AGE AINT NOTHING BUT A SLUMBER
Age is funny, it is all relative, yet it is finite, yet infinite. Age is something we have never fully discovered, it baffles us as much as it did the stone age men. After discovering fire and perfecting flint blades, they must have still sat around wondering why they can’t chase the antelopes like he used to. I sat and thought about the time I have seen in my life. When I was a child, I couldn’t wait to grow up. When I wanted to get a bike to replace my outmoded tricycle I was told “not till you are five”. I eventually got one aged seven. Then I saw people riding motorbikes and I wanted one “not till you’re 16.” I waited patiently for the time when I could have a motorbike but they were a serious health risk with guaranteed brain damage. Couldn’t drive till 17, couldn’t vote till 18. Couldn’t be an MP till 21, couldn’t do this or that. This especially thwarted my life because I am an early developer for example I was ready to be an MP aged 20 but I had to wait a whole year and by then it was too late.
Now I still see benefits of being older, I see the older people with all the money. They have high-performance cars that they choose to drive slowly, they have money that they insist on spending wisely and they just seem to bobble along. They alternative is hideous, the human being is designed to retire and relax in older age. This was proved to me today as I watched Glastonbury with the venerable Iggy Pop was hobbling around on stage. His defining image is his rippling torso thrusting with vitriol, now his emaciated corpse creaks onstage like a see-through biological model. His skin so thin you can see the workings of his gut, his bile was his bile itself. Why didn’t he age gracefully? Maybe it’s the money, the girls, the drugs but you’d think they’d have lost their charm by now.
You get more cynical and conservative as you age; I was horrified to find myself agreeing vehemently with Jeremy Clarkson. It took a while to sink in as I realised I had become the enemy. But things ain’t what they used to be, damn it. It wasn’t meant to be this way. You always got a plan, do this by age that, do that by age this. What you never say is DO X WHEN I’M READY! Because that is the truth it isn’t about your age, it’s about when you ready. I remember asking my mum her age when I was about 7. “30? Oh Mum that’s really old.” I am a year older than that and I don’t have kids, I was meant to have kids by now but the timing is by readiness and not by chronology.
In some ways you never age at all, mentally at least, issues I had in my childhood affect me today WHY WONT THE OTHER KIDS PLAY WITH ME? This happens every time I start a new job and I don’t know anyone so I feel nervous, the other day I went to a party and saw this. This sweet boy was sat all alone while kids who all knew each other played, he edged closer and sat on the fringes but it was like nobody saw him. I had to introduce him saying something like THIS IS X, BE NICE TO HIM.
So my Clarkson moment, he was hounded by the PC brigade for calling a car ‘a bit ginger beer’ I didn’t see the car but I supported his right to call it so. You can’t say anything now there is; racism, classism, anti-Semitism, ageism, disabiltism, sexism, homophobism, anti-Islamism, fat-ism. Every generation says this as language changes and we redefine what is acceptable. I imagine a white guy in the 70’s saying “you can’t call them sambos anymore, or niggers. It’s PC gone mad.”
It is a fact that as you grow older you get more and more conservative. You think the media is a liberal conspiracy, that a cabal of evil masons rule the world, that the EU is trying to destroy your life. The usual; kids today have no respect. Criminals have it easy, immigrants get it easy, the taxman gets too much, the schools don’t teach the right stuff, marriage isn’t sacred anymore. The rose-tint of memory calms our nerves on a cloudy day. “I remember when you could get a bag of weed, a hamburger, into the clubs and a ride home for £20!” I see that happening in a nursing home around 45 years from now. One of the most humbling things you’ll ever see is letters from ancient Romans, the Vindelanda letters. In one of the a woman bemoans the lack of morals, respect, honour blah blah. It shows that man never changes because he goes through a social evolution with age.
I used to be a student activist, I wanted to bring down the system; I wouldn’t even know what rally or the cause I was shouting for. We had a loose amalgam of interests on the fringe of the system and we had to break in and tear down the system. In the morning it was Gays, then Palestine, then world poverty, then human rights and all topped off with an anti-capitalist romp. The police would come and it would get exciting, kudos and street cred were the prize.
Now you realise the gays are the new blacks, the blacks were the new Jews, the Jews were the new Irish. The liberal fringe always uses disadvantaged groups to ram its way through to power. A liberal guy was once telling me how blacks and gays are the same, I was sceptical at first; yes we both face discrimination but he corrected me. He told me how gays were taken from Gayland and huddled in ships head to toe, then they were forced to work in the fashion industry for 300 years. They were lashed 300 times if the fabric they produced wasn’t soft enough or unstylish. I cried by the time he had finished, the tragedy.
So now I slumber into conservative middle-age, in my views at least. If youth is about nuance; you want to see it from all sides, then older age is about certainties. I know there is no chance of peace in Palestine. I know that racism will always be there. The poor will always hunger for the basics. What can we do in the meantime? We can ban words; the N-word, the C-word, the F-word referring to gays (to distinguish it from the other F-word. The Poor became “economically disadvantaged” the N-words become “ethnic minorities”, benders become “same-sex couples” and things get better. The basic dichotomy is Liberal vs. Conservative is; the Liberal has a vision of idealist heaven, he first seeks to portray this vision then strives to achieve it. While the Conservative has seen this before and knows it can’t work.
We blacks thought we were special but we were just another group that needed saving. It’s like the Superman dilemma. Why is he saving those people? No matter how good your cause you must have a reason. Is it altruistic? Narcissistic ? Or just a reflex. Is he saving those people coz he is Superman and that is what he does? Do liberals save out of reflex? Because they need to be saving someone, Liberal is short for liberator. While the right is caught up with big-business, the left is caught up with victims.
In the 60’s while they were high off nature’s finest hallucinogens they hatched a plan “We’ll start with the Blacks, then we’ll do the women’s lib thing, then Nuclear, Gays, Fox-hunting, Gay-marriage, then anti-Iraq war. Trust me it will be great.” But where now? Should we Liberate the animals? Maybe the liberals will have to save us from our worst enemy….. Ourselves! We are a danger to our own well-being. We smoke too much. We drink too much. We eat too much and not the right diet. We live a life of constant excess so they are have to curb these excesses by legislating. In a way we are committing suicide by pleasurable excess. Age is wear and tear, it is come and go, it’s just a number and every cliché is true.
I hope the liberal idyll comes to pass, like the newscasters laugh along multi-culturally to banal jokes while in a set like the Star ship Enterprise. We’ll all sip fair-trade tea with locally produced milk, in a carbon-neutral house with a hydrogen cell-solar powered sports car on the drive in the middle of an Eco-town somewhere in a nature paradise. I look forward to consuming, just spending my money. Holidays, cars, rare exotic food, all the things that would harm the polar caps.
I once hatched an audacious plan to take over the world, it was a brilliant strategy, the genius of which hadn’t been seen before. I was going to start locally and then go global. I would take over parliament eventually (peacefully), the EU would know my wrath, then the UN, then the outcome GLOBAL DOMINATION. But when I got outside it was raining. I hadn’t planned for that, my whole plan was hatched without accounting for rain. Now that I am older I no longer make such amateur mistakes, I plan for extenuating factors. When I’m going out to take over the world I carry and umbrella or at least wear a thick coat.
Saturday, 23 June 2007
Wednesday, 13 June 2007
PC world
TECHNO-FASCISTS RULE THE WORLD
There used to be time when sexually inadequate men were powerless and isolated; this time was a Golden age for mankind though we didn’t seem to know it. The whole technological revolution was merely a smokescreen for an overthrow of the then prevailing status quo. Before we were ruled by the most handsome, or the most clever, or the most ruthless; depending on our given need at the time. But now we are ruled by the most nerdy and techno-centric people.
It all started when I tried to buy a computer, this computer that I am actually writing on, I want to save this for posterity to pass on to my grandchildren so they can know just how hard it was for their granddad to get his first laptop. This is a tale of one man (myself) and his battle to get online and join the technological revolution, in the old days they were desperate to get people online but now they are more discerning. I read a few things online about buying computers before I set out on my trip. The usual nuggets of good sense that apply to buying any product; know what you want, get a budget and stick to it, view several products etc but I hadn’t reckoned on the nous of the computer salesman.
I determined my product. Laptop! Basic spec, as basic as you can get coz I don’t do any whizzy stuff. Budget £300 coz that’s all I could afford and these things are out of date so quickly, there’s no point in buying something that’s going to be out of date before you even tap in your PIN. I decided that the name wasn’t important and brands are stupid anyway. First stop PC world, coz ‘where in the world’ would you start to buy a computer. I perused through the laptops they had on display with the disdain of a more discerning buyer, I made a point of not being impressed by the various letters after the models. Such as 4-Gig. 2.5MB, wireless 3945abg, all of which was meant to blind me into stupidity.
The salesmen were giving it the hardsell to some other squirming customers; who were like bunnies facing floodlights, nodding incessantly like they had epilepsy (maybe they did, if so sorry). This elderly couple who had come in for a new printer were soon convinced that the computer was actually the problem, they also decided they needed dual surround sound with their hearing seeming to deteriorate annually. I was ostracized like a mongoose in a snakepit, I motioned for some attention several times and they looked at me like I farted. Eventually a salesman approached, to describe him would do justice to his comic appearance. He was a short fat ginger guy, but that isn’t the funny bit, he had dyed his hear black to fit in with his gothic lifestyle. He even dyed his beard which still betrayed its dyed roots; he emerged from his imaginary world of fantasy goblins to grace me with his presence.
I was like the wheelchair guy in Little Britain and pointed THAT! I pointed at the one I wanted. It cost £300 and that was all that mattered, it had everything I wanted as in a screen, keypad, internet, word processor, just the basics. “Sorry mate I can’t sell you that!” why oh why I said. “Coz it’s shit! I really can’t sell it in good conscience” Beware a salesman with a conscience. “Honestly, it’d be quicker to just give me your money and I’ll throw it out of the window.” That was really kind of him to offer but I would much rather have the computer thanks. “There is absolutely no point buying that computer, it break down in about a year.” I pointed out that it had a 3-year warranty. It didn’t matter because a plague would befall my house; he told me a horror story about his friend who made the mistake of buying that model and had suffered endless misfortune. I didn’t get all the details but it ended tragically with his wife leaving him. I took on board the moral of this precautionary tail but I was still bound by my budget. I told him that I would even sign a release form stating that I took sole responsibility for this act of stupidity provided I got my computer. He said “Come to think of it, I don’t think we got any in stock. Trust me you’re lucky.”
I pointed to the one priced nearly as conservatively about 350 but I was chastised again. “Are you stupid? That ones even worse. Honestly mate, there no point buying a laptop for less than £500. Then they start to get good.” That was when my hobbity friend broke into a rapid fire burst of techno-babble. Numbers and letters in various combinations, I thought a ram was a male sheep and a gig was some kind of entertainment. But my ignorance was soon exposed. “Ideally you need a desktop coz you can update the memory, start off with 4gig and you can get an upgrade……. My brain had frozen. I told him that I utterly despise techies, people who tell anyone who will listen just how much memory they have, how their graphics are so much better than everyone’s. I told him that I had not intention of joining the game of penis envy that is the techno-fascist world.
“Then this one is perfect for you, 3MB, Pentium dual core, 80GB, this one is so not penis envy. Trust me, no one will envy you at all.” At this point we had part I gave him an ultimatum that if I didn’t get the £300 one I would do something horrible like get a gun and force them to sell it to me but he still refused. He proceeded to write down the number for Dell computers, a major rival if I am not mistaken. He just couldn’t bring himself to sell a substandard computer when ubercomputers were all around. The computer I wanted was like a gay socialist cripple Jewish gypsy computer when there were all the Aryan computers around. Vhy did I Vant ze inferior model?
I stormed out of PC world and went into town, went to Curry’s and before the salesman could get into his spiel I said. “Look I have been trying to buy a computer all morning, everyone is full of bullshit and they don’t want to listen to what I say. I am going to tell you what I want and you are going to listen; if I feel that you aren’t paying attention then I am out of here. Understand?” He nodded. Krishnan and I went through the various choices on offer and he was such a nice guy I ended up exceeding my budget by 150. I sat back and I admired what I had bought and was pleased.
Just for the record my dick size is
ADVENT ERT2250
Intel core duo T2250 1.7GHz
1024 MB DDRII RAM
80 GB HDD SATA
About 7inches equivalent
There used to be time when sexually inadequate men were powerless and isolated; this time was a Golden age for mankind though we didn’t seem to know it. The whole technological revolution was merely a smokescreen for an overthrow of the then prevailing status quo. Before we were ruled by the most handsome, or the most clever, or the most ruthless; depending on our given need at the time. But now we are ruled by the most nerdy and techno-centric people.
It all started when I tried to buy a computer, this computer that I am actually writing on, I want to save this for posterity to pass on to my grandchildren so they can know just how hard it was for their granddad to get his first laptop. This is a tale of one man (myself) and his battle to get online and join the technological revolution, in the old days they were desperate to get people online but now they are more discerning. I read a few things online about buying computers before I set out on my trip. The usual nuggets of good sense that apply to buying any product; know what you want, get a budget and stick to it, view several products etc but I hadn’t reckoned on the nous of the computer salesman.
I determined my product. Laptop! Basic spec, as basic as you can get coz I don’t do any whizzy stuff. Budget £300 coz that’s all I could afford and these things are out of date so quickly, there’s no point in buying something that’s going to be out of date before you even tap in your PIN. I decided that the name wasn’t important and brands are stupid anyway. First stop PC world, coz ‘where in the world’ would you start to buy a computer. I perused through the laptops they had on display with the disdain of a more discerning buyer, I made a point of not being impressed by the various letters after the models. Such as 4-Gig. 2.5MB, wireless 3945abg, all of which was meant to blind me into stupidity.
The salesmen were giving it the hardsell to some other squirming customers; who were like bunnies facing floodlights, nodding incessantly like they had epilepsy (maybe they did, if so sorry). This elderly couple who had come in for a new printer were soon convinced that the computer was actually the problem, they also decided they needed dual surround sound with their hearing seeming to deteriorate annually. I was ostracized like a mongoose in a snakepit, I motioned for some attention several times and they looked at me like I farted. Eventually a salesman approached, to describe him would do justice to his comic appearance. He was a short fat ginger guy, but that isn’t the funny bit, he had dyed his hear black to fit in with his gothic lifestyle. He even dyed his beard which still betrayed its dyed roots; he emerged from his imaginary world of fantasy goblins to grace me with his presence.
I was like the wheelchair guy in Little Britain and pointed THAT! I pointed at the one I wanted. It cost £300 and that was all that mattered, it had everything I wanted as in a screen, keypad, internet, word processor, just the basics. “Sorry mate I can’t sell you that!” why oh why I said. “Coz it’s shit! I really can’t sell it in good conscience” Beware a salesman with a conscience. “Honestly, it’d be quicker to just give me your money and I’ll throw it out of the window.” That was really kind of him to offer but I would much rather have the computer thanks. “There is absolutely no point buying that computer, it break down in about a year.” I pointed out that it had a 3-year warranty. It didn’t matter because a plague would befall my house; he told me a horror story about his friend who made the mistake of buying that model and had suffered endless misfortune. I didn’t get all the details but it ended tragically with his wife leaving him. I took on board the moral of this precautionary tail but I was still bound by my budget. I told him that I would even sign a release form stating that I took sole responsibility for this act of stupidity provided I got my computer. He said “Come to think of it, I don’t think we got any in stock. Trust me you’re lucky.”
I pointed to the one priced nearly as conservatively about 350 but I was chastised again. “Are you stupid? That ones even worse. Honestly mate, there no point buying a laptop for less than £500. Then they start to get good.” That was when my hobbity friend broke into a rapid fire burst of techno-babble. Numbers and letters in various combinations, I thought a ram was a male sheep and a gig was some kind of entertainment. But my ignorance was soon exposed. “Ideally you need a desktop coz you can update the memory, start off with 4gig and you can get an upgrade……. My brain had frozen. I told him that I utterly despise techies, people who tell anyone who will listen just how much memory they have, how their graphics are so much better than everyone’s. I told him that I had not intention of joining the game of penis envy that is the techno-fascist world.
“Then this one is perfect for you, 3MB, Pentium dual core, 80GB, this one is so not penis envy. Trust me, no one will envy you at all.” At this point we had part I gave him an ultimatum that if I didn’t get the £300 one I would do something horrible like get a gun and force them to sell it to me but he still refused. He proceeded to write down the number for Dell computers, a major rival if I am not mistaken. He just couldn’t bring himself to sell a substandard computer when ubercomputers were all around. The computer I wanted was like a gay socialist cripple Jewish gypsy computer when there were all the Aryan computers around. Vhy did I Vant ze inferior model?
I stormed out of PC world and went into town, went to Curry’s and before the salesman could get into his spiel I said. “Look I have been trying to buy a computer all morning, everyone is full of bullshit and they don’t want to listen to what I say. I am going to tell you what I want and you are going to listen; if I feel that you aren’t paying attention then I am out of here. Understand?” He nodded. Krishnan and I went through the various choices on offer and he was such a nice guy I ended up exceeding my budget by 150. I sat back and I admired what I had bought and was pleased.
Just for the record my dick size is
ADVENT ERT2250
Intel core duo T2250 1.7GHz
1024 MB DDRII RAM
80 GB HDD SATA
About 7inches equivalent
Sunday, 10 June 2007
LETS TEACH JOHNNY FOREIGNER SOME VALUES - EH?
LETS TEACH JOHNNY FOREIGNER SOME VALUES - EH?
Britain is waking up to immigration problems a bit late in the day, they say it is better late than never but is that really so? Talking about immigration has been the modern day equivalent of Puritans talking about sex. Now we are talking about it but getting all our wires crossed, a deluge of issues are swirling in our collective conscience and blurring the lines beyond comprehension. Terrorism, integration, migrant workers, British values, border security and a host of other issues are all seen in the same context.
We are trying to correct 50 years of multi-culturalism with legislation that will affect only new immigrants. Multi-culturalism which is the supposed co-existence of several cultures is now seen to be a failure when only a few years ago it was seen as one of the defining successes of modern Britain. So what happened in the intervening time? Where did it all go wrong? The emergence of home-grown terrorism has something to do with it. The mass-immigration of the last few years has a lot to do with it. Suddenly Britain doesn’t know where it stands anymore.
In the post-war era Britain needed an influx of labour; people from the colonies duly obliged and sailed the high seas to help the very nation that was sometimes oppressing and exploiting them. These immigrants needed a place to stay when they got here, quite often the immigrants found themselves living in third-world conditions alongside working-class whites. There started a chequered co-existence between immigrants and the working classes. The middle-classes could afford the luxury of ‘white flight’ but the rest were left like frogs in a dank bucket to squabble over housing and preferential treatment. The ‘Darkies’ could be restricted to one part of town so the Jerusalem of suburbia could remain untainted.
We were happy to have immigrants staying in their own part of town; but when these Ghettos became breeding grounds for terrorism we decided to do something about it. The sight of an old Pakistani man crouched over and hobbling in the cold with only the light cotton cloth of his traditional wear and his long beard blowing in the wind. His English is just a bad as it was when he left Baluchistan; he has had great-grandchildren in the 40 years he has stayed here. This sight is a damning indictment of multi-culturalism, partly the fault of society in failing to coax him out of his cultural separatism and partly his fault in failing to deal with his fear of change.
It is very possible to spend long periods of time in this country without speaking English; I am Rwandese and can spend a whole weekend in a Rwandese bubble without uttering a word of English. I can go to Rwandan bars, restaurants, you name it and all this in a small community, imagine if there were millions of us instead of a few thousand. The result of this is most Rwandese don’t speak good English, are stuck in low-income jobs, have poor housing and all the effects that go with that. Quite often they feel excluded and discriminated against. The irony is that some working class whites think they get preferential treatment as if all immigrants get a Rolex and Gold card on entry to this country.
The white working-classes are not the villains of this piece; they have born the brunt of the negative effects of immigration yet they have taken all the steps to integrate with wave after wave of newcomers. They have intermarried, changed their dietary habits, bitten their tongues when they wanted to scream and all of this because of their British tradition of just “getting on with it”. One of the reasons why immigration has become touchy among the chattering classes is the upward mobility of the previous waves. After years of sacrifice and maybe the rising house prices has lead to immigrants moving out of the ghettos to the leafy suburbs. But how can they be immigrants? After 50 or 60 years of being here, if they were white they could change their name to Smith and be as British as John Bull, but their skin-tone will always be a living reminder that they don’t fully belong here.
In the aftermath of the 7/7 bombing I heard a White workmate (who I can utterly vouch for as not racist as his child is mixed-race) he remarked about the bombers and I quote “If they hate this country, they shouldn’t come here!” Bearing in mind these bombers were born and bred here, it underlined these basic misunderstanding Brits have towards immigration. They view it as something happening when it happened 60 years ago; if those boys were white they would probably have joined some lunatic fringe of the anti-globalisation movement. What do you do and where do you go when you utterly despise the country you call home?
Every second generation of immigrants has to deal with their parents failure or success in integrating. That is what the 7/7 bombers had to deal with, a sense of duality of not fitting in either world, so the evil world of extremism is only too happy to oblige. A favourite saying of the British is “Tarring them all with the same brush” and this is what is going on. We can’t force a small part of the Muslim community to integrate but we can make it harder for future citizens to achieve their basic rights. Tarring them all with one brush would be fairer that what would be seen as racism or Islamophobia.
So the notions of empire are re-enforced, the ‘white mans burden’ is back and he must teach these natives the basics of civilisation, again. But the sad fact is that the British can learn a lot from the immigrant communities. The first thing is family values; I was once with one of my English friends when a man walked past us and they shared a nodding glance. This man turned out to be his uncle, his mothers brother, as an African the thought of not revering an elder is shameful. Family breakdown is at the heart of all the anti-social behaviour we suffer from. The sad thing is if I wanted my family in Africa to come and see me it would cost me thousands and several months wrangling with the Home Office; so I would travel to Manchester to see a second or third cousin.
The second lesson would be hard work, migrants are only to happy come and slave away for £5.60 per hour. They take pride in their work no matter how low and demeaning. They have a sense of duty to their fellow man that has long been lost in this country. They are more likely to have strong personal faith, as the churches in this country are full of immigrants, as are the mosques.
So what is the solution? Well we don’t even know what the problem is. Are there too many foreigners? Are they not integrating? Are they getting special treatment? Are they changing this country? One thing is for sure; Britain can’t go on creating racial under-classes to solve its problems.
Britain is waking up to immigration problems a bit late in the day, they say it is better late than never but is that really so? Talking about immigration has been the modern day equivalent of Puritans talking about sex. Now we are talking about it but getting all our wires crossed, a deluge of issues are swirling in our collective conscience and blurring the lines beyond comprehension. Terrorism, integration, migrant workers, British values, border security and a host of other issues are all seen in the same context.
We are trying to correct 50 years of multi-culturalism with legislation that will affect only new immigrants. Multi-culturalism which is the supposed co-existence of several cultures is now seen to be a failure when only a few years ago it was seen as one of the defining successes of modern Britain. So what happened in the intervening time? Where did it all go wrong? The emergence of home-grown terrorism has something to do with it. The mass-immigration of the last few years has a lot to do with it. Suddenly Britain doesn’t know where it stands anymore.
In the post-war era Britain needed an influx of labour; people from the colonies duly obliged and sailed the high seas to help the very nation that was sometimes oppressing and exploiting them. These immigrants needed a place to stay when they got here, quite often the immigrants found themselves living in third-world conditions alongside working-class whites. There started a chequered co-existence between immigrants and the working classes. The middle-classes could afford the luxury of ‘white flight’ but the rest were left like frogs in a dank bucket to squabble over housing and preferential treatment. The ‘Darkies’ could be restricted to one part of town so the Jerusalem of suburbia could remain untainted.
We were happy to have immigrants staying in their own part of town; but when these Ghettos became breeding grounds for terrorism we decided to do something about it. The sight of an old Pakistani man crouched over and hobbling in the cold with only the light cotton cloth of his traditional wear and his long beard blowing in the wind. His English is just a bad as it was when he left Baluchistan; he has had great-grandchildren in the 40 years he has stayed here. This sight is a damning indictment of multi-culturalism, partly the fault of society in failing to coax him out of his cultural separatism and partly his fault in failing to deal with his fear of change.
It is very possible to spend long periods of time in this country without speaking English; I am Rwandese and can spend a whole weekend in a Rwandese bubble without uttering a word of English. I can go to Rwandan bars, restaurants, you name it and all this in a small community, imagine if there were millions of us instead of a few thousand. The result of this is most Rwandese don’t speak good English, are stuck in low-income jobs, have poor housing and all the effects that go with that. Quite often they feel excluded and discriminated against. The irony is that some working class whites think they get preferential treatment as if all immigrants get a Rolex and Gold card on entry to this country.
The white working-classes are not the villains of this piece; they have born the brunt of the negative effects of immigration yet they have taken all the steps to integrate with wave after wave of newcomers. They have intermarried, changed their dietary habits, bitten their tongues when they wanted to scream and all of this because of their British tradition of just “getting on with it”. One of the reasons why immigration has become touchy among the chattering classes is the upward mobility of the previous waves. After years of sacrifice and maybe the rising house prices has lead to immigrants moving out of the ghettos to the leafy suburbs. But how can they be immigrants? After 50 or 60 years of being here, if they were white they could change their name to Smith and be as British as John Bull, but their skin-tone will always be a living reminder that they don’t fully belong here.
In the aftermath of the 7/7 bombing I heard a White workmate (who I can utterly vouch for as not racist as his child is mixed-race) he remarked about the bombers and I quote “If they hate this country, they shouldn’t come here!” Bearing in mind these bombers were born and bred here, it underlined these basic misunderstanding Brits have towards immigration. They view it as something happening when it happened 60 years ago; if those boys were white they would probably have joined some lunatic fringe of the anti-globalisation movement. What do you do and where do you go when you utterly despise the country you call home?
Every second generation of immigrants has to deal with their parents failure or success in integrating. That is what the 7/7 bombers had to deal with, a sense of duality of not fitting in either world, so the evil world of extremism is only too happy to oblige. A favourite saying of the British is “Tarring them all with the same brush” and this is what is going on. We can’t force a small part of the Muslim community to integrate but we can make it harder for future citizens to achieve their basic rights. Tarring them all with one brush would be fairer that what would be seen as racism or Islamophobia.
So the notions of empire are re-enforced, the ‘white mans burden’ is back and he must teach these natives the basics of civilisation, again. But the sad fact is that the British can learn a lot from the immigrant communities. The first thing is family values; I was once with one of my English friends when a man walked past us and they shared a nodding glance. This man turned out to be his uncle, his mothers brother, as an African the thought of not revering an elder is shameful. Family breakdown is at the heart of all the anti-social behaviour we suffer from. The sad thing is if I wanted my family in Africa to come and see me it would cost me thousands and several months wrangling with the Home Office; so I would travel to Manchester to see a second or third cousin.
The second lesson would be hard work, migrants are only to happy come and slave away for £5.60 per hour. They take pride in their work no matter how low and demeaning. They have a sense of duty to their fellow man that has long been lost in this country. They are more likely to have strong personal faith, as the churches in this country are full of immigrants, as are the mosques.
So what is the solution? Well we don’t even know what the problem is. Are there too many foreigners? Are they not integrating? Are they getting special treatment? Are they changing this country? One thing is for sure; Britain can’t go on creating racial under-classes to solve its problems.
Saturday, 9 June 2007
Celebrity sucks ask Paris Hilton
CELEBRITY PEDESTALS
I awoke this morning to a truly pleasurable sight; it was Paris Hilton returning to jail only this time she was handcuffed and in tears. I was too ecstatic to wonder why I was gripped by shadenfreude but I consoled myself that I was with the majority of the populace in delighting in this airheads misfortune. Call me a cynic but this was good news; at last the rich and powerful were being treated equally, or were they? The jury was split between those who said that Ms. Hilton was being made an example while others swore she that she got off lightly.
The chickens have come home to roost for Paris; a dull and vacuous celebrity for a dull and vacuous age. It is a shame that we are even talking about her and this just underlines the hysteria that has gripped us. CNN switched from their usual fare of Baghdad suicide bombing and G8 summit reports to give us minute to minute coverage of the press camped outside her house. It was nice to see they had their priorities sorted and that they wouldn’t let pointless tragedy get in the way of a real scoop.
Paris is taking the flak for a whole generation of pointless celebrities that are just famous for being famous. The main criticism is their lack of talent but I would venture that their lack of talent is what makes them so appealing. Talent can be limiting in the sense that you could be famous for playing good music or making good movies but when the movies and the records start to flop then you are out on your ear; however if you can be famous for not being talented than you are not restricted. Paris is talented at being Paris, the day she stops being a spoilt little rich girl is the day she will be irrelevant.
There used to be time when you could for famous for something, now even the lines of fame and infamy are so blurred that celebrity and notoriety are one and the same. It was Herodetus or Thucydides who said “there are three types of men, those who are born great, those who achieve greatness and those who have greatness thrust upon them.” Which category does Paris fall into? She was born into great wealth as an heiress to a multi-billion dollar empire, she has arguably achieved some kind of greatness by getting a top-rated reality she and trust me it is hard work to maintain such a constant profile. Lastly she has had all the aspirations of celebrity wannabees thrust upon her and now she is stuck in the ivory tower of her own creation, unable to have the minimum privacy to even have a minutes clarity to clear her head.
This is not a new phenomenon though we may perceive as such, going back to the 19th century with Lord Byron and Oscar Wilde had their whole lives talked about endlessly. Moving into the 20th century; stars of Hollywood had their lives splashed on tabloids, leading the major studios to take over the lives of their stars and create artificial lives for their stars to protect them from overexposure. Our base needs have not changed but we have been desensitized by years of endless exposure. The song goes “video killed the radio star” the same goes for this generation, “internet killed the TV star”. The rise of the new multi-media celebrity who bares all is a new breed that has taken over the waves. Fame is the drug of choice for our generation, it can fulfil all our inadequacies for a while at least.
New and modern media is driven by two factors, the fact that we have multiple platforms that allows 24-hr coverage and the equipment has shrunk in size that we enter places that were previously inaccessible places open to view. What function does this serve? Watching a celebrity is like watching paint dry and eventually they have to contrive situation to make it watchable; this was the case with “A simple Life” and the ‘poor little rich girl’ was born. The is no way of talking about this without mentioning big-brother.
Television now thinks it is REALITY; you aren’t someone unless you are on TV. The show was recently under threat because of the recent ‘Shilpa fiasco’ so they went full circle. My friends and I were betting what the composition of the inhabitants would be. “A least 3 gays, 1 black, a posh person, a working class hero and least a couple freaks to lighten up the mood. But the surprised us all by picking their core audience; mindless young women seeking celebrity. People used to have to wait till they left the house before they could become celebrities now it is instant fame. Do we all feel so unloved? The sad fact is that I would a bit of the celebrity lifestyle myself; who wouldn’t? money for nothing, a blank canvass for society to project their feeling on. But that would be hell, I would lose focus on who I am and would wind up on several drugs and violating my probation with the world watching.
I awoke this morning to a truly pleasurable sight; it was Paris Hilton returning to jail only this time she was handcuffed and in tears. I was too ecstatic to wonder why I was gripped by shadenfreude but I consoled myself that I was with the majority of the populace in delighting in this airheads misfortune. Call me a cynic but this was good news; at last the rich and powerful were being treated equally, or were they? The jury was split between those who said that Ms. Hilton was being made an example while others swore she that she got off lightly.
The chickens have come home to roost for Paris; a dull and vacuous celebrity for a dull and vacuous age. It is a shame that we are even talking about her and this just underlines the hysteria that has gripped us. CNN switched from their usual fare of Baghdad suicide bombing and G8 summit reports to give us minute to minute coverage of the press camped outside her house. It was nice to see they had their priorities sorted and that they wouldn’t let pointless tragedy get in the way of a real scoop.
Paris is taking the flak for a whole generation of pointless celebrities that are just famous for being famous. The main criticism is their lack of talent but I would venture that their lack of talent is what makes them so appealing. Talent can be limiting in the sense that you could be famous for playing good music or making good movies but when the movies and the records start to flop then you are out on your ear; however if you can be famous for not being talented than you are not restricted. Paris is talented at being Paris, the day she stops being a spoilt little rich girl is the day she will be irrelevant.
There used to be time when you could for famous for something, now even the lines of fame and infamy are so blurred that celebrity and notoriety are one and the same. It was Herodetus or Thucydides who said “there are three types of men, those who are born great, those who achieve greatness and those who have greatness thrust upon them.” Which category does Paris fall into? She was born into great wealth as an heiress to a multi-billion dollar empire, she has arguably achieved some kind of greatness by getting a top-rated reality she and trust me it is hard work to maintain such a constant profile. Lastly she has had all the aspirations of celebrity wannabees thrust upon her and now she is stuck in the ivory tower of her own creation, unable to have the minimum privacy to even have a minutes clarity to clear her head.
This is not a new phenomenon though we may perceive as such, going back to the 19th century with Lord Byron and Oscar Wilde had their whole lives talked about endlessly. Moving into the 20th century; stars of Hollywood had their lives splashed on tabloids, leading the major studios to take over the lives of their stars and create artificial lives for their stars to protect them from overexposure. Our base needs have not changed but we have been desensitized by years of endless exposure. The song goes “video killed the radio star” the same goes for this generation, “internet killed the TV star”. The rise of the new multi-media celebrity who bares all is a new breed that has taken over the waves. Fame is the drug of choice for our generation, it can fulfil all our inadequacies for a while at least.
New and modern media is driven by two factors, the fact that we have multiple platforms that allows 24-hr coverage and the equipment has shrunk in size that we enter places that were previously inaccessible places open to view. What function does this serve? Watching a celebrity is like watching paint dry and eventually they have to contrive situation to make it watchable; this was the case with “A simple Life” and the ‘poor little rich girl’ was born. The is no way of talking about this without mentioning big-brother.
Television now thinks it is REALITY; you aren’t someone unless you are on TV. The show was recently under threat because of the recent ‘Shilpa fiasco’ so they went full circle. My friends and I were betting what the composition of the inhabitants would be. “A least 3 gays, 1 black, a posh person, a working class hero and least a couple freaks to lighten up the mood. But the surprised us all by picking their core audience; mindless young women seeking celebrity. People used to have to wait till they left the house before they could become celebrities now it is instant fame. Do we all feel so unloved? The sad fact is that I would a bit of the celebrity lifestyle myself; who wouldn’t? money for nothing, a blank canvass for society to project their feeling on. But that would be hell, I would lose focus on who I am and would wind up on several drugs and violating my probation with the world watching.
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