So, here we are, almost a month into a new decade- and it can’t have escaped your notice. The already tepid TV that we’re subjected to over the Christmas season (except Doctor Who. Doctor who rules) was jam packed with programmes reviewing the last ten years. Someone somewhere must have thought we cared.
The ‘noughties’ were my decade. I was eleven when the clock struck midnight on January 1st 2000. I went to school and college and uni. I began to forge an adult identity out of the sticky, awkward clay of adolescence. I became aware of music and films and culture and art in a new and critical way. I (in theory) physically and emotionally matured. I grew up in the first decade of the twenty first century and, let me tell you, it was rubbish.
Standing where I was and looking back at the vibrant culture from the fifties onwards I can perhaps be forgiven for feeling a little peeved that I was born so late. There’s been no youth movements to speak of in the noughties. ‘Chav’ is an insult and ‘emo’ is a resurrection of an ‘80s subculture. Nu metal was the worst thing to happen to music ever.
Fashions just copied what had gone on in other decades. The fashion industry ran out of ideas so they started marketed things as ‘60s, ‘70s or ‘80s revival. And people actually bought it. This was also decade when you could start buying music t-shirts at Topshop. Now if you see someone in a Beatles or Rolling Stones or Jimi Hendrix t-shirt it’s actually a pretty good bet that they don’t know a single one of their songs. Of course, there are exceptions. My friend is a die hard Bowie fan and his Bowie t-shirt came from Topman, but on the whole they’re meaningless.
Mainstream music all but died as the really creative people retreated to the safe and cheap haven of the internet to market their products. There’s more artists now, but fewer are well known, and even fewer are well known and good.
Coupled, seemingly insanely, with an increase in paranoia over paedophiles the sexualisation of children reached terrifying heights. The clothes marketed to six year olds included jeans with ‘sexy’ written across the arse, thongs, padded bras, mini skirts and t-shirt bearing such delightful slogans as ‘bitch but you want it’. Barbie may have been a patriarchal tool to trap girls in tradition female roles, but at least she did stuff other than party and kiss boys like Bratz do. My Barbie had a 4x4 and went camping with Cindy and Action Man back in the ‘90s.
So much has been done to undermine women. The models got skinnier and skinnier until they started dying and the pressure to be beautiful increased as botox and plastic surgery became more readily available.
Politically speaking things have been no better. The ‘War on Terror’ has acted as the green light for our civil liberties to be systematically eroded. Health and climate change scares have been motivated, in my humble opinion, less out of concern for our welfare or that of the planet and more as a handy way of making everyone easier to control. People lost faith with their politicians and in the isolation that followed every community from the white middle classes to the Asian working classes saw an increase in extremism. Young people who’d gone to school and been friends with every race started voting for the BNP. Young Muslims whose parents had been staunch liberals were drawn into anti-West rhetoric.
And the name sucked. ‘Noughties?’ Seriosuly? It sounds like a euphemism for stealing biscuits from your Mum when you’re five.
So, yeah, 2000-2009 sucked in almost every way I can think off. Obviously there were some good bits, but this wouldn’t be a very good rant if I included the good bits, would it?
Peace and Love and enjoy the rest of 2010. x
25 January 2010
18 January 2010
Grow Up About the Army
Most people have, at some time or another, come across someone whose life story is so colourful and impressive that you can’t help but doubt them. These people are for the most part harmless. It’s a bit irritating if you’re in the wrong mood and you always wonder if they’ll take it too far and hurt someone, but no one really loses sleep over it.
Roger Day appears to be the exception to this. He was sentenced to sixty hours community service last week after attending a Remembrance Day parade wearing seventeen military medals, none of which he’d earned. He said that he’d made up his military past to impress his wife.
It was no doubt offensive and upsetting for those who had earned those medals and their
families to see an imposter marching alongside genuine soldiers, but I can’t help but feeling that sentencing the man to sixty hours community service is pushing it a bit. It is illegal to impersonate a soldier and with good reason. If you’re in the middle of a battle you don’t want the ‘soldier’ watching your back to have had no military training, especially ifthey’ve got a gun.
But after retirement? Yes, he was a twit about it and yes, I can understand the anger felt by soldiers and their families, but come on. The guy’s clearly nothing more deadly than a fantasist. He’s probably more frightened of the effect it’ll have on his wife than anything else. He’s apologised. The sentence in my opinion is far too harsh.
It is also, however, unsurprising. The view we have of our armed forces in this country is rose tinted to say the least. Soldiers are seen as saints regardless of what they have or have not done on the battlefields. In the eyes of some all you need to do is sign up for basic training to be placed on a moral pedestal high above the rest of the population. I understand that it’s a difficult job and a real tragedy when a young soldier is lost while fighting for (what they believe anyway) is the freedom of the UK, but I don’t think these people are saints.
In fact they kill people. Currently they are killing people in wars many of them do not agree with against those who are ill equipped technologically to fight against them. There have also been, and I stress here the rarity of these cases, many soldiers would not dream of acting in such a way, incidences of barbarity committed by our ‘brave boys’-as the Sun likes to call them.
The Sun, being one of the sexist pieces of chip paper in waiting currently conning people out of their money in this country, always refers to them as ‘our boys’. Never ‘our soldiers’ or ‘our army’ or even ‘our people’. They clearly do not see the scores of women who work just as hard in just as dangerous conditions as their male comrades worth mentioning. And it’s rather infantilising to the soldiers themselves. They are ‘boys’, not ‘men’. Perhaps this is because it’s easier to see them as wide eyed and innocent if they’re portrayed as children. But that’s a different rant entirely. Time to get back on topic methinks.
And then there are the moral problems many people have with the conflicts we as a nation are currently engaged in. You can stand up and blast the government for their action in Iraq and Afghanistan but even hint that the military may be at fault for following these orders and you instantly become a social pariah on the same level as Roger Day. And before anyone says anything yes I understand that the individual foot soldiers can’t question orders without severe consequences. That final remark was directed more at the higher echelons of the military.
I think we, as a country, need to grow up a bit about the army. Stop seeing them as a link to the ‘glorious age’ that is gone and is never, ever, ever coming back. Stop putting them on ridiculous moral pedestals because you’ve been brainwashed into believing that the young people who don’t risk their lives in unjust wars are pushing this nation into an obese drink induced promiscuous stupor. Stop giving out hopelessly disproportionate punishments to people who are just sad fantasists who need a slap on this risk rather than actual dangers to society.
Peace and Love. Seriously, can we all be a bit more peace and love? x
Roger Day appears to be the exception to this. He was sentenced to sixty hours community service last week after attending a Remembrance Day parade wearing seventeen military medals, none of which he’d earned. He said that he’d made up his military past to impress his wife.
It was no doubt offensive and upsetting for those who had earned those medals and their
families to see an imposter marching alongside genuine soldiers, but I can’t help but feeling that sentencing the man to sixty hours community service is pushing it a bit. It is illegal to impersonate a soldier and with good reason. If you’re in the middle of a battle you don’t want the ‘soldier’ watching your back to have had no military training, especially ifthey’ve got a gun.
But after retirement? Yes, he was a twit about it and yes, I can understand the anger felt by soldiers and their families, but come on. The guy’s clearly nothing more deadly than a fantasist. He’s probably more frightened of the effect it’ll have on his wife than anything else. He’s apologised. The sentence in my opinion is far too harsh.
It is also, however, unsurprising. The view we have of our armed forces in this country is rose tinted to say the least. Soldiers are seen as saints regardless of what they have or have not done on the battlefields. In the eyes of some all you need to do is sign up for basic training to be placed on a moral pedestal high above the rest of the population. I understand that it’s a difficult job and a real tragedy when a young soldier is lost while fighting for (what they believe anyway) is the freedom of the UK, but I don’t think these people are saints.
In fact they kill people. Currently they are killing people in wars many of them do not agree with against those who are ill equipped technologically to fight against them. There have also been, and I stress here the rarity of these cases, many soldiers would not dream of acting in such a way, incidences of barbarity committed by our ‘brave boys’-as the Sun likes to call them.
The Sun, being one of the sexist pieces of chip paper in waiting currently conning people out of their money in this country, always refers to them as ‘our boys’. Never ‘our soldiers’ or ‘our army’ or even ‘our people’. They clearly do not see the scores of women who work just as hard in just as dangerous conditions as their male comrades worth mentioning. And it’s rather infantilising to the soldiers themselves. They are ‘boys’, not ‘men’. Perhaps this is because it’s easier to see them as wide eyed and innocent if they’re portrayed as children. But that’s a different rant entirely. Time to get back on topic methinks.
And then there are the moral problems many people have with the conflicts we as a nation are currently engaged in. You can stand up and blast the government for their action in Iraq and Afghanistan but even hint that the military may be at fault for following these orders and you instantly become a social pariah on the same level as Roger Day. And before anyone says anything yes I understand that the individual foot soldiers can’t question orders without severe consequences. That final remark was directed more at the higher echelons of the military.
I think we, as a country, need to grow up a bit about the army. Stop seeing them as a link to the ‘glorious age’ that is gone and is never, ever, ever coming back. Stop putting them on ridiculous moral pedestals because you’ve been brainwashed into believing that the young people who don’t risk their lives in unjust wars are pushing this nation into an obese drink induced promiscuous stupor. Stop giving out hopelessly disproportionate punishments to people who are just sad fantasists who need a slap on this risk rather than actual dangers to society.
Peace and Love. Seriously, can we all be a bit more peace and love? x
11 January 2010
Wanna Know What's Really Terrifying?
Although we are now eleven days into 2010 I would still like to wish you all a happy New Year and I hope you all had a pleasant Christmas. See, I do have a nice bone in my body. Apologies for lack of blog last week. I'm a lazy fecker and considered it to still be my hols. And I was doing my dissertation, which I pretty much have not stopped doing since. Anyway, on with perceptive
(*cough cough*) political comment.
If you’ve been anywhere near a TV, radio, newspaper or any form of mass media it can’t have escaped your notice that for the people on board a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas day it was probably not the relaxing day they had planned. Some fool tried to blow the plane up. He failed.
Not surprising really, considering he was carrying the bomb in his underwear. Oh well, I suppose it was an original excuse as to why you’re uncomfortable on a long haul flight. He intended to ignite the powder he had stored in his trollies with some liquid. That doesn’t sound like a particularly efficient way to cause an explosion. I'd have used a fuse. Note to anti-terrorist cell, you’ll be please to know I was crap at chemistry and therefore no threat to national security.
And some brave bod jumped on him long before he could produce anything better than a few choice flames, so he only managed to singe two people’s eyebrows and one of them was his own. Kudos to that brave bod though. I think that’s how we’d all like to imagine we’d react to an attempted terrorist attack on a plane we were currently inside. And this is by no means a slight to the no doubt shaken and perplexed passengers. A terrorist attack, even a failed one, is quite frightening. If they’ve stopped shaking already they’re clearly made of stern stuff.
But, fortunately, the attack failed, although if you’ve been following the news you’d be forgiven to think that it was successful and everyone in Detroit died in a deadly fireball. Although I'm fairly sure the apparently unflappable Obama reacted in a more rational manner than George W Bush would have done it still seems to have been blown out of all proportion. No pun intended...well, maybe just a small one.
The already frankly ridiculous security measures have been stepped up. We are now subject to full body scanners that, as well as clearly having been invented by the kind of pervy old man you don’t want sat behind you on a bus, take about twenty minutes to get through. Oops, you’ve missed your flight. No holiday for you. Please bend over while we shove this special exploding underpants detector up your rectum. It sounds like something out of Black Adder. As well as powders, liquids, Jilly Cooper novels and insulin needles (have you any idea how long it would take to stab someone to death with an insulin needle? They’d die of old age first) we are only a few days away from being unable to wear our own underwear on flights. We’ll have to be provided with special airline pants with the corresponding logo emblazoned on them so if you so get arrested they know immediately who to bollock for not checking your passport.
Due to someone’s oversight somewhere Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (that’s the terrorist that is) should not even have flown. He was on a no fly list. But rather than tell those whose job it is to check such things to shape up a bit we’re now probably going to have to go through a hell of a lot more faff to get a passport. As a random aside, how exactly do those no fly lists work? There’s pretty much no one in the world with an entirely unique name. Just an aimless ponder...
It seems whatever we do terrorists are one step ahead of us. Whatever draconian measures are put in place they find a way to get around it. Kind of like organised criminals, which I suppose they are. Eventually so many restrictions are going to be put on our freedoms that the ‘civilised society’ the terrorists are apparently trying to destroy and we, the ‘good guys’, are trying to protect will be unrecognisable.
Abdullmutallab may have failed in his attempt to bomb a plane, but he has sufficiently terrorised the US (and therefore the UK by default) to merit the title terrorist. It wasn’t his ill thought through pants bomb that did it either, it was the panic stirred up by the media and the over reaction of security services eager to be seen to ‘do something’ to appease that very same fear mongering media. It’s a sad state of affairs when the terrorists don’t even need to detonate their bombs to do their work.
We should be grateful the Christmas bomb plot failed, and we should review the measures already in place. We should not use it as an excuse to make air passengers even more paranoid and ordinary members of the public more suspicious of each other. After the bombings on the London underground the general public had the right attitude. They just kept going about their daily business, determined that they would not allow themselves to be ‘terrified’. In contrast the security services overreacted and shot an innocent man to death.
Retain some perspective and stop doing the terrorists job for them.
Peace and Love x
(*cough cough*) political comment.
If you’ve been anywhere near a TV, radio, newspaper or any form of mass media it can’t have escaped your notice that for the people on board a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas day it was probably not the relaxing day they had planned. Some fool tried to blow the plane up. He failed.
Not surprising really, considering he was carrying the bomb in his underwear. Oh well, I suppose it was an original excuse as to why you’re uncomfortable on a long haul flight. He intended to ignite the powder he had stored in his trollies with some liquid. That doesn’t sound like a particularly efficient way to cause an explosion. I'd have used a fuse. Note to anti-terrorist cell, you’ll be please to know I was crap at chemistry and therefore no threat to national security.
And some brave bod jumped on him long before he could produce anything better than a few choice flames, so he only managed to singe two people’s eyebrows and one of them was his own. Kudos to that brave bod though. I think that’s how we’d all like to imagine we’d react to an attempted terrorist attack on a plane we were currently inside. And this is by no means a slight to the no doubt shaken and perplexed passengers. A terrorist attack, even a failed one, is quite frightening. If they’ve stopped shaking already they’re clearly made of stern stuff.
But, fortunately, the attack failed, although if you’ve been following the news you’d be forgiven to think that it was successful and everyone in Detroit died in a deadly fireball. Although I'm fairly sure the apparently unflappable Obama reacted in a more rational manner than George W Bush would have done it still seems to have been blown out of all proportion. No pun intended...well, maybe just a small one.
The already frankly ridiculous security measures have been stepped up. We are now subject to full body scanners that, as well as clearly having been invented by the kind of pervy old man you don’t want sat behind you on a bus, take about twenty minutes to get through. Oops, you’ve missed your flight. No holiday for you. Please bend over while we shove this special exploding underpants detector up your rectum. It sounds like something out of Black Adder. As well as powders, liquids, Jilly Cooper novels and insulin needles (have you any idea how long it would take to stab someone to death with an insulin needle? They’d die of old age first) we are only a few days away from being unable to wear our own underwear on flights. We’ll have to be provided with special airline pants with the corresponding logo emblazoned on them so if you so get arrested they know immediately who to bollock for not checking your passport.
Due to someone’s oversight somewhere Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (that’s the terrorist that is) should not even have flown. He was on a no fly list. But rather than tell those whose job it is to check such things to shape up a bit we’re now probably going to have to go through a hell of a lot more faff to get a passport. As a random aside, how exactly do those no fly lists work? There’s pretty much no one in the world with an entirely unique name. Just an aimless ponder...
It seems whatever we do terrorists are one step ahead of us. Whatever draconian measures are put in place they find a way to get around it. Kind of like organised criminals, which I suppose they are. Eventually so many restrictions are going to be put on our freedoms that the ‘civilised society’ the terrorists are apparently trying to destroy and we, the ‘good guys’, are trying to protect will be unrecognisable.
Abdullmutallab may have failed in his attempt to bomb a plane, but he has sufficiently terrorised the US (and therefore the UK by default) to merit the title terrorist. It wasn’t his ill thought through pants bomb that did it either, it was the panic stirred up by the media and the over reaction of security services eager to be seen to ‘do something’ to appease that very same fear mongering media. It’s a sad state of affairs when the terrorists don’t even need to detonate their bombs to do their work.
We should be grateful the Christmas bomb plot failed, and we should review the measures already in place. We should not use it as an excuse to make air passengers even more paranoid and ordinary members of the public more suspicious of each other. After the bombings on the London underground the general public had the right attitude. They just kept going about their daily business, determined that they would not allow themselves to be ‘terrified’. In contrast the security services overreacted and shot an innocent man to death.
Retain some perspective and stop doing the terrorists job for them.
Peace and Love x
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
