Celebrity to Asians - well done you on the not-terrorism
More incisive politics from one of the UK’s most fêted writers.
The good thing that came out of the riots was a renewed sense of community. “How does one put this without sounding gross … it was terrific to see the Asian communities on telly and not to have to think about terrorism, and not to have to think about the thing I’m always thinking about… do they want to kill Jews?”
Kudos indeed by the way for not sounding gross, &, yes, what about our pain? Which of us White Folk has not long been strung out by our obligation to wonder whether brown people want to ostentatiously kill Jews?
(Jacobson does always speak for victims. Recall his wise intervention about the flotilla hellbent & merciless in its intent to deliver letters to Gaza. With Alice Walker yammering on about Palestinian children, what, insisted Jacobson, of the real victims, the heavily armed Israeli soldiers? Bringing mail, or in Jacobsonian idiom, ‘a cargo of intention … freighted with political sympathy and attitude’, would have been ‘a provocation’, the flotilla ‘half inviting a violence’. They were, to put it another way, asking for it. How refreshingly Jacobson cut through the cant, Walker’s ‘language of outraged moral purity’, her delight in ‘feeling good about herself’. & snap to you too, Hedy Epstein! You & Hajo Meyer. All Holocaust-survivor this, unarmed-civilian-that, solidarity-against-oppression the other. Such fucking drama queens.)
Anyway, you know Asians? Isn’t it brilliant that we’re not forced to assume they’re terrorist Jew-killers any more? That was some tiring shit right there.
Such images are never about the animal. They are always excuses to depict buildings in the background. A terrible lubriciousness for architecture, zoologically disavowed.
Except where those animals will not stay still. Defy their depicter. Walk right up to that unmentionable and sniff it. The guilt, but oh, the relief.
Of course it would be pigs.
Praeteritio & political priorities
(Parenthetically, just as a muttered aside, pootling around online, swallowing bile, following links to those who, popping the collars on their threadbare contrarianism, foppishly defend primetime white supremacism, one grows tempted - sorely fucking tempted - to articulate a position whereby hate for them is the indispensable political grundnorm. But we must keep perspective. It would be a waste of time, a dereliction. If one man in particular were to demand attention, on that & many occasions, by the toddler’s method of screaming & smearing himself with shit, he would be a vacuity, a swaggering irrelevance, a malefic clown, a bleating pantomime sidekick spite-monger. He would have no agency, would be flotsam tossed as mindless as bladderwrack in & by the choppy froth of reaction. He would be a function of Evil at its very laziest, its least imaginative. Or as if, rather ironically, the result of industrial action in Hell, extruded from the vats by devils on a work-to-rule. For these reasons, rejectamentalist manifesto would never pay such a one any mind.)
There has been universal condemnation of David Starkey’s extraordinary outburst on Newsnight, in which he blamed Jews, or ‘a culture of Jewry’, for Britain’s woes.
‘I’ve just been rereading Julius Streicher. … His prophecy was absolutely right in one sense. … But it wasn’t Jew-on-Gentile violence. … What has happened is that a substantial section of the chavs … have become Jews. The Gentiles have become Jews. A particular sort of conniving, secretive, nihilistic usurious culture has become the fashion. And Gentile and Jew, boy and girl, operate in this language together, this language which is wholly false, which is this Eastern European Yiddish that’s been intruded in England, and this is why so many of us have this sense of literally a foreign country. …. It’s not blood, it’s cultural. … Listen to David Miliband, an archetypal successful Jew. If you turned the screen off so you were listening to him on radio you’d think he was Christian.’
It is uncontroversial of course that such explicitly racist statements are beyond the pale. The fascist right is delighted, but no mainstream commentators have anything but condemnation for these remarks.
Oh wait, my bad.
Smash, Grab, Run
Let the minutes unleash
The bullets Brixton wishes
Barbed wire is the ivy on my walls
Acrid cordite like mist in autumn
Dissolves the harsh street into pellucid cameos
Think how the striking truncheon outpaces thought
How the burgeoning Molotov cancels discussion
And for just this once in my black British life
Exploded the atoms in me into atoms of power
Let each viewfinder’s instant exorcise
The pictorial myths complacency devises
Each hurtling brick aimed to smash this enchanter’s glass
Aimed to loot the truths for so long packaged in lies
I am the hundreds of putrid meat in English prisons
In derelict houses, in borstals, the millions of condemned meat
Who let the grim minutes unleash their canned grime.
No object of any dignity in any jewellery drawer would allow itself to nestle randomly against its neighbours. But, mute, dumb, without motile power or mind, they do not choose their dioramas. Accordingly, their only option is to retrofit symbolic coincidence from the scenes they must motionlessly enact.
The majority of trinkets, tchotchkes & ornaments make themselves religious references. Back-project minor cults & orders whose teachings they abruptly illustrate. Here, four pieces perform the Parable of the Wise Procrastinator, from the Gospel According to Jonah’s Great Fish.
The punditocracy knew who was responsible. It wasn’t pretty to see the righteous certainties of Islamic savagery crumble in the face of mere truth. The efforts to continue to apportion blame where all blame must lie have been fervent but disappointing. The attempt to defend Breivik as a paladin of The West displays a regrettable lack of savoir faire: one may indulge such strategies, but one does not speak of it at table. Insinuations that multiculturalism is to blame feel a little oblique. Insistences that yeah but still Islam is the enemy have the whiff of fire-fighting.
We’ve come to a pretty pass if court experts are going to allow bagatelles like irrefutable proof that they are talking bullshit to undermine the baiting on which their livelihoods depend. Fortunately, we can build on by far the most ambitious of the rhetorical strategies deployed in rearguard defence against the terrorist’s white Christianness: the impressively ex nihilo insistence that the Muslim-hating fascist learned his craft from Muslims, ‘adopted the language’ of jihad. In fact the perfidy is worse even than that.
Avant-garde physics is open to the idea that the future can affect the past. It is not disputed that Breivik technically did it: the question, surely, is who is going to have made him do it?
Europe awake. Yestermorrow there will was be going to have been Jihadi retrocausality to contend with.
Elements
The earth elemental manifested in a form combining indolence & destruction. Even its evicted victim had to say well played.
Static, or what scientists term ‘poised’, fire.
In the pugilist science created to beat up the air, kerchiefs loosely tied serve roughly the same purpose as boxing gloves. Injuries to the fists are, nonetheless, common.
The - not silver! - lining to the tragedy is transmutation. That such-&-such a place is ‘paved with gold’ is bastardised gibberish of course; but it is a folk-memory of alchemico-urban aspiration. Sufficient footfall does render a surface potent. Streets become alembics. Most matter remains stubbornly not-gold, but minor alterations are feasible. Dead favourites, for example, become jewels.
Such beasts of London
anything less would never have done, & it was that revelation, that what she had thought a tree had always been a web but an old web, unglued, pendulous with dust from corridors; that the predator was not whatever suburban Shelob had spun it but time, that had out-waited that filament trap & quietly drunk its inhabitant & dropped its husk to earth. All the cars were dead spiders
Go
France to Women: ‘You’re Welcome.’
An Algerian man’s Bad Sexism precludes him from qualifying for French citizenship. ‘[H]is idea of sexual equality is not that of the republic’. Hurrah for the French state! One feels certain this man’s sexism had a kind of Muslimness to it, rather than displaying any fidelity to long-protected Republican traditions of ‘machismo … sexual predat[ion] … salacious remarks … paternalism … infantilization … aggression … male domination … & phallocracy’. One feels sure that were he to sexually assault a domestic worker, for example, he would do so with a complete lack of any suave Gallic élan.
