I was reading a half interesting post on Jerry Coyne’s fine and prolific blog, ‘Why Evolution is True‘, regarding the seasonal mating habits of the British. In the comments, someone posted a link to a humorous song called ‘I’m British‘. I mentioned in passing that this should be the UK’s National Anthem and this led to another poster offering his own contender for the honour: It was the wonderful Julia Hills singing ‘Being British‘ (from the brilliant UK TV comedy series ‘Who Dares Wins‘ which ran from 1983 to 1988).
Following the link brought back a few memories, so over a cup of tea, I had a thunk about my own contenders for this Sceptered Isle riven by an ever-growing gap between rich and poor, the powerful and the powerless.
I came up with two.
The first is a rant by London cabbie, Chunky Mark (Mark McGowan) that was put to music around the time of the Labour leadership election (I posted it then, under the title, ‘The Most Dangerous Man in Britain‘).
The second is from Luck & Flaw’s inimitable ‘Spitting Image‘ on the eve of the ’87 election. It is the final sketch before the outro. I remember being in a room full of twenty or so people. As the credits rolled, we all knew what the next five years would bring. Everyone was silent. All had tears in their eye’s.
A collection of various UK press articles from 2007 to 2015 concerning Cameron’s flood defence cuts (2) and the belief that Yahweh has frowned upon Cumbrian Homosexuality and UK Gay Marriage in particular (7).
5 Nov 2014 – Half of Britain’s flood defences are at risk because of funding cuts but the … to inform homeowners living nearby, the National Audit Office has said. … TheGovernment made an extra £270 million available following the … Related Articles …up with the increased risk of flooding in the face of climate change.
1 Jul 2007 – The Rt Rev Graham Dow, the Bishop of Carlisle, has shocked the liberal …and death across the UK were caused by God after he was provoked by the …Homophobic mother slammed for branding school’s LGBT week ‘filth’ …
21 Jan 2014 – Dean Burnett: Claims that same-sex marriage cause severe floods may have … that a lot of people don’t like homosexuals for no logical reason.
5 Feb 2014 – Councillor who said floods were caused by gay marriage is expelled from UKIP after saying homosexuals should ‘repent’ … Bishop of Carlisle, argued that thefloods that year were a judgment on society’s moral decadence …
Yes, floods were caused by homosexuality.Bishop confirms. … The Rt Rev Graham Dow, Bishop of Carlisle, argued that the floods are not just a result of a lack of …
5 Feb 2014 – The Ukip councillor who blamed Britain’s storms and floods on same-sex marriage has been expelled … Mr Silvester deepened the rift over homosexualmarriage and floods by calling on gays “to repent”. … Related Articles.
2 Jul 2007 – Bishop of Carlisle: Floods are judgment on society. The Bishop said pro-gay laws were to blame for the floods. One diocesan bishop has even …
We have been told that in future we should call our naughty neighbours in Islamic State by the Arabic acronym, Daesh, (pronounced Day-esh, Die-esh, Dee-ish, Dish, Daysh or Dash) which, apparently translates to ‘Islamic State’.
I initially thought that this was by way of our politicians trying to sound cool, hip and down with the kids in that embarrassing way your father might use the phrase Bro’, or the dreaded ‘Hey, my Nigga!’ upon being introduced to a friend of yours. I was wrong. It would appear that this is simply because the Arab acronym sounds similar to the abusive Arabic term, ‘Daes’, meaning ‘one who crushes something underfoot’, or even the unbelievably more derogatory, ‘Dahes’, which translates as ‘one who sows discord’.
Sticks and Stones…
Seemingly, this word is absolutely hated by IS in the same way that a past classmate of mine, Jimmy Tusser, hated the mean-spirited pronunciation of his surname. It must drive them mad – it certainly drove young Jimmy mad: he became a loner and a compulsive eater. Selling his mother’s house in Anfield, Liverpool 4, he emigrated to New Zealand along with the final insult of having to pay for two seats due to his obese size.
No doubt the Kiwi’s at immigration – known for their wit – immediately added insult to injury upon his landing.
Sometimes, sadly, shit sticks and you never hear the last of it – how long has it been since Mohammed looked lovingly into Aisha’s dreamy little eye’s?
He was a touchy kid – Jimmy, that is, not Mohammed – and I feel an element of guilt in the abuse he received. Words, after all, hold considerable power. It was bullying, pure and simple. There is no other description for it.
Terrible Suffering
Still, it is with this in mind that I hold some considerable sympathy with the government in its attempts to upset or hurt ISIS by calling them names. Let’s face it, as Fat Jimmy Tosser has shown, it works. One only has to look at the pain and hurt sustained by poor Simon Danczuk, Labour MP for Rochdale, who, I imagine, has suffered terribly over the last few days following his voting record on the precision bombing of people standing next to Syrian children. How hard must it be to be the constant target of words such as wanker, twat, arsehole, gobshite, loser and cunt, particularly when they’re true?
Bullying can be a powerful weapon in the hands of the righteous, especially when we see just how touchy our ISIL opponents seem to be. This sensitivity, in my opinion, shows a real weakness in their armour – let’s face it, it’s hardly wounding to be called ‘one who crushes something underfoot’, is it? I could do better than that without a moment’s thought – how about ‘one who wears little girls pink knickers’? See how easy this is.
Victory Imminent
This weaponisation of bullying – something that the Tory party are supposedly particularly adept at – needs to be given a bit more thought if it’s to help in the now nearly almost imminent victory in the War on Terror. The good thing is we don’t have to rely on the Old Etoninians, here – with the power of the internet and social media we can all do our bit, even in the most critical of Terror alerts: I’ve just thrown ‘Pack of fucking Kiddie Fiddlers’ into my online Arabic translation app’ and have come up with a surefire Brimstone missile for our War of the Words: “الاستغلال الجنسي للأطفال”. Yeah, see, take that, Islamic State/ISIS/ISIL/Daesh/IS.
Admittedly I’m still struggling with the pronunciation.
We really ought to let these Jihadis know that once the Forces of Light have gathered, and the ground war starts, prisoners can expect to be given wedgies, Chinese burns, held against hot radiators, and to be picked last for the footie during P.E. – only to end up in goal.
The gloves are finally off.
Anvil Springstien.
Added Bonus Content:
Free MI5 ‘Terror Alert’ Status as of 23.47 05/11/2015
The wonderful ‘Pride’s Purge’ (Tom Pride’s blog) has a really interesting video interview
with ex Isis hostage, French journalist Nicolas Henin. Henin spent 10 months in Syria in the company of Isis and says the West bombing them is what they want:
Today, of all days, as the British parliament debates and votes on the bombing of Syria, and as David Cameron disgracefully implies that anyone who votes against the bombing is a ‘terrorist sympathiser‘, the interview below should be watched and shared as much as possible:
[The Screen-Grab – above right – is a link to Tom’s blog which I thoroughly recommend you visit and follow. I’ve reproduced the video in its entirety below.]
Out of Our Cinema’s, Out of Our Schools, Out of Our Bedrooms and Out of Our Government
The Church of England is ‘astonished (…) disappointed and bewildered’ at what they see as a ‘plain silly’ decision to not screen their ‘Lord’s Prayer’ cinema advert in the UK. They had hoped for the 60 second advert (video below) to be playing in UK cinemas prior to the holiday screenings of Star Wars. The advert features a montage of everyday people – a grieving son at a grave, a cop, gym users, a farmer, street preachers, a gospel choir – all speaking or singing ‘The Lord’s Prayer’ and ending with the slogan, ‘Prayer is for Everyone’. This is followed by the hashtag, #JustPray.
Well, patently ‘prayer’ isn’t quite for everyone. Certainly not the Digital Cinema Media (DCM) agency who handle advertising for the UK’s largest cinema chains. They released a statement saying it was the policy of the agency ‘not to accept advertising that was of a political or religious nature’, adding that they understood that some people may be offended by religious adverts if they were of another faith, or no faith at all.
Astonishing
Astonishing isn’t it, that the Church of England doesn’t understand in any way shape or form that this might be the case? After all, most polls show that church attendance is hovering around the 10% mark for the UK (for comparison I recall it being 39% for the States and 7% for Australia) and has a history of dropping around 1% per year. We are, for the most part, a gratefully faithless nation. I should add that pollsters are traditionally wary of figures regarding any country’s religiosity and feel uncomfortable stating a normal margin of error here, as when questioned about religious activity, people of faith (and here you may read ‘Christians’) are apt to lie.
Disappointing
Disappointing too, that Christians cannot see that people of ‘no faith at all’ tend to view faith as simply an excuse to believe absurdities without evidence. Faith is, of course, a recent phenomenon for the religious: In the past this virtue was entirely unnecessary as Gods of various persuasions and their acolytes would regularly part seas, flood planets, tear moons asunder, destroy whole cities, kill children at the drop of a hat, demand human sacrifice, fly winged horses, use teenage virgins vaginas as Star-Gates, and bring lots of the dead back to life as Zombies. Faith was simply not required. You just had to open your front door and there’d be a God out there doing Godly things.
Kids today would have loved it back then: it would have been like living in a Marvel Comic. I often wonder if they had baseball-type cards? Perhaps made from papyrus, mud or clay?
‘I’ve got ‘Pillar of Salt’ twice, swap you for ‘A Laughing Rock’, a ‘Talking Snake’ or ‘Uzziah Struck with Leprosy…’.
Following the Silence of the Gods which occurred around the time of the run-up to The Enlightenment, god-botherers of all persuasions began to pretend, in the absence of overt godly action, that their Gods would now speak to them personally and in private. When questioned as to said gods accent, choice of language, received pronunciation and the like, the faithful would mumble something about hearing their god via a ‘warm fuzzy feeling in the region of the groin’.
Bewildering
Bewildering in the extreme, isn’t it, to imagine that the 90% of us who have never felt the warmth of the Lord’s breath bellowing in our underpants, or have ever visited a church or mosque to converse with an imaginary deity, would want to begin a family evening in the company of our favourite cinematic characters with a Call to Prayer? Star Wars has more than enough fictional characters for one night, thank you.
It should be obvious from the figures above that very few of us have little desire to watch an advert – of whatever persuasion – that seeks to sell us a piece of bronze-age or medieval juju. Yet unbelievably, in this land chock full of Heathens and Infidels, our government demands that this happen every morning via collective worship in our nation’s schools. Perhaps in this neo-liberal age we should consider outsourcing our educational policy to much wiser folk? The good people at Digital Cinema Media should put in a quote – they’d certainly get my vote.
Plain Silly
Plain silly then, to encourage the religious further by urging them to open an ever growing number of religious schools, act as a proxy of the state whilst discriminating against same-sex marriage (their Gods apparently hate the pee-pee thing being anywhere near the poo-poo thing), or worse still, allowing 26 of the buggers to sit and vote in the UK’s second chamber – The House of Lords – as representatives of an established religion – something we have in common with, er… hold on, I wrote this down somewhere? Ah, yes, there it is… Iran.
Don’t get me wrong, I have some sympathy for the culturally religious. They, like I, did not choose the religion of the meaty hole they fell through at birth – no-one is faced with a multiple-choice at this juncture. There aren’t a number of holes, each with a label above – just one. It could be a Catholic hole, a Sikh hole, a Seventh Day Adventist hole. If you’re really unlucky, it could be a Mormon hole – or worse still, a Chelsea hole!
Whatever the hole, it remains purely a circumstance of birth. An event that marks us, Cain-like, until our passing into the much larger grand hole of infinity.
However, But, Some of My Best Freinds etc’
It is difficult enough, then, to shake off these social identifiers that have travelled with us through so much of our lives – no more so than when these identifiers are challenged forcefully from outside. The tendency to become defensive when confronted by physical or intellectual attack is understandable. It is hard to have a finger pointed at you, or a fist waved at you, as is the case presently with the Muslim community – a community who, for the most part, have nothing to do with the violence perpetrated in their name.
However, it must be said – so it might as well be me that says it – the actions of Islamist fundamentalists have nothing to do with cultural or moderate Muslims in the same way that cultural or moderate Christians have nothing to do with the recent American-funded campaign calling for the imposition of the death penalty for homosexuality in Uganda, or the actions of the literalists of Westboro Baptist Church, or Settler violence on the West Bank has to do with cultural or moderate Jews – yet the common denominator, the elephant in the room, the one factor that allows literalist movement along the spectrum from cultural, to moderate, to conservative, to fundamentalist, to murdering psychopathic gobshite – be it Christian, Jewish or Muslim, is the unquestioned and unevidenced belief in absolute nonsense – this relatively new fad of the religious, this thing called faith.
With this in mind is it wrong to ask the religious that they attack their texts with the zeal of a Thomas Jefferson, tearing away the nonsense until they are left with little more than the Golden Rule? Or, indeed to express at least surprise, or even mild anger, that they would be astonished, disappointed and bewildered, or see as plain silly, an objection to their missionary call to join them in talking to an imaginary man in a cinema. To join them in Faith.
Following the Paris attacks, the hashtag #PrayForParis began trending and was given prominence by the world’s press. The pious seemingly oblivious to the bad taste felt in the mouths of the godless by the untimely mention of any God. Joann Sfar, one of the surviving Charlie Hebdo cartoonists, responded to the hashtag with the following:
“Friends from the whole world, thank you for #prayforparis, but we don’t need more religion,”
Joann is right. Not only do we not need it, it would appear that most of us don’t want it, either. Please take it out of our cinema’s, out of our schools, out of our bedrooms and out of our government
Well done to Digital Cinema Media for standing their ground against such nonsense. May the Force be with them – along with music, kisses, life, champagne and joy.
We have been told that in future we should call our naughty neighbours in Islamic State by the Arabic acronym, Daesh, (pronounced Day-esh, Die-esh, Dee-ish, Dish, Daysh or Dash) which, apparently translates to ‘Islamic State’.
They had hoped for the 60 second advert (video below) to be playing in UK cinemas prior to the holiday screenings of Star Wars. The advert features a montage of everyday people – a grieving son at a grave, a cop, gym users, a farmer, street preachers, a gospel choir – all speaking or singing ‘The Lord’s Prayer’ and ending with the slogan, ‘Prayer is for Everyone’. This is followed by the hashtag, #JustPray.
meVolution 