Serfing on a Wave of Royal Jubilation

What is everyone doing to celebrate the Jubilee? Painting a Union Jack on your pet dog’s face and then sending it to attack foreigners? Donning an Armani cap then fanning wads of cash at your economically disenfranchised neighbours as they die from scurvy before your very eyes? Having a family meal at Pizza Express in Woking? Sending warships to the Falkland Islands? However you choose to celebrate it, just remember – as you stand there snuffling your face into a bowl of Eton Mess or quaffing strawberry-bobbed flutes of Prosecco – that you’re perpetuating an archaic, deeply unfair system of class privilege that’s prevailed for millennia. You’re also teaching children everywhere to venerate wealth and hereditary titles above all else. But still. Wave your wee flag, eh?

Never mind the offensive ridiculousness of subsidising such an obscene occasion from the public purse when many millions have just been thumped below the poverty line like a crooked tent peg: why is the Royal Family still a thing, here in the supposedly enlightened 21st century? The Royal Family is like a sick old farm-dog that no-one quite has the heart to take out into the backyard and blow away with a 12-bore shotgun – which would almost certainly have happened if the owners had been French.

Gawd bless ya, mam

The Queen and I in happier times

I’ve listened to various vox pops and dispatches about the Queen over the last few weeks, and I’ve heard the usual sickening platitudes. Apparently she’s worked hard. She’s a grafter. As if she’d spent 70 years slaving down a mine with a pick-axe and a pit-canary, instead of travelling the world waving at people, and reading out an annual Christmas message to the nation with all the warmth and sincerity of a hostage reading their kidnappers’ demands. I guess, in a way, she is a hostage, trapped inside a high gilded cage, simultaneously looking down upon the stinking masses with a sneer of contempt on her face, as we in turn look up at her and her family like they’re sad, exotic animals in a zoo. It’s tempting to say that we’re all losers in this game, except they’re losers with scores of palaces and a multi-million pound fortune. If the Queen was really struggling with her gas bills they’d probably just let her burn Peckham to the ground.

Apparently the Queen is also like a mother to us all. Someone who’s spent 70 years ‘looking after us’. The people who say these things never cite specifics, mainly because they can’t. They’re just spewing out the sort of candied, bum-tonguing nonsense they feel is expected of them when asked questions about their ‘betters’. I’m being unfair here, though, because Auld Liz has reputedly got the common touch as well. So they say. Although quite what Simon the salt-of-the-earth scaffolder from the East End of London thinks he’s got in common with a nonagenarian who wears a million-pound hat on her head, and spends the year flitting between seven castles, is beyond me. What does he imagine they’d talk about over a few jars down The Queen’s Head?

Ayl tell you one theeng, Simon. One is ebsolootlee fucked. One’s spent all morning auditioning butlers for Sunday’s dinner with the Danish Royal Family.”

Bladdy tell me abaht it. We’ve ‘ad it up to eer wiv that showra mugs. Yoo wan’ anuver pint, sweet’art?”

Meek it a treble vodka. And one has some ching in the Range Rover.”

Phwoar! Must be amazin’ to snort some Colombian froo your own rolled-up face. Two’s up, darlin’!”

Ah, but I’m forgetting everything the Queen does for tourism, amn’t I? Clearly the UK would be an urban wasteland reminiscent of a deserted North Korean super-city if not for the Queen bringing in those visitors, who absolutely insist on a living Royal Family to complement their sight-seeing trips. After all, since the French murdered their Royal Family not a single foreigner has ever visited Paris. The Grand Canyon, too, suffered a severe drop in foot-fall when prospective visitors discovered that there were precisely zero monarchs living at the bottom of it. And they had to close Edinburgh Castle, because it just wasn’t the same being in a castle without the tantalising prospect of an old woman waving at you from a balcony.

Do you know, I stood outside that bloody Buckingham Palace for eight hours, EIGHT HOURS, and that snobby old bitch never ONCE came to the window. My mate Kev said he saw her doing juggling and show-tunes over the balcony when he was down here last year, and in 2018 my mate Bruce got a glimpse of her silhouette through the bathroom window as she was nudging out a shit.”

I’ll concede that the Queen does a lot for tourism when I see her handing out flyers for Pirate Island on Blackpool promenade.

Why does one give a shit?

I can understand the fawning obeisance towards the Royals exhibited by the masses back in the middle ages. If they hadn’t cheered for their King or Queen’s birthday they would have had their head lopped from their neck and kicked into a shrubbery. That’s a pretty strong incentive to celebrate. But now? The Royals may have a woolly, wholly symbolic constitutional role in our society, but their days of guillotining are over. For instance, I could dress a hyper-realistic Japanese sex doll up like the Queen and have it greedily fellate me as I sat on a throne made of burning fifty-pound notes, and the worst that would happen to me is that I’d probably get my own Netflix special. So why do people still behave as if they’re 13th century serfs?

I think I get it. I was scrolling through a megaton of flags and Jubilee articles on Facebook when I spied an online commenter, his profile-picture more flag than human, throwing his patriotic weight behind the Queen by charging forth with the rousing comment: ‘May she reign over us for another 50 years!’ I asked him to explain in what manner she reigned over us, and what precisely that reign entailed. Rather than engage with my question, he said: ‘Like her or not she is still your Queen so just be grateful your British.’ (The grammatical error, dear reader, was Mr Flag Face’s) This, I think, strikes at the heart of why so many people seem to deify the Queen. In their minds and hearts her reign is as immutable as it is unquestionable. It’s just something that is, was, and always will be: a holy trinity of traditionalism that fuels the wet dreams of conservatives with a small ‘c’ everywhere, not to mention Conservatives with a big ‘C’ – or C***s as they’re sometimes simply known.

All the pomp and pageantry of the Royal Family is absorbed into the soul of the flag-shagger like Sunday school psalms, or verses from the Quran, and defended just as unblinkingly. Their brain is a swirl of triggers, rituals and symbols, recalled and relayed by rote. For those of us who aren’t Royalists, an occasion such as this can make you feel as though you’ve woken up inside a 1950s sci-fi film, and everyone has been possessed by the tendrils of sinister space pods. What the fuck is everyone doing? Why can’t they see that their passion is misplaced to the point of absurdity; that they’re taking up metaphorical arms for a family who literally wouldn’t piss on them if they were on fire?

It’s all so mad, so arbitrary. Like religion. Brain-washing. In some bizarre parallel universe there are crowds of middle-aged men being whipped into a violent frenzy by the unfurling of a giant banner with a picture of a carrot on it. Our universe is no less ridiculous for its grown men and women singing loudly and defiantly at scraps of cloth.

Childhood is where this eerie group-think begins. To paraphrase Aristotle – and indeed that, em, sage philosopher Adolph Hitler – you can inculcate anyone, anywhere, into any mode of thought imaginable, so long as you start them young. That’s why the government has spent £12m securing a boot-licking book on the Queen for every primary-age child, and why most of your kids have spent the last few weeks eating strawberries and colouring in pictures of the Queen’s million-pound crown with a one-pence pencil.

Know One’s Place

The Royal Family, much like death and taxes, appears to be a constant. In a rapidly changing world they’re an anchor to the imagined past, a world where everyone knew their place. You remember the hierarchy. It goes: The Queen; rich white men; rich white women; poor white men; dogs; cats; seahorses; cockroaches; anal warts; poor white women; AIDS; cancer, and, lastly, everyone everywhere else. And then brown and black people.

It’s about time we removed our white-lilly-tinted spectacles, and started to think – really, genuinely think – about the sort of world in which we want to live. The people we want to be, and the things we want to prioritise. Do we want a kinder, fairer society in which we all work to help those less fortunate than ourselves, or do we want to wave flags and throw money at the feet of a family who have enjoyed entitled and protected status since their ancestors first made a career out of executing peasants and looting the nation’s wealth? And who even now think nothing of withdrawing from the Bank of Peasantry to pay-off the victim of an underage sex scandal perpetrated by one of its members?

Happy Platty Joob Joobs everybody.

Take Churchill, but leave my racist gran out of it

Statues are kaleidoscopic totems; golems whose frozen faces hold different meanings for different groups of people throughout different points in history. Statues are erected, just as history is written, by the winners, but society is a rolling contract, a constant site of conflict and negotiation, and those at the bottom usually, sooner or later, get their shot at – or the opportunity to fire some shots at – the top-spot. Just ask the French Royal Family circa 1789, or Saddam Hussein and his Ba’ath party.

The symbols that once united, may one day divide; the statues that once stood for valiance and jubilation, may one day fall for avarice and hubris. One chunk of sculpted marble can run the gamut from hero to villain and back again over several life-times – that’s if it can manage to avoid being beheaded, blown up or pulled down by chains.

2020 has been a time of great unrest in the world, both biologically and societally. Unrest over the Black Lives Matter movement has swiftly eclipsed the west’s tantrums over coronavirus restrictions, to the point where the coronavirus looks set to join the recently evaporated ghost of Brexit in the shared Ecto-containment units of our collective memory (although I predict a particularly nasty second wave of Brexit at some point in the autumn).

It’s Statuegeddon out there. History is being violently re-framed and re-claimed at home and abroad, both in the media and in the streets. In the US, Columbus and various Confederate generals have borne the brunt of this revisionist violence; here in the UK, the statues of a handful of regionally, but not nationally, well-known colonial ne’er do wells have met their ignominious ends, most notably the likeness of slave-trader Edward Colston, which was wrenched from the ground, marched through the streets and tossed into Bristol harbour.

In the UK, all of this was met with mild indignation on one side and righteous vindication on the other. Until, of course, BLM protestors in London – or at least a handful of those present during demonstrations – turned their attentions to Churchill: the great grand-daddy plinth-pimp; the undisputed Billy Big Balls of the statue world. You’ll no doubt have seen the image of the words ‘IS A RACIST’ spray-painted on the statue’s plinth beneath Churchill’s name. Later in that same day, a man was seen standing atop the cenotaph trying to ignite the Union Jack. Two competing narratives are clashing, like hammers into anvils, and it’s causing sparks.

My paternal grandmother was a life-long supporter of the SNP and Scottish independence, but never-the-less she venerated the arch-conservative Churchill as a God. She wouldn’t hear a bad word said against him. I accepted her view of Churchill wholesale and without criticism, mainly because I was young and hadn’t yet been exposed to any criticism of Churchill the man, but also because my gran had been alive during World War II. She’d spent the early forties living in perpetual fear, worrying about bombs dropping on her town, worrying if she’d ever see my grandfather again, worrying who else in the town wouldn’t be coming back, all the while working her fingers to the bone. I trusted her judgement; her lived experience. I trusted history, at least as I understood it at the time.

Churchill once represented a generation’s shared agony and sacrifice. He stood for imperialism, the old guard, a certain Brutish, British sentiment, yes, but also strength and resolve in the face of a conquering enemy, an enemy that was much worse than anything the world had ever seen before, at least in terms of scale, and military range and capability. He undoubtedly galvanised people’s spirits, fanned the flames of hope.

Now, as the war generation dwindles to a handful of living emblems, there’s sufficient distance to re-evaluate Churchill’s legacy away from the propaganda and old Blighty bluster.

Churchill may well have been an effective rallying force in the fight against Hitler’s eugenocidal expansionism, but looked at through different sets of contemporaneous eyes it’s probably fair to say that he was somewhat lacking in decency and compassion. You know. Just a smidgeon. In fact, he was a bit of an arsehole, even adjusting for the rampant racism and ingrained xenophobia that was reputedly typical of the era.

It’s quite possible that his rousing defence of the Empire was just that: a rousing defence of the Empire, and not really anything to do with repelling fascism which, under certain circumstances, Churchill was more than prepared to admire, especially when it dressed as snappily as Mussolini. And what about those train time-tables? Phwoar, missus.

In 1919 as secretary of state for war Churchill ordered chemical attacks on the Bolsheviks in northern Russia; his strategising was responsible for the out-manned and under-resourced 51st Highland Division being abandoned in France, resulting in the death or capture of some 12,000 Scottish soldiers. And that’s not to forget his part in the decision in 1919 to send tanks and soldiers into Glasgow’s George Square to settle a labour dispute.

Churchill regarded the many subjugated peoples held hostage under the banner of the British Empire as subhuman savages or unruly children, and routinely treated them as such as a matter of policy, particularly the Indians, whom he held in special disregard, a sentiment baldly expressed through his complicity in the Bengal famine, a man-made tragedy that claimed the lives of millions of Indians. This is but a small sample from the dark side of Winston Churchill. It’s hardly exhaustive. Black and tans, claims of Aryan superiority, pillages in South Africa. The list goes on. And on and on.

Had my gran been faced with this list I’m almost certain that it wouldn’t have swayed her from her worship. Churchill was her warrior, her guide, her leader. Who was she to question him, especially when she appeared to agree with many of his underlying assumptions about people from other races?

My grandmother never carried out any genocides – none that I’m aware of anyway – but she was  undoubtedly, em, a wee bit racist. Like many of her generation, she couldn’t understand what people of other races had to complain about. And wasn’t slavery a long time ago anyway? I hear that sentiment echoed, even now. But if white people who never fought in the second world war – who weren’t even alive until years after its end – can say that they are still touched by its, and Churchill’s, legacy – that its importance will continue to be passed down from generation to generation – then why are we so unable to grasp the idea that something as horrific as slavery, still a very recent event in human history, might still cause ripples throughout white and black communities for some time to come. Nobody pushed a big button to end all racism at the moment when slavery was abolished. Some scars take a long time to heal.

My gran wasn’t rabid with her racism. It sometimes felt like she’d received a flyer about the benefits of racism one day, and just thought, ‘Ooooh, that sounds nice.’ She’d never met anyone of colour, and her TV was replete with westerns and war films, all of which helped to reinforce the white-centric status quo. Life was black and white for my gran, sometimes literally. The Japs? Vile. Blacks? Animals. The Red Indians? Savages. Arabs? Never trust them. That last one came straight from my grandfather, who’d served amongst North Africans and middle-easterners during the Second World War and formed a life-long judgement of them as a consequence. Given that during war-time my grandfather was involved with the smuggling and selling on of black-market oil via dealings with the Italian mafia, he wasn’t really well placed to opine on the trustworthiness of any particular person, much less a whole race.

I remember my papa dropping the bombshell on me that he didn’t like black people. He said it almost impassively, barely bothering to take his eyes from the TV. I was around fourteen at the time, and unencumbered by any explicit racist notions – beyond past complicity in the sad trade of unnecessary and uninspired racist jokes at my almost entirely all-white primary school, the punchlines of which featured Twixes, Drifters, chocolate biscuits and red head-dots – and wanted to know why. Why, papa? What have black people ever done to you?

‘I dunno,’ he said with a half-hearted shrug. ‘I just don’t like them.’

Although I wasn’t looking for an Aristotelian exploration of his beliefs and motivations I must confess to feeling a little less than satisfied with his answer.

I pressed him further. ‘What do you mean “you just don’t like them”? There has to be a reason.’

He thought for a moment. A few seconds later he delivered his pay-load.

‘You know how you sometimes don’t like a flavour of ice-cream? It’s like that. I just don’t like them.’

I didn’t have a comeback for that. How could I have? You’ve got to admit, that’s genius racism. Deftly dodging the whole arena of thought and reason to frame his views not intellectually, but emotionally, reducing his racism to a calm statement of preference. It didn’t seem to stem from any visible sense of hatred. Racism for my papa was as simple as saying, ‘Nah, cheers for the offer, but no thanks, I’d rather not.’ Oddly, he seemed to dig Sidney Poitier. Cognitive dissonance writ large.

I did toy with bringing him a bowl of Neapolitan ice cream, and saying, ‘Look, papa. Look at all the different colours – the pink, the yellow and the brown – all sitting happily together, in perfect harmony,’ but I was worried he might scoop out the pink bit and leave the other two by the two-bar fire to melt.

When I was 21 I met a couple of Israeli back-packers in Amsterdam. Really good guys. They saved my life in some ways. One of the duo, Dani, was of Russian ancestry; the other, Ilan, was from Arab stock. A few months later they came to Scotland to visit me. Ilan arrived first. I took him to meet my dad and gran. Now, this was certainly the first time anyone of colour had ever been in my gran’s house, and she reacted as I knew she would: with a sort of fear-soaked, ultra-politeness. She brought through a platter of sandwiches, and I just knew she’d opted for a platter because the serving plate could double as a shield should any shit happen to go down. After all, never trust an Arab, right? In retrospect, as much as I enjoyed dragging my gran into the twentieth century, it wasn’t necessarily fair to put the fear of bloody murder into her old eyes.

She was a lovely woman, my gran, kind and warm, content in her later life to live in her wee town-shaped, Catholicism-scented bubble. That feeling she got when she was finally confronted with the ‘other’ was, I think, the root of her racism, which wasn’t really racism at all, but fear. Pure, undiluted fear. A fear stoked by the people around her, and the newspapers, and the TV shows, and the movies, and by people like her old hero Churchill, who was always more than happy to take a big oily crap on the whole concept of the brotherhood of man.

So what do we do with Churchill now?

I suppose it’s possible to embrace both Churchills: the bold, heroic, no-nonsense, fight-them-on-the-beaches figurehead, and the blood-thirsty, racist tyrant. It’s just a question of how we reconcile those Churchills and choose to remember him as a consequence. Do we really need to venerate him with a statue, and would it really damage his legacy if his statue were to be moved to a museum? On the other hand, are we being too knee-jerk, too revisionist? If we move Churchill to a museum, would he even be safe there? Are the looted treasures of Britain’s museums next on the list for reclamation or obliteration? Should the state cow-tow to violence, however righteous the impetus?

On the other other hand, in the face of a stubborn and indifferent state, isn’t violence sometimes the only mechanism that people have at their disposal to effect change? I don’t think the French Revolution would’ve gotten very far if the marginalised, powerless citizens of Paris had written a series of withering letters to their local feudal representatives.

Maybe, going forwards, if we feel the need to build a statue, we should keep it abstract or symbolic; something that evokes a moment in time rather than a man or a woman of the moment. Because things can change in a moment. If 2020 has taught us anything, it’s almost certainly that.

I don’t know what’s going to happen to, or about, Churchill. Perhaps this re-evaluation couldn’t have come at a better time, given that those who moved to defend his statue this past weekend were witnessed giving Nazi salutes and attacking the police, behaviour that stands a little at odds with the virtues they claimed to be in town to defend and uphold.

Whatever we do with Churchill and the murky legacy of Britain’s colonial past, can you do me a wee favour? Leave my gran out of it. She was a good ‘un.

Some of my best friends are grans.

Boys Will Be Boys: A Few Words on Gender Roles

Me doing my bit to reverse gender stereotypes.

When I was little, blue was for boys and pink was for girls. In the playground we merry band of little men grabbed sticks in lieu of real guns and played ‘Japs and Commandos’, a game that would probably see us dragged before The Hague if we tried to play it today (especially as we’re now adults). We stood at the top of the grassy hill while our peers fired imaginary weapons at us, and we had to die down that hill in a manner befitting the destructive consequences of the arbitrarily appointed weapon. ‘Rocket launcher!’ they’d shout. ‘Grenade!’ they’d scream. ‘Radioactive llamas with anger issues!’

Boys will be boys, right?

We played football. Well, I didn’t play football all that often, on account of being absolutely crap at it. I possessed all the silky footwork and balance of a newly born calf. The rest of the boys usually stuck me in goals, where I functioned both as failed goalkeeper and lightning rod for their fury after we lost 26 – 0 for perhaps the twenty-sixth time. It was the defence’s fault, naturally.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the playground the girls were busy playing hopscotch, making bracelets from daisies, and manufacturing 3D paper hexagons with the power to reveal which of us they’d be marrying in the future. We feared them. The girls had their own team sports, too; their favourite was excluding one or more of the other girls until they cried.

Naturally, there were a few outliers on both sides, but in the main our behaviour fell along traditional gender lines. Everybody knew exactly what sorts of activities they could or could not participate in relative to the type of genitalia they possessed. Girls couldn’t play football; guys couldn’t braid each other’s hair. Girls couldn’t play British Bulldogs (a no-holds-barred ‘sport’ where the boys thundered across the playground, while an ever-growing number of boys in the middle tried to yank them off their feet and throw them onto the ground); boys couldn’t use a skipping rope – even if they chanted the nursery rhyme from Nightmare on Elm Street as they did it. Breaches of the unwritten gender conventions were policed rather harshly, with punishment usually being meted out in nicknames, the corrosive stain of which might never wash out.

And, yet, when I look back on my youth it occurs to me that – contrary to the idea of the eons-old, iron-fisted rule of the patriarchy – the world in which I lived was very much a woman’s world. My parents divorced when I was five, and although I had a step-dad it was my mother who called the shots. My older sister, with whom I’m still incredibly close despite the geographical distance between us, was like a second mother to me. All of my teachers were female. Not just the ones who taught me, but every teacher in my primary school. On a national scale, for better or worse – and the answer is definitely worse – the good ship United Kingdom was steered by the claws of the indefatigable, and defiantly milk-snatching, Margaret Thatcher. Everywhere I looked, whether I acknowledged it or not, women were in charge. And yet somehow it appeared to be unthinkable that women should play football, drive buses or sit at the helm of Fortune 500 companies.

Nowadays, most westernised countries – with the exception of The Nightmare States of America (and I think we all know which states within that blessed union are the nightmares) – have had, or currently have, a woman as their head of state, including right here in Bonnie Scotland. Women can be – and both can and do excel at being – CEOs, scientists, professors, soldiers, surgeons, boxers, managers, entrepreneurs, presidents, drug dealers, contract killers, Ghostbusters… well, okay, maybe not that last one, but you get what I mean. Nobody bats an eyelid about women in the workforce these days, whatever their role or standing, and neither should they (nor ever should they have).

While it’s true that seismic progress has been made in the advancement of women’s rights and gender equality here in the secular west over the last hundred or so years, these victories are somewhat over-shadowed by the precarious position women in other cultures and countries still occupy, some of them existing so far down the societal ladder that they’re practically slaves or hostages.  Some of the poor wretches have even been – heaven forfend – married to Donald Trump.

Men, too, have seen their position in society altered. It’s now perfectly acceptable and widely accepted for men to be nurses, mid-wives, carers, flight attendants and stay-at-home parents. I still remember my initial shock upon discovering that my first-born’s key nursery worker was a man. Never underestimate the power of your early programming to spark up a few bolts of discordance in defiance of your intellectual outlook, but, equally, never underestimate the power of your learned and ever-learning mind to have a quiet word – and perchance a few pints – with your inherited preconceptions in some back-bar of your subconscious, resulting in either an amicable accord or your ever-learning mind kicking the ever-loving shit out of your preconceptions. Sometimes in life it’s as important to unlearn as it is to learn.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not some gender militant. Neither am I, in some respects, what you would call excessively progressive. I’m not out to ban gender reveal parties, argue for the removal of ‘mankind’ from the English lexicon, or insist that my sons become proficient at scissoring once they enter adulthood – you know, just in case. While I concede that many of the gender stereotypes my generation was forced to internalise are harmful, retrograde nonsense, I also believe that there are manifold physiological and psychological differences between men and women which should be discussed, understood and accommodated rather than denied, destroyed or suppressed.

And while I wrote this piece here in praise of the first two seasons of Amazon’s quirky yet powerful drama Transparent, I still have a great many questions about transgenderism, and exactly how the many issues it touches upon should be absorbed into and reflected by law.

I think the impulse to welcome babies into the world without gender assignations comes from a good and noble place. As well as being a means to side-step outdated notions, it could also go some way towards removing shame, anguish and hardships from the lives of transgender or intersex people. However, like most things in these polarised times, a heady cocktail of mutated goodwill and an almost fascistic instinct to stifle debate and cudgel dissent (on both sides of the political divide, I may add) tends to transform any discussion of, or attempt to grapple with and understand, these issues into a full-on, balls-out (or indeed balls–off) political knife-fight.

I don’t see why men and women as categories should cease to exist because there are people in the world who don’t fit comfortably into those slots, or who identify with a different gender, or no genders, or have both sets of genitalia. There should be room for all of us in this big old crazy world, whatever we’ve got between our legs.  But that’s a discussion for another day; one I couldn’t do full, fair and proper justice to here (if at all).

Let’s round things off with a tale of a trip I took to some charity shops with my youngest boy, Christopher, a few months ago now, before the Coronavirus was little more than a twinkle in a Chinese bat’s eye.  We were at the toy shelves, and Christopher picked up a pink plastic briefcase. An old woman materialised at my shoulder, looked down at Christopher and said, ‘Ooooh, that’s not fur you, son, that’s fur wee girls, you’re no’ a wee girl.’

‘It’s just pink,’ I said, to an empty, glassy stare from the old woman, who had doubtless found Christmas a cinch when her family were younger, thinking no more deeply about her gift choices than ‘dollies for girls and soldiers for boys’. I’ve got two boys at home. We read just as many bedtime stories about princesses as we do about monsters. They’ve got a toy kitchen. They wear pink T-shirts. They help with the housework. They’re encouraged to talk about their feelings, taught to be gentle and kind (which doesn’t always work, because they routinely batter each other). Welcome to the 21st century. You know what Christopher eventually picked? A toy horse, four Barbie Dolls and a gun. Fuck you, old woman.

And, yes, I admit it, as cool as I am with the breaking down of gender barriers, I was secretly relieved when he rounded out his selection of ‘girly’ toys with a firearm. I guess some of the old programming still holds firm.

If either of my sons ask to wear a dress one day, I’ll have to make sure it’s emblazoned with a picture of a skull, or a dead cat or something. You know. Yin and yang, and all that. Or whatever pronouns you’d prefer instead.

Jamie’s Digest (2): Cool Bits From Books

Whenever I’m reading I always like to highlight phrases and passages that strike a chord with me, either because they’re emotionally or intellectually resonant, or because they’re exceptionally relevant to something that’s happening in the world today. I’d like to continue to share some of the these excerpts with you.

Catholic Tastes

In light of both the ascension of the DUP to the role of king-makers, and Germany’s recent parliamentary vote in favour of legalising gay marriage, I thought the below was exceptionally relevant. It’s an extract from a piece published in a gay newsletter in Southampton the late 1970s by a man named Paul, a volunteer for the Solent Gay switchboard. A copy of the full text (which speaks of his sorrow at the extent of anti-gay discrimination in the country), as well as appearing in the newsletter, was also sent to the Rev. Ian Paisley, Lord Longford and Mary Whitehouse, a trio he felt had lent credence to those who would level violence and abuse at gay people.

Many heterosexuals like to remark that if everyone were homosexual, the human race would come to an end. (The human race would suffer the same fate if the entire male population became Roman Catholic priests, but God in his infinite and unfailing wisdom ensures that only about 5% of us are homosexual and that even fewer are Roman Catholic priests.) In view of the acknowledged importance of sex in perpetuating the human race, it is strange that there are still those who regard it as something shameful, embarrassing or rather awkwardly special.”

Amazon link: Ban This Filth by Ben Thompson (p.347 – 349)

The Bondage of Work

The below extract is for those of us (most of us) who are unlucky enough to work for ‘da man’ in any of his multifarious guises.

Every time you go into your workplace, you leave a democracy and enter a dictatorship. Nowhere else is freedom of speech for the citizens of free societies so curtailed. They can abuse their political leaders in print or on radio, television and the Web as outrageously as they wish, and the secret service will never come for them. They can say that their country’s leader is a lunatic, their police force is composed of sadists and their judiciary is corrupt. Nothing happens, even on those occasions when their allegations are gibberish. The leniency of free societies is only proper. Freedom of speech includes the freedom to spout clap-trap, as regular surfers of the Web know. If employees criticise their employers in public, however, they will face a punishment as hard as a prison sentence, maybe harder: the loss of their career, their pension, and perhaps their means of making a livelihood.”

Amazon link: You Can’t Read This Book by Nick Cohen (p.149)

Mo’ Men, Mo’ Problems

As a humanist an atheist and a secularist (sometimes we all walk into a bar) I’m appalled at the prejudice frequently levelled at my fellow human beings on account of their skin-colour, country of origin or set of beliefs; I’m further appalled by the foreign policy measures and media hyperbole that has inflamed hatred in this country and abroad. However, I’m also appalled at the way in which our freedom to criticise religion, in all of its forms, is slowly being eroded, mostly – it has to be said – through fear: fear of violent reprisals, and also fear of being on the same side of the argument – albeit for vastly different reasons – as the nation’s execrable clan of right-wing racists. That being said, however incompatible I consider organised religion to be with a measured, rational view of the world, and however strongly I may wish mankind to move beyond the infantile and supernatural, it’s always a good idea to seek out differing and (especially) opposing views; to be as well-informed and educated as possible on the history, structure and practice of religions.

Below is an extract about the history of Islam that you may find surprising (or perhaps not).

The emancipation of women was a project dear to the Prophet’s heart. The Quran gave women rights of inheritance and divorce centuries before Western women were afforded such status. The Quran prescribes some degree of segregation and veiling for the Prophet’s wives, but there is nothing in the Quran that requires the veiling of all women or their seclusion in a separate part of the house. These customs were adopted some three or four generations after the Prophet’s death. Muslims at the time were copying the Greek Christians of Byzantium, who had ong veiled and segregated their women in this manner; they also appropriated some of their Christian misogyny. The Quran makes men and women partners before God, with identical duties and responsibilities. The Quran also came to permit polygamy; at a time when Muslims were being killed in the wars against Mecca, and women were left without protectors, men were permitted to have up to four wives provided that they treat them all with absolute equality and show no signs of favouring one rather than the others. The women of the first ummah in Medina took full part in its public life, and some, according to Arab custom, fought alongside the men in battle. They did not seem to have experienced Islam as an oppressive religion , though later, as happened in Christianity, men would hijack the faith and bring it into line with the prevailing patriarchy.”

Amazon Link: Islam – A Short History by Karen Armstrong (p.14)

Brazil Nut

Nemesis – an account of the rise of an ordinary man in one of Rio’s most infamous favelas and his rise to the rank of don of the criminal under(and over)world – is a wonderful book: fast-paced, exciting, shocking, thoughtful, well-written and meticulously researched.

The extracts below give shape to the idea that tackling poverty and inequality through state and welfare policies/spending is not only an essential component of our common humanity, but also makes sound long-term economic sense. Effective social policies and less poverty equals a society that has greater stability, greater contentment, less crime, less unrest and less violence across the board.

After decades of dictatorship and chaotic transition, renewal and optimism were surging out from the federal capital, Brasilia, towards the furthest reaches of the country’s body politic. Whole regions and classes were reviving after a long period of neglect and deprivation. The sudden arrival of a period of prosperity that saw unemployment fall to record levels and personal spending increase significantly is crucial in explaining why Rio was becoming less violent. Young men in the favelas were turning away from weapons and drugs in favour of education and settled employment.”

While China was lauded for pulling some 100 million citizens out of poverty from the mid 1980s, fewer noticed Brazil’s more monumental achievement flowing from [socially democratic political moves and social policies designed to eradicate the chronic, crushing poverty experienced by a significant proportion of Brazil’s citizens). In Brazil, 30-40 million people managed to cross the poverty line. Given the much smaller population of Brazil, this was an even greater feat than the Sino equivalent.

The consequences of this golden era for Brazil’s political personalities were immense. The primary beneficiaries were the poor, not least those who lived in the favelas of the south. This was especially true of Rochina. Its isolation from other favelas and its now well-established tradition as a large market, both for the residents and for those coming from outside looking for a bargain, enabled it to ride the wave of economic confidence with a swagger. This growth spurt offered alternative employment to its younger men and women, and so the drugs trade became a somewhat less attractive career path.”

What was the biggest obstacle to political reform? Well, surprise, surprise: “The vested interests of Brazil’s powerful, if numerically small, economic elite proved deft in constructing numerous barriers.”

Amazon Link: Nemesis by Mischa Glenny

Read books, motherfuckers. Read books.