I love you baby, but face it, she's shit

Madonna is an atrocious beast. That's on my mind today because in Ghent on Sunday they were piping her 'music' into the abandoned pedestrian precinct/shopping area, I think in the same spirit as the British pipe classical music into yobbo-congregation points. You've heard about this? It's done in other countries too. The theory runs that classical music grates on the nerves of juvenile delinquents so it will drive them away from public places like train stations, parking lots, street corners, etc., where they might be 'anti-social' - which in England, at least, doesn't mean shy; it means being English and drunk.

Maybe now is the time to voice some of my disgust with the state of the England - haven't been to Scotland or Wales in ages so I'll restrict myself to shooting my mouth off about England. We had a really smashing vacation there with smashing people who I'm very fond of - English people are great, funny, hospitable, helpful, generous, all the rest of it. But I can't figure out how they can tolerate the shithole they live in and it makes me impatient. There is a really unhelpful paternalism, bordering on soft totalitarianism, in their government's relationship with them. The endless 1984-ish CCTV cameras are only one symptom of it, or we can say part of a broader and defining trend.

And that is that the government, whichever party is in, consistently relinquishes control of national assets that are obviously best run by a proper 'paternalistic' government, competition in those sectors being problematic or impossible (like the rail service, civic public transport, and its own fucking monetary policy), while struggling more and more to control the behaviour of private individuals through the ubiquitous CCTV cameras, Asbos, extended chargeless detentions. . . The Asbos are especially funny in a soft totalitarian sort of way. The most hilarious thing about them is that they were tightened up in 2005 - the same year the UK government allowed 24 hour drinking.

I can't see how that pattern - a consistent, cross party trend of letting go of the control of public concerns it should be controlling, struggling for control of things that private individuals should be controlling themselves - can come off as anything except a nasty and apparently corrupt soft totalitarianism. And I can't figure out why the British people have allowed this to roll out over the last 20 years. Belgians put up with remarkable amounts of undemocratic shit from their adminstrations but just try throwing that combination of lousy services and incarceration-happy government at them; they'd bring this place to a standstill in 15 minutes.

Anyways, Madonna. Though she's an atrocious beast and though her music being piped onto the deserted Ghent pedestrian precinct hurt my ears, I think it was a good choice. Because in every single one of her songs, from the slowest to the danciest, her singing always, ALWAYS sounds like she's scolding the shit out of you and that the best thing to do to get her to stop would be to get far away from her. Such an awful, scoldy voice. I just don't get it, you know. You'd have to be a raving, self-loathing masochist to like that crap. 'Justify my love - now - NOW, you fucking piece of shit! God that's good' And so on.