Jerusalem

And do I blog re. modern times
A way that I might vent some spleen
And do I write about these clods
Because it’s so fun to be mean

And did the bank your loan decline
Even though you can’t pay your bills
And stupid stars must we revere
You realise they have no skills

Our TV's bad it's getting old
Jeremy Kyle is truly dire
This fat chav a sight to behold
Was not just poor but a liar

I will not cease my blogging plight
Nor shall my rhymes be very grand
‘Til I have tried offending all
In England’s green and pleasant land
‘Til I have tried offending all
In England’s green and pleasant land

one last eviction

‘It looks like she ruined a very lucrative career.’ These are the words of celebrity publicist and all-round manipulative sleezeball, Max Clifford, following Jade Goody’s eviction from the Celebrity Big Brother house in January 2007. True enough, after receiving 82% of the public vote, it seemed that Jade’s status as lifestyle guru, perfume magnate and critically acclaimed autobiographer had come to an abrupt end. And perhaps rightly so. After all, there was the whole matter of her obscenely inappropriate and deeply ignorant conduct in calling a fellow housemate of Indian extraction a ‘Poppadom’. But not to fear, she’s got cancer. And if there’s one thing that eclipses all previous sin in the eyes of the public, it’s a terminal disease. Well played, Jade!

I am not denying that it is tremendously sad for a young wife and mother to lose her life. Indeed, only an obscenely inappropriate and deeply ignorant person would do that (ring any bells?) But what I am also not denying is this woman’s past. ‘The past is the past!’ I hear you yell. Well yes…but…fuck off! I want to rant.

First things first, what is it that she is actually famous for? I, like most of the country, had completely forgotten how the Goody-phenomena began. However a quick search on Wikipedia reminded me that she was initially brought to the public’s attention for being incredibly thick.

Now I’m no snob. I realise that not everyone knows that Cambridge is not in London, or that East Anglia is not a separate country. Or that Saddam Hussein was not a boxer. He does sound like a boxer. But you have to be pretty special in the head when you come up with the line: ‘I had my first birthday when I was one’. Seriously?! There are home-schooled four year-olds with webbed toes in the deepest recesses of South Carolina that would be able to point out the pointlessness of that sentence.

Clearly we are not averse to granting celebrity status on the unintelligent in this country, but Jade Goody is in an entirely different league to your average moronic pop singer or drooling, stripper-beating footballer. As she herself states: ‘I am intelligent, but I let myself down because I can't speak properly or spell’. Brilliant.

Following her original appearance on Big Brother, she utilised her status as a symbol of the chav-culture that was (and unfortunately still is) spreading across Britain like an ever-increasing spew of Burberry vomit, by writing in such quality publications as Heat and OK! as well as launching her own fragrance, Shh…Jade Goody. If only.

However, the tawdry call of reality TV was not far away, and in 2007, she was once again shoved in front of the public eye, like so many images of downtown Basra, only less attractive. This time around she was accompanied by two other polished turds; her mother Jackiey Budden and her boyfriend, Jack Tweed, both of whom only served to explain how a specimen like Goody could have blended into society prior to her primary public appearance. And it was here that she demonstrated the thoroughly unfunny side to being poorly cultured and dangerously thick. Who would've thought?

I’m not going to go into detail about her conduct on Celebrity Big Brother; we all know about the racism scandal and the subsequent shit-storm it caused. But it is this moment of Goody’s life, or at least her public life, that most clearly exemplifies my point. She is, to put it plainly, a nasty piece of work. The sort of person that anyone within the civilised world would look upon with nothing but utter disdain. Therefore why should we immediately feel sorry for her now that she has cancer? Would we feel sorry for Joseph Goebbels if he was diagnosed with a terminal disease? After all, he had children (a lot). He had access to a public medium (several). And he perpetuated prejudice and the supposed differences dictated by people’s race. ‘Ahh, poor old Joey G. That’s such a tragedy. Imagine what he could have done if he had another twenty years. Let’s give him a million quid.’

Admittedly, comparing Jade Goody to Joseph Goebbels is a slight stretch (although their initials are the same; coincidence? Almost certainly). Nevertheless the point remains just as valid. She displayed a belief that a person could be labelled by her racial creed and utilised this to refer to her derogatorily. It is people as ignorant and insecure as her that justify the existence of parties such as the ever-tolerant England First Party. And we all know how lovely they are.

Ironically enough it was The Sun, the paper that now uses its pages to canonise the woman, that best summed up this episode in the celebrity’s life: ‘Jade Goody went into the Big Brother house appearing to be simply a fun-loving working-class girl canny enough to have made millions from her 15 minutes of fame. It was all a meticulously manufactured lie. She has left the house with her true personality laid bare - a vile, pig-ignorant, racist bully consumed by envy of a woman of superior intelligence, beauty and class.’

And now she’s dying. And everyone’s really sad. Yep, it is truly tragic that we will never again marvel at her divine beauty on our screens. Or that we’re unlikely to ever sample her new fragrance, which was genuinely to be called Controversial (presumably making light of her ‘cheeky’ racial slurring). Or that there’ll never be a follow up to Jade: My Autobiography (though I wouldn’t put it past her). Oh, wait. I’ve just read that she did release another one in October last year: Jade: Catch a Falling Star. Jesus Christ.

As already stated, I’m not saying that it’s fair that Jade Goody should be taken from this earth at the age of 27. What I am trying to convey is that the British public’s reaction to the news is perhaps a tad over the top, especially when taking into account her previous actions. However they've disproved Clifford; her bigoted bullying would not appear to have ended her money-making one bit. Well thank Vishnu for that!

Maybe it's time to turn the cameras off? Maybe, just maybe, they should never have been turned on?

I’ll leave you with this final thought: 80% of the population of India are Hindu. Karma’s a bitch.

barking bulldogs

Whilst relatively pleased with my previous blog entry (that is ‘relatively’ in comparison with my only other blog entry), I was concerned that it might be construed as a fascistic tirade about Britain’s journey to the dogs, as one might find between the pages of moron-rags such as the Mail and Express. Although I was clearly implying societal decline within my rant, I want to make it absolutely clear that it should in no way be read with any nationalistic sentiments in mind. In fact, if you are reading this and would consider yourself to be strongly right wing, I would like you to stop reading this, log off your computer and re-evaluate your life and the damage you are doing.

I, personally, couldn’t be less right wing. I am nothing if not a liberal. And a liberal in the true sense (verging on libertarian); people should just do what they want as long as it doesn’t harm other people. It’s as simple as that. Admittedly the http address listed above would suggest otherwise, but trust me; I’m not a Nazi. I just like to moan.

Whether you believe me or not, I would still like to utilise this entry to demonstrate my political centrality and absolute abhorrence of anything nationalistic. ‘How best to do this?’ I hear myself ask. Well, ‘luckily’ enough, I work for a department of the UK Parliament, which, in addition to allowing me to rant randomly on the internet instead of working, meant that this morning I was thrown into contact with some colourful chaps known as the England First Party. Whilst the context of my dealings with them was firmly within the wearisome realm of their financial accounts, I couldn’t help but read up on the party, in order to find out what it was that these accounts were in aid of. Naturally, I was prepared to read that they were a political faction perhaps more inclined towards shaven heads and Holocaust denial than the average balanced individual. However I was nowhere near ready for their ill-founded beliefs, policies that can, at best, be described as ‘deranged’, and overall unpleasantness.

At the top of the homepage of the England First Party is the ‘definition’ of racism. Set out as if lifted directly from the OCD, we are told that the word ‘racism’ actually means ‘The mechanism by which white society is to be stripped of its capacity to defend itself against the genocide of multi-racialism’. Uh-huh. Do, go on. 'When a civilization no longer has the stomach to fight for its existence, and views its own self defence as unwarranted aggression, it has signed its own death warrant'. I see…

Simply put, this party is mad. What’s more, these lunatics have pre-empted most people’s concern that they might be a racist party by completely redefining the word; ‘No, we’re not racist. It’s the blacks who are racist’. Quite.

Nevertheless, it is their 12-point manifesto that really raises the loony stakes. The first two policies of repatriation of all immigrants and the death penalty for murder would not look out of place in the manifestos of most extremist parties or, indeed, the private ramblings of some Tory back-benchers. But rule number 3 of restoring ‘the gibbet, stocks and whipping post for serious violent offenders, paedophiles, sex pests and drug dealers’, surely raises some alarm bells. Treating crimes with inhumane violence? I could be wrong, but didn’t they decide that was a bollocks idea over a century ago? Plus, I don’t know what a ‘sex pest’ is exactly, but I’m guessing some of them are going to prefer a whipping.

With regards to education, these dangerously-fanatical tosspots would like to teach the ‘Aryan histories of Western Europe’ along with ‘sexual abstinence’ to the youth of England; a combination that surely would produce the most ill-informed and dull race of people on the planet. Good luck trying to explain the increase in blond-haired, blue-eyed children twelve hundred years ago without contradicting one of those!


Game: guess what links these three?

(Hint: it's not that they're all ugly)


Point 6 of ending ‘all forms of animal cruelty’, initially sounds like a good policy; almost cutely fascist. Like Mussolini in bunny slippers. However, read on and you find that this includes the ‘barbaric’ methods of killing animals employed by the Muslim and Jewish faiths. Indeed, the England First Party wishes to abolish the Islamic faith altogether. And, if that wasn’t enough, they wish to demolish all mosques! Presumably so the people that remain in this ‘New England’ don’t get turned on by their giant boob-shaped domes and there aren’t enough stocks to put them in.

The remainder of the manifesto lists such really sane policies as compulsory hard labor for the unemployed, the ‘bringing to justice of all politicians guilty of treason against the people of England’ (not cashing-in on the current political climate, you understand) and, I’m not making this up, the encouragement of ‘our women folk…to concentrate their time and energies on caring for their home and families.’ See what I mean? Bonkers.

Aside from perpetuating this bigoted twaddle, the website also provides a merchandise section which offers badges depicting certain English emblems, posters of various Aryan art and books written by individuals who were not an uncommon appearance in 1940s Nuremberg.

It truly boggles the mind to think that there are people living in Britain today that have such antiquated and harmful convictions. That some humans existing at this very moment have more ignorant views than those of thousands of years ago. Ironically enough, it is usually these misguided and angry individuals that commit the violent crimes that they would so severely punish. One piece of prejudicial memorabilia the England First Party offers is a bumper sticker depicting a bull dog and the maxim: ‘Too fast to live! Too young to die!’ I wonder if that’ll be their excuse when they are lead to the gallows?

In conclusion, I’m not a nationalist. Nor am I mad. Although the two, I think, are often linked.

what's it all about?

This, the tagline to the 1966 cult movie (as well as the 2004 cock-up remake) Alfie, begged the audience at its conclusion to consider the overarching themes behind the meaning of existence. What is it we're doing here?

This week, a different Alfie has prompted members of the British public to examine some of the deeper ethical aspects of the world. Namely, what the hell is it all coming to when a child becomes a father at the age of 13?!

The redtops published the story of young Alfie Patten, the UK’s latest evidence for the accuracy of Revelations, last Friday, stating that the ‘baby-faced boy’ became the father of ‘7lb 3oz Masie Roxanne’ after he and his 15 year old girlfriend, Chantelle, ‘decided against an abortion after discovering she was pregnant’. Whilst my initial reaction to reading this story was to empty the contents of my stomach all over St. James’ Park tube, I was slightly relieved to hear that they had at least thought about the decision first. ‘Decided against an abortion’! This boy, who’s barely old enough to sit in the front passenger seat, sat down with his orang-utan girlfriend and discussed the pros and cons of embryo termination, did he? I’d find that easier to believe if I thought that either of these two could spell ‘abortion’.

Naturally, this raised the standard irate disgust and calls for decency that are usually perpetuated by such stories, with the ever publicly-savvy David Cameron latching on to the indignation, claiming that it raised ‘worrying’ questions about modern society. How perceptive.

The story was allowed to fester over the weekend, only to have it explode back all over the press this morning, when it was revealed that several other ‘young men’ have claimed paternity of the baby. In fact, according to the Daily Mail, there is said to be six other contenders for the crown of Britain’s Biggest Fuck-up. One of them, the 16 year old trainee-chef Richard Goodsell, who looks like a cross between rugby ball and a bulldog’s arse, has said that everyone thinks that he is the father, even his mother, who, incidentally, provided the bulldog facets to her son’s unique aesthetic.

The other front runner for Daddy Drool is 14 year old Tyler Barker, who is said to be ‘really worried’ that he might be the father. I’m not surprised. Apart from the fact that he would be forced to raise a child that, thanks to her morally devoid relatives and the tabloid press, has absolutely no chance of being normal, he would also have to spend more time with the baby’s mother. Judging by the less than flattering photographs that have accompanied the plethora of articles in recent days, that single night of passion with Chantelle the Wonder-Slut would have been enough for any man, whether he shaves or not.

Meanwhile, what does this mean for our young hero, Alfie? The Telegraph reported that the schoolboy was ‘distraught’ by the possibility that the baby was not his. Interesting thought when you consider young Tyler’s response to the situation. Presumably Alfie is enjoying those rather tasty tabloid cheques that have been arriving in the post since last week. Ten grand before you’ve even opened the Frosties in the morning is not bad going. Besides, he needn’t worry; Chantelle herself denies all possibility that her baby does not carry the much-coveted Patten genes, stating that they ‘decided to start a physical relationship because [they] love each other’ and that ‘there has been no one else’. Given the already-discussed appearance of said maiden, one might be forgiven for believing her. However, taking into account her ability to hide her lapsed virginity from her parents for so long, it is entirely possible that she is, again, bending the truth slightly.

So, again, I return to the question: what’s it all about? Does this story demonstrate the rapid decline of British society? Well, undoubtedly. But it’s something far worse that troubles me. Don’t get me wrong. I’m certainly not implying as one Sun columnist claimed that these actions ‘will break the existing cracks in society so wide open that there’ll be no hope of repair’. I remain optimistic that the majority of British people are rational creatures that have at least some aspect of decency to them. Indeed, the British tabloids push a story like this so virulently because of its rarity and ability to shock. What I am concerned about is the fact that we as an audience crave such stories to such an extent that the characters of these unfortunate events are rewarded with more money than those that live a quote-unquote normal life. One might argue that these people are being compensated for their emotional distress; a sort of mental breakdown rebate. But what does it say about our society when these two minors will be rewarded with, according to one publicist, ‘hundreds of thousands’ for copping off when they should have been doing their homework? What sort of message is that for Britain’s increasingly dim witted school children? And we, the ‘adults’, are to blame. We are the ones that buy the newspapers so that we might be entertained with tales of people with lives more hopeless than our own. Have our lives become so mundane, our finances so dire, our situation so depressing, that we find solace in ruined youth and the generally messed-up? Surely that is what soap operas are for.

Personally, I remain optimistic that this story is a soap opera. These news articles are all part of an elaborate hoax; a cleverly orchestrated piece of marketing, designed to promote a new show. Tyler? Chantelle? Masie Roxanne? These are not people from the real world, surely. Yes, we can all have a good laugh when Channel 4 airs the first episode of Kiddy Fiddlers next week. Though maybe not.

So, what is it we're doing here? What’s it all about?