Sun gods of metal

Reading this, it occurs to me that "Coronal Mass Ejection" would be an inspired name for a heavy metal band (maybe it already is,* in which case, apologies for wasting any passing metalheads' time by re-inventing the wheel).

Just an idle thought that wouldn't go anywhere else.

* or at the very least, the thought's probably unoriginal.

Restrictive practices

Cowed by some ostentatious offence-taking by some Very Important People, backed up by a furious chorus of incoherent snorts and bellows from the likes of the Daily Mail, the BBC has caved in and refused to play more than five seconds of Ding Dong the Witch is Dead on Sunday's chart show. This is, apparently, 'a “compromise” which will prevent the song, which is heading towards the number one slot ... being adopted as a posthumous protest by opponents of Lady Thatcher.'

The handling of taste and decency was weird enough (a thing's either too offensive to broadcast or it isn't - you can no more split the difference by playing five seconds of the tune than you can be "just a little bit" pregnant), but after being lectured by the Mail not to gloat or be offensively disrespectful about people who can't hit back, I had to re-paint the dial on my irony meter, which now goes up to eleven.

I'm getting this surreal thought that Paul Dacre has travelled back in time, to be reincarnated as a print union shop steward from the pre-Murdoch era, furiously steaming in to assert his rights in some touchy demarcation dispute:

Oi! What do you think you're doing? You can't just come in here, kicking people when they're down, upsetting grieving families and picking on somebody who's in no position to fight back. I'm the official representative of the Federated Union of Flamers, Trolls and Clickbait Manufacturers, and as you should know, taunting grieving families and causing gratuitous offence to anybody we feel like picking on, is our job and nobody else's. Now go and hop it, before I call a strike ballot.

More than a quarter of a century after Wapping, and our gutter press is still operating a closed shop policy towards causing offence. These sort of Spanish practices should have the old girl spinning in her urn.

Prague's Iron Lady

At 5 o'clock in the morning of April 28th, 1991, Czech art student David Černý, along with several accomplices, advanced on a plinth in Prague’s Kinsky Square, armed with brushes and paint pots. On top of the plinth stood a wartime Stalin II heavy tank, set up in the square by the former communist authorities as a monument to the Red Army's liberation of the city in 1945. Under cover of night, Černý and his band of pranksters painted the tank bright pink.

The next morning, when the authorities found out what had happened, they weren't amused. The Minister for National Defence, Mr. Dobrovsky, made a hasty apology to the Soviet Embassy for the "vandalism". The Czech Army mobilised a bunch of squaddies to re-paint the tank in a more respectful military drab green. By 8 May, the General Prosecutor had charged Černý with "public disturbances."

In April 2013, a 45 year old old drama teacher set up a Facebook group called "The Witch is Dead" in order to organise street parties to celebrate the death of Margaret Thatcher. This - and other acts of blatant disrespect for the deceased - provoked predictable outrage from members of the political establishment, along with a furious bout of naming and shaming from the Daily Mail and Telegraph, probably in the hope that she'll get the sack for expressing her dissent in such an offensive manner.

Respect and dissent continue to be touchy subjects. Listen to this boilerplate Iron Lady obit:

She was known as an iron lady, both loved and loathed....Consensus and compromise, they said, were not in her vocabulary. She'd won a bloody war with Argentina over the Falkland Islands, took on Britain's powerful labor unions. She ignored IRA hunger strikes....Determined, dynamic, and deeply controversial, Thatcher leaves an indelible mark on the world's political landscape.

The Red Army was likewise loved and loathed, deeply controversial and won a war far bloodier than the Falklands spat. On the one hand it took, and inflicted, the vast majority of the casualties in the war against a genocidal Nazi regime bent on world conquest. Taking on something like two thirds of the Nazi war effort, and losing some nine to eleven million combatants in the process, was no small sacrifice - and that was just military deaths (thirteen to fifteen million Soviet civilians were killed). Heck, the Soviet Union was already spending blood and treasure on the fight against fascism during the Spanish Civil war, while the British and French governments were sitting around, allowing the fascists to carve up Spain in the name of "non-intervention" (conveniently ignoring the massive German and Italian military intervention propping up Franco's coup).

If that was the only context, defacing the Monument to Soviet Tank Crews seems like nothing more than an act of puerile disrespect. But there's more to the story.

There were terrified Soviet soldiers advancing against suicidal odds for fear of the NKVD goons in the rear who'd shoot anyone who retreated. There was complicity in the destruction of Poland (the occupation during the Nazi-Soviet pact, the Katyn massacre, the Red Army pausing on the outskirts of Warsaw to let the Nazis exterminate the participants in the Warsaw uprising). Then, the brutal occupation and oppression of eastern Europe, the tanks rolling in to crush the Hungarian uprising and the Prague Spring.

Under those circumstances, it'd be surprising if uncorking years of bottled-up anger and resentment didn't result in a spurt of joyous defiance.

It'd be a harsh world if we lost all respect and fellow feeling, whether it was for the unimaginable suffering and sacrifice of an army of millions, or for the grief of a single bereaved family. But it's also a harsh world where our instinctive feelings of respect and empathy for other people's loss is hijacked by cynical apparatchiks to airbrush history, to silence dissent, to justify cruelty and to rub the losers' faces in it. I don't want to dance on Thatcher's grave and I feel uneasy about the jubilation (which is, on a political level, misplaced, since so much of modern Britain is exactly how she'd have wanted it), but I'm also sickened by the carefully-orchestrated obsequies and sanitised half-truths of the establishment consensus:

All three party leaders united to praise the legacy of Margaret Thatcher today, as MPs returned to the Commons to mark the passing of one of Britain's most influential prime ministers. 

Pass the sick bag. It's enough to make you long for a bit of absurdest dissent. If we have to have a memorial to the Iron Lady on the Fourth Plinth, I reckon another pink tank would be an appropriate symbol for somebody who crushed everything in her path, had a steely hatred of compromise and was both loved and loathed by millions.

Masks

What's all this, then? William Hague and the rest of the cabinet backing David Cameron's claim that North Korea could launch a WMD attack on Britain within 45 minutes? Or just a bunch of hardcore Doctor Who fans getting ready for the 50th anniversary?


No. Photograph courtesy of Kitchener Lord's flikr stream (creative commons)

Are you thinking what we're thinking?

As the Tories used to say. As a matter of fact, I'm not. I'm thinking what Max Dunbar's thinking. Except he's thinking it in one impressively simple sentence, rather than two windy blog posts:

It just seems that these days, if you’re not obsessed with welfare and immigration, if you don’t have an irrational consuming envy of benefit claimants and poverty-line refugees, then there’s no place for you in mainstream politics.

Note to self - must edit posts.

Trolling the aspiration nation

There was no point in getting offended by the Daily Mail's biggest troll of the week, or with George Osborne, for living down to everybody's low expectations by parroting the Mail's hogwash. Like the man said, never wrestle with a pig - you get dirty, and besides, the pig enjoys it.

In radioland, professional troll A N Wilson crawled out from under his bridge to goad fellow interviewee, Labour MP Pamela Nash, by pontificating in a plummy drawl about how the Philpott case showed that the welfare state was way too generous and puts the morals of the undeserving poor in mortal danger. Sadly, instead of butting him into the river, Nash fell into the trap of being offended. 'No, no, no', I thought, 'the pig's enjoying it. Don't do it like that.' This is the way to do it:

The Daily Mail has apologised for failing to notice that people from wealthy backgrounds who are likely to inherit significant sums of money, might also be murderers.

Stephen Seddon, 46, was convicted of killing his parents for a quarter of a million pound inheritance in a story the Daily Mail failed to cover with the headline, “Vile product of affluent UK”.

Editor Paul Dacre apologised for the oversight, telling reporters, “We at the Daily Mail pride ourselves in drawing vociferous conclusions based on highly questionable evidence linked by wildly tenuous correlations – as yesterday’s front page about Mick Philpott showed.”

“Clearly we can link welfare payments and benefits to killing your children in a house fire, so how we missed this story about people with money killing people is anyone’s guess.”

“I would like to apologise to all of our readers for not telling them that Stephen Seddon is a product of UK’s truly awful culture of wealth accumulation and nepotism.” 

News Thump, skewers the whole manufactured "debate" like a shit kebab. If these sort of extreme, isolated cases had any relevance to anything (except for smearing the scapegoat du jour), the personal finance pages would be full of dire warnings that people were saving way too much for their retirement, without realising that the nest egg they'd been putting aside to keep them in Saga cruises or Werther's Originals was putting them at serious risk of being bumped off by their own greedy kids.

When even the right-wing Speccy concedes that this whole thing is nonsense, it's time to calm down and quit pig-wrangling.

Starstruck in London

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen we were having a family day out in London. I'd hoped to take my currently space-mad six-year-old to the old planetarium next to Madam Tussauds, but when I googled for details of prices and show times, All in London dot com cheerfully informed me that:

The London Planetarium, once located in Marylebone Street, in the green dome next to Madame Tussauds, has been closed in order to make way for a new celebrity-themed show that opened in July 2006. Although the planetarium used to be one of London’s attractions, there was less demand in recent years. The planetarium was therefore renames [sic] 'the Auditorium' and now hosts a show by Aardman Animations about celebrities.

Now a real* integrated part of the Madame Tussauds experience, the show was designed especially for projection onto the dome shaped ceiling. It takes visitors through a complete 360 degree circuit exploring how our earthly legends such as Marilyn Monroe are viewed by aliens!! 

I resisted the temptation to bang my head repeatedly against the desk (although if I'd done so for long enough I might have become sufficiently brain-damaged to enjoy a "real", integrated, celebrity-themed experience). Knowing that a working planetarium had been gutted in order to make way for this abomination was bad enough, but knowing that the people behind Wallace and Gromit were complicit in the sacrilege was almost too much to bear.

Instead, we took a boat downriver to Greenwich and visited the Royal Observatory, which now houses the Peter Harrison Planetarium, so we got our show with the added bonuses of a river trip in glorious, though chilly, sunshine followed by one of London's best short walks, from the Cutty Sark and Wren's Old Royal Naval College, up through Greenwich Park to the observatory. The Offspring enjoyed the show at the planetarium, which now proudly calls itself 'London's only planetarium.' Because you clearly couldn't find enough geeky kids to support more than one working planetarium in a city that only attracts one and a half million tourists a year and is home to a mere eight million people.

Now that we know that the universe in which we live is billions and billions of times less interesting than whatever Simon Cowell tweeted ten minutes ago, we can safely move on to your breaking sleb news. Our resident paparazzo has a sensational photograph from Greenwich, confirming gossip that celebrity foodstuffs bacon and chocolate have been collaborating on an exciting new project:

Compared to that, the whole of infinity sucks, obviously.


*If you're in the business of promoting waxwork replicas of airbrushed, PR-washed, image-controlled slebs who looked like waxworks to start with, I wouldn't bother with the word "real."