Apologia Absurdum

A brief apology and explanation to regular readers....

This blog, if I am honest, started as something to do because I missed the buzz of writing for print journals but was in no position to do much about that. This year, for various reasons, I started looking again and, coincidentally, also started getting more requests.

The upshot is I now have regular spots in two more publications, as well as the column in the bi-monthly which originally gave this blog a name and some sort of focus. I am also likely to add to that by next year. Seems it isn't just you nice folk who share my odd obsession for knowing what the religious lunatic fringe and other puritans get up to outside of London or Texas.

I will be continuing here, but it might be restricted to, say, a short weekly comment as things pick up. Hope that meets with your approval, and thanks for encouraging me to keep cranking stuff out in lean times.

Shameless plug for The Pink Humanist

I’ve been somewhat remiss in pointing you all towards the June issue of The Pink Humanist, probably because I’m a guest contributor. I am a good friend of the TPH crew, so was happy to give them some on-the-spot reportage on ‘the Ramsey lesbians and the landlord from hell’.

This was not so much to stir up more trouble as to set the record straight. The Isle of Man may be a lot of quirky things, but is no longer the centre of the flat earth world, and Ramsey folk – by and large – are OK. In fact, if we could just fill up a leaky fishing vessel with the town’s evangelical preachers, a few of the crankier Commissioners and maybe the management of the worst finance sector firms, then set it off into the Irish Sea with the rudder set for hell most of our troubles would be over.

I was also glad to do it for other reasons. One is, simply, that TPH runs articles on humanism and current affairs that no other publication can match, and just having my name as a contributor alongside Peter Tatchell, the incredibly brave and intelligent Nigerian campaigner Leo Igwe and other such figures is a boost to my ego.

Take a look and see what I mean. Astonishingly good stuff – every issue a groundbreaker.

Witless Christmas crackers

Ah well, Bilious Henderson’s attempts at cheap publicity over the
lack of nativity plays in Manx schools (see the update on Christmas matters ) sank miserably.
How sad. Now he’ll have to go back to stealing BNP myths about immigrants.
If the deluded herd really want to put the Crass back into Christmas over here they also need to use better hacks. For a start, don’t use a witless waffler who lifts her argument straight from the Christian Institute.
You can see what I mean at
http://www.iomtoday.co.im/columns/Not-amused-by-Ann-Summers39.5869489.jp. The only cheap shot missing from the C.I. original is their dig at Maria Eagle’s personal life.
And that a journalist – even a house-trained numpty like this one – thinks the loss of blasphemy laws have sent the UK to the dogs?
What can they be teaching them on NCTJ courses these days? Gary Otton will laugh his socks off to hear that Johnston Press’s policy of only employing dour know-nowt Calvinists on their Scots papers has now spread to their other titles.
(Sighs deeply) Now, take this down in your worst shorthand (if they teach you that either!)…
People have rights. Ideas do not, and in order that the world moves on it is also vital that they are rigorously challenged.
People can have their reputation defamed, even though in practice it is only rich individuals who can complain about it. Fairy stories cannot, and were made for little children, who (unlike religionists) learn to enjoy the myth without taking it literally.
But then, you can see how desperate the Examiner is by their ‘Christmas cancelled’ effort at http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/Christmas-cancelled-in-bid-to.5868955.jp . Note in particular that the Port St Mary Living Hell con-artists are getting a bung from the Commissioners and the attempts of the Elim to get one too.
As for the fate of the Festival of Light? Anybody who names a community event after Mary Whitehouse’s gang of chuckleheads deserves to fail, if you ask me.
Oh, and to return to the original story. If my daughter asked her mum: 'What's a Horny Christmas, mummy' I suspect she’d get the same answer as when she asked ‘what’s an orgasm?’
That answer being: ‘Ask your dad’.

Real Journalism shock

I haven’t recently checked out Spiked, the ‘libertarian Marxist’ website which was, if nothing else, a place to find contrarian and argumentative pieces which challenge kneejerk liberal assumptions.
Spiked articles can genuinely question or merely irritate by turns, as you’d expect from folk from a now defunct Trotskyite group.
Still, a Nathalie Rothschild item usefully sums up a Guardian story I should have noticed earlier, as it finally explodes the traffiking myth being stirred up by evangelicals in order that they can preach and pass the begging bowl some more.
She tells us that:
“The Guardian got hold of an internal police analysis of the six-month campaign, Operation Pentameter Two. It showed that after extensive intelligence-gathering and raids on 822 brothels, flats and massage parlours across Britain, only 96 people were arrested for trafficking, and out of these only 15 men and women were convicted. For 10 of them, police found no evidence of their having coerced prostitutes. In the end, only five men were found to be genuine traffickers – that is, they had imported women and forced them into prostitution – but they had been detected before the Pentameter investigation started.”
Actually, it gets worse. Even amongst those arrested elsewhere were a couple whose arrest was more due to police needing a nice dramatic shot of a door being battered down for a TV documentary than months of patient work uncovering some criminal ‘Mr Big’.
Not, in short, helpful for future appeals by a TV vicar and his faithful accomplices with a propensity for stoking up moral panics then starting ‘charities’ to deal with them.
The entire piece is worth a read (see http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/earticle/7625/ ), but be sure to go on to two original Guardian pieces by Nick Davies at http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/oct/20/government-trafficking-enquiry-fails and http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/oct/20/trafficking-numbers-women-exaggerated.
I say this because Davies is the journalist who gave us Flat Earth News. This important book exposed ‘churnalism’ and other practices by which even the ‘quality press’ has stopped chasing real news or employing real investigative reporters, while regionals (especially those owned by large corporations, not old fashioned local activist/publishers) just cut and paste national stories (in turn bought from a handful of agencies).
This explains, for example, how one agency, friendly to groups like Christian Concern for Our Nation and the Christian Legal Centre, is able to place story after story in the Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail about ‘sincere Christians’ being 'persecuted' for their hate (sorry ‘faith’), and why those stories then make it to the top of other news organisation story lists.
In short, some real and useful journalism for a change.
Read and remember next time such moral panics ‘coincidentally’ hit the headlines elsewhere.

Swells party piece

I only discovered yesterday that while I was in hospital recently an old friend was in another one, in a far worse state, and had died.
Steven Wells, possibly the most in-yer-face hack ever to work in the music press, finally popped his clogs in a US hospital on 24th June. Knowing Swells, he was probably more annoyed at dying in America than that he was dying at all.
I first met him way back in 1982, when I tried to bring ‘Seething Wells’ over to Belfast for a gig, along with fellow ranting poets Joolz Denby, Attila the Stockbroker and Wild Willi Beckett. It fell through, but I was so intrigued by this unlikely Bradford skinhead poet that I stayed in touch over the years. A couple of years younger than me but sharing all my background experiences and constraints, he was like the mischievous little brother I never had.
Somewhere I have his recipe for roast police horse from Attack on Bzag ( the fanzine he started with James Brown), his article on raizing the Globe Theatre to the ground to build a skateboard park and many other outrageous delights. As others have said, Swells didn't write just to annoy or disturb the comfortable, but to cut through crap and force fierce argument about things he deeply cared about.
A few years ago, he even contributed to the campaign to abolish the Manx equivalent of Section 28.
Way back in 1992 he was doing PR for Manic Street Preachers and sent an open letter to Pope John Paul, Axl Rose and numerous other homophobes suggesting they dress in sackcloth, wear a sign around the neck reading ‘UNCLEAN’ and ring a bell to atone for their sins if appearing in public. The ridiculous image, and attitude, stayed with me and when a Manx politician (currently responsible for transport though unfit to even direct traffic) suggested the ban shouldn’t be repealed because homosexuality ‘causes diseases’ , I asked Swells if I could re-use his challenge.
Typically he said "Go for it" and I did, in the local paper. After the campaign, I never found out if the politican involved, on resigning as Education Minister, really did receive a school bell as a parting gift from his staff. I do know it was suggested.
What I also didn’t know then was that while e-mailing me Swells was fighting lymphatic cancer. He never bothered to mention it.
Swell later wrote about that experience at http://www.philadelphiaweekly.com/news-and-opinion/cover-story/the_english_patient-38416404.html. He not only countered all the irritating touchy-feely hogwash about disease and charities that leech off the terminally ill he hated as much as I do, but set me up for my own hospital encounters this year.
A few months ago the cancer came back, and Swells topped his previous outrages with http://www.philadelphiaweekly.com/news-and-opinion/Cell-Out-42215357.html and
http://www.philadelphiaweekly.com/news-and-opinion/in-extremis/Steven-Wells-Says-Goodbye-49054426.html, the last things he wrote.
Damn you Swells! You couldn’t even die politely.