The word

It takes a supreme effort to do anything that might make me feel sorry for the ghastly Texas governor Rick Perry, but his rival for the Republican nomination Herman Cain has managed it. Apparently Perry’s family once rented a hunting lodge that we will describe as N-----head, so as to spare the blushes of those who dislike the word “nigger”. (And as a mark of my equal opportunities policy when it comes to verbal offensiveness, “Paki”, “yid”, “cracker”, “faggot”, “fuck”, “cunt”, OK?)

Cain, who is black, and made his fortune from unpleasant pizzas, has declared that there is “no more vile, negative word than the N-word” and I can see how an association with the grotesque process of lynching must make it seem that way; but surely such vileness must attach itself to “rope”, “tree”, “torch” and “mob of inbred bigots” as well. And in any case, the Perrys took action to paint over the offensive word where it appeared on the property; although they didn’t do it immediately, and apparently it was still visible under a coat of white paint this summer. So it’s not really racism or insensitivity for which Perry is being hounded, but sloppy editorial protocols. On second thoughts, the guy deserves everything he gets.

The barbarian

I don’t know whether David Starkey is a racist. I doubt very much whether he knows either, because the word has ceased to have any empirical meaning, now being little more than a Humpty-Dumpty term of socio-political abuse (see also “politically correct”). But – probably inadvertently – he has raised another issue, about black culture. Or rather cultures, as his fellow panellist Dreda Say Mitchell argued, rightly pointing out that black British people should not be defined as a group  in terms of second-hand gangsta archetypes.

But if this is the case, that there is no single, homogeneous black culture, surely the same applies to the majority (dominant, mainstream, white, British, Judeo-Christian, whatever you want to call it) culture. Starkey probably wouldn’t wish to be defined by the antics depicted on The Only Way Is Essex. Indeed, I suspect he wouldn’t wish to be defined by comparison with Simon Schama or Niall Ferguson either. And if it’s impossible to define culture at the micro-level of self-publicising TV historians, (What would the collective noun be? A pontification?) then how the hell can you do it on a broader scale? What is white culture, English or British or western culture? It’s everything, and as such is nothing.

While the neds and scallies and oiks and rudies of all colours were smashing windows and burning buildings, it was Dr Starkey who – again by accident – laid waste to culture as we know it.

(Five Chinese Crackers weighs in, with just the right combination of passion and forensics; and you’ve probably already read Charlie Brooker on bling, but anyway. And then Rhodri Marsden on how the above video clip fits into everything. You may be none the wiser, but don’t say you aren’t better informed. PS: And also something about the contribution of urban [non-]planning, by Owen Hatherley. Do I spoil you or what? That said, I might write about something unriotous next time.)

Don’t call me whitey...

I feel a little inhibited about commenting on the news that Professor Alan Gribben has brought out a new edition of Huckleberry Finn with the word “nigger” removed; or that the Canadian Broadcasting Standards Council has banned the Dire Straits song ‘Money For Nothing’ because it includes the word “faggot”. I became even more reticent after the movie critic Roger Ebert was digitally roasted for expressing his opinions on the former controversy. His offence was to tweet that he’d “rather be called a nigger than a slave.” The objection, apparently, is that Ebert “would actually say which word he would rather be called when he will never be called neither [sic].” Actually, if these are the criteria, maybe I am allowed to comment, because I’ve been called a faggot more than once; and I’ve even been called a nigger, although I think my interlocutor on that occasion was trying to call me a nigger-lover, but got a bit lost half-way through an uncharacteristically polysyllabic word.

No, it’s all too sensitive. I don‘t want to get embroiled in this never-ending argument about whether particular words are good or bad or only to be used by qualified individuals with the appropriate genetic makeup. Instead, I’d just like you to consider a scenario. Imagine that a whole load of wise and wonderful scientists and medical workers had announced that they wouldn’t in fact develop and implement vaccination programmes that would save millions of lives; that instead, they’d decided that if they just stopped people from saying those nasty words “smallpox” and “polio”, then everything would turn out OK in the end.

White write

Something I penned for The National, the English-language daily in Abu Dhabi, where I have never been, unless you count the inside of the airport. Still not happy with the ending. But I rarely am.

Getting down to business

If you’ve ever spent any time in Asia – unless you’ve spent your whole time secluded in tourist hotels – you’ll have encountered the squat toilet. Opinion is divided on the merits of the device. Some argue that it is more hygienic, in that the feet are the only part of the body to come into contact with apparatus; and also that the squatting posture is a more natural one for the elimination of food wastes. Others find it very difficult to keep their balance, resulting in all manner of mishaps. Essentially, though, it’s a question of what you’ve become used to; when Mao Zedong visited the Soviet Union, he always insisted on taking a Chinese-style loo with him, which he would have placed on top of the barbaric occidental seat.

Increasingly, at least in premises where foreigners tend to congregate, sit-down, flush toilets are becoming the norm; although it’s also fairly common to have both styles represented in the same set of stalls, which surely is the most helpful and civilised solution in a global, polycultural society.

Well, you’d think that, wouldn’t you? The management of a shopping centre in Rochdale has apparently been advised that some customers from Asian backgrounds might prefer to use squat toilets. And seeing as how they’re in the business of making money by giving the customers a wide choice of goods and services, they decided to install a few squat loos, for those who might want such a thing. You know, a bit like when you couldn’t get organic vegetables in supermarkets, and then some people said “It would be nice if we could get organic vegetables in supermarkets”, and then suddenly you could get organic vegetables in supermarkets, but you could also get non-organic vegetables as well, if you preferred.

Then the Daily Mail got hold of the story. Now, to be fair, they could have really gone to town on this one. Granted, they interview someone from the British Toilet Association, who says he thinks it’s a bad idea, but doesn’t mention that installing squat toilets is rather cheaper than the alternative, so it’s obviously bad news for his members. And they quote the response of Philip Davies, the Conservative rentaquote bell-end MP for Shipley, who, after the Pavlovian bit about political correctness, informs us that “We in Britain are rightly proud of our toilets”, which is just plain weird, and perhaps a little sad.

But it’s only when they throw it open to the readers that things get really silly:

• What happened to western civilisation! I am certainly not interested in his backward money wasting scams.
• Absolutely disgusting that these things should be used in a pubic [sic] place in Britain, may as well squat in the street, yet more of the trend to Islamify Britain.
• You must be joking!? They are welcome to do number ones and number twos here, but don't take our toilets away from us aswell as everything else!! I can't read the Daily Mail whilst squatting down.
• I see, so now we English are not even allowed to sit down on the toilet anymore in case it offends "asians".

And so on. To be fair, there’s an occasional blip of common sense, such as this remark from a reader in Shanghai:

• Great news. Don't British people expect Western toilets wherever they go in the world regardless of the culture of their hosts?

which is immediately red-arrowed into the ground. But that’s the thing about Mail readers. Wherever they go in the world, it’s not actually a foreign country or a foreign culture they’ve arrived in; it’s just a bit of Britain that hasn’t quite got the hang of proper, British civilisation yet, where, with a bit of encouragement and, if necessary, a sound thrashing or two, the natives will eventually learn to speak English, drink sherry, and defecate in a manner that is only right and proper, preferably with the assistance of the Daily Mail.

PS: Just wondering if a branch of this restaurant might appear in Rochdale. Although the seating appears to follow the Mail-approved model.

Dead president

The ANC has expressed its outrage over a painting by Yiull Damaso, depicting Nelson Mandela on the autopsy slab. According to spokesman Jackson Mthembu, the image, based on Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson, is reprehensible on a number of counts:

It is in bad taste, disrespectful, and it is an insult and an affront to values of our society... In African society it is a foreign act of ubuthakathi (bewitch) to kill a living person and this so-called work of art … is also racist. It goes further by violating Tat’ uMandela’s dignity by stripping him naked in the glare of curious onlookers, some of whom have seen their apartheid ideals die before them.

It’s not clear exactly how the painting is racist, especially since its depiction of non-white people in positions of authority significantly improves on Rembrandt’s original. But the allegation of ubuthakathi does raise one tricky question: will the painting suddenly become less problematic when Mandela does actually die? Moreover, Mr Mthembu’s vitriol leaves another matter unaddressed: as is so often the case with supposedly shocking works of art (see the Danish Mohammed cartoons), the picture is really a bit rubbish. The dead Mandela looks more like Morgan Freeman.

And they had the best uniforms

I remarked a few weeks ago on the fact that to many people in Asia, Hitler is simply another figure from history, with little of the bogeyman baggage that he brings in the West; he’s just one more Dead White Male, neither better nor worse than Churchill or Shakespeare or George Washington. Many Indians, it appears, would see nothing odd about the notion of a Bollywood movie called Dear Friend Hitler, dealing with the pragmatic alliance between the Nazis and the controversial Indian nationalist Subhas Chandra Bose, although the actor who was meant to play the Führer seems to have woken up to the fact that there’s something a bit iffy about the whole notion. But Mein Kampf has been selling well in India for years; and when a Mumbai scholar says something along the lines of

I didn’t find the book inspiring at all. It was interesting to read how he coped with his days of struggle, but his ideology of racial purity smacked of racism.

we want him to be more angry, more disgusted. Simple disapproval falls short. I bet Hitler would be mightily miffed to learn that his life’s work only smacked of racism.

But is it possible to be too angry about the Nazis? Forget the bloody football for a moment, and a hundred headlines dredged from the Stan Boardman songbook. Consider instead the people complaining about River Island selling a badge that resembles the Iron Cross; so full of loathing for fascist iconography that they forget that the decoration was first awarded in 1813, when Prussia was engaged in the Napoleonic Wars, when they were on our side. Which surely makes them the good guys, doesn’t it?

Dear Nick Griffin...

Half of my ancestry is of the sort of Anglo-Saxon stock that you revere (possibly with a small dash of Celt, the sort of thing you mention to reinforce the notion that yours is a British rather than English party). The other half is Polish Jewish, a rag-tag bunch that came over in about 1900, economic migrants and asylum seekers.

Should I send my legs back to where they came from?

Class Waugh

I’ve long felt uneasy about my fondness for the writings of Evelyn Waugh, simply because the man was such an utter bastard. I’ve just come across a piece detailing some memos that he wrote when two of his books were being considered for Hollywood adaptation. (Neither happened.)

The first, on Brideshead Revisited, surprises only because it contains so many errors of grammar and spelling. Maybe he didn't take as much care when writing to mere Americans; or maybe his novels had the benefit of a good proof-reader.

But it’s the note about Scoop that’s a real jaw-dropper. On the decision to move the setting of the story from Africa to Europe, he writes:

It is appreciated, however, that this is a question of higher policy involving race relations in the USA and that if, for the moment, niggers may not be treated as the subject for comedy, dagoes must suffice.

And then:

It has lately been demonstrated that cinema audiences do not know whether the films they see are spoken in Italian or English. It is useless to write down to their level. Try to produce a work of art.

Monkey* gone to heaven

I don’t know whether the above cartoon, published in the New York Post earlier this week to much brouhaha, was intended to be racist. As Gawker has pointed out, the artist, Sean Delonas, doesn’t appear to be a particularly sophisticated political thinker, but his peculiar obsession would seem to be homosexuality rather than race.

As with the Danish cartoons controversy (see here and here for previous rumblings), I think the aspect that everyone’s overlooked is that Delonas’s cartoon is completely crap, a far greater crime on my charge sheet than any perceived sociopolitical insensitivity.

He does, however, follow in a glorious tradition of bad, reactionary cartoonists. I have particularly fond childhood memories of leafing through my grandparents’ copies of the Daily Express and enjoying the foam-flecked daubs of the veteran Cummings. Here are a couple of his gems, that make Delonas look like a woolly liberal:





*Although, as the deliciously preposterous Al Sharpton failed to acknowledge, chimpanzees aren’t monkeys.

PS: And, if you really want to see people living up to derogatory ethnic stereotypes, here’s an Irish joke to beat them all.

The bigot in the woodpile

I've written before about the difficulty of reconciling an artist's work and politics, and how it's sometimes necessary to draw a veil over some writers' more rabid asides.

For example, here's that old rogue Jorge Luis Borges, describing the return of the Gods in the parable 'Ragnarök':

It all began with a suspicion (perhaps exaggerated) that the Gods did not know how to talk. Centuries of fell and fugitive life had atrophied the human element in them; the moon of Islam and the cross of Rome had been implacable with these outlaws. Very low foreheads, yellow teeth, stringy mulatto or Chinese moustaches and thick bestial lips showed the degeneracy of the Olympian lineage.

...which isn't exactly an extract from Der Stürmer, but still, it's not really the sort of thing we like to hear nowadays, is it? There's a number of possible responses to this sort of thing. You can excuse it through context: it's a dream sequence; maybe it was translated badly; it's postmodern irony, stupid. Or you can treat it with polite, strained embarrassment, as if JLB were a glum uncle who's had one too many gins and starts mumbling about the blacks and the poofs and how they ought to bring back flogging.

In any case, within the space of a few lines, Borges offers up a sentence of pure, audacious magnificence:

We took out our heavy revolvers (all of a sudden there were revolvers in the dream) and joyfully killed the Gods.

Which is so glorious that it makes everything feel OK again. Doesn't it?

Brothers in rhythm

The next time some plausible bigot starts wielding The Bell Curve or a similarly specious tome to justify, ever so politely, the notion of white racial superiority, I'll just show them this:



followed by this: