BY JAMES LILEKS
The primary export of the UK these days seems to be ludicrous examples of PC-gone-amok, yobbo / chav fashion horrors, and photos of Posh escorting her gumballs down a red carpet. In other words, they’re starting to look to us as we must look to them.
This story made my eyebrows hoist. A "conservationist, columnist for the Daily Telegraph, and the chairman of the Countryside Restoration Trust” named Robin Page won 2K pounds in a court award for false arrest. It took five years to do so. From the article:
He claims that in order to gain the attention of listeners at the gathering in Frampton-upon-Severn, Glos, he started in a "light-hearted fashion".
His opening remark was: "If you are a black, vegetarian, Muslim, asylum-seeking, one-legged lesbian lorry driver, I want the same rights as you."
Naturally, he was arrested for committing a hate crime. It made me think of a Jay Leno remark I heard excerpted on the Hewitt show; Chris Matthews was describing the GOP contenders in terms of the Iraqi political players – these guys are Sunnis, these guys are Shiites, Romney’s the Kurd. Leno responded that "Larry Craig was the guy with the sheep." If you wanted to be offended, you could note that this equated homosexuality with bestiality, and cast Arabs as dispositionally zoophilic. Should he be arrested? Charged with inciting the easily incitable, with equating the newly-minted right to play jiggery-pokery in a lav with an aberrant behavior? If it's abberant, that is. We’re probably ten years away from bestiality japes entering the no-go zone. Within five years they’ll probably remake “Flipper,” and it’ll be a hard R. Critics of the movie, if they’re on the right, will be subjected to the usual eye-rolling, because they can’t possibly be objecting to sex with animals; it’s part-and-parcel of their desire to return to the 50s, when Donna Reed was chained to a stove, deprived of footwear, perpetually pregnant and forced to vote for Ike at knifepoint. Oh, sure, you disapprove of sex-positive dolphin movies. Your kind didn't want the nation to see Elvis from the waist down. Doesn't mean the critics will be comfy with Flipper-gets-busy movies, but they have a dread of making common cause with the trogs. So the movie will be criticized on aesthetic grounds. If nothing else, its poor script and pedestrian direction will be a lost opportunity to advance a controversial topic.
There, that should keep the dinner invites coming.
The story links to another tale of woe; this one involves a police officer sacked for giving a Muslim officer a bottle of wine and some bacon. As a joke. A secret-Santa joke. A bad tone-deaf joke, ill-conceived. But here’s the pith:
Pc Mahmood believes it was "not meant in a malicious way, just a bit of banter". He told a sergeant, who was "really disgusted", that he knew it was meant as a joke and did not want to make a formal complaint.
"I just took it on the chin. But someone else in the room must have thought it was a racist incident, and reported it," the officer said.
So the officer who got the “gift” wasn’t offended. Everyone else in the room thought it was “below the belt” as well, and didn’t hoot at the Mooselman and shout porky porky porky, who’s got the porky now, wot? But the people who had nothing to do with the event were offended on the fellow’s behalf, and that was it.
Orwell was slightly mistaken: the future is a boot, stomping on a joke.
Doesn’t it seem a bit condescending? Look, chap, you should be offended, you being Muslim and all, so we’ll cause the stink we know you’d cause if you weren’t oppressed by the historical monocultural strictures. Don’t thank us; all in a day’s work.
I recommend the European press; some days, it's like a Coming Attractions reel.
The Bleat, she will suffer here. Thursday was just silly mad busy, but it was great. I did a buzz.mn post on a story about a local shopping center and the fears of some residents that the clientele was getting scarily dusky. They didn’t say so, but when they said they felt unsafe at the mall because of “people” you can detect the sentiment. I drove over to get a current version of 1953 opening day photo the Strib ran, and I also intended to shoot a tall clock tower put up in the early seventies by Northwestern Bank. The tower, alas, has been ruined. It used to be two tall thin brick slabs with modern clocks on either side and backlit stained glass in between the clocks are gone and the glass was removed, replaced with something black and plastic. As I wrote on the site about the Johnson Meat site, it’s a period of architecture I expect will vanish completely. Too young for landmark status, too old to stay up, too out-of-vogue to get widespread attention.
When I got to the mall I discovered I’d forgotten my camera battery, so I shot it with the iPhone. The modern world: damn, no camera. I’ll have to use my tricorder.
After I knocked off buzz.mn posting for the day I hit the hay for a restorative nap, then took (G)Nat to Chuck E. Cheese’s. En route we listened to the Hewitt interview with Norman Podhoretz on the Iranian situation, and Hitler was mentioned.
“Hitler!” (G)Nat said. She hates him. “They’re talking about Hitler.”
“Don’t worry. He’s still dead.”
“Why did he have to kill all those people?” she said, fuming.
“He wanted power. And he wanted to control Europe and the world.”
“Well he should have just asked.” She looked out the window. “He was sneaky, you know.”
“How so?”
“Well Ben said that he told people they were going for a nice clean shower but it was really gas and they died.”
The things kids discuss. It’s remarkable: the clammy grasp that bastard has on the collective imagination is undimmed generations later. But it’s a good sign when your kid makes a fist and punches a picture of Hitler. She takes it personally.
I'm sure I noted this before, but it bugs me every time:
That is the Halloween typeface. It is not an Ice Cream typeface. And the "Factory" font is a knockoff of the Jurassic Park font. It's a nightmare.
I always enjoy seeing this on a giant video screen:
"We are sorry for the inconvenience." Yes, of course. Programmers by the dozens are opening their bellies with letter openers, convulsed with shame.
As I noted on the Hewitt show tonight (I say that in case anyone thinks I’m trying to pass this off as fresh material) point inflation has struck the skee-ball world; the 100 point holes are now 100,000 point holes. A score of 450 no longer gets the bonus award. Now you need 450,000 or more to get a substantial quantity of tickets. I suppose this is supposed to make kids feel empowered: look at all the points I got! It had the opposite effect on (G)Nat, who got 10,000 points for the worst shot possible and shrugged. Excess reward for substandard effort: she wasn’t buying it. Somehow it made it less fun.
So Skeeball is dead to us now, I suppose. Except in Wii form.
We played some air hockey, with her Pokemon plush sitting on the sidelines. He fell off the table, and a passing kid scooped him up. Panic in the streets. (G)Nat said “Excuse me no that’s mine” and the kid clutched it to his chest and spat at her. The father pried it away.
Hitler, kid-spitting, runaway skee-ball inflation: another night on the town.
Back home I did the Hewitt show, did a Diner in record time – one take, and it shows – then drilled the child on her spelling test, assembled the recycling (many milk containers, since I threw out all that Target milk I lauded the other day. Tasted like plastic.
Smartflix piece should be up around 1 PM or so. Buzz.mn all day. Here's the first Diner of the year. An utterly substandard effort, but I had to get cracking on them before the month elapsed.
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