Positive Cattitude

We went for an interview at the local animal shelter this morning to see about fostering cats, which we will do, both to help deal with our rat problem and to be responsible citizens and, like Dot in Raising Arizona, so that I got something small enough to cuddle. The lady who worked there was one of the more passionate charity workers I've ever met and after five minutes I realized why: she's British.

Now I make my fun of the Inselaffen, and out of all of the Germanic countries Affen Insel is far and away the most banana-republicky. But one thing I will say for them: they are bloody marvellous with animals. I understand the notoriety attached to fox hunting, which is indeed repellent, but it's important to bear in mind that fox hunters and their advocates represent a tiny minority of the population, most of whose majority doesn't even like foxes much and yet still considers the practice fuckin' barbaric, to the point of having it criminalized.

Australia, however . . . well. There are lots of parallels between Australian culture and Inselaffen culture, probably far far more than your typical Australian would dream of admitting or even imagining, but a touching and laudable concern for animal welfare is not one of them. For me there are two fiscal/legal situations that illustrate this to a degree so disturbing and repellent that I understand I'm now less likely to stay in this country than I was before discovering them.

1). Australia, as is well-known, is rotten with invasive animals, including feral cats and dogs. It is a real ecological problem. My favourite associated ecological problem, though my personal opinion is that it's more of a thing than a problem, are all of the ethical and eugenetic issues swirling around dingos, in a way they don't swirl around canines in Canada.

Briefly, if a dog in the wilds of Canada runs into a wolf or coyote, there is the biological possibility of reproduction, as genetically speaking dogs, coyotes, and wolves are all a single canine species capable of making fertile babies. However, what is much more likely is that the dog will be eaten, and the odds of sexual congress are poor for that reason. And also poor because lady wolves and coyotes in our wintercentric land only hit oestrus seasonally, which cuts down on the scope for lovin' somewhat (though my understanding is that usually these sorts of interbreeds are boy wolves/coyotes/dingos doing it with a bitch - sort of a much more S&Mish version of Lady and the Tramp).

Here in Australia, however, if a feral dog and a dingo meet up, generally the feral dog will get eaten, but there is far more scope than there is with coyotes and wolves for sparks to fly and babies to get made, especially since both dogs and dingos hit oestrus many times over the year. After all dingos, in the final analysis, amount to multi-generational ferals; they were brought to the continent as domestics, and had no one to fuck but each other, that is, other feral domestics.

The issue here, though, is that dingos are a discrete group, with cultural meanings to the aboriginal people, and recognized as fundamentally separate from other feral domestic dogs even though every indication is that they were imported to Australia by aboriginal people as domestic dogs. So there is a broad feeling that when a dingo fucks a domestic dog and they make dongo or whatever babies, this is some sort of pollution of the dingo gene pool going on. This is a particularly Australian problem as in the rare instances where a coyote or a wolf fucks a dog and makes babies with it in Canada, there's little idea of some sort of pollution of the coyote or wolf gene pool, and several dog breeds popular in Canada are very, very wolfy in their provenance; my understanding is that hybridizing wolves and dogs there for commercial purposes is illegal but in those instances where a bitch gets herself fucked instead of eaten by a wolf her babies are in hot demand . . .

Oh, how I've blathered and haven't even yet got beyond the background exposition of the first point, which is actually about subsidizing desexing. More bitching about Australia tomorrow.

Talking Australian Part 2; Intoning, subsection 1

Australian Question Intonation is something that I first experienced culturally second-hand via Brits who were addicted or overexposed to Home and Away and Neighbours, two examples of how similar nationalities almost always manage to produce their own special brands of fucking dime-store dreck which can travel to their sister nationalities.*

Many of the people I meet here are absolutely bemused by how much British people love their shitty soapies, but of course the British people who I spoke to about it aren't confused at all. Neighbours/Home and Away are full of images of warm beaches and sun and healthy young people who aren't in the early stages of rickets or scurvy - three things that are painfully lacking in British society. Those two shit-parades of drossy television between them have made the British media's endless quest to present Australia as a barren and miserable land full of nothing but floods, fires, and man-eating creatures (so pretty please don't move there because if you've got enough money for the ticket and visa Britain can't afford to lose you) more or less futile.

So the upshot is that I've been exposed to so many Brits who use the Question Intonation after overexposure to shitty Australian television, despite the finest efforts of Stephen Fry, that moving here didn't make me bat much of an eyelash; not to mention the Question Intonation was one of the few perversions of Australian speech the F-word maintained during our years with the European Savages, while he was teaching them English.

It is making me a touch twitchy though, for reasons that will be explained in a future post, when I've wrangled the carpet pythons out of our living room; they were driven there by the flood water. Sigh.



*Canadians foisted dramatic heart-wringers The Littlest Hobo/Degrassi Junior High onto the world; the US manages all those awesome blowdried daytime soaps with the devil and incest and amnesia and whatnot; the Brits play some sort of perverted voyeuristic class-fantasy game wherein they pretend to spectate the torrid, disgusting lives of blue-collar types in Manchester and London via Coronation Street and Eastenders.

Breaking the naughty language barrier

Yesterday during a moment of mental pause, whilst on the rowing machine - I do some of my best thinking on rowing machines, a poor second to kayaking but what do you want, I live in a city where the only river is both biologically dead and underground - I asked myself to what degree my pottymouth may have held me back in life. I don't feel held back in life, I feel like I'm more or less where I want to be, lack of sexual congress with Tom Selleck as he was in 1981 notwithstanding, and I don't think having dropped the pottymouth would have helped me with that.

I think it came from my recent trip to Oxford. Rodelinda mentioned to me that she'd warned her friends I swear like a sailor, for example, and some of them nonetheless went glassy-eyed when I went off an a tear about something. And this in a country that has produced some of the most gifted, lyrical potty-mouths of all time. John Cleese dropped the F-bomb at Graham Chapman's funeral for heaven's sake.

But then I always find Rodelinda's British friends somewhat discombobulating. This odd, specific class of upwardly-mobile-middle-class Brits are bizarre. I don't understand what the hell they're still doing there, first of all; they can take all their pounds and go off and live like queens in Canada, Australia, or New Zealand. I mean I don't pretend Back Home is Shangri-La, but it's at least a place where you can live in a house without tying up all your capital and where the social services more or less work, ie the police still serve a purpose besides ticketing the hell out of everybody and steadfastly avoiding any situations they can't reliably club their way out of.

And then this odd class drinks their faces off, make showing up hungover to job interviews and suchlike some sort of virtue, and fuck each other like the world's about to end - I mean, really make utter tits of themselves over their drunken promiscuity, and I say that as a former roundheels who's only got a few regrets, none of which involve wishing I'd fucked less. But break out a spliff and they go all trembly. This in a country where everybody else, besides this odd, odd in-between class, has a very close relationship with drurrrrrrgs. What is it? Why is it? Is it watching too much BBC following the government line about weed suddenly being a super-dangerous drug now? You know - this is one of the funnier things I saw there, 1984-ish coverage of the Afghan violence aside - BBC newscasters don't call it marijuana, they call it "cannabis", in this low, very serious, very worried sort of voice, like it's going to break into your fucking house and rape your daughters.

Fuckin' please, bitch. Please. It's marijuana for fuck's sake, people have been smoking it since the English were still wiping their asses with thistles, and somehow the world continued to turn until Americans realized in the early part of the last century that they're allergic to Mexicans.

Anyways. So far The Pursuit of Love is providing some answers . . . albeit archaic ones. Cracking good read!

Promotional material

This mother of a mood indigo won't fuck off out of my head, although yesterday the sun broke through the clouds a few times, like at Exki (first bit of promotional material - it's quite nice. There. Quite is promotion, right?) one of the nice till ladies didn't charge me for a peice of lemon cake. I never, ever buy cake for myself because I'm a cheap bastard, but yesterday I fell for the consumer conviction that I deserve it, and I got it for free. Yay.

Second bit of promotional material: the BBC's How Earth Made Us. It's a backhanded promotion, because besides being something I'm enjoying whilst high, it's also a whole great load of almost laughable cackhanded cockwank, with this Scottish bastard with funny teeth showing up everywhere and ejaculating 'Amaaaaazing! Bloody briiiilliant! Thaaat's fantaaastic! ' instead of the time being properly filled up by just showing lots of awesome visuals and interesting facts about geology, one of my closeted obsessions.

I don't understand how the public television juggernaut that is the BBC, the mighty force behind the mighty Attenborough, has now figured that to make people sit still in front of educational programming for an hour at a time now they have to have some jerk-off taking up 40% of the screen time, jerking off. At a certain point I started feeling bad for the poor bastard, who I understand is a real-life academic and probably has a lot of hugely honest enthusiasm for his subject: surely it had to be ass-clenchingly embarassing for him to be made the Centre of the Thingummy like that?

But then again I'm not sure . . . there aren't going to be too many people who will hear the BBC say 'look, we're going to make a super-expensive and awesome documentary about >>>>, but you're going to take up 40% of the screentime jerking off over things, because our market studies have shown audiences like to have an emotional relationship with the narrator,' and say 'why no, I don't want to be the centre of fucking attention, please, please minimize me.' Anyways. All that notwithstanding, it's still worth watching if you're high or if you're the sort of geeky girl who likes Scottish geology professors who've still got all their hair. I complain but I know for a fact that in that case there are legions of girls who'd tap that. Diff'rent strokes.

Also helping me get through the mood indigo, besides free cake and weed and semi-crappy if beautiful-to-look at BBC documentaries, is lots of wine. But beautiful wine, because that way I'm not drinking too much; I'm enjoying my drink too much.

1. Macatela Tempranillo 2008, EHD (Spain)- a light aaaaaalmost fizzy wine, very new. It's sulfite free, or as sulfite free as commercial wine is allowed to be, so you can drink a lot of it without having a headache the next day. That's actually its main benefit - it's not really fantastic, not really exciting. But you can't argue with being able to sink half of it on a weeknight and show up at work without groaning the next morning.

2. Malbec Reserva 2007, Domaine Jean Bousquet (Argentina) - like the preceding, organic, but with the normal amount of sulphites as far as I know. But even though I get it at wholesale prices because I know a guy, the consciousness that it retails at about three times what I normally pay for a bottle keeps me from slamming it back like a self-aware advertising executive. Anyways it's probably worth the retail price. It's fucking yummy, with a rich, complex taste that doesn't linger any more than it should.

3. The Cork Grove Touriga Nacional 2005, Casa Branco (Portugal) - neither organic nor sulphite free nor, sadly, obtained at wholesale prices. But you know, out of the three I think this one's my favourite. It's like drinking really delicious water that gets you drunk, and in heaven there's almost certainly a stream where this lovely stuff runs and plays over the rocks.

Wonders did not cease on Wednesday

So you know what's funny? There were zero problems with the trains getting here. None. Nada. Easiest train ride I've ever had in this green and monkey-stuffed isle. And one of the most pleasant, because all three trains were very close to empty. Thank you, British "journalism", for ensuring everybody was too scared to leave their homes and giving me whole train carriages to stretch out in. But now I feel as though I have a karmic debt that I will be paying off when I try to get home on Sunday.

It's nice here. I've never seen it snowy like this before and it's pretty. My grandmother doesn't remember me, or much else, but I think that makes her like me rather more. So good for both of us.

Preparing for adventure

So I'm off to the fucking UK tonight and it will be an adventure, because they're having one of their seasonal national meltdowns due to the cold and snow. I'm due in at Scarborough around midnight, and I guess I knew there was always likely to be some sort of snag involved in managing that. And what with winter acting up, it's anybody's guess where I actually sleep tonight. My guess is York. I think I'll make it as far as York. And then maybe I'll sleep in the Royal hotel, because I have travel insurance. Although a nice B&B wouldn't come amiss. As long as I get bacon for breakfast. Mmm, bacon.

God, that country is stupid. I complain a lot about Belgium, I know, but honestly the real debate going on inside my head is whether it's Italy or the UK that's stupider on a national level; Belgium isn't even in the running, too many things go right here (though not Electrabel - the retarded bastards are still billing my missing-presumed-dead boss for their services despite his mother telling them he was gone a couple of months ago. What are you going to do, you stupid fucking cunts, ruin his credit rating? God, they're cunts).

At the moment, the UK is winning the debate, mostly because of this nugget from their prime minister from the afore-linked article, responding to claims that the country is in the grip of a gas crisis, as private citizens have been asked to limit their use while the (of course, privatized) gas companies emergency source from the Continent:

“There are always difficulties when we have a long spell of bad weather.”

In other words, a developed country, one that prides itself on not falling victim to Continental mischievousness like functioning public services, strong trade unions, and reasonably representative democracy, loping from crisis to crisis - and that the sort of crisis that could lead to people freezing to death.

(Slow clap)

The Red Dragon has a serious question . . .

Do you think Martin Amis ever gets tired of sucking? Or do you think he has any idea?

Jesus. At least that fucking blight on the face of the English-language 'literary' establishment is punching in his own weight class. His novels are to the contemporary canon what the words "healthful" and "orientate" are to the English language; ungainly, redundant, pretentious and lacking any excuse to exist. But to be fair, healthful and orientate's fathers weren't Kingsley Amis so it's more on their own merits I have to keep fucking seeing them in print.

Concentrating on anger

Hey, you know what I've just figured out about the Kübler-Ross model? There are five stages of grief because the fifth stage is so shitty. Anger, denial and bargaining, especially, are way better than acceptance.

On the anger side of that equation, I may have an absolutely blood-chilling story of inselaffen bureaucratic Brazil-esque bloodymindedness, something beyond their normal such retardation altogether, something entering the realms of Eichmann herself, a picture perfect demonstration of the Banality of Evil. But I hope with all my heart I don't, because the man concerned, who would be the victim, is someone I and many other people hold very dear indeed. With all my heart, with all my heart, I hope all I have to tell you will be an absolutely blood-chilling story of inselaffen bureaucratic Brazil-esque bloodymindedness with the potential to have been a picture perfect demonstration of the Banality of Evil.

I do know this already though: if ever I get in trouble abroad, I would like you, please, to appeal to my beaver-beater embassies, not my fucking inselaffen embassies. Because put any fucking inselaffen into a public service and they become incompetent, responsibility-dodging fucktards and I hate them, I hate them, I hate them. They are like lobotomized Germans with no fucking zest for life and a fucking case of the paranoias. I hate the inselaffen administration so much. They cut corners here and there and still manage to devote more and more money to harassing their own citizens, and then when you need them the most they fuck you up the ass and apologize the whole fucking time they're doing it, but they don't stop, because inselaffen shitheels don't have any balls, and I hate them. Fuck, may they rot in a receptacle where where the stunted may become strong and the perverted be restored.

There's a massive fashion there of police blogging, by the way, in which dozens of anonymous cops with huge followings and, often, book deals, bitch about how the public hates them and the government keeps giving them dumb, unreasonable shit to do. Well, news flash, porkers: the two phenomena are not mutually independent. No matter how often you tell the public you're being put upon by the government, poor fucking you, it doesn't change the fact that that putting-uponness tells on the public, and while the government may be the asshole stepping on the public's neck, despite your whining you've chosen to become and remain the boot. Congratu-fucking-lations, everybody'll fucking love you now.

I'll see you in a receptacle where the stunted may become strong and the perverted be restored, motherfucker

This account of metaphysical bureacracy and the defeat of Satan Himself in the highest court of English law is sourced from 'The New Harrowing of Hell' chapter from Derek Jarrett's The Sleep of Reason.

According to Anglican doctrine, hell froze over in 1864 and the Devil lost his groove in 1876. A couple of court cases did the trick, one of them featuring a priest who'd been a bit too nice in his thinking, and another featuring a man who wanted to take Communion despite his lack of belief in the Devil.

It started in a sense with Charles Darwin, or rather with geology and the necessity of acknowledging that the world was rather older than the Bible suggested. Essays and Reviews was published some time thereafter and went a ways to reconciling Christian faith with the new discoveries, but in a way many people thought was heretical. And the objections to it weren't all about the new science; some were about a new compassion.

For example, Henry Bristow Wilson, one of the contributing priests, had offered what Jarrett calls the 'kindly and comparatively harmless suggestion' that, rather than counting on the existence of Hell and eternal damnation for the naughty, '"we must entertain the hope that there shall be found, after the great adjucation, receptacles where the stunted may become strong and the perverted be restored."' A less kindly church court found Wilson guilty of heterodoxy for the suggestion.

However, Wilson appealed to the secular Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (something like the Supreme Court) and was cleared, partly on the basis of the committee's finding that eternal punishment was not part of the teachings of the Church of England. "He dismissed Hell with costs, and took away from orthodox members of the Church of England their last hope of eternal damnation," snarked the Spectator of the lead judge.

The reaction of the Anglican clerical heirarchy was furious, and following a synod and lots of rough talk the Convocation sent out a letter to all the priests in the land explaining that they really, definitely believed in hell and instructing them to sign a statement to that effect.

But Hell officially ceased to exist as a definite Anglican reality in the House of Lords on Friday July 15 1864 when Lord Houghton, esrtwhile suitor of Florence Nightingale and prodiguous pornography collector, pressed the issue by asking if the Convocation had had the right to send out a letter about how they all believed hell really, definitely existed and telling priests to sign it, whereupon the Lord Chancellor (head of the British judiciary until 2005) bitched that the Convocation was a futile, ridiculous body that had been suspended for its troublesomeness for a century and would be suspended again if it persisted in its hell-raising ways.

And the Anglican Church, whose highest echelon of authority is the political class, had to listen. State religion, baby; making the secular rulers of England the spiritual rulers as well was good for something besides letting Henry VIII stick his dick in Anne Boleyn with a clear conscience. Of course many Anglicans, lay and clerk, continued to insist hell was real and the world was heading there in a handbasket, but the dogmatic tide was against them.

In 1876 the Privy Council overturned another church council decision supporting a priest who had refused one Henry Jenkins communion on the basis of Jenkin's disbelief in the Devil, on the basis that belief in the Devil was not part of Anglican doctrine. The Devil - at least as far as Anglicans are concerned - disappeared in a puff of legal papers, with the unfortunate side effect that just under 120 years later Kevin Spacey managed to convince a generation of movie-goers he could act really well by delivering the line 'the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist' in the Usual Suspects.

Of course popular perceptions took much longer to change, with priests and parents continuing to use images of hell and the Devil to scare the fucking bejeebus out of their charges for decades and decades to come. But here we are some 150 years later, and Anglicans are finally complete fucking milksops about that sort of shit, and power to them.

So if all it took was a couple of court cases and a century and a half to get Anglicans to shut the fuck up about hell and the Devil, I wonder how long it will take them to shut the fuck up about how they're not comfortable with the ordination of women.

Big wah

Working from home today. Sniffly, coughy, and fucking frightened of getting sick before going to Portugal. Mind you I was coughy and sniffly before going to Croatia, and the minute I stepped off the plane there everything seemed to clear up. Sometimes I wonder if the flu actually exists as a virus rather than our bodies demonstrating their misery at us making them live in a Neanderthal climate. And once in awhile it turns into a pandemic and a kajillion of us die. We're not Neanderthals, for fuck's sake, we're fucking savannah monkeys. What are we doing up here? What the fuck are we doing up here?

In other news, the sun is out for now, so at least I can write about the disintegration of western capitalism on my balcony. Yayyyy! Also last night we started watching Coast, and it's adorable. In a deeply public school way, though . . . had some discussions with Rodelina about that - about people from public schools in Britain, and people who are invisible, or football players, or people fucking football players. Sometimes I wonder why anybody stays in that country - why be sidelined like that?

The ex and the new are relative

Mmmm . . . my expectations are being bucked at the moment. That's nice. I do hope it's for real. What's been disturbing me about the Honduras coverage is the way the BBC jumped right into the coup - yesterday morning, they were calling Zelaya 'the former president' and Michiletti 'the new president'. Given what happened in Venezuala you'd think they'd be a little more careful to hedge their bets in cases like these - but this is the Internet age and all you have to do is change the text after Barack Obama bucks expectations and talks about terrible precedents. Which they have done.

The BBC has such great coverage in terms of having news gatherers everywhere, but it is highly politicised. Inevitable, I guess. Most state-owned media are, in a more or less but generally less way than private media, because taxpayers are so happy to cry foul. The interesting thing here is that it looks like a sort of inertia, rather than a particular agenda, just sort of drifted the BBC into saying the coup was an accomplished fact . . . and then they could just rewrite their language when they realize that no, the hegemons weren't supporting it this time. Inertia. Such a powerful social force.

Talking shop

This post is a post of praise about my home and natal land. Oh yes . . . Canada. The national police may be taser-happy goons and the city police may be mind-bogglingly incompetent and the situation with the natives might be second in Anglo retardation and murderousness only to the fucking Australians (that charming little chestnut about driving natives out of town on extremely cold winter nights and dumping them on the side of the road to avoid dying of hypothermia as best they can comes up with monotonous and vomitous regularity), but nonetheless, when it comes to me, my job, and my relatively po-po free life - oh Canada, you big beautiful bastard.

Here's the thing. I'm putting together a feature about the Canada/EU free trade talks. Our focus is Africa, the Middle East, and Europe, so I don't talk to Canadians working for the national government much; this was the first time in more than a year. I'd forgotten how good it was. Generally, talking to national/continental government workers is my least favourite job when researching articles. Call a private company, industry organization, or local government body, and you can usually get a straight answer one way or another. But call a national government body, and sigh.

Here they are, listed by quality:

1. Sub-Saharan Africa. The best in my normal field. Everybody who picks up the phone speaks either French or English, everybody who picks up the phone is polite, helpful, and competent, and it takes a very brief time to get a cellphone number for the appropriate minister or minister's assistant or whatever. The main pitfall with calling African governments is that 3/4 of the time, the landlines just don't fucking work, and even once you get a cell number, 1/2 of the time the reception is so fucking bad the conversation sounds like a shouting match and you wrap it up understanding only about 50% of what's gone on. So the best, but still a massive pain in the ass.

And then a precipitous drop in quality as we head to:

2. Mainland Europe -national governments and EU institutions. A near impenetrable-wall of ringing phones without message services. Get past that and reach another imposing barrier of aggressive, monolingual secretaries or receptionists who have no demonstrated grasp of the fundamentals of the departments they work for, and whose mandate, very obviously, is to prevent you, as a member of the media, from speaking to anybody in their department with a title. As if that wasn't enough of a roadblock, call anytime between the hours of 11 and 15, and there's no chance of speaking to anybody whose lunches are subsidized. Call after 16, and the fuckers have all gone home.

3. The Middle East and north Africa. Complete gas factory. Combination of sub-Saharan African phone services and European monolingualism, which is a rather bigger problem for me as I don't speak Arabic but do speak a few European languages. The most frustrating port of call has been Iraq, to follow reconstruction projects wherein they were soliciting international funds with English press releases from departments where no-one willing to talk on the phone spoke English. More on that another time.

4. United Kingdom. Far and away the worst. In the case of mainland Europe and the Middle East I suspect part of the problem with getting in touch with anyone governmentally significant over the phone has to do with civil service sinecures and nepotism and the wrong jobs going to the wrong people for the wrong reasons. In the UK it's rather more surreal and much, much more fucking annoying than that.

You call the media contact at the pertinent organization. The media contact never has any idea what's going on; their function, seemingly, is to try to determine the right person for you to talk to. They get back to you with punctilious efficiency, generally about three hours later, with a name and number. You call that person; not quite the right one. Lather, rinse, repeat. You call a total of no less than five people. Each one takes down your details and enquiries, and each one refers you on to someone who would no doubt be helpful who isn't, but at least everybody answers their phone.

The next day, your phone starts ringing. Everybody who you've spoken to the day before, everybody who has referred you on to someone else - everybody gets back to you. And creepily, everyone tells you the same thing - a bland, anodyne message obviously dictated by some eerie centralized intelligence that answers absolutely no questions, no matter how innocent or factual. Call the HSE with a series of questions about a spate of employee deaths and get a five-paragraph answer about how the HSE would like fewer employees to die. Call Defra with specific questions about breakdowns in the recycling chain, and get a five paragraph response about how Defra would like more things to be recycled. And get the same responses from four or five different people. You've wasted your time calling them and now they're wasting your time calling you back, refusing to engage with facts that are already part of the public domain, as if they're all scared they'll be sacked if they deviate an inch from the party line.

Ugh.

But Canada however - darling Canada. Give the trade department a holler about free trade negotiations with the EU and the media contact has an in-depth understanding of subsidization issues. I didn't speak to a single secretary yesterday, or if I did, they understood their department enough to give out information on its nuts-and-bolts operations, like the base duty rate with Most Favoured Nations and prior difficulties and roadblocks with NAFTA. Oh god, it was so good to call back home. Everybody is so polite and so much less retarded and Kafkaesque and ghost-hacked there. It lit up my whole afternoon but I won't lie to you, it also made me as homesick as fuck. Oh well.

The Green Dragon pouts, redux

I find it disquieting that the performance of the green political movement, which is now the fourth biggest block in the European parliament, has been the littlest story of this past European election in Anglo reporting here, particularly as the Anglo reporting here is British, and particularly as the Green party did remarkably well in Britain. But there it's all fuss over the BNP, BNP, BNP, who only managed to get two little measly European Parliament seats - same as the Greens - but rather more remarkably (since the two seats the Greens got were the same two seats they got in 2004), there's a fuss about the BNP getting three council seats, while the Greens got eighteen - eight up from last time. It was the fourth and fifth biggest party in the two respective elections - comfortably or far ahead of the BNP on both counts - and nobody is fucking talking about it in the papers. If you see any coverage of the green political movement in the limey press, it's about France, where the greens nearly knocked the Socialists into third place.

I was complaining about this to the F-word, and he thought it might have to do with the how headlines about all those people voting Green relative to the BNP might be a little too "Millions Of People Get On With Their Lives!" for the famously trite and sensationalistic British press to bother with. (Was it Alexei Sayle who made that gag? Rik Mayall? Hugh Laurie? Fucked if I can remember.) And he's probably right. But wading through The Making of the English Working Class as I am (thick into the Luddite bit), of course I see conspiracies everywhere, and the 'extremes' of the British press, that are quite open in their support for one or the other of the major parties, all had a little fuss about how not voting properly was going to make the BNP win - a revolting prospect, to be sure, but for fuck's sake, the BNP is just one of several small parties, and despite all the scare-mongering did worse than both the Greens and the single issue UKIP in the last elections . . .

My point is, this is Europe, not the United States, and a vote for the green party, or any other smaller party, isn't a vote flushed down the shitter. And that was clear enough to enough people that the green party did very well, including in Britain, where it gets so little airtime even relative to a bunch of raving racist loonies whose electorate seems to be made up mostly of truck drivers, skinheads, and doddering old brownshirts who can't even get girlfriends in their own ethnic group. What sort of vote could the green movement have got if it was treated seriously in the media; if there was some relationship between its degree of popularity and its degree of coverage? What if people who depend on the Telegraph and the Mirror and all that shit for their news had been informed that this party was a serious contender, that it was polling well enough that one's vote wouldn't be thrown away on it, that it was miles ahead of the BNfuckingP?

My personal hunch is that if they had been given serious coverage, we'd have seen a more seriously good result than we did. And I think the editorial boards of the papers in question probably had the same hunch. Furthermore, I think that means they're burrowing themselves a little deeper into the bin of irrelevance, because the green political movement is continuing to build strength and momentum with the motors of common sense and the new media. And people wonder why newspapers are in trouble . . .

Chavs: the scurvy of the limeys

You know what I love? Celebrity gossip. Years ago I wrote about three entries in a blog that would examine celebrity gossip. Almost right away, once I started spending half an hour a day reading celebrity gossip, it made me want to sick. Not because of the celebrities, but because of the obsessively bourgeois preoccupations and yardsticks of the celebrity gossipers. Icky - icky in a way beyond, say, Jade Goody expiring of cancer in front of the camera, which honestly I didn’t think was all that icky; it’s not how I’d choose to expire of cancer, but I was never deprived of anything good as a child and our needs were certainly different . . . but icky in the sense of how celebrity gossipers so uniformly seemed to see the people they were gossiping about as subhuman in a very snobby, iper-pudique way.

That’s not why I dropped the blog (there was just no time for it); that prudery was so complicated and so fascinating that however much it made me want to sick, I still could have spent months looking it over and trying to pull it apart to understand it, because it was so mixed up with a sort of guiltless class-consciousness, capitalist envy, and unconscious but plainly visible feelings of inferiority from the gossipers, all at the same time.

Especially the English gossip. Its tension is different from American gossip’s, more overtly class-based. I have no idea who the people the poms are gossiping about are, because usually they’ve done much less in a professionally artistic sense than American gossip objects have – lots of Page 3 girls and footballer’s wives and reality television stars, whereas in America you usually have to be a singer or actor or something for people to care about you. Fantasy is still important in America - the fantasy that the aging Ciccone bint is Madonna, that sad old sack Terry Bollea is the Hulk, that fat dead narc Elvis, like Jeebus, fucking lives. There's something grimmer, more cynical in England - I'd say more realistic, but sometimes fantasy is more honest than decontextualized reality. Reality television has taken off in a different way there than in America, in a way that some commentators describe as a celebration of mediocrity (a bit rich coming from Paul McCartney, considering his seminal contributions to pop music over the past 30 years, but I'm shooting at clay pigeons with no Wings here so I'll stop.) I’m not trying to be cruel when I say that if their gossip is anything to go by, that's because the English have an obsession with useless people.

I believe this is because of their monarchy and aristocracy – the remnants of a bunch of gluttonous, arriviste armed thugs who burst in from Scandinavia, and then France, Wales, Scotland, the Netherlands, and then Germany, and monumentally enriched themselves at everyone else’s expense over more than a millenium now. And over the last few hundred years, serving absolutely no function for good or for ill except for being the sort of figureheads who help reinforce the status quo – which is a purpose I find profoundly useless when the status quo has been such shit. There's no real fantasy associated with monarchy or aristocracy, just a decontextualized reality - you don't think, I wish I was a princess because then I'd be a great singer or dancer or football player or actress or politician and I'd be so great everybody would love me - no. People wish they were princesses so that they would be princesses. For the same reasons English people wish they were reality stars - to be rich and famous and influential beyond their talents or intelligence. The difference being that the monarchy and aristocracy managed to enrich themselves and impoverish the other classes so entirely that they became the arbiters of taste instead of its challengers.

And the present breed of gluttonous English arrivistes, while managing to accrue multi-million pound fortunes, haven’t taken over to the degree that they can be the arbiters of taste; they’re very much a fucking taste challenge. They're 'chavs'. Chavs. What a word. You’re not allowed to say proles anymore because we're supposed to be living in some sort of post-Marxist world, and anyways they’ve got too much disposable income, even in that impoverished iniquitous shithole of a pseudo-European nation, to be proles in the way the bourgeois were educated to regard proles. So the bourgeois rename them chavs and don’t have to ask themselves hard questions about their place in the class conflict. They're just celebrity gossiping. About rich chavs. Not proles. No biggie. And all the while this profound fear and disgust and jealousy at the thought of yet more idle, useless barbarians taking over . . .

Your boner, my problem

You know what's funny? Premature ejaculation. I understand they can't help doing it and that it's very psychologically painful, but I can't help laughing at it, because it's very psychologically hilarious. Or at least it's hilarious now that I don't have to put up with it anymore, because at the time I never found a way to see the situation as funny or laughable or anything but me not getting the servicing I deserved, and it was infuriating. The massive egoism of a girl in need of a massive bang, I know, and the inability to not jizz right away was probably not associated directly with a conscious wish to disrespect and frustrate me, but the pain was real. Good lord, sexual problems are problematic.

My favourite historical sexual problem was probably Catherine de Medici and Henry II of France. I have a general fascination with Catherine de Medici - you could hardly find a more remarkable life. She'd be a feminist icon, but the English have always hated her, and the French obviously under-appreciate their monarchs, and she was far too evil to be palatable, I suppose - but sadly that's part of what feminism is - having as much power to be evil as the men. Or else we're working on the assumption that women are somehow morally superior, and I think that nasty bint Margaret Thatcher killed off that idea in the post-feminist context.

Anyways. Catherine de Medici. Her husband didn't love her and neither did her husband's family, after her uncle Pope Clement died and the new Pope wouldn't pay her dowry. And she was married for a decade not getting pregnant, while her husband managed to impregnate other people. Disastrous. But eventually she managed to conceive - and did she ever manage, having a grand total of seven children who made it for awhile, at least, and some miscarriages and infant deaths into the bargain. The story goes this was after the physician Jean Fernel, who in many respects looks more useful than physicians seemed back in the 16th century, examined both Catherine's twat and Henry's gear, saw some irregularities, and recommended a series of sexual positions that would facilitate impregnation. What were the positions? I'd dearly love to know. Not necessarily to aid in my impregnation, which we're still trying, in fact, to avoid - just because I don't think monarchs are good for anything but perving on.

Another of my favourite historical sexual problems, more for the way it's been perceived over time, was Henry VIII and Anne of Cleves. Almost any way you look at the history of this marriage - and there have been many ways - the odds look good that Henry was simply not able to get a boner for her. The way the English interpret their history and (bizarrely) internalize the lives of their monarchs means the view continues to dominate that this was her fault - that she was unpalatably ugly, though the Holbein portrait of her was commissioned to be an exact likeness, and it shows one of those pretty, calm women that Belgium, the Netherlands, and northwest Germany are full of, and frankly who I'd fuck, and I don't have a monarchical imperative to impregnate them.

But after a jousting accident in 1536 - probably not coincidentally, the last year he managed to impregnate a woman - Henry began to get vastly fat, and covered in fetid boils, and blessed with a revolting, weeping ulcer on his upper thigh, which didn't heal before his death eleven years later, at which point he was too vast and unhealthy to walk under his own power. The man was a disgusting, suppurating mess by the time he was in a position to get a boner for Anne of Cleves in 1540, seven years before his death. Think end-of-life Marlon Brando, except oozing pus and having people executed.

And yet despite this, and despite the commissioned-to-be-realistic, rather lovely Holbein, your typical English asshole has been raised in the certainty that Henry couldn't get a boner for Anne because she was ugly, and not because Henry was a living, bleeding, decomposing whale who would make any sensible woman kill the mood by vomiting uncontrollably as soon as he started taking his clothes off, assuming his willy was still in any way actually functional. And those pretty, calm women that Belgium, the Netherlands, and northwest Germany are full of are nothing if not sensible. It's amazing, the different persistences of nationalism in the way a people see their history. Henry VIII was a disaster of a man and king but it's simply received wisdom that his failure to get or sustain a boner was his wife's fault, even today.

Oh, historical sexual problems. Is there anything more human, or historical? I think a Spike Millligan quote is in order:

. . . whereupon she ate (of the fruit), and gave of it to her husband. 2. And the eyes of them were both opened and they knew they were both naked , and Adam said to her, 'Stand back, I don't know how big this is going to get.'

No, seriously, now we're taking Berlin

We watched Battleship Potemkin last night. Just that sort of mood. Sometimes I can't emotionally commit to a film but just want to watch some sort of cultural document. But it turned out it was actually a film, even though it was silent and from 1925. The end made me cry. Goebbels loved it, apparently. He thought it could turn anyone Bolshevik who wasn't already strongly something else. Unsurprisingly it was banned in Nazi Germany; rather more surprisingly, it was also banned in the UK until 1954, at which point it was released with an X rating. A few chocolate-syrup blood scenes aside there's no gore, and there wasn't any move to ban other propaganda films like Triumph of the Will even at the height of the war, or, you know, that American one by Griffiths about how if you fully enfranchised black people they'd uncontrollably rape white women, the poor helpless dears, so I guess we know what that's about.

I wonder how much the working class still scares policy makers and property owners in the UK. Probably not much. The Labour party, who theoretically represented the working class, managed to sweep to a huge electoral victory after publicly castrating itself in the mid-nineties, and the public snobbery about the working class is amazing. But I guess that's the thing. The workers there don't have any impact on the means of production anymore because there are no means of production - they've all been exported, and the working class has turned into the service class. Just insecure retail or service jobs that don't mean a damn thing if you go on strike. It's pretty gross.

According to the Open Veins of Latin America, which I'm hoping to knock off on the plane tonight, because I just got The Making of the English Working Class by E.P. Thompson to read in tandem with A Social History of England by Trevelyan just to blow my mind (yes, I'm the world's biggest geek who doesn't understand math or computers) exporting industry wasn't always the British way; their constant push for free trade applied to primary resources for many years while the means of transformation stayed, aggressively, in England. Which was noticed by Ulysses Grant (sweet name) when his country opted to follow the same model for awhile:

For centuries England has relied on protection, has carried it to extremes, and has obtained satisfactory results from it. There is no doubt that it is to this system that it owes its present strength. After two centuries, England has found it convenient to adopt free trade because it thinks that protection can no longer offer it anything. Very well then, gentlemen, my knowledge of our country leads me to believe that within two hundred years, when America has gotten out of protection all that it can offer, it too will adopt free trade.

But a point always comes where the workers just get too scary and where protection can no longer offer anything because you've managed to create a big enough consumer class, to the point that it's worth exporting production piecemeal to export-focused economies full of people who remember what it's like to be hungry. Leaving the UK a bit of a shell when it comes to production, and increasingly the US as well. People get so het up about European protectionism in the manufacturing industries, and there is a huge and easily mocked disconnect between what is legally committed to and what is actually done here in trade terms. But there's no doubt French people or people here get more say what their government and their employer do to their lives than do British people. Oh well. Time to get ready for Berlin.

Smashy smashy

The only big problem with The Life of Charlotte Brontë is that now I want to read Shirley instead of moving on with my life and reading more Eliot or Hardy or something. Oh well. I'm not much of a one for biographies, but Brontë had such a strange life, and Gaskell did a fair job of putting that life in some sort of social and cultural context. She did a better job of being all Gaskell-y as she wrote (effervescent, perspective, though with a tendency to force sainthood on her objects of affection), and she was clever enough to lean heavily on letters; not only as source material but, in places, as the bulk of the text.

What dwells on my mind and what's pushing me to read Shirley is a growing curiosity about the specific social context Brontë and her sisters lived in. One can get swept up in the melodrama of their blockbusters and forget the general melodrama of their times, just as when you hit an Austen book you can get swept up in these narrow, sparsely-populated worlds the women live in, where the Napoleonic wars beating around their island only make vague appearances through the changes in fortune of their men.

But their vague historical contexts were so exciting, not so much from a war-ish point of view as in the flux hitting a rhythm of life that was about a thousand years old . . . Again in Austen it's all left indirect in favour of the development of individual characters. Nicely done all the same through their relationships of course, as in Pride and Prejudice, where every minute division in the privileged classes is mapped out carefully for us - we understand living on Cheapside is something to sneer at, that Elizabeth Bennett can marry Darcy without raising eyebrows beyond those of his aunt, whilst Wickham could marry her sister after an elopement while it was absolutely out of the question to tolerate his suit of Darcy's sister. We get the feeling things have changed over time but again, it's narrow; confined to the privileged classes and its bastards, hangers-on, and orphans.

Now the Luddites . . . there's something else altogether, and something far bigger and more important than which independently wealthy person was allowed to marry which other independently wealthy person (seriously, in Austen, the worst that was going to happen to those women if they didn't score rich husbands was moving to a small cottage or living with cousins - we only get glimpses of those less fortunate, who risk the real poverty that the vast majority of Austen's contemporaries risked). Most of what I know of Luddites is through one single explanation of a single concept that has stuck in my brain - the 'Luddite Fallacy'. That's the idea that increased mechanization or increased production efficiency would mean lower rates of employment. It is a fallacy, the thinking goes, because increases in production efficiency won't lead to the loss of jobs; instead of getting rid of employees, industrial concerns will use ever more employees to produce ever more stuff.

And here we are, nearly two hundred years after mechanization: we can consider the 'Luddite Fallacy' fallacious (sounds dirty!), because if there's one thing we produce a lot of, it's stuff. Far too much stuff. The production of ever more stuff has not abated. We're drowning in stuff and the oceans we once thought infinite are choking with stuff and all of that stuff is produced by a staggering number of people working. That's another story.

Fine - but I think the 'Luddite Fallacy' is one of those half-truths that are worse than a lie. Think of England, poor, fucked up England, where all of my industrial contacts are trying to pull the plug because it's a mess. We see people having jobs, yes - but incredibly crap, incredibly tenuous unskilled jobs in parts of the service sector that are the first to feel the pain when consumers start to worry. We see the benefit of stuff in their professional lives, that great surfeit of stuff with which we're polluting the world: it provides the Inselaffen jobs by having them sell it, not manufacture it. And then we see the Luddite Fallacy isn't a fallacy, but a half-arsed equivocation by the people who use the term.

Sure, English people are employed (though dramatically less so these days), but one kind of employment is not another, and there's nothing more replaceable or sackable than your standard service worker. What would happen if all the sweatshops servicing retailers like the Gap somehow managed to find out where each other was, and hold a co-ordinated strike? Fucking chaos - and they'd get what they wanted. But what would happen if all the salespeople at the Gap went on strike? A bunch of salespeople would get fired and replaced by a bunch of 18 year olds who want staff discounts. Maybe for a couple of days the shirts wouldn't be as nicely folded. Oh noes.

So the question for me: was the mechanization process that began two hundred years ago the beginning of the slow castration of the unprivileged classes in Britain? One part of my brain says no, of course not, the mechanization process turned the unprivileged classes into the working class, and the working class became a political force, and functioned as such until its balls were cut off in the 1970's. Another part of my brain says yes, of course, because mechanization ended the need for artisanal, skilled labourers, which meant you could send the machines to a country full of desperate people who you could bully into dropping tariffs and environmental/labour standards. Of course you'd be a fool not to. But the upshot is I don't know which part of my brain is right, or if neither is right.

And I want to, I want to know far more about how all this happened, and why the country of my mothers - my country, I suppose, though I'm a second-class citizen - is such a shithole now. All of which brings me back to Shirley - I need to know how a thoughtful, gentle and dreadfully conventional woman (as the Life has shown Brontë to be) wrote about the Luddites - how she presented them to her huge fan base down south - how she reconciled the misery of the working class in the West Riding with her need for political and religious continuity. And once it gets personal enough for me, I'm wading into the Luddites.

Marchons, marchons qu'un programme economique impur abreuve nos sillons

Longtime readers of this blog know that I'm a bit of a francophobe. I challenge anyone to spend three years working and studying in Paris without following suit. Since I moved away and started visiting France bit by bit - especially Marseille, where people were beautifully kind - on a rational level I know that Paris is not France, and France in general is a lovely country full of lovely people. On an emotional level - because of that time in Paris, France is a just a big rat-infested city full of snotty assholes who think they're clever because they know a lot but who can't analyze or synthesize their way out of a stubby paper bag. I'm trying to get over that. A few more trips to Marseille would help.

Anyways, emotionally revolted as I am by the French, one thing I will say about them: at least they're not a bunch of snivelling baby pansy-ass motherfuckers who are content to be swept into pauper's graves by the overwhelming tides of history, modern Anglo-Saxon style. "€36bn for the bankers and we get screwed" indeed. Yesterday as I read up on the strike I was sort of passingly impressed by the demands of the unions and bodies staging the strikes and demonstrations - in that it wasn't just a demand for social support, but for business support, in a real concerted effort to make sure labourers, who hadn't contributed to the economic crisis (not even indirectly through their retirement funds in France, as pensions still function as pensions there - they haven't been basculated into throwing all their scrimpings and savings into the stock market through mutual funds, like Ango-Saxons have), aren't the ones who pay for it.

But this morning I was extra-impressed by way of comparison when I read this in the Independent, a 'leftish' British paper, which treated the demonstrators, and the other much more serious and desperate demonstrators in southern Europe and the new EU entrant countries, as recalcitrant, incoherent children complicating an already complicated situation. Honestly, it makes me want to vomit. Let me put it like this: there's a reason that I, a British citizen, chose to work in Belgium, and looked for jobs in France, Germany, anywhere in northern Europe, basically, besides Britain. And it wasn't because I was anxious to fight with banks and utility companies in a language that isn't my first - that was just a fringe benefit. It was because the standard of life in Britain is absolute shit compared to the rest of northern Europe. Job security sucks, benefits suck, public services suck, the cost of living and average salaries are wildly unbalanced, and only rich people can afford to live close to their offices if they work in London; it has execrable wealth distribution even among normalish people.

And there's one reason for this: northern European governments get kept on their toes by their people. Elections don't come frequently enough to communicate effectively with them that way, and northern Europeans know you have to hit the streets when they do something that's not in the people's interest between-times. It's not rocket science - it's the purpose of public sector strike, the purpose of a demonstration: to act against the government in a way that isn't illegal when the government is acting against you in a way that isn't prosecutable. But not in Britain anymore, it seems, and hence their awful quality of life. I wonder why. I think it's because the Thatcher years saw the media managed so well during the strikes in the early 80's - really managed to present the strikers as Britain's problem, rather than the symptom of Britain's problem - and the media is still playing the game even today. That's what happens with you let Rupert Murdoch in. A national assfucking.

Dreams of sheds and projectors

Home again today. My lungs are just too disgusting. The F-word says I smoked too many joints this weekend; I say I'm a victim of society; the reality is that my co-workers look queasy when I come close to coughing up my lungs. Fair enough.

Reading Samuel Pepys's diaries, from the final couple of years. What a slut that man was. But then, what a slutty time he lived in. It's small wonder melancholia used to be known as the English Disease considering the centuries they spent wildly complicating their lives by trying to bang everything, and small wonder that finally the Victorians had to be, well, Victorian. Sheer exhaustion, I guess, but now they seem all rested up. I love the way the Brits of my acquaintance rail against their reputation as loose, and then take my breath away by marathon scores anywhere from business functions to subway rides. Their cultural legacy, I suppose - hangover guilt not letting them just own how awesome it is that they have so much sex with so many people. I think it's awesome, anyways. I can't do it myself because I don't like most men and because I don't understand how to work other people's vulvas, but I'm glad some people do. Reminds you people are people so why should it be, that you and I et cetera.

My boss lent me Planet Earth, too. David Attenborough narrated but did not write it. Still, I expect his voice will soothe me sufficiently and it looks awfully beautiful. His documentaries always make me wish I had a projector. Oh well. Someday. Perhaps when we live somewhere less narrow. Our Art Deco flat is big, but it's one of the ones en enfilade - three rooms in a row, with the kitchen off to one side - so it's long but skinny. Is it over-domesticated of me to want a real house? I'll tell you what I want, what I really really want - I want a back yard with a shed in it. Fuck a house. If I could have a flat like this, and then a nice yard where I could grow things with a nice shed where I could make things, I'd be happy as a freshly jigggajiggaed Spice Girl.

The private life of plague carriers

I don't think there's a limit to the number of sickdays you can take in Belgium; at our office there certainly isn't. Just as well because in this city everybody is a little sick all the time. Today I actually feel quite good, mood-wise and everything, but I'm hacking like an autistic Englishman, those clever influenza germs agitating my respiratory system in a quest to become airborne as I cough all over potential new colonies, ergo est my colleagues. Well, fuck you, germs. I went to work yesterday and you had your chance.

Besides being a plague carrier I have too much to do today - bully the banks, write to young family members about the Netherland's land reclamation strategies, sew some diapers for the legions of friends who've started breeding, and basically be better at keeping in touch. I don't understand how I can love my friends and family so much and be so crap about keeping in touch.

Wanted to point out something though: David Attenborough's Private Life of Plants might be one of the most exquisite things I've ever seen. Even more exquisite than the Life of Birds. And better suited to drrrrrurrgs. There aren't many people who I don't know personally that I love, but I reckon I love David Attenborough. Imagine if he was your uncle or something, and read to you. Wow. That would be the best uncle ever. Even now I like to watch his documentaries last thing before bed - brush and floss before they start and go to sleep with his enthusiast-calm voice still in my ears. Watched P2 of the Private Life of Plants last night and what he said about the conifers, carbon dioxide and light gave me the same soothed, sleepy feeling as The Paper Bag Princess did when I was little.