Take your tradition and shove it up your revolting dairy farmer

The natives are restless, to the degree their protests - oh, it's the one and only thing I love about the fucking Belges, they are walking surreal - have made it into Picture is Unrelated. I buy directly from the farmers at the market, and fail to understand why the entire city of Brussels doesn't do so. So I don't really care if the farmers feel like their wholesale prices suck. And frankly I'd be wallowing through a bit more tearjerks of fucking sympathy if I didn't remember the rabidity with which our vendor jacked up the farmer's market prices in 2007 when there was an upswing in wholesale prices. Didn't hear them fucking whining about a free market then.

But still, this is Europe and what do you expect. Farming is tradition, as is assaulting working class police officers who didn't cause and can't fix your fucking problems, and some of these families have done nothing else in all of recorded history, why should they stop now just because any value-subtracted, long-life dairy product like skim milk or butter is much, much cheaper and not worse if you source it from some poor country somewhere where farmers are too busy starving and killing themselves to spray milk on a cop?

My attitude to tradition is undergoing a bit of a walloping at the mo, by the way. I guess it's hearing all the North American outrage about those dumbass Australians who minstreled up the Jackson Five and got told by Harry Connick Jr. Everybody mentions it to me because everybody knows I intend to go there and everybody wants to know what I think about living in such a fucking racist country.

And my answer to that is that racism in honky Australia is one of the top three things making me nervous about living there. The way they treat Aborigines makes it look like honky Canada is giving the First Nations a fucking multi-generational spa-and-tonguebath treatment (and honky Canada really isn't giving them a spa-and-tonguebath treatment). I'm guessing already that as soon as I start shit-talking to anybody there about how cuntly that is, they'll dismiss my "ooo er so they don't have any fucking land rights" as Yankee political correctness, even though I'm not Yankee, and even though I'm pretty sure I'm not politically correct, and then I'll get mad, and I understand they're punchy sorts of people, and then, you know, it'll just be a bad scene.

But you know what happens to children at Christmas if they'd bad where I live now? Zwarte Peter (who by different accounts is either Sinterklaas's Moorish 'helper' who he liberated, or a black devil he enslaved) carries some willow switches down the fucking chimney to beat the kid up. And people black up to play him, on television, on the streets, at kid's parties, with big fucking red Meg Ryan lips and everything. It causes the absolute minimum of outrage and nobody uses Zwarte Peter to talk about how fucking racist Belgians and Dutch people are, even thought Belgians and Dutch people have a couple of the most august and recent histories of massive colonial exploitation and slave trading. It causes the minimum of outrage because it's fucking tradition.

So you know what I think living in a fucking racist country like Australia is going to be like? Like here but better. Fewer goddamn traditions. Cultural bankruptcy, I'm starting to think, may not be 100% bad.