The benefits of having a soul eating office job are things like being able to buy CDs. bongzilla's latest, 'Amerijuanican' is another storming effort from this bitchin' outfit and their cover of Muddy Waters' 'Champagne & Reefer' is fucking amazing. I guess this is also the benefit of living in the wonderful freedom that the god given miracle of democracy bestows upon us in it's glorious beauty.
A bit much? Well I'm not alone in getting carried away about how great our society is, lately the media has been full of it, but then what's new. Sitting on the bus the other morning, on the way to my soul eating office job, I glanced about to see that most people were reading the 'Metro'.(1)
Now in my experience the Metro is an utter rag and even if I didn't get sick reading on the move I still wouldn't touch it. The headline this day was something about evil Muslims trying to destroy our way of life and featured a picture of protestors with banners demanding the execution of some poor Danish cartoonist.
Nearly everyone on the bus was reading this. Among the few that weren't were myself and a young girl wearing a hijab. Looking at the back of this girl's head I suddenly felt very uncomfortable for her. I tried to imagine how I would feel if the headline had been something about hippies being paedophiles for example. Not only is everyone around me wearing different clothes but they're all reading about people they're bound to associate with me being utter scumbags.
Following Murray's comment on last week's Swine Of The Week, and my subsequent response, I've been paying particular attention to the nature and volume of media coverage given to Islam. After a few days of this I was driven to beg the question, where am I?
Is this really the proudly free and tolerant nation I'm always told it is? Or is it an increasingly fascist state where the public are treated like morons and racism is ok as long as it's tastefully and professionally delivered?
Something I've always considered to be particularly sound advice is to 'never believe your own hype', it's fatal. Somehow we're all so convinced that we're not racists and that this country is totally free that we point blank ignore evidence to the contrary even when it's right in our faces.
It's very clever to try and make people take sides over something like the 'cartoon issue' and then subtly shift those allegiances to something else but that's not happening here. Let's lay it out on the line, as simple as can be:
Muslims are angered by some cartoons of their prophet?
Tough shit, fuck you, live with it.
Muslims are angered by a wide spread and persistent 'negative rebranding' of their religion and cultures? Damn right! I'm angered by it too and I'd be happy to stand 'shoulder to shoulder' with them any day.
There is a lot we can be proud of in this country and I'm certainly not ashamed of my passport. There's also plenty worth changing however and it's important we recognise this. If we don't the slide will continue and before you know it this great place will have changed beyond all recognition and I won't be the only one wondering, 'where the hell am I?'
footnote
(1) a free paper available on buses, for those who don't know,
Murray
I remember very clearly two things that were said to me in the immediate days after 9/11. A good friend said 'Their gonna get their war with Iraq'. I thought he was talking shit at the time but in the ensuing months the whispering began, which became the eventual shove to war. But what really disturbed me was when a Croat friend predicted a villification and ultimate purge against Islam. Now this is a guy who knows a thing or two about ethnic tensions - he came here to escape the war in the early nineties. I remember very clearly the way he said it. Almost as if it was a self fullfilling prophecy with a tiring predictability. What genuinely worries me is that I have so far seen nothing to prove him wrong and evrything to prove him right. Where is this all going?