers and financial gamblers that led our economy to the edge of financial oblivion and also exposed the ideological bankruptcy of our collective political and social systems.

I understand many will view the statement above as a rather critical assessment of our society, but we have reached a point where the ideological glue holding us all together has been stretched to breaking point, revealing its weaknesses and giving us in turn a massive opportunity, if not a mandate, to take the reins again and shape our society into a fairer and more equal one.

It’s said that the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was to convince humanity he didn’t exist. Similarly, the greatest trick that greedy and unchecked capitalism pulled was to convince us that we can have anything we want, whenever we want it and at the lowest monetary cost possible. Do you want your fast food burger and chips? Pay a couple of pounds for it, never mind the Amazon being destroyed to breed cows. Do you want a £1 top? Go to your high street chain and buy it, never mind who made it and under what conditions. Do you want to have 6, 8, 10 holidays a year? Book and check in online and while you’re at it, put it on your credit card, never mind the cost to the environment or the fact you can’t really afford it yet. Do you want an 8 figure bonus at the end of the year? Gamble with someone else’s money, never mind the OAP who’ll have to do with less money since you’ve just lost their pensions.

Make no mistake about this, we’ve all bought into the ‘Veruca Salt mind set and we are partially responsible for the state of where things are. We need, almost like children, to learn the value and worth of ‘no’. No, we shouldn’t always have everything we want. Sustainability shouldn’t have to be a life choice but instead it should be part of the way we interact with our surroundings. I believe we are at a pivotal stage in our development as a species where a few tweaks in our ideological mind set could set us in the right path. And here’s where the heart of my ponder lies. How can we achieve that? We are about to embark on a whole new decade, how do we want the future to judge us? And are we capable of change at a social level and move on from the ‘I want it all, I want it now’ mind set to a fairer one where ‘at any cost’ is no longer part of our vocabularies? Or am I perhaps a raving dog barking at the wrong tree? I don’t know. What do you think?

O, and Happy New Year!

 
Click here to go to first post

Click here to go to most recent post

Did you hear the one about the Tiger and the penguin?

by Candice Carboo-Ofulue @Candaloo

Yesterday, I received a considerably frustrated phone call from my friend Penguin. It transpired that yet another round of strikes within the Antarctic Post had delayed his copy of the National Enquirer, and he and the polar bears were desperate to know the latest in the Tiger Woods scandal. Surprised that a penguin as educated and informed as he cared about celebrity gossip, I suggested that he should probably be more concerned about the real events of Copenhagen, at which he laughed.

Unfortunately for Penguin I have been righteously ignoring the Tiger Woods story, so I could not divulge much. I half-heartedly relayed what I had glossed over in the Guardian that weekend about the National Enquirer being bribed to “bury” a story of one of Woods’ affairs back in August 2007. Rejuvenated with his celebrity fix, Penguin sadistically mocked that the reason for Woods’ indefinite leave from golf, was because he had been deafened by the sound of his life crashing down, and had lost his balance. I replied that it was wrong that his public life had been so catastrophically affected by personal matters. After all, he’s an excellent golfer, who cares who he sleeps with. Penguin told me I was naive and then hung up.....and I was left pondering.

Why is the world so obsessed with celebrities? Admittedly, this is not a new question, simply type the words celebrity and obsession into your search engine and it will readily respond with an abundance of hypotheses from religion to consumption. But recently, it seems that the slime of celebrity obsession is proliferating, blocking all news outlets with its infectious gunk, and even contaminating the channels of serious news. For those of us who refuse to care, camping out within the pages of the Guardian or other ‘broadsheets’ is no longer possible, with even those publications giddily spooning out celebrity trash as a side to our world news dish. That’s not what we ordered. All we can do is sew our ears shut, but then they’ll just get us through our eyes.

So I propose that we fight back with why? Most answers I have come across fall short of providing a comprehensive explanation. This obsession is more than just passively ‘gorking’ at the rich and famous through the OK window. It’s dynamic. Our celebrity diet simultaneously combines all the virtues and ‘unvirtues’ of human nature; we admire, adorn, mythologize, imitate, criticise, judge, sympathise, desire, fanaticise. In fact, over the last decade we have even been actively manufacturing celebrities through the reality TV machine, so that we can create our very own ‘celebridolls’. It’s more than complex, it’s a phenomenon. And in accordance with the phenomenon tradition it should be awarded it’s very own ‘ology’. So, ‘Celebriology’: The Study of the Obsession of Celebrity - let’s give it a crack.

Hmmm.....

The first important question for ‘Celebriology’ is whether our obsession is instinctual? Possibly. Some essential characteristics that underpin our celebrity fetish also worked for our branch swinging ancestors. Gossip; many evolutionary psychologists agree that gossip was an effective means of helping our ancestors make sense of the world, which may explain why we ruthlessly air Tiger Woods’ dirty laundry through every possible news outlet.

How about the desire to imitate high status individuals; used by our ancestors to ascertain scarce resources and secure their reproductive success, maybe that why we rapaciously consume mags that salivate over celeb lifestyles and offer cheap routes to the latest must-haves flaunted by Posh.

But does our desire to imitate explain why we’re so ruthlessly judgemental when celebs go bad? Maybe we can’t distinguish between their private and public lives? We believe that the price for enjoying life’s luxuries is that they follow a higher code of ethics. The ‘Gucci Ethics Code’. This may explain why Tiger Woods has fallen from the pantheon of Gillet, but it fails to explain why one day we’re pillorying Jordan and the next we’re dowsing her with compliments and admiration. So maybe, familiarity provides a more sufficient answer (another of evolutions wonders). We are more flexible in our judgements towards people we know. Jordan, through living her life within the media, has exposed her many faces, which makes her an intimate and our memories short-term. But the ‘private’ Wood’s is a stranger, so we struggle to be empathetic.

Ahh, the mind ponders and boggles. Don’t even get me started on religion. All I will say is that the distant world of celebrities is looking suspiciously similar to Greek Mythology, with its nefarious and incestuous goings-on. Although, this arguably a product of our desire to mythologize than how celebrities actually live.

So, there it is. The beginnings of Celebriology. Of course, before it can compete with the likes of Sociology, Psychology, Pathology etc, it will need to be developed. Share your comments, so we can collectively build a theory that will contain this monster. Either that or we find a suitable place to hide, and given my discussion with Penguin, the Antarctic is off.

Click here to go to first post
Click here to go to the most recent post

Am I Really Black?

by Joshua Surtees @joshuasurtees

“But I’m not black” says my sister. We are in the car with our mother driving home from the airport. “Yes you are” I say, mildly annoyed. Since childhood, our white mother has always told us we are black and should describe ourselves as such, even though we are half white. Right now, however, our mother appears to be supporting my sister’s argument, and beneath my growing angst I realise it may be wrong of me to impose my personal view of our ethnicity on to her. And yet I persist.

“No, I’m mixed race” she says. “Yes,” I say “but you’re also black”. “No, I’m as much white as I am black, but nobody calls me white so why should I call myself black?” “Do you really not know?” I say. “If you mean the one drop rule, then yes of course I know” she says “but why should a theory derived from the civil rights movement in the US decades ago apply to me now?” It’s an interesting point…

Let me back track to the conversation that sparked this discussion. In my kitchen at home one evening I’m talking to my lodger. She is of the same background as my sister and I (her father is black her mother is white). We are talking about her imminent return to Suffolk after a year in London. “I’m going to miss London,” she says. “There aren’t many brown people in Bury St Edmunds”. I’m amused by the comment. “You don’t describe yourself as brown do you?” I ask, slightly bemused as it’s been a while since I’ve heard the term. “Yes, I’m not black and I’m not white, I’m brown”. “Oh that’s interesting,” I say, “what does your dad [a black American] think about that?”, “He’s fine with it” says my lodger.

Over the next 20 minutes or so my lodger and I discuss the merits of the various labels that could be applied to us. I tell her that my own perception of the label ‘brown’ is the derogatory, condescending term ‘brown babies’ used in the British post-war years to describe children of white mother’s and black US soldiers. I also explain my concern that mixed race people often refer to themselves as brown out of some residual sense of lingering shame at the thought of calling themselves black. It must be remembered that in the eyes of most of the world, being black is something that only relatively recently emerged as something to be proud of. This is especially so in England where immigration of black people in large numbers only really began in the 50s and 60s. The generation of the earliest immigrants from the Caribbean still to this day refer to themselves as coloured. Because that is what they were told they were. Because being ‘black’ back then was undesirable. The term coloured today is racist, and yet older generations, including my white grandmother, still use it innocently, as if it is the correct term.

At school in the late 80s/early 90s, the awful term half-caste was commonly used. My siblings and I would come home from school describing ourselves thus, having been described as such in the playground or even by teachers. My mum would tell us never to describe ourselves as such, nor allow others to, explaining that the term comes from the Indian caste system and essentially means you are half a person. Of a lower class. Thank god that term is largely eradicated now along with terms such as mulatto or indeed yellow.

I suppose the term half caste came about from a genuine embarrassment in this country about the new phenomenon of mixed race babies. Until a turning point in the 60s and 70s, it was rare for a white woman and black man to have a baby, or vice versa. It is this embarrassment around issues of race that I have a problem with and may be why I am not a fan of the term brown. To me, it feels like an attempt to sanitise, ‘pretty up’ or get out of simply saying black. It is ‘black’, made more palatable for society. To me there should be no sense of shame or compromise with the word black. It should be something to be proud of. That is what was drummed into me by my mother, and indeed my father, and has stuck with me. “People will see you as black and you should be proud to be black, never deny that you are” was their message. “But Rachel [my sister] is lighter than some Italian people” we would argue. “She’s still black” would be our mother’s response.

For me, the black pride factor runs deep in this debate. Many black people require black success stories and role models to identify with, to motivate and to stimulate personal pride. If a half black person achieves success and calls themselves a black man or woman, this represents a greater fillip to black empowerment, than calling themselves brown or even mixed race. Barack Obama describes himself as African-American. What would it do to the psyches of other African-Americans in the States if he instead described himself as multiracial, bi-racial, mixed race or dual heritage? I feel it would be a disservice.

But am I wrong? Is it me who is living in the past? Is it not the choice of each individual to decide their ethnicity, even when those individuals come from the same background or even the same family, like my sister and I? Surely she has the right to call herself mixed race and my lodger to call herself brown? In the months since my lodger used the term brown, I’ve heard it quite frequently, most often from people of Indian or South Asian origin. So, is it just me that’s still living in a 1980s PC ‘Right On’ world where we march against ‘the bomb’ and acid rain and Thatcher and people calling themselves brown?

I tell my sister I find the term ‘mixed race’ unsatisfactory. “It’s meaningless. It doesn’t even describe which races one is a mix of. Ethiopian and Italian? Korean and Mexican? Iranian and Jewish?” In an, ideal world I would describe myself as half English half Jamaican. When I ask my half Norwegian half Guyanese friend he concurs. Yet these are our parents’ nationalities, not really our ethnicities. I think dual heritage is a prettier term. For me, ‘mixed race’ is just the latest in a line of flawed terminologies that the government and equalities agencies haven’t really thought through. I think it will be replaced fairly quickly with another generic, unflattering term.

My sister recounts the a time when a chatting with two childhood friends she said to one “please don’t call me half caste it’s incorrect” and the other joined in “yeah, and don’t call me Indian”, to which my sister had to politely point out “but, you are Indian!”. The unfortunate interjection somewhat devalued the original point but it neatly highlights my previous point; that some people actually are embarrassed or confused about who they are.

Then, she makes the final point that another mixed race friend, a well educated young woman, until only recently referred to herself as half caste. I am shocked.

It seems political correctness is not the solution to everything where individuals are concerned. This is the essence of the debate. Is it the right of individuals to call themselves whatever they want? Whether that be black, white, brown, mixed race, coloured or even half caste? Is it unacceptable for others to label people with official, political or ideological terms?

I think it’s fair to say I have mixed feelings on this one.

Click here to go to first post
Click here to go to most recent post

The Fear

by Euclides Montes (@Gatulino)

You’re on the night bus, on your way home after a night out on the town. A group of boisterous hooded teenagers get on the bus, perhaps having a laugh about something or other. You can feel the mood change in all of your travel companions. It darkens. The fear can almost be seen by the naked eye. These are no longer teenagers, you see, but they are instead the shadowy demons from Ghost who have come to claim your peace or maybe even your souls. Never mind that 9 out of 10* of all bus journeys will always end up as intended: just a bit late, with us iPoded Britons looking grumpily for a free seat. I could have used many other examples to highlight the explicit fear that I think permeates our society but in all of them, the result is always very clear to me. Even though the odds are stacked heavily against the things that scare us – be it gun crime, immigration causing an uncontrolled increase in our population or the PC brigade trying to ban Christmas – the fear of these things happening is here, it’s obvious, it’s pervasive and, I feel, it’s here to stay. And so, to my ponder. Is this fear understandable? More importantly, is there anything or anyone perpetuating the fear? And for what purpose?

Where to begin? For a start I believe that there are many anthropological/ sociological/ biological explanations of what ‘fear’ is but this post will not attempt to tackle these philosophical musings since the author cannot really claim to have the academic nous to put forward a definitive appraisal of the explanations! However, in the spirit of a good ponder, I have been wondering what it is that drives these waves of fear in our societies, for the simple reason that it’s as clear as day to me we are suffering from a terrible case of collective heebie-jeebies. Since we haven’t got too much space, and time is always a commodity, let me plant my flag and declare my stance on this issue.

I believe that as a species, our brains are wired into feeling fear. Fear of the dark, fear of the unknown, fear of heights. In short, fear of the dangers that in evolutionary terms have been with us for a while. We have now taken those fears and translated them, writing them into the complex socialised system we know as a society. We have understood them, given them fancy names and tried to master them but these fears are part of our biological imprint. They are part of what ‘we’ are. Now, here’s where my piece could be seen as a tad controversial because I believe that what’s different about this particular moment in our social history is that we have not only tried to master our fears but we have also managed to use them as tools of social control. This has happened to such an extent that we are at a stage where we are being constantly bombarded by fear-mongering from all directions with one single purpose: someone wants to sell us something. And in order to do so, our primeval ‘fear’ has been, and continues to be, exploited.

Please don’t get me wrong, I’m not simply talking about the McDonalisation of our private fears. After all, fear has always been used to sell almost anything that needs selling. A religious system, a dodgy war, a government campaign, the latest brand of toothpaste, a xenophobic ideology. In fact, this has become such a repetitive process that we have taken the next logical step in this tale and “The Fear” is now a permanent feature of our daily lives.

And who’s perpetuating this fear on a daily basis if not the media? I’m not saying they’re wholly responsible for this state of affairs but they are certainly liable for at least some of it. The newspapers and news channels that we go to get our daily dose of facts are suddenly now using this sales technique for their own agendas and that worries me.

If fear is part of our psyche and it is being exploited indiscriminately to sell whatever it is you’re supposed to be buying, where does the responsibility of the media start? This question arises because, in my opinion, this was a bad year [and maybe even a bad decade] for journalism. For every positive achievement by the media, there were 10 scaremongering pieces out there. For every Transfigura, there were your Dunblanegates and your racist fau pauxs. For every Aaronovitch, you had your Jan Moirs and your Littlejohns. All in the name of sale figures.

Why? It’s an issue that goes to the very meeting point of our modern society and our primeval fear. We have readily-accessible information everywhere and suddenly every click and every sale is worth a lot more than before. Sometimes I can’t help but feel that certain sectors of the media want you to be in a constant state of fear, scared of everything. It would seem that tales of teenagers killing are better for sales than reporting on fiscal deficits or Prime Minister’s Question Time.

Some of you might say that business is business after all but here is where my ponder hopefully becomes yours. Shouldn’t newspapers be more responsible? Shouldn’t we expect them to be a positive force in our society? Don’t get me wrong, ‘the fear’ came first in this ‘chicken and egg’ scenario but I believe that a few fat cats have made a omelette of it and the result is that suddenly our bearded neighbour becomes a jihadist, a vaccine becomes a poisonous arrow and our children become the goblins who haunt our trips back home from the pub late at night. ‘The Fear’ is here and here to stay. And now the weather...

Click here to go to first post
Click here to go to most recent post

Caster Semenya: All 'Sexed Up' With Nowhere To Go?

by Candice Carboo-Ofulue @Candaloo

Poor Old Caster Semenya. Is there any light at the end of this controversial tunnel? For those of you whose memories need a bit of a nudge, Caster Semenya sprinted into our collective conscious this summer after her win in the women’s 800 meters was clouded by speculation about her sex. First it was the “leak” that exposed the International Association of Athletics Federation (IAAF)’s suspicions about Semenya’s sex, followed by a tsunami of angry words from South African Athletics (ASA), the South African Government, and Semenya’s family. Not to mention the preferred tactics of avoidance and defence by the IAAF. Oh, and the public discrediting of Leonard Chuene, Head of the ASA.

Poor old Caster has been left exposed under the microscopic spotlight, publically dissected, and of course ‘glammed up’ for that all essential glossy front page makeover. And yet still the saga continues. There is contradiction between the ASA and IAAF about Semenya’s future: whilst the South African Ministry of Sport has declared that she can keep her gold medal, the IAAF claims to be in negotiations. And the long anticipated results of her gender verification test, which were due to be announced last Friday, are “still to be completed”. Poor old Caster Semenya.

But, can someone please enlighten me. Why all this frenzy surrounding the alleged ambiguity of her sexual anatomy? Seriously, I’m confused. I mean, if her gender verification test results confirm that she is indeed a ‘hermaphrodite’, she wouldn’t be the first. In fact, to be born ‘intersex’ is somewhat normal. Admittedly statistically uncommon, but then there are lots of genetic rarities, not all of them result in outright hysteria. And I refuse to accept that this is some kind of public reaction to the ‘unknown’. Anyone, like me, who was raised on cable TV, will remember the obsession with ‘transgendered’ and ‘intersex’ people on day-time freak shows (sorry, I meant talk shows) such as Sally Jessie Raphael.

For some the answer is obvious. It’s the incompatibility of ‘intersex’ people within sport, which is defined along the lines of ‘sexually decisive’ men and women. Possibly. But that doesn’t explain the confusion. From the leak, to the fact that she was allowed to run despite the speculation, to the protracted gender verification test; disorder is an understatement. Semenya might just as well be a Martian. In fact, that just reinforces my question. How to ‘deal’ with ‘intersex’ people is a well established dilemma within competitive sport; gender verification tests were introduced into the Olympics in 1968 for that reason. Since then there have been a number incidents of gender speculation, such as in 2006 when Indian middle-distance runner Santhi Soundarajan was stripped of her silver medal after failing the gender verification test. Surely, it must have been someone’s job to develop some kind of policy, or at least a transgendered Olympics? But no, just a bunch of headless chickens wearing suits and IAAF name badges.

So I wonder: does the source of the hysteria go beyond the track? Maybe all this bewilderment surrounding Semenya is our belief system in meltdown? I mean, what led to the initial speculation? Was it that this young girl’s body is just too masculine? Her voice just too coarse?

Maybe it’s not that ‘intersexuality’ is incompatible with sport itself, but rather that our sporting competitions fall short in accommodating the sexual variations that actually exist? Do we feel uncomfortable with ’intersexuality’ because it rips the heart out a belief system that masquerades as natural but is in fact socially created? Surely, the presence of ‘intersexuality’ mocks our restricted view of men and women. In fact, many scientists believe that sexual ambiguity is statistically underrepresented, since not all people born ‘intersex’ have external male and female anatomy. What if you have the internal anatomy of a woman, but the external genitalia of a man? Does that make you an ‘unwoman’ or an ‘unman’. So even within the context of ‘intersexuality’ there are variations. Should sex be viewed and understood as a continuum? Furthermore, if nature is content with creating ambiguous sexual anatomies, why are we so absolute?

I wonder if this challenge to our ‘natural’ belief system explains our frenzied and possibly aggressive reaction to ‘intersexuality’? We’re fraudsters. Rather than accept this ambivalence we defend our beliefs. We view it as wrong, abnormal, pitiful. We feel safe in dichotomies: men and women, old and young, ugly and beautiful. So instead, we talk about the need to rectify maldeveloped, abnormal or defective reproductive systems through ‘corrective’ surgery? It is up to the ‘other’ to ’correct’ their reproductive systems to conform to our ’normal’ ideas of sex. Of course, many may chose to have surgery, but this choice should determined by the individual, and not be the result of a ‘gender dogma’. How do we know what is natural if the ‘other’ is corrected and suppressed?

So I’m left in the position where my confusion has been substituted by questions. Is this just an issue for the minority of people who are born ‘intersex’? Maybe there is no need to challenge our entire belief system solely to incorporate a few? But if our collective thinking is so intrinsically intolerant to the extent that our social views create sex, where are the boundaries? Within our present climate of body ‘dysmorphia’, should this be asked? Consider this: last year the number of women seeking labiaplasties (cosmetic surgery on their female genitalia) rose by 70 percent. Women having operations to become more womanly. Have our ‘socialised’ beliefs of sex become so ‘natural’ that now they are ideals to which our bodies should aspire? Now that is interesting.

Click here to go to first post
Click here to go to top

My Straight Gay Wedding: What's In A Name?

by guest contributor Tom Freeman

In 342 AD the Christian emperors Constantius II and Constans issued a law in the Theodosian Code prohibiting same-sex marriage and ordering execution for those so married. Things have come on a bit since then. On 24th November at 10:30 am my partner and I have an appointment at Islington Registry Office to give notice of our intention to form a civil partnership. You might think this is a time for celebration, but you’d be wrong. Our notice will not be accepted. The reason? My partner is a girl. The Civil Partnerships Act 2004 says: ‘two people are not eligible to register as civil partners of each other if they are not of the same sex’. In the words of Sam Leith in the Evening Standard on Monday: ‘it is an abomination before Blair to see man and woman unnaturally so conjoined’.

The mantra I have been droning to all and sundry is: ‘separate but equal isn’t equal at all’. Those of you who can remember history GCSE will recognise this idiom from segregation-era America. Derived from an act of 1880, ‘separate but equal’ became a legal principle, not overturned until 1954. Black people were entitled to public services putatively equal in quality – just as long as they were kept separate from services for white people. In Plessy vs Ferguson (1896), the landmark case in which Homer Plessy was prosecuted for riding in a white railway carriage, the majority of the court blindly refused to accept that the law implied any inferiority of black people. In reality the majority had accepted equal rights for the minority only on the condition that they were held at arm’s length. This, in my book, is not what equality is. The analogy with matrimonial law in the UK is obvious: the legal effects of Civil Partnership and civil marriage are identical, the rights and obligations are identical, yet one is for gay people only, and the other – with all the prestige that the ancient institution entails – for straights only.

This throws up a whole box full of ponders. First, is there something inherent in the nature of sexuality which dictates that long-term committed relationships between same-sex and opposite-sex couples are fundamentally different and must be recognised as such in law? In his article, Leith, using the analogy of apartheid, writes ‘the ANC weren't campaigning for the right of South Africa's black majority to call themselves white’. This implies that by seeking a Civil Partnership we are ‘calling ourselves gay’. Is this association of concepts something that can or should be broken down? Plenty of countries have managed it. While the Netherlands introduced registered partnerships in the 90s to give gay couples the benefits available to married couples, this didn’t stop them becoming, in 2001, the first nation to grant same-sex marriages. The Canadian Parliament approved the granting and recognition of same-sex marriages by redefining marriage as “the lawful union of two persons to the exclusion of all others” in 2005. Similar steps have been taken in Norway, Belgium, Spain, South Africa and Sweden.

But I’m being silly, aren’t I? This is all just semantics. Everybody, gay or straight, has the same rights, so where’s the problem? My second ponder therefore is: are labels really important? Leith goes on: The ANC ‘were campaigning for equality under the law. And that's what we've already got... things are pretty much okee-dokee in a society, I think, where the nomenclature is the only thing wrong with a law’. Are they, though? This comes down to the effect of names. Did anyone else notice that following Kevin McGee’s sad death, major newspapers used the word ‘husband’ to refer to his relationship to Matt Lucas, but put it in inverted commas? This is just one example of a trend. Civilly partnered couples are portrayed as imitating their married counterparts, but somehow falling short. I think this is a case of the media reflecting societal prejudices. But consider: how would attitudes be affected if we were no longer handed such an easy line to draw between proper couples and pretend ones? Would this eventually alter our perceptions? I genuinely don’t know. Maybe not. Maybe gay couples are glad to have their own institution and not be assimilated.

Which brings me to my final ponder. Who cares? Who actually are we representing here, except ourselves? How did we end up seeking to be a test case in the overturning of what seemed to us a gross inequality? It seemed like common sense. But if this is so self-evident why are others seemingly blind to it? There is no organised campaign in England on this issue, and a gay male friend tells me that interest in ours among gay men will be limited. I approached a certain prominent charity who were instrumental in lobbying for Civil Partnerships with my idea, and it was met with outright hostility. Does this in itself mean that what we are doing is wrong? Who gets to say? Can someone fill me in on this? I really should have checked.

Because of course we have now effectively excluded ourselves from the legal and economic benefits available to married couples – we are denied civil partnership by law, and we can’t back down now and go off and get married. If change does come, it will be very slow. I understand the Green Party has concrete plans to liberalise the law, but it looks like the Tories are on the way. Labour brought in Civil Partnerships, which is progress, but have no plans to go further. You could even say that accepting a compromise for the time being slows progress towards a goal (actually, it might even occur to a more cynical mind than mine that an understanding could have been reached with those lobbying for Civil Partnership that this would be ‘enough’). So for the time being, we’re kinda stuck.

That’s what’s been on my mind. Can separate but equal really be equal after all? What’s your view?

Click here to go to first post
Click here to go to most recent post

Freak Out Friday? Do Me A Favour...

by guest contributor Hugh Lindley (@HughLindley, normally found trying to tolerate people on Bertie's Bastard Blog)

Today the date is 13/11/2009. It is the second Friday in November. It is 3 days before Monday the 16th. It is one of 4 days in the month that has a ‘3’ in it. None of these things are remarkably interesting. But hang on – if I were to say it was Friday the 13th, it would suddenly make the day seem interesting, eerie and supernatural wouldn’t it?

No. Of course it wouldn’t. You cretin.

It’s been a bumper few weeks for people who are scared of their own reflection, cracked paving slabs and particularly sharp pencils. No sooner have we got the annual farce that is Halloween out of the way (with all the crap fancy dress parties and kids pushing dog turds through letterboxes that it demands) than we have to put up with people rehashing the same old myths about Friday the 13th.

The annoying thing for ‘normal’, ‘sane’, ‘rational’ people like, well, like me, is this: after all the ghosts, ghouls and werewolves of the former (which are still a load of bollards but would at least be genuinely frightening if they existed), the latter’s non-specific threat and general excuse for cowardice is a bit of a comedown.

The former is, at least, one of many spurious reasons for the British population to binge drink and have a bloody good laugh; the latter may well involve some of your friends refusing to come to the pub in case they accidentally fall in front of a bus on the way home… something that could almost definitely be attributed to the ill-advised shot of Pernod they always finish the evening with.

There’s a fairly good chance that somebody will say to you today something like: ‘Oh I’d better not – it’s Friday the 13th, lol!’. Most of these people won’t be saying this with any real degree of seriousness (hence the ‘lol’) but with some you’ll probably be able to tell that they actually believe on some level.

This is very frustrating to me. I can just about tolerate people’s religious beliefs (if forced) but why should I have to put up with somebody who thinks that the date on the calendar has an adverse effect on their fortunes? There’s no element of harmless fun like with Halloween (you get sweets!), or celebrating the brutal execution of Jesus Christ (you get chocolate!). In the USA it is estimated that 17-21 million people have some form of a fear of the day and that it costs the economy $800-900 million (which they can hardly afford to lose these days). What is the point in propagating this myth, sometimes (as in 2009) 3 times a year? How can we convince these cowardly custards that, as Stevie Wonder always says, superstition ain’t the way?

One possible answer is pure ridicule. The fear of Friday the 13th is called paraskevidekatriaphobia. Look at that word. Would you like to be known as a paraskevidekatriaphobic? The chances are that word would get round to your neighbours, who are equally jumpy but for more tabloid-fueled reasons. This would probably result in your house being graffitied, your shed burnt down and your door no longer knocked on by trick or treaters. Your mother would buy you Gary Glitter albums for Christmas in a futile attempt to sympathise. Apart from that, it’s just a stupid word and you probably can’t pronounce it anyway.

However, this massive stick may not be the best answer, so perhaps the paraskevidekatriaphobic community could be persuaded to take off their tin foil hats and mince down to the carrot shop? Or to put it another way, should we waste our time patiently explaining to them that there is very little evidence to suggest that there is any link between Friday the 13th and really bad things happening? Indeed a Dutch study suggests that there is a decreased rate of traffic accidents on these ‘fatal’ days due to people taking extra care.

On the other hand, other studies have contradicted this and shown an increased rate of accidents. No problem for us rationalists though – firstly there are more accidents on weekends anyway due to alcohol consumption and secondly one can assume that some of these are due to psychosomatic reasons: ‘Well I was bound to drive my car off a cliff today wasn’t I? It’s Friday the 13th lol!’.

However… if you’re driving today and at the lights you look to your left and see one man frantically checking his mirrors, tightening his seatbelt and wiping the sweat from his face as he desperately tries not to cause an accident; and you then look to your right to see a man wearing a blindfold and a bodybag, releasing his handbrake, already resigned to his fate… Well, you’re probably better off just staying in aren’t you really? You never know do you?

Click here to go to first post
Click here to go to most recent post

Things To Do While I'm Alive

by Euclides Montes @Gatulino

A couple of weeks ago I convinced myself that I was dying. Ok, it’s not as dramatic as it sounds, the sense of impending doom lasting for just about 5 minutes during an idle bus ride. But with my general clumsiness and medical history, the feeling was very real while it lasted. And the aftertaste it left got me pondering about life, achievements and all that. At 27, have I achieved everything I wanted to? Certainly not. So, what are those things I should, nay, must do before I actually kick the metaphorical bucket?

I should write a small disclaimer at this stage. If in the next few lines you’re expecting to read a great philosophical treatise on the futility of life achievements or the fragility of our existences, I must admit that you’d have more luck finding a YouTube clip of Jeremy Clarkson noisily suckling directly from the royal bosoms. I just ain’t that deep. Instead, I’m offering you a little glimpse into my crazy head and hoping it gets you pondering about (and planning for) those things you’ve always wanted to do.

I started by thinking about some of the greatest achievement in my life so far and the list looked like:

Keep a great relationship with my loved ones Check

Find the woman of my dreams and make sure she falls desperately in love with me Check

Run a marathon, raising £1000s in the process Check

Learn another language to high professional level Check

Grow my beard and hair until I look like a wannabe Messiah Check

Snog Margaret Thatcher Check

Ok, let’s stop there because this is quickly turning into a self-serving exercise, ego blosturbation if you will.

So, there are all of these things that I’ve managed to achieve already in my life, but the list that I wanted to draft was about the things I should get on with doing now that I’d had my new found sense of purpose thanks to my wonderful [read: rather trivial] epiphany.

So I visited the rich literature of ‘thing to do before..’ that abounds online and the choice is endless yet vaguely pointless.

Swim with dolphins? I think I’d rather chase squirrels in the park. Far cheaper and more rewarding.

Fly Concorde to New York? Erm.. Bugger, as late as Silvio Berlusconi’s sense of decorum.

Walk the Inca trail to Machu Pichu? Only if you promise to clear the country of all tourists but me.

Travel into space? Ta but most hardcore drugs give me a fuzzy belly.

In fact, it felt to me that most of these lists had been drawn up by travel agents during the times when we all used 10 pound notes to wipe our arses with. But to me, all these lists rang hollow and pointless. Should I really spend the best part of my year working like the Duracell bunny, saving all of my money only to fly away to Texas to have a go at cowboy ranching? Really? If I was actually dying tomorrow, would I be thankful that the last thing to flash before my eyes was the glimpses of a bunch of cows waiting in line for the slaughterhouse?

No, friends, that’s not for me. So, instead, I think we should draw a better list and maybe even post it to every single person at the age of 16. That way people aren’t going to be disappointed when visiting a casino in Las Vegas only to find that faux-Pharaoh selling them chips is actually a pissed off usher working like crazy so that he can fly to our very own London and go on the London Eye. Hmm.

I’ll start us off, shall I? Here are the first items in my new list and I promise to do all of this (or at least have a proper go at them) and I might even add a few of your suggestions if they’re really, really good.

Keep the first two of the list above going strong until the peaceful day I give up the ghost.

Write that novel I’ve been threatening the world with for so long now.

Become a master in the science of stilt walking.

Get 200 people to re-enact that Braveheart scene (you know the one) in Trafalgar Square with me.

Become best friends with Simon Pegg.

Never shrink from standing up for what I believe.

Age disgracefully and never allow the puerile and immature child in me to die.

Never say no to an ‘off the beaten’ track challenge.

It’s possible that I may be accused of lacking ambition, or some such similar charge, but to be honest I’m not sure I care. I firmly believe that life should not be defined by how many exotically-named facebook photo albums you have.

In fact, the reason that I’ve called my list ‘things to do while I’m alive’ is because we shouldn’t be hankering after these seemingly “amazing things” to do at some point in the future, but maybe it should instead be about finding the beauty and magic in every moment we have right now.

I grant you, it’s probably not possible to achieve your greatest conquest every day. But each day that passes could be a stepping stone toward getting there. That way, when you’re actually facing the grim reaper at the final stage you’ll be able to hand in a well worn body, a memory full of wonderful victories, a heart overflowing with happiness and a bright and wide smile that says ‘no regrets’.

Right, I better quit while I’m ahead lest I embarrass myself any further by sounding like Oprah’s Christmas Special. To come full circle, I reiterate that I hope this silly post gets you pondering about those things you’ve always wanted to do with your life. I’ll certainly get on with mine! Now, who’s up for some kilt-wearing hilarity in central London?

Click here to go to first post
Click here to go to most recent post

Pornography?

By Jason Todd - Guest Contributor

Pornography. Escapist fantasies? A bit of harmless fun? Sexually liberating? Plain old wrong? Whatever your view, because let’s not pretend you don’t have one, porn is here and it’s here in a big way.

Porn has moved off of the top shelf and is in our homes. You may think this sounds a little like something Mary Whitehouse would storm the BBC saying, but none-the-less, it would be hard to deny that it’s true. Pornography has crept onto mainstream television. Films like 9 songs have brought it back into the cinema and with magazines like Nuts and Loaded it is still firmly in the newsagents.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that I think in the main, pornography is ok. Well, at least in the sense that I don’t see anything inherently wrong with a consenting adult(s) watching another set of consenting adults having sex for the purpose of sexual gratification, or just for a laugh. In fact, one could argue that pornography has done some good. I think on the whole people today (certainly those of my generation - the ’20 something’s’) are more open and confident about their sexuality and sexual practice. They are more aware, and have better sex as a result. I’m not sure many people would argue that we should return to the sexually repressed age of doctors inducing orgasms for stressed women… although, judging by some porn titles, apparently some people do.

But here is my ponder, when did this happen? When did porn become ‘OK’ and do we really think that it is actually all ok? Gone are the days of having to travel to a seedy shop in Soho and leave with a paper bag. Now pornography is well and truly out in the open. People talk about porn, people buy it openly, hell your nan’s probably seen it.

I am opting to avoid any huge social commentary, because there are more able and eloquent people amongst us who can do a better job, but seriously, when did this happen? And whilst we’re at it, by having this ever more open view of pornography have we opened the door to something seedier, that by default we all now have to accept? Gone are the days of having to hide porn away, but gone too are the days of Shannon Tweed politely bobbing up and down on some mullet-wearing man in time to Santana-esque electric guitar, and in are the days of “gagging”, “puking” “abuse of drunks” and the now infamous ‘two girls one cup”. By opening the way for porn in its most general sense, did we also inadvertently invite these more extreme forms into the open? Did we legitimise them?

I stated by saying that I don’t have any real issue with pornography in the abstract sense, but I’m uncomfortable with the idea that this means I then have to also accept it in its extreme forms. Sex should be fun, it should be pleasurable, and so too then by extension should pornography. So why then is it now nasty? Something happened in society to make pornography acceptable, but what on earth happened to make this new form ok? My original reason for writing this piece was a conversation I had with a friend. Although never explicitly stated it was clear than in our time we had both watched porn and by the sounds of it enjoyed it. What concerned us was not people watching porn in the abstract, but rather what it purported to tell or show us about socially acceptable norms of sexual behaviour. The subsequent risk then of course is the impact that extreme but recently legitimised forms of pornography could have on young, sexually naïve minds.

And there folks is the heart of my ponder, when did it become ‘ok’ and where do we draw the line of ‘ok-ness’? This musing is full of questions, perhaps then it is fitting to take you back to the title: pornography?

Click here to go to first post
Click here to go to most recent post

Shooting The Breeze

by Candice Carboo-Ofulue @Candaloo

Is it just me, or does anyone else feel that we need to refresh the debate on black-on-black gun crime? Yes, the media are still salivating over stories of “shootings” and “gangsters”, but it seems that the Government has left the building. Meanwhile cases such as Nathan Harris; a teenager sentenced to 16 years in prison for ordering the shooting of 20 year old Craig Brown saturate the media. Except, what I didn’t see anywhere in all of the coverage of this heartbreaking story was anyone asking why. Why has a teenage boy taken this track in life? Why does a teenage boy know how to get his hands on a gun? Why do we have a lynch mob style “death by reputation” media inquest, instead of having real solutions put in place to prevent this happening again? Why has this issue slipped down the political agenda? Now, more than ever we need to tread those murky waters of “underachievement”, joblessness and poor housing.

Recently, the only noise around this issue is that being created by the tabloids spitting stories of “gangsters” and “villains” infesting our streets. Like the Medieval morality plays, these stories have no intention of raising debate; they are designed to instill fear, entrench stereotypes and ultimately sell papers. And of course, there is also the unmistakable sound of the police cracking down. Meanwhile, black boys slide deeper into the abyss of gangs, guns and violence.

To a large extent, gun crime has traditionally been linked to the seedy world of drug dealers. However, the uncomfortable truth now is that gun crime is spreading its tentacles beyond drugs. Turning black youth culture into a delinquent sub-culture. What morals and values are we instilling in our youth? Our most recent attempts to engage, mostly driven by the media I should add, have sucked us into discussions of “callousness” and “gangsterism”. Unfortunately, this type of analysis uproots solutions from the social realm and drops them into some of kind of fantasy world made up of good guys and bad guys. Unfortunately life is not that simple. Call me cynical but is this not just a deliberate attempt to ignore our societal responsibilities? I wonder.

What is the basis for our unwillingness or inability to address the problems? Or is it that we’re just unable to understand? What is perhaps unsettling for some is that when we start to analyse the human behind the monster, we discover that his desires and aspirations are not that different from "our" own. Success, power, affluence – these are considered normal aspirations. So as the fog of fear begins to clear, what we see is a parallel sub-culture, with a unique set of skills and values. In this world violence and guns are normal methods of achieving respect and success. Here, the “gangster” is functional, entrepreneurial, likeable. Could this be an alternative society that accepts those rejected by the mainstream?

Oh, and before anyone starts on about rap music providing unsavoury role models again, please don’t. Instead, perhaps we should be looking closer to home before casting blame elsewhere. Let’s talk about why our young black boys are so poorly equipped emotionally to be able to deal with anger and frustration? Where are their vocational or intellectual skills to access society? How do we broaden their horizons?

Last week, as most of us were sucked into the frenzy around Nick Griffin’s appearance on Question Time, the news that the Metropolitan Police plans to deploy armed police units to patrol estates in Tottenham, Lambeth and Haringey slipped surreptitiously into the BBC evening news. This, they said, was to “proactively respond to the increase in gun crime" and is only a “temporary” measure. Hmmm, when did the definition of proactive include a semi-automatic weapon?

I’m no expert but this will probably result in more arrests, increased marginalisation and evidently more shootings. Come on people, let’s start talking before the Government commissions Brazilian style death squads to clean our streets.

There is a big blue elephant in the room, and he’s angry and holding a gun.

Click here to go to first post

Click here to go to most recent post

A Terrible Case of the X

by John Ellul - guest contributor

So, for better or for worse, Cheryl Cole’s debut solo performance came and went this weekend on The X-Factor and the world has continued spinning regardless. After encountering a backlash when it emerged that Cole planned to record the performance beforehand and mime over the track. She then appeared to swerve everyone, presumably in answer to her critics. Her seat was empty at the start. She stayed in the same costume throughout. Some of the vocals were shaky – surely it was live. Were we all had? Does it even matter?

The calls for authenticity on a TV show more artificial than ‘Cosmetic Surgery Live’ are a bit misguided, with some under the impression that Cole should ‘set an example’ by singing live. Perhaps having a stellar career for the last few years gives her the right to a night off – but would the same apply in other walks of life? “I’ve been a brilliant postman for 17 years now. Today though, I’m just going to pretend to post the letters while I play on the swings and you lot can sod off.”

The abiding issue isn’t about the quality of Cheryl Cole’s singing – but of the song. Cheryl didn’t have to write a great song, rather choose one from those offered to her. Ms Cole has the world at her feet and all her army of expert advisers had to do was pick a barnstormer with which to announce herself on the international solo stage. Seeing as “choosing the right song” is about the only tangible thing the mentor has to do for their chosen acts on The X-Factor, this should have been a breeze.

The limp, lifeless ‘Fight For This Love’ is boring, drab sub-R&B album filler at best. So is Cheryl the next Beyonce or the next Mel C? The song will likely get to number one this Sunday thanks to the exposure Simon Cowell can guarantee (in exchange for her firstborn, presumably) but on this evidence a tail-between-the-legs Girls Aloud reunion can’t be too far off. The Daily Mail got it half-right – the song is derivative, but not because it’s a Kelis rip-off.

The man behind the song, Andre Merritt, is responsible for several recent successes (Chris Brown – ‘Forever’; Rihanna – ‘Disturbia’) and his reference demo has been floating around the net since December. In the year since then it’s also been recorded by American singer (and 2002 American Idol contestant) Tamyra Gray. Looking closer into Cheryl’s tracklisting we also find the 2008 will.i.am hit ‘Heartbreaker’, on which she (apparently) sang the chorus, and a cover of Nikola Rachelle’s 2006 single ‘Don’t Talk About This Love’. That’s an awful lot of recycling.

Song-swapping is commonplace in contemporary R&B, a genre Cheryl Cole appears eager to shoehorn herself into. This scene consists of several songwriting collectives and individuals who’ll go anywhere once the cheque clears, ‘rent-a-pens’ with few scruples and even less quality control. Once the song is done, a vocal reference is recorded to demonstrate how to sing it and it’s emailed to whoever wants it. This process often runs into roadbumps. Usher initially hesitated over recording 2004 mega-hit ‘Yeah!’, and when he did eventually ask to buy the rights to the song, producer Lil’ Jon had sold it to rapper Petey Pablo. A hastily-made imitation was thrown together and proved a smash.

So how much of the music we listen to is really ‘real’? I’m pretty confident this musical ‘bed-hopping’ doesn’t take place in other genres. Was ‘Golden Skans’ originally offered to Kasabian before they passed it up? Did ‘America’ sit on a producer’s desk for a year while Razorlight, The Kaiser Chiefs and The Killers argued over it? We used to be able to kid ourselves that our pop stars were at least trying to keep up the charade. Now, not only is the Emperor wearing no clothes, he’s smiling and shaking his dangling bits in our face while he does it.

The British black pop music scene is experiencing exposure and success on a never before seen level. Chipmunk, Dizzee Rascal, Ironik, Tinchy Stryder and N-Dubz have all had recent triumphs and Cheryl Cole stands as the R&B figurehead, alongside Taio Cruz, and her X-Factor cohorts Alexandra Burke and Leona Lewis. Reality shows have served her well and she needs to seize this opportunity creatively or risk solo failure.

Perhaps she is more aware than I give her credit for though. Booking Whitney “I Will Always Have a Problem” Houston to sing directly after you is a masterstroke that ensures few people will remember your own drawbacks. The Evening Standard wrote that Houston “looked flustered” when talking to host Dermot O’Leary. Since when did “flustered” become the accepted euphemism for “on crack”? “Sorry I haven’t been in for work for three months boss, I was flustered. In a flustered den, with my flustered pipe.”

Whether Cheryl’s approach to her album and her career are ‘admirable’, this is of course academic – both the album and subsequent singles are guaranteed sales and financial success thanks to blanket coverage. The naysayers have bemoaned sampling in hip-hop, and autotune in R&B – is a backlash against the invisible business of ‘song-swapping’ far off?

Hubby Ashley, who dutifully sat in the crowd on Sunday night, is to be applauded. Faced with the prospect of their partners embarking on international superstardom, more insecure husbands would feel emasculated. Not our Ash. Although maybe he just wants Cheryl to reach a second album so he and Rio’s imaginary hip-hop ensemble (the Merx Brothers?) can appear as guest rappers and finally “spit some hot lyrics”. And how much exactly would Cheryl pay her beloved Ashley to appear as a guest on her album? £55 grand? Is she taking the piss, Jonathan?

Click here to go to first post
Click here to go to most recent post

Little Nicky: A question of free speech or home entertainment?

by Peter Manning - guest contributor

As I am sure you know Nick Griffin is on Question Time next week. There has been a lot of fuss among the liberal left about the fact that the BBC is providing a platform for a far-right group to promote its agenda on a popular show that always does well in the ratings. The BNP website has, in fact, already installed a countdown clock, as if welcoming in some kind of apocalyptic final showdown; Straw and Griffin, poised to go head to head (I assume with Dimbleby acting as some kind of burlesque referee). I don’t think Griffin knows Straw has impaired eyesight; I don’t think Straw knows he is facing a parody of Stephen King’s ‘IT’ (principally manifest as a clown, but sometimes also taking the form of people’s deepest fears). If we accept that the limit of free speech within a democratic society is realised exactly at the propagation of wholly undemocratic ideas then we should quite reasonably conclude that a publicly funded body should not allow this farce. But a farce is what it will almost certainly be, and, I think, it may be a useful one.

I personally can’t take Nick Griffin seriously; he does actually remind me of an angry clown. For the record, I am completely aware that Griffin’s rhetoric is not only offensive, but also inflammatory and potentially dangerous. The recent spats of racially motivated violence and vandalism against Muslims and Jews are enough to remind us how serious a general threat the ideas of the far right in modern Britain can be.

The other panellists on Question Time have a decision to make early on next Thursday. On the one hand, they can collectively condemn Griffin from the off, quashing his attacks wherever possible, bully style, at best letting proceedings deteriorate into a shouting match, and, at worst, potentially risking an exhibition in martyrdom. On the other, an alternative (albeit risky) approach may very well be to let Griffin enjoy the platform, abuse it even. By keeping disagreement and correction firm but mild – parental, soothingly patronising even – the panel can allow Griffin to be the only farce on show. Thinking back a year or so ago, Joe Biden’s strategy in the Vice-Presidential debate showed that this can work. Biden respectfully allowed Palin to expose her own cognitive deficiencies. I am obviously not trying to compare the politics of Sarah Palin and Nick Griffin; one is an extremist power-hungry maniac, and the other is… Er…

The point is that Griffin’s ideas should not be taken seriously, even if they are by some groups that are presently feeling disenfranchised from the public sphere. Surely we should be addressing the roots of that marginalisation, rather than assuming swathes of the population are either innately racist, or too stupid to spot someone making a public fool of them self? This is not ‘Weimar Britain’, despite the BNP’s preference for the population transfer of all non-indigenous persons (that is, essentially, all of us – can the last person in Britain please turn the light out?). The fact that the BNP website seriously suggests that ‘overpopulation’ – a direct result of immigration – is ‘the cause of the destruction of our environment’ shows that Griffin can quite capably show the fallacies of the BNP attack without any help, and quite on his own terms.

The great thing about the UK is that we (generally) have an understanding of public citizenship according to secular and non-ethnic/racial/gendered criteria. That is something that – dare I say it – we can be proud of, and something that has taken many hundreds of years to establish. Yes, we live in a culture that en masse consumes Simon Cowell as entertaining, and yes, sometimes the public is not critical enough of blindingly obvious blights to our society (the Royal Family). But there is a tendency on the liberal left to err toward a rhetoric of condemnation which, in situations like the forthcoming BNP Question Time appearance, further inhibit the collective critical conscience, rather than stimulating it. In some situations this can be helpful, crucial even (on climate change perhaps). But the public needs to be able to make its own judgement on Nick Griffin, in many ways just to illustrate clearly what political apathy can lead to. In making that judgement, I am convinced that the public will see Griffin next Thursday for what he is: an angry (and dangerous) clown.

Click here to go to first post
Click here to go to most recent post

No Ball Games

by Joshua Surtees

Recently, while walking through a council estate in Wood Green where I live, I noticed a small boy repeatedly throwing a basketball against a sign that clearly read 'No Ball Games'. Now, I don't know whether kids are subversive at age 10 or just naughty, but this was a deliciously brazen act. He was bouncing the ball, I believe it's called dribbling, and then using the sign as his 'hoop'. If only I'd had a camera to hand (oh but wait, it's illegal to photograph minors...as my brother recently found out when trying to take a photograph of his own son at a cafe). I particularly liked how the basketball kid looked around occasionally, just to check if anyone was looking. It was genius, and added a needed touch of comedy to an otherwise bleak scene of garages, concrete and prohibitive signs.

A couple of days later while reading the Tottenham and Wood Green Journal, I happened across an article featuring a Banksy story. Banksy has come to Tottenham and given us a beautiful new piece of art. What is interesting about this story, as with all Banksy street art, is the debate about what should be done with the piece. The owner of the building (which houses a Polish grocery shop and, I believe, a kebab shop) clearly has the right to remove the painting (as has been done many times in London before people cottoned on to the fact that Banksy is one of our greatest current artists). Apparently the owner is still debating what to do about it. Haringey council meanwhile, not wanting to appear culturally ignorant, have erected a Perspex shield around the piece to protect it and "to draw visitors to the area". Hahaha...if you have ever been to this junction in the heart of Tottenham you will know why NO visitors will EVER be drawn here by ANYTHING....it's grim). Perspex, you will recall, also covers a Banksy piece on Essex Road. While the reflective plastic does tend to deface and emasculate these pieces somewhat, at least councils are now protecting them, and drawing attention to them rather than chemically removing them.

It is, however, an interesting dilemma. If the owner is a Neanderthal and has never heard of Banksy he could have it removed. Which brings us to an interesting debate about ownership; who really does ‘own’ this piece? Can the artist claim ownership or is he technically a vandal? Does the building owner have the right to remove, alter, cover or indeed sell it as his own personal property? Does this piece of art belong to the community at large and everybody who walks past it and beholds it? I do not have the answers to these questions but I do feel that areas like Tottenham deserve this kind of adornment. This is now (hopefully) a permanent artwork on display and touching local people’s everyday lives. It is exactly the kind of subversion of the restrictions society places upon individuals that De Certeau would be proud of. In areas with bleak prospects and living environments, the inspiration, aesthetic uplift and humour that such work can bring is invaluable.

I also feel strongly that senior figures within the artistic community should do more to encourage high quality street art. In cities like Lisbon or Paris I have seen vibrant examples of street art which appear to be understood and celebrated by the local residents and artist communities. London, meanwhile, until fairly recently had a blanket policy of removing any so-called ‘graffiti’ from its streets. Artists such as Banksy have made great strides in altering perceptions and, indeed, differentiating between ‘tagging’ artists, whose mission is to simply proliferate their monolithic symbols as widely as they can, and ‘real’ street artists.

To end, I refer back to the aforementioned ball-throwing kid and share with you some of the thoughts that his wanton act instigated in my mind: Was he referencing Banksy in his act of juvenile delinquency? Was he sending out a big 'fuck you' to Haringey council, to the government, to the state, to the authorities who create these stupid signs? Will he be the next Michael Jordan and grow up to tell the stories of how he used to have to use a sign for a hoop? Will he grow up to be a nihilist, an anarchist, an agitator, a political activist, an anti-capitalist demonstrator, a football hooligan? Was it simply that he could not speak English, or was perhaps illiterate, and therefore couldn't understand the sign or the significance of his act? Or was he just a naughty kid chucking a ball against a sign? Whatever the facts behind this extraordinary sight are, it was a beautiful, beautiful thing to observe. Thank you small boy, whoever you are.

And you can read/see more about Banksy and other street art from around the world at this rather pleasant website

Click here to go to first post
Click here to go to most recent post

Lament of a Woolly Liberal

By Euclides Montes @Gatulino

I’m worried. That in itself isn’t new, worrying is the favourite pastime of us woolly liberals. In fact, worrying is precisely the reason that I haven’t eaten anything Nestlé in years, or why I have never had a cup of coffee from Starbucks in my life.

But this is different. Overt racism, currently in vogue in its Islamophobic manifestation, is suddenly thriving in the United Kingdom [and The West at large] and it really worries me. Worse than that, I would argue that liberals are giving these formerly extremist views an almost free passage into middle ground politics. When fear mongering about Muslims ‘conquering Europe’s cities, street by street’ is not only accepted but praised and commentators are confident to make statements like ‘The Serbs figured [it] out... if you can’t outbreed the enemy, cull’em’, I worry that we have a serious problem on our hands. A problem compounded by a self-imposed liberal myopia that refuses to accept the prevalence of racism in our society.

No matter where you stand on the issue, it would be hard to deny that racists and racism are apparent through all levels of society right now. They are in the papers that we read, they are representing some of us in office, they are gaining a legitimate foothold in the national discourse. Heck, they are so confident that they’re taking to streets, in numbers.

And Islam seems to be taking the brunt of this xenophobic wave that’s washed up on our shores. For instance, the English Defence League (EDL) is slowly but surely becoming more confident in its actions, and its arguments are more honed to deliver a message through which Muslims are invariably cast as the proverbial boogie men. And what’s even more surprising is that whilst hundreds of EDL protesters marched through the streets, throwing Nazi salutes and racist chants, most of my friends [well educated folk and mostly woolly liberals like me] are unaware of the EDL's existence, let alone their actions. You could argue that the EDL by themselves aren't actually the main problem, the main problem is that the EDL are just the tip of the iceberg you see. Wherever they go, the ugly face of racism appears. They’ll be marching through the streets of Manchester later this week and the signs of yet another wave of racial attacks have begun propping up everywhere. Just last Friday, over 25 Muslim graves were desecrated in the Southern Cemetery in Manchester, an item of news that didn’t even get a couple of lines in any national newspaper. It worries me.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting we’re experiencing the dark days of fascism all over again but no matter how many times we joke about the way they look, how many times we dismiss their views as marginal, how many photoshopped pictures of their leaders sporting toothbrush moustaches we release on the blogOsphere, no matter how inconsequential we feel it is that some of them gained public office, dismissing it as nothing more than a ‘fluke’ or a ‘wake up call for the mainstream parties’. No matter any of these things, the racists are moving further and further towards the centre and they’ll openly be on our televisions soon. And soon we’ll have to hand over a large wad of taxpayers money to these elected members in public office for their campaigns. No, I’m not suggesting we’re experiencing the worst of fascist racism but it worries me how easy it has been for them.

And what worries me even more is how much of the responsibility for this sad state of affairs – where a person of Nick Griffith’s calibre is one of our faces in Europe and a legitimate political option in the United Kingdom – lies in the heart of the mainstream left. Many would argue that racism has always been there and that closet Mosleyians are just feeling more confident in expressing their views, making this fresh wave of overt racism a bi-product of complex social circumstances. But none of these arguments gets us off the hook. We cannot dismiss the intellectual bankruptcy in leftist flanks that has allowed this situation to arise.

Whereas previously the Griffiths, Caldwells and Manchester rioters of this world would’ve been met by a strong, committed left; confident in its own values, arguments and merits. Whereas before we could have seen off the challenge of a racist party in electoral contest, now, we have to sit and stare. Now, the only heated arguments we feel confident to hold are with other lefties about the tactical merits of ‘going green’. We’ve lost our intellectual backbone, if you ask me. Where are our EP Thompsons and our Battles of Lewisham? Even that vanguard of left-of-centre journalism The Guardian can sometimes get muddled up in the dark waters of centrist appeasing. You can go and blame Tony Blair for that. I blame all of us.

When faced with these great political challenges of the 21st Century, we’ve resorted to navel gazing. When faced with one of the greatest racist uprisings in our country in the last 50 years, we have resorted to the intellectual equivalent of ringing doorbells and running away. We are far too ready to shout ‘racist’ but not that willing to stand our ground and defend our point. This cerebral anaemia is not only unacceptable but it’s also untenable in modern society.

We need to be ready and willing to challenge racism wherever we may find it, whatever shape it takes. Dismissing someone’s fears over foreign appropriation of jobs or the country being ‘overrun’ by over-breeding, benefit-claiming asylum seekers as simply racist without instead providing a reasoned and sensible challenge to these views, is not only unhelpful but worse, it helps recruit supporters for those who are trying to stir up feelings of victimisation for the "indigenous population". Regardless of whether they are backed up by fact or reality, the concerns of the British working class people who are now turning their backs on the Labour party and are instead joining ranks with the likes of the EDL are genuine concerns that cannot, and should not be dismissed with a cry of racism. Our reluctance to face these issues head on has paved the way for a malignant racist minority in our society to successfully foster a culture of misinformation, rife with stereotypes and prejudice. It’s our duty to challenge them rather than dismiss them. Crying ‘racist’ only plays into the hands of the wolf.

This brings me back to my original point. Muslims are the main target of that part of our society where prejudice and xenophobia breed and prosper. And although I truly believe that the open hostility towards this important part of our society is purely symptomatic of a deeper, more dangerous and, suddenly, more confident and vocal racist streak embedded in the very fabric of western culture, I worry about the immediate consequences this may have, especially if the Left doesn’t come out of the wilderness with a revived sense of purpose and, more importantly, a stronger intellectual backbone. Until then, I worry about what might happen. But I guess I’d say that because I’m a woolly liberal, right?

Click here to go to most recent post