What if they gave an election and no-one came? (1)

Remember 1977?

There seemed to be a widespread and genuine enthusiasm for celebrating the Queen's Silver Jubilee. The Queen still looked a little like the pretty girl who had been coronated 25 years earlier; people in their 30s remembered the 1953 celebrations with some affection and wanted to recapture some of that fun and optimism; the avenue from Buck House to Trafalgar Square was genuinely filled with people, only 16 or 17 of whom stood any chance of actually seeing the balcony, and the chants of "We want our Queen!" didn't seem to have been orchestrated. There were also some good movies showing at the Odeon.

It was against this background that groups of young men with spiky noses and safety pins in their hair got banned from the wireless for singing anti-monarchist "pop" songs, which seem to have arisen from a genuinely nihilistic outrage against the whole charade. I don't suppose that being anti-monarchist in 1977 was particularly brave -- no-one was actually going to punch you. But it was at least very slightly non-conformist.

It may be that, after the sordid tale of Charles and Di and the national dementia which followed its pathetic final act, there is a conscious effort to play down the wedding of William and Thingy. (And protocol says that the marriage of the second in line to the throne doesn't count as a State occasion.) But I get the impression that this time around nobody really cares all that much about the wedding. It isn't that we've all suddenly gone anti-monarchist and republican: we just aren't very interested.

Cameron has made a rather ridiculous attempt to get his retaliation in first. He has assumed emergency presidential powers with regard to local council traffic by-laws. "It doesn't matter what local council by laws say: I'm damn well Prime Minister and if you want to hold an outdoor party in the middle of a busy road you can, because I said so, so there." So when it turns out that people stayed away in droves, he'll be able to blame elf and safety, left wing councils, political correctness gone mad. Oh, everyone wanted a street-party, he will say, but the cultural Marxist killjoys needed them to fill out a form, do that they didn't bother. (See also: Christian Good Friday Parades, by Marxist Muslim Health and Safety Committees, Banning Of.)

So the attempts to hold "f**k the royal wedding" parties -- or just to mischeivously weed the garden and pretend the TV coverage isn't happening -- look increasingly pathetic. Small minded. It isn't big. It isn't clever. It's mainstream. You can buy anti-royalist tee shirts in Primark, for goodness sake. I did enjoy the suggestion that people who think that it is really really important that we should have an elected head of state with no power (as opposed to a hereditary heard of state with no power) should, instead of watching the big wedding on the telly, invite their neighbours round for a slice of cake and a cosy chat about constitutional reform. A sort of republican tea-party.

Abolishing the monarchy used to be a great big political idea, argued for vociferously by the far left, yelled about furiously by anarchists, debated about in terms of Way Tyler and Tom Paine. Now it's part of a general, cynical, whining background noise. The leftists, liberals and intellectuals didn't exactly win the argument. They just bored everybody else into submission. It looks very much as if we are going to wake up one morning, say, in 2025 and find that the Royal Family went away five years ago and nobody noticed. Oh, there will still be someone with the title "King of England" but that title will only be meaningful to a handful of fellow eccentrics. The same thing has, I think, already happened to the great big arguments about the separation of Church and State. King William V may very well be given a piece of paper that says he is supreme governor of the Church of England. He may keep it in a drawer and bring it out at parties, or have it framed and hang it in the loo. But no-one will know or care because the Church of England will have long since stopped mattering, and I will no longer have any excuse to use the word antidisestablishmentarianism. The people who argue that because 0.04% of the members of the House of Lords are Anglican bishops, England is a theocracy on a level with Iran already look ridiculous, fighting a war which ended a hundred years ago. 0.04% of bugger-all is bugger-all.

This doesn't mean that I don't retain a nostalgic affection for the Queen. And it doesn't mean that I don't find these new anti-monarchists incredibly smug and irritating. "Look at me, putting forward a mainstream point of view! How incredibly daring of me!" But I always found the keen Royal Family fans incredibly irritating as well. Why can't I be a nonconformist like everybody else?

continues

Nothing to see here.

You really need to read this page and also this one . I have got into the habit of responding to evil lying tabloid pondscum and evil lying political pondscum through a mixture of smugness and sarcasm, but there really is a need for this kind of rage as well. We are the men of England and we have not punched you in the face yet. And we're probably not going to because we probably can't be bothered, but it's the thought which counts.


No interest whatsoever in the Archers, but the Bellowhead theme is straight in at number 5 in the "unofficial national anthem" stakes.


I realise everybody else within a vague interest in Americana knew this already, but I didn't. The words are religious, you see, but the tune is oddly familiar....





Obviously, stealing tunes is what folk singers do, by definition, but hearing this makes me admire Mr Guthrie even more than I did before.

Which reminds me: came across this in the Joe Klein biography (quite the most depressing book I have ever read, in a good way):

"The national debit is one thing I caint figger out. I heard a senator on a radeo a-saying that we owed somebody 15 jillion dollars. I don't know their name but I remember the price. Called it the national debit. If the nation is the government and the government is the people, then I guess that means the people owes the people, that means I owe me and you owe you, and I forget the regular fee, but if I owe myself something, I would be willing to just call it off rather than have senators argue about it, and I know you would do the same thing and then we wouldn't have no national debit." (Woody Sez newspaper column, c 1939.)

A Compleat Guide To Political Correctness

(i thunked some peoples might like to have linkification to all 27 sections, because order reverse in them indexes blogger)

Homosexual Frogs
 
Homosexual Frogs 1

Homosexual Frogs 2

Homosexual Frogs 3

Homosexual Frogs 4

Homosexual Frogs 5

Homosexual Frogs 6



Little Baby Jesus



MELANIE PHILLIPS

Melanie Phillips - 1

Melanie Phillips - 2

Melanie Phillips - 3

Melanie Phillips - 4

Melanie Phillips - 5


Facebook Traincrash Thread Post-Mortem


DAILY MAIL

FUCK

JOKE

NUT

LOVELY

BUTTON

ELF

MAWWIDGE

PREACHER

ONCE UPON A TIME

FIDO

ARMAGEDDON

NORMAL

A Moving Picture of Some Men Telling Jokes

I posted this because I saw it on the telly and thought it was funny and thought that some people who maybe hadn't seen it on the tell would also find it funny.

An Excerpt From A Longer Moving Picture

A Moving Picture

A Moving Picture, Accompanying A Man Singing A Song

A Moving Picture

A Moving Picture

NORMAL

There is such a thing as nudity: either I have some clothes on, or I don't.

However, we might also say that there is a concept of nudity where there isn't particularly a concept of cardiganlessness or hatlessness. If I were writing this article with no hat, or no shoes, or in my shorts, you wouldn't be very surprised and might wonder why I mentioned it. If I were writing it in the nude, you would be amused or surprised or shocked, as indeed would the other customers in Cafe Kino.

The line between "nude" and "not nude" is quite curious: you can watch athletes in very small swimming trunks on daytime television, but if that one piece of clothing was removed, it would become shocking and X-Rated. And it isn't merely about what parts of the body are showing: a lady who runs across a football field with no clothes on at all is doing something amusingly naughty and outrageous: a man who left all his clothes on and exposed his penis would be doing something really quite sordid and disgusting. Although if either of them left on all their clothes but exposed their bottoms, you would probably take it as a harmless comic insult.

And this "concept" may very well change over time: it looks a lot like previous ages would have used "naked" to mean "having removed some of his clothes" (naked being the past participle of the verb "to nake", to strip or to peel). Quite disappointingly, when we read that William Blake and his wife sometimes took afternoon tea "naked" (and implicitly challenged their visitors to complain) it may mean no more than "in their underwear". And Victorian underwear was probably a good deal more modest than the clothes modern people wear in a mixed public gym. (When we read that Victorian miners and factory workers went naked, I think it probably means "when it got hot, they took their shirts off.")

So. If I said "I wish to abolish the very concept of nakedness" you might take it two ways.

You might think that I wished to put an end to clothessness and make a law that people keep their knickers on in the shower.

Or you might think that I wanted to change people's way of thinking, get rid of the special status of "being naked" and instead just think that at certain times people wear a lot of clothing, and at other times, very little. If I arrived at the pool to find that I'd left my swimmers at home, and said "Oh I'll manage without them for today" you wouldn't pay any more attention than if I answered the door to the postman with no shoes or socks on. It could happen. In my lifetime, it seemed funny or indecent or actually illegal for a mother to breastfeed her baby in a public place. Now, we literally don't notice.

I think that when Melanie Phillips talks about "normal" sexuality she means "heterosexuality". Being straight is normal; being gay is not. When she says that The Secret Masters of the World want to destroy "normal" sexuality, she intends her readers to infer "to stop people being heterosexual and force them to join The Gay".

However, when someone says "You're mental. Gays don't want to force anyone else to be gay: they just want ignorant arseholes like you to leave them alone" she shifts her ground and points out that some sexual radicals argue that "normality" is not a useful concept when talking about the wide gamut of human sexual behaviour. We've always suspected that a lot of weird stuff goes on in the average bedroom, to say nothing of the average mind; the Internet has decisively shown us that we were right. So wouldn't it be better to divide sexual behaviour, not into "normal" and "abnormal" but into, say consensual and the non-consensual, the safe and the not so safe, the advisable and the inadvisable.

"There you are." she replies "Some people really do want to destroy the concept of normal sexuality. They have said so. Har-har, Guardian readers are silly, Obama is a commie." 

Richard Littlejohn, another Mail columnist who combines the social attitudes of Melanie Phillips with the subtlety of Jeremy Clarkson, was outraged at the compulsory (i.e optional) gay lesson plans that were put out for Lesbians and Gay history week. 

"And why a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender month, anyway?" he frothed "Why not a Foot Fetishists, Spankers, Sadists and Masochists History Month?" 

I think he was doing the same thing that Mel was doing when she didn't say that homosexuals were on a moral par with people who practice bestiality. Setting up a link in his readers' minds between homosexuality and "weird" sexual behaviour. Implying that homosexuality is something kinky, something sordid : at best a rather eccentric hobby or quirk, at worst a disgusting perversion.

But the more I think, the more I ask myself: why not a foot fetishists spankers and sado-masochists history month?  

Could there have been a society in which people defined their identity by what they did, not who they did it with ? There have certainly been societies where it is quite okay and normal for a man to sexually penetrate another man, but very weird and shameful for a man to allow another man to sexually penetrate him.

A while back, Stonewall ran a poster campaign which said "Some people are gay. Get over it." At the time, I thought this was admirably clear message, in admirably clear anglo-saxon words. But I now think that that kind of language takes the puritans and theocrats too much on their own terms.

I think it should have said: 

"Some people are more gay than others. Some people are a bit gay, some people are very gay, some people are not at all gay. Some men think that Michelangelo's David is a thing of beauty; some men would quite like Orlando Bloom to do a nude scene. Some men go to bed with other men. Some men are into foot fetishism, spanking and sadomasochism. And some men, more than you'd think, would honestly rather stay home with a cup of tea and boxed set of classic Doctor Who. And the women as well, of course; neither me nor Queen Victoria wants to even think about what they get up to. And it's all normal. And none of it matters. And none of it's any of your business. Get over it."

I'm done.