over 25000 palestinians dead and i'm STILL seeing pjo posts on my dash. your childhood faves (funded by zionists!) cannot possibly be more important than the lives of real living breathing people.

Oh the disrespect to Malorie Blackman from fandom proves the backlash is bigoted. As a millennial Brit I've always known her to be immensely respected as an author and social activist, Pig Heart Boy and the Noughts and Crosses books were big back in the day. It's amazing Chibs got her to write and a fitting one for her to write. If you're familiar with her books you'll recognise just how her the episode is. But also because she was wanting a female Doctor since 2013 so it's so cool she got to write for the first.

I don’t think I’ve ever been infuriated more than when I had someone supposedly attacking me from the left that Malorie and Chibs were incompetent writers on Rosa because it wasn’t horrible enough. Malorie is an award winning children’s writer and was brought on to write the first historical of the era with the whole point being that it was a story that would be accessible for children to understand. She is a perfect choice because of her professional status to do that. Also if you listen to in audio commentary she talks about the level of research she did for that episode, and it’s a lot. She even mentions that she made sure Frank Sinatra would be playing around that time period for the ‘reward’ 13 offers the other bus driver because she knew if she got it wrong fans would point it out. Like I don’t understand how you can say the episode is racist and the writer was incompetent and some how sit on some virtue pedestal when calling an award wining woman of colour writer incompetent.

Also people saying that Demons of the Punjab doesn’t vilify the British enough… generally the white lefty anti 13 types say this… Vinay wrote that story drawing on his family’s experience… who are these white lefty anti 13 types to say to a person who’s family lived through this situation that they didn’t write their story right??? Also it is pretty clear in the episode the British are to blame, it’s mentioned serval times we just don’t see the bad British white mans face who’s the villain and that’s because that’s a different story! This is a story focusing on how this broke families and tore loved ones apart, it’s not a story about the British it’s a story about the people who were affected.

this is me speaking frankly about my thoughts on all of this because i've been really struggling over the past 2 days because of the matty shit and it hurts. i will admit i feel conflicted over this which i hate and if you feel similar or want to tell me to shut the fuck up feel free but i think talking about it and getting out my system will help. this is rambly, incoherent, kinda personal and quite long so feel free to ignore but i just want it out there.

i think i am very parasocial with matty and that makes me want to excuse him far more than i should, and i'm willing to admit that is a flaw. i want to be in denial and tell myself that this is all just a big bit and he's not really like that but how the fuck am i supposed to know that? i keep telling myself that he is better than this and he doesn't actually believe any of this but realistically i know nothing about this man other than what he shows us, and what he showed on that podcast was really shitty. i can't keep excusing his shitty behaviour, before i just thought of him as a loveable asshole but he's turning more and more into just a straight up asshole.

i feel like people on both sides of this debate are being way too loud because it's a lot more nuanced than either 'he has committed every -ism under the sun and is a terrible bigot' or 'he's done nothing wrong lol you're just a fake fan that's his humour' and i hate that no one can just have a conversation about this. i've seen and spoken to a few people on anon about it and it's been much nicer so i appreciate this tumblr community for being so nice even though this blog has only existed for like a week lmao.

i have loved matty since 2015 and my love was really reignited back in November and it's made these past few months so good for me, i saw them live and made 15 year old me's dream come true and i think i was kinda waiting for it to all go to shit so i feel like i shouldn't be surprised but i still am.

it hurts that a man who has been so vocal about supporting women and condemning bigotry and toxic masculinity can't stop himself from participating in such unnecessary low blow humour for some cool points. like i don't really give a shit if it's satire and all a big bit, the words are still harmful and they still fucking hurt.

like it's so frustrating because in my head i want to believe he is better than this!!! he has been so vocal in the past and that goddamn brit award speech he made just doesn't seem like the same person who was in that interview. but once again how am i supposed to know that. maybe he's an absolute prick behind closed doors.

i don't feel like what was done was egregious but he was clearly happily complicit in it and thats what makes me so uncomfortable. it's such shitty punch down humour that is completely unnecessary, like yeah its a joke or whatever but its such a shit joke that is only funny because its something they know will never happen to them. even if the hosts are minorities themselves it doesn't give them the right to make such shitty racist remarks and especially for privileged white boy matty to be joining in with them.

i think its poe's law that goes something like 'if your attempt at satire is indistinguishable from the person you are mocking you are no better than them'. like even if he isn't a bigot he sure is fucking sounding like one and it pisses me off. and i have seen people who definitely are bigots laughing at this shit and feeling validated by it. if people who genuinely believe that shit are laughing and agreeing with you then you need to take a step back and reevaluate what you are saying.

he has no ability to understand when to shut his mouth and understand that his opinion isn't fucking needed. oh great yet another rich privileged white man's opinions, exactly what the world fucking needs.

i feel like he could maybe redeem himself is he showed even an ounce of self reflection and realisation that he has genuinely hurt people, if he actually apologised or fucking did anything to acknowledge the shitty stuff he has done, but he never does!!!! he never does because he can get away with it because people keep letting him get away with it.

and yet despite all that a small part of me still wants to love him and its been tearing me apart. i considered myself to have very strong morals and this goes against so many of them. i'm not sure if it's the parasocial attachment or the comfort he has brought me over the years but i really don't want to lose that, but that sacrifices my own morals to do that (am i being too sensitive, am i too morally black and white, is what i am feeling valid, am i a bad person for thinking this???)

i hate the fact that every time i try to listen to their music or i see the videos that used to make me feel so happy i just feel sick. i want to feel comforted and happy like i used to but now i just think about him and feel upset, i don't want him to be that person i so desperately don't but i don't know anymore and i don't know what to do.

i hate the fact that i can't form my own opinions and i am so influenced by what other people say, i am so desperate for someone to valdiate me but two people have told me it's okay and i still feel sick. i want someone to tell me how to feel about this but when they do i can't accept it. i love him and i hate him so much and those feelings can't get on with each other. it just really really fucking sucks.

Thess vs The Last Two Days

Okay. I promised some kind of explanation - or at least breaking it down for the non-Brits who are following this catastrophe we call a government. So. Let’s take it from the top:

A Bit Of History: So a few months ago, a mass wave of resignations basically forced Boris Johnson to resign as PM himself. It took months for them to pick a new one. They called it an ‘election’, but it wasn’t, really - what happened was that paid-up members of the Conservative Party (note: this does not include members of Parliament; this is just a bunch of rich old white dudes, a fair few of whom don’t even fucking live here anymore) voted on which candidate they wanted in the leadership position. This got us Liz Truss, and no mandate whatsoever - the MPs hadn’t chosen her, the people hadn’t chosen her, no one but this 160k people or so were even able to vote for her ... and she didn’t even really get the majority of those; there were just some abstentions. Then, of course, the Queen died, and there was two weeks of sweet fuck all done. Then, Truss basically announced this awful economic idea (but not a budget because she didn’t want the Office of Fiscal Responsibility anywhere near it) of heavy borrowing, tax breaks for the wealthy and zero accountability, which freaked out the markets, tanked the pound, and made a few people who’d shorted the pound just before this happened even more wealthy than they already were. There were U-turns. Truss sacked her Chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, in an attempt to blame him for the ‘mini-budget’ or ‘fiscal event’ or whatever godsawful euphemism we were using for it. We got Hunt, who went back on basically everything (except the bonuses for bankers) and went full austerity. The problem is, we’ve been operating under austerity policies since Cameron took power (because the LibDems did fuck all in that so-called coalition government) in 2010 or so. There can’t be any more spending cuts on public services because there isn’t anything left to cut without destroying public services altogether. That’s still in limbo because of the events of the last couple of days.

So. Let me try to explain the last couple of days. I’m trying to sum this up as succinctly as I can but it’s so stupid and convoluted that it’s difficult.

Who’s Suella Braverman, Why Did She Resign, And Why Did This Matter? Okay, Suella Braverman was one of the people who stood for the leadership position a few months back. She’s the one who is by her own admission obsessed with deporting refugees to Rwanda. (No, she literally called it her dream and her obsession. She is one of at least four boomerang bigots in government right now.) The reason she gave for her resignation was breach of the ministerial code - namely ... well, BUT HER EMAILS (she sent sensitive information to colleagues via her personal email account). Thing is, it’s pretty clear by the tone of her resignation letter that she did so deliberately because she wasn’t happy that no one was helping her live her dreams of sending refugees to a country with a history of crimes against humanity because of being too busy dealing with the collapse of the economy. Seriously, her entire resignation letter was a passive-aggressive “fuck you”. Thing is, this mattered because of how Johnson was forced out of office - when key members of your cabinet start resigning, it’s a death knell.

What’s the 1922 Committee, And How Are They Involved? For our purposes here, the 1922 Committee deals with votes of no confidence in either Prime Minister or Government. If a party in government has no confidence in their leader, or if the MPs in general lose confidence in their government, they send letters to the 1922 Committee demanding a vote of no confidence. If they receive enough letters, they put it to a vote. Winning a vote doesn’t always mean anything - if the margin by which a PM wins is small enough, they might quit anyway owing to lack of mandate (that’s what happened with Thatcher; Johnson had a smaller margin than Thatcher did, but stayed until the mass resignations because the man has a massive sense of entitlement and no shame). Anyway, there are a couple of rules about when you can and cannot send letters to the 1922 Committee about this. By those rules, a PM has to be in office for a reasonable span of time (I think a year?) before they can face a vote of no confidence ... unless the 1922 Committee has been given reason to change the rules. The 1922 Committee was given reason to change the rules not only by the sheer number of letters they were getting, but also Braverman’s resignation - they remember how Johnson was forced out too, after all. That put the writing on the wall for Truss, because the new rules they set were getting her really close to facing a vote of no confidence.

How The Hell Does The Fracking Vote Come In? The fracking vote is complicated. Basically, there are a couple of factions in government who are dedicated to restarting fracking in the UK despite the serious ecological and safety concerns - to the point that they’re basically trying to sabotage land laws to make it nearly impossible to put solar panels on any land that might conceivably, in some far-distant universe, grow a thing. Thing is, the Tory manifesto states that they will not give the go-ahead to recommence fracking in the UK until or unless it is deemed safe by experts. And they did have it looked at by experts! Thing is ... the government won’t show us the results of this. All we have is that Victorian-undertaker-looking motherfucker Jacob Rees-Mogg saying that we could probably survive a few earthquakes, and a statement from the government that fracking is the only way to deal with the energy crisis (see above re: solar panels).This breaks with the Tory manifesto, and is a hard sell with most. And Labour, bless their little cotton socks, put forward a motion to Parliament to ban fracking entirely. This is technically more in line with the Tory manifesto than “Fracking is all that will save us! No, you don’t need to see the safety studies!”, so a fair few Tories would be inclined to vote for this thing. Except that someone close to the PM said, “We’re going to be using this vote to determine whether Liz Truss has a mandate, in the face of all this attention from the 1922 Committee”. And then someone else said, “No, scratch that, it’s just a vote!” And it got all confused but it was pretty clear by the three-line whip that was called for this particular situation that for some reason, this vote was still being seen as Truss’ salvation.

Why Are We Talking About Whips Now? It’s not quite as kinky as it sounds but is honestly more BDSM than it sounds. When you think ‘whip’, literally think like the country’s the carriage, the PM’s the driver, and the MPs are the horses. When something’s put through to the vote in Parliament, the whips from all parties involved (who are actual people in this case) are briefed on exactly how the party should be voting, and they pass that along to the MPs. There are different grades (lines) depending on how serious it’s supposed to be taken - everything from first line “You’re a rebel and we’re keeping an eye on you” to third line “YOU MUST VOTE THIS WAY OR BE BANISHED!” (Literally; anyone rebelling against a third-line whip has to leave the party and sit as an independent.) So calling a third-line whip and telling them to vote in a way that entirely goes against the Tory manifesto because the party said so ... well, honestly, whoever made that decision, it was turned into a test of whether the MPs would put country before party ... and they were expected to put party before country, or face serious consequences.

So What Happened In The Voting Chamber Last Night? It was bedlam. There was yelling. Both chief whip and deputy chief whip briefly resigned. Tory MPs were being bodily dragged into the voting chamber, effectively being forced to vote. I’m not sure what it says that Truss herself was one of the forty who abstained ... probably her way of at least trying to signal that no, it really wasn’t a test of party loyalty, this vote. It didn’t work, anyway. The motion to ban fracking was dismissed because forty abstentions isn’t enough to kill an eighty seat majority in Parliament. Thing is, it didn’t show party loyalty either, just because of the bullying, yelling, and general mishegoss of the vote itself. All it showed was just how fractured the Conservative party has become.

So What Happens Now? As you’ve probably already heard, Liz Truss resigned today, which means she holds the record for shortest term for a Prime Minister. Anyway, she’s going to be in office for as long as it takes them to find a successor.

So That’s Good, Right? Not really. While it took months to vote in a successor for Johnson, they’re getting Truss’ replacement in about a week. This through online voting - same 160k old rich white men that make up the Conservative Party membership, but this time the contenders have to have at least 100 MPs supporting them before they can be considered.

Dare We Ask Who’s Standing? Rishi Sunak is back. So’s Kemi Badenoch, the boomerang bigot and transphobe. So’s Suella Braverman - you know, that one I mentioned just above who deliberately broke the ministerial code and dreams of sending refugees to Rwanda? A couple of dipshits I’ve never heard of. And... Well...

Oh No. Oh yes. Boris fucking Johnson is apparently going to stand again, or is at least “taking soundings” about it. And since he’s this country’s Trump, he actually still has actual people who have been horribly adversely affected by his policies making the #BringBackBoris hashtag trend again.

But Didn’t He Also Breach Ministerial Code? AND HE BROKE THE FUCKING LAW, BUT APPARENTLY NO ONE CARES. He’s being seen as a “big tent leader”. They’re clearly trying to evoke an image of ‘ringmaster’; all anyone with a brain sees is ‘clowns’.

I ... honestly don’t know if this makes any more sense than the headlines do, but I tried. This is as uncomplicated as I can make it. It’s just idiotic. People are screaming for a general election so that we can actually see a manifesto and get some kind of mandate of the people, but the Tories are going to hang on until the Elections Act kicks in properly so that we require voter ID and so that the Elections Commission will be at least partly under their jurisdiction (under their thumb, more like). We get no say in what happens now. AGAIN. All we get is a succession of lapdogs to the exorbitantly wealthy, and they are fucking killing us at this point. This from a country that dragged us out of the EU on “the will of the people” that was decided by the slimmest fucking margin in the universe.

Hope this helps, anyway.

“It’s easier for me here, it’s more dangerous for you.”– Rosa

We thought we were getting a ‘celebrity historical’ as codified in 2005. What we’re got was something older: the closest thing in generations to the original Hartnell pure historicals, where history can’t be changed (not one line!), where we learn a lesson about the past, and where people are going to kill you.

This is one of two key things about Rosa. We’ll come back to it later.

The first key thing, as sneering baddie Krasko will outright say, “tiny actions change the world.” His plan to change history is to simply nudge it subtly, so Rosa Parks never sits down in a specific time and place. It’s not plausible that this alone will prevent the US civil rights movement from succeeding but it’s a good lesson for kids, so we’ll let it slide. Instead of history and its celebrity figures being solid forces, Rosa is simply a tired activist who reaches the end of her tether one night and might have moved another night. We even see this at the start, with her first run-in with the bus driver James Blake: she does briefly attempt defiance, sitting in a Whites Only seat temporarily to get her purse, but that’s as far as she dares go.

Instead of a grand technobabble battle, the Doctor and her chums have to keep history on track with their own subtle actions – a fake raffle here, a delay there, a few full seats. This is the show again looking to practical, dirty-hands action. The need to get things exactly right and to undo Krasko is an intellectual puzzle, one emphasising how easy it would be to change what we think of as the arc of history.

Krasko is a weak point after a while. When we don’t know he’s incapable of doing physical harm, his sociopathic swagger, his humblebragging his murders, and his tactic of simply opening fire makes him a menace. But once we know he can’t touch them, the threat is gone, he’s just a puzzle to be figured out, and he lacks a strong enough personality to engage on that level.

But that leads us to the second key part of the episode: the greater threat. The one the Doctor can’t stop.

The real threat in Rosa is being alive in 1950s Alabama.

In a superb scene, the Doctor lets Krasko grab her by the neck and taunts him knowing he can’t pull it off. In every clash, she’s standing up to him, unimpressed with his intimidations. She never does this with the regular Alabamans. In their first encounter, where a random man backhands Ryan and threatens to lynch him, she is visibly terrified and trying to calm the man down. When a swaggering policeman shows up, Ryan and Yaz have to hide behind the bins while the Doctor can only delay him, quietly denying his racism but not having the bravado to challenge him.

Krasko is a science fiction villain and is no match for a science fiction franchise lead. A racist cop with a gun in 1950s Alabama (indeed, in much of 2019 Alabama) is not science fiction. This is a real man who can kill the Doctor’s friends. TV methods will not stop him.

I don’t know what parts of this episode arewas Chibnall’s work and what parts are Malorie Blackman, but these parts are almost certainly Blackman. This is the sort of material she’s touched on in the Noughts and Crosses series. It’s an obvious plot beat that as soon as Yaz says “time travel’s awesome”, they run into a nasty racist from the past but the sudden violence, the threat of worse, the entitlement of it, this is new.

And the whole episode is like this. It’s not just one man and one angry cop. The cast can’t eat in a restaurant without facing hostility. Getting about in Montgomery to do their clever plan means being on the bus and directly experiencing the racism. The murder of Emmett Till for allegedly touching a white woman is raised, a thing that could happen to Ryan. Rosa Parks is clearly irritated at points by these stupid English tourists who don’t understand what’s going on, who are blundering around making her already hard life harder. In one scene, Yaz can’t even be sure where she fits in the racial hierarchy as a “Mexican”; the rules are arbitrary and she can’t be sure what’s safe. The entirety of Montgomery is oppressive, an obstacle that you can’t puzzle through with clever minds. Nobody is safe here.

It is not the first time Doctor Who has acknowledged time travel can be piss – Martha faced racism in Human Nature, for example. But in the end, she could stand up to the racists and she was not presented as being in physical danger. In The Idiot Lantern, the 1953 bigot is a threat to the people in the past but can be humiliated in his own home with no splashback by the Doctor & Rose. This has different rules. This is more akin to The Aztecs in 1963, where the cast had to be aware of the social mores and structures, and if pushed too far the Aztecs might kill them for crimes against the norm. Humans are the enemy, not monsters.

And in no other story I can remember do we have a companion angry he has to hide behind a bin during what’s supposed to be a wonderful sci-fi adventure. And Ryan and Yaz both discuss that, while things have improved, they still have to deal with racism in 2018. In the end, in the triumphant discussion of how Rosa Parks changed the world, we will hear how much she struggled after her protest and how old she was before being granted honours by President Clinton. There is optimism for the future – indeed, Krasko makes it explicit that racial equality wins – but tempered with the knowledge we have a way to go.

The story would have been stronger as a pure historical, the Doctor realising things aren’t quite happening right and the threats all from our friendly local policemen. Those are the parts that sing the most. See also the utter dismay from Graham when he realises he’s trapped in history, he’s part of the reason Rosa Parks can’t sit down, and he doesn’t want to be – he wants out. The clever-clever puzzle of keeping history on track ends with the character’s having to sit and watch and be complicit, rather than being part of the victory.

With the TARDIS regulars, something interesting has happened: Graham and Ryan are getting on better. Here, for the first time, Ryan publicly reaches out a hand to his granddad by helping him process his grief. They mutually remember the lost Grace, Ryan saving Graham from a depressing moment by joking “she’d start a riot” if she was there. Following that, they work together for the Doctor’s plan and driving James Slate away from his fishing trip is very much a team effort. They work together and banter and generally troll him into defeat. Over three episodes, we’ve gone from them being frosty to chummier.

Travelling with the Doctor has made them get on.

A nice touch too, for Yaz, when Ryan is threatened – she instinctively tries to make the man back down in the same way she would as a copper. Sadly, that will not work here.

A very annoying touch: Ryan zaps Krasko with his time gun and sends him very far back. When Krasko was firing at them, it was presented as killing-by-other-means (so why doesn’t he zap Rosa Parks?? Oh well). The episode after the Doctor admonished Ryan for using a laser gun on mindless robots, she’s fine with him de facto killing a man!!

But points like this don’t drag down the episode. It’s still a powerful piece, teaching Brits about part of the world they may not have known, making us look unflinchingly at the past.

On JK Rowling, Dumbledore, lycanthropy, and cultural context

I want to address an idea I’ve been seeing pop up a lot recently, which is that JK Rowling added Dumbledore being gay and lycanthropy being a metaphor for AIDS years later in order to seem progressive, and I’ve put a lot of time into thinking about why these claims bother me (since I’m definitely not mad on Jo’s behalf because she’s been dead to me since 2016), and I think it really comes down to this. These claims are based entirely off of how things are today and show a fundamental disregard for the cultural context at the time that’s concerning and feels dismissive to the people who lived through it. Basically, it goes hand in hand with the lack of knowledge and sometimes intentional rewriting of our community’s history that’s so prominent on this site.

Note that I am not arguing that Dumbledore is good rep or that the lycanthropy-HIV metaphor was well executed (or even a good idea in the first place). I just wish people would stop treating these things like JK Rowling said them yesterday as opposed to 12 years ago.

1. Dumbledore being gay 

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows came out in July 2007 and Jo first publicly said Dumbledore was gay and in love with Grindelwald in October 2007, so the idea that she added it years later is just factually untrue. It came out three months after the release of the final book. 

Let’s take a look at public attitude towards queer people in 2007. I’ll preface this by saying that I’m American, so I’ve done my best to find data on the UK, but most of my info is from the US.

In 2007, in the US, Gallup reported that only 59% of adults surveyed believed consensual sex between two people of the same gender should be legal, that 46% of adults believed that same-sex marriage should be legal and come with all the same rights are marriage between a man and a woman, and that 50% of adults favored a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman. Despite all that, only 22% of surveyed adults answered that they thought gays and lesbians (the language in the poll) should be more accepted in the US and 27% of adults thought gays and lesbians should be less accepted. Jumping back to 2005, 43% of respondents didn’t think gay people should be hired as elementary school teachers and 36% didn’t think we should be hired as high school teachers. I mention these numbers specifically because they’re relevant to Dumbledore. 

On the legal side of things, there were enforceable sodomy laws on the books in 13 states until 2003, four years before Deathly Hallows came out and Jo announced that Dumbledore was gay. In 2004, the fact that Kerry was in favor of same-sex marriage was considered a significant liability in his presidential campaign because even a lot of democrats still didn’t support it. In October, 2007 when Jo did that interview, same-sex marriage was legal only in Massachusetts, civil unions were legal in four states, and domestic partnerships were legal in three states. Meanwhile, twenty-five states had constitutional bans on same-sex marriage and twelve of those states also had constitutional bans on other rights, such as civil unions and domestic partnerships or extensions of employment benefits to same-sex partners.  

In the UK in 2007, just under 40% of adults believed that same-sex relationships were morally okay, 17% strongly agreed that same-sex marriage should be legal, and just under 45% believed that a same-sex couple could raise a child as well as a man and a woman. A 2005 Gallup poll found that, 38% of Brits believed homosexuality should be more widely accepted, 15% thought it should be less widely accepted, and 44% thought the currently level of acceptance was about right. 

On a more personal note, my high school hired its first openly gay teacher in 2008, and the fact that he was gay was considered pretty scandalous among the student body. We had a gay band instructor, but he only ever referred to his partner as his roommate. When we did debates in social studies classes, same-sex marriage was always one of the issues we had to debate over. Of the eleven people I went to high school with whom I now know are queer, only three of them were out in high school. That’s how uncommon it was at the time to come out before you were relatively independent. 

So this idea that announcing that a prominent character who was a headmaster at a school and had a close relationship to the teenage boy main character in a wildly popular children’s book series was gay would have been a popular move in 2007 is pretty laughable to anyone old enough to remember what 2007 was actually like. No one was using support for queer people just to bolster their public image unless their product was specifically marketed towards queer people, because the general wisdom at the time was that it would hurt them too badly with straight audiences. In fact, if memory serves, the queer fandom’s reaction to Dumbledore was initially pretty positive because it was more than we ever thought we were going to get. I didn’t start seeing people talk about how it wasn’t enough or about how the entire plot line was homophobic until maybe 2012.

You can’t use today’s context to interpret why someone made a decision in 2007 because it’s difficult to overstate how different things are now. The only reason to want to look pro-gay in 2007 was if you genuinely thought it was the right thing to do.

2. Lycanthropy and HIV

I was genuinely surprised when this caused a stir when JK Rowling tweeted (?) about it in 2016 because I was pretty sure she’d talked about lycanthropy being a metaphor for HIV years ago. It turns out I was right. She discussed it during the copyright trial she was involved in in 2008 (you can find it here, on pages 72-73). So it didn’t come out until nine years after Prisoner of Azkaban and three years after Half-Blood Prince (when Fenrir Greyback was introduced), but it’s not something she first mentioned on twitter in between tweets about how she meant for Nagini to be a Korean woman in 1989. It was before she was shooting off her mouth about ridiculous stuff every other day.

Regardless, I can understand why that would feel like her pulling something out of left field today because HIV doesn’t get talked about as much, but you have to remember that these books were written in the 90s at the height of the AIDS crisis. It’s difficult to imagine how much that permeated our culture if you didn’t experience it, even for someone like me who was in elementary school in a white suburban area and, as far as I’m aware, didn’t know anyone who was HIV+. My school had a how-not-to-get-AIDS assembly every year.  They probably showed us every movie in existence about kids with HIV. After-school TV shows did special episodes about how you shouldn’t be “blood brothers” with your friends because of AIDS. 

So when my friends and I were reading Prisoner of Azkaban as middle schoolers in the early 2000s, those memories were still fresh in our heads. We didn’t need to be told lycanthropy was supposed to be a metaphor for HIV because it had just been a huge issue five years ago and we knew enough about HIV and how the people who had it were treated to see the parallels. I imagine it was even clearer to the people who read PoA right when it first came out in 1999. It didn’t even occur to me that the metaphor is less obvious to people who are younger until I started seeing claims about this was just something she made up years after the fact and was like, "What do you mean this wasn’t clear to you when you read the book?” It fits perfectly with the general public’s preoccupation with and faulty understanding of AIDS in the late 90s. You just have to acknowledge that things have changed in the past twenty years.

I know that this comparison calls on a lot of stereotypes that are homophobic and otherwise bigoted against people who are HIV+, but those aren’t arguments against the metaphor existing and being intentional, they’re arguments about why that’s not a good thing. Fenrir Greyback is straight out of a 90s detective show. The “person with AIDS who wants to infect other people because they’re bitter about it” was such a common trope that almost every crime drama in the 90s and early 2000s did an episode about it. The “adult man gives a young boy HIV” thing grew out of the “gay men are pedophiles” and “queer people want to recruit your kids” stereotypes. These were prejudices Jo had that misinformed her writing.

I don’t have a whole lot to say on this one other than that given when it was written and how close it fits, including how much it draws on negative 90s-era stereotypes about people who are HIV+, I would honestly have a harder time believing it wasn’t intentional than believing it was.

Anyway, really my point is that it wasn’t always 2019 and if you’re using only today’s culture to inform your opinions about why someone made a certain decision a decade or two ago, not only is your understanding of the situation going to be incomplete, but the fact that it’s incomplete is going to be obvious to anyone who remembers what things were like during the time period you’re trying to talk about.

Demons Of The Punjab - Doctor Who blog

(SPOILER WARNING: The following is an in-depth critical analysis. If you haven’t seen this episode yet, you may want to before reading this review)

Let us now look at our first non-Chibnall episode this series. Demons Of The Punjab, written by Vinay Patel. 

Curious about her grandmother’s past, Yasmin persuades the Doctor to take them to India in 1947 only to discover that the man her grandmother is marrying isn’t her grandfather, but a Hindu man named Prem. What follows is quite possibly the most well written and emotionally charged Who historical story I think I’ve ever seen.

Honestly this comes as something of a relief. I confess when the giant alien bats showed up, screeching and teleporting all over the place like something out of a tacky horror film, I was worried. Chris Chibnall and Malorie Blackman showed remarkable restraint with their episode Rosa, focusing solely on Rosa Parks and the oppressive society she was forced to endure without letting the sci-fi elements intrude or distract from the narrative. With this in mind, an amateur production of ‘Attack of the Killer Bat People’ trouncing all over partitioned India doesn’t exactly seem like a good follow up to me. Thankfully they don’t go that route. Turns out that the Thijarians (not the Vaginas, as I first misheard them) are just a massive red herring. They’re not alien invaders. They’re just travelling psychopomps comforting the dead. Presumably they’re the basis for the numerous death deities that have appeared throughout many cultures and civilisations. It’s a nice idea. Granted the episode would have worked just as well without them, but it’s still a good twist on the monster of the week format nonetheless.

Patel quite rightly focuses on the characters and historical setting. Demons Of The Punjab is refreshing in more ways than one. It’s a historical, but it’s not set in Britain or America. Some people (let’s call them idiots) may complain that the show is getting ‘too PC’, but I for one am quite interested in the history of India. It’s about time we delved into the past of another country and another culture. New Who has spent so much time in Victorian London in recent years, I’m surprised the Doctor doesn’t just rent a holiday home there. It’s also nice to have an episode that isn’t afraid to point out that the British Empire was... well... a bit of a bastard, to put it mildly. The Moffat era in particular was very much guilty of romanticising British history (the most notable example being Winston Churchill, presented as a cuddly leader and the Doctor’s bezzie mate when in reality he was a colossal racist and arguably the very epitome of British imperialism in the early twentieth century). Patriots and anglophiles can’t help but think of Britain in positive terms, seeing the British Empire as some kind of noble ideal. The truth of the matter is the British Empire wasn’t some Utopian peace keeping force uniting the world. It was a bunch of white colonialists taking other people’s land and resources and not giving a tally-ho fuck what the ‘alien races’ thought.

The partition of India is quite possibly one of the most petty and irresponsible things we as a country have ever done. Crudely dividing the country into regions before picking up their ball and going home, leaving the native Indians to sort it out for themselves. What angers me is that I was never actually taught this in school. I learned about the partition of India years later through fucking Wikipedia. And you’d think this is something we ought to know. Like the Atlantic slave trade, this isn’t ancient history. This happened relatively recently and the after effects are still being felt today.

So not only am I’m glad we’ve got an episode like this, I’m also glad that Patel chooses to explore the partition of India in a very intelligent and respectful way. Like with previous episodes, Demons Of The Punjab is very intimate and small scale. It’s not about the Doctor combating a massive threat. It’s about how a massive threat affects the lives of this one family.

Demons Of The Punjab has a stellar cast to play Yasmin’s extended family. Amita Suman does an excellent job as the younger version of Yasmin’s grandmother Umbreen. Something this series has been really good at for the most part is finding that humanity at the core of the stories. It’s not about the aliens. It’s about the people. Demons is not about the space bats. It’s about this young woman struggling to compromise between committing to her Hindu fiance and staying faithful to her Muslim faith in the wake of rising political and societal tension, and Suman portrays this perfectly. It’s an incredibly powerful and moving performance and it’s her character you feel for the most.

Then there’s Shane Zaza as Prem, quite possibly the nicest guy in the fucking world and definitely didn’t deserve his final fate. He’s appalled by the rioting and infighting, saying how this wasn’t what he fought for in the war. Despite being confused and scared by the ‘demons’, he still accompanies the Doctor and Ryan and protects them from harm. But most importantly, he clearly loves Umbreen dearly, preparing to share and adapt his beliefs to hers and vice versa. Throughout the episode, Prem and Umbreen’s relationship is presented as the ideal. A love for the ages. How the world should be, transcending belief systems and cultural barriers. This could have become quite sickly in the wrong hands, bu thankfully the episode never over-eggs the pudding. We like this couple and we like Prem, which is what makes his death at the end one of the most heartbreaking in all of New Who and the fact that this comes at the hands of his own brother makes it all the more tragic.

Hamza Jeetoa’s performance as Manish was exceptional. From the start you know there’s something not quite right with him as he seems to buy into the India/Pakistan border quite enthusiastically, but I assumed (perhaps in my naivety) that the Doctor would persuade him to accept his new sister in law Umbreen over the course of the story. Of course that’s not the case. Like I said, the aliens are the red herring. The real villain is Manish. Except... it’s not. While Prem was out fighting for the Brits, a disillusioned and confused Manish was left alone, leaving him a prime target for radicalisation. So as disgusting and horrifying as his actions are, it’s hard to truly hate him because he’s not a bad person. You do see occasional glimpses of brotherly affection between him and Prem, a brief window into their relationship before the partition, and it’s this that humanises him and makes him an effective antagonist. Yes he’s killed people, yes he killed his own brother, yes his views are downright poisonous, but he is in many ways just another victim of this turbulent time. He’s a cautionary tale about the dangers of rigid belief systems and how easy it is to indoctrinate and radicalise the young and disenfranchised. Jeetoa does a great job selling this character without tipping over into panto. He’s not some rabid bigot foaming at the mouth. He’s a confused young man who has willingly bought into this anti-Islamic dogma because of his own frustrations toward the British, He feels like an actual person. It’s this that makes the ending truly shocking.

I don’t think there’s any need to talk about the main cast. They are predictably good. Jodie Whittaker continues to blow me away as the Doctor. Her eulogy at the wedding, her excitement and enthusiasm when celebrating the night before with Yaz and Umbreen, and her sorrow and disgust when Manish shoots Prem are all memorable moments showing Whittaker’s range as an actor. Graham and Ryan don’t have as much to do this episode, although they do still have their moments (the scene where Graham hugged Prem and told him what a good man he was made me cry. God, Bradley Walsh can act!). This really is Yasmin’s episode and it’s about time too. My one complaint I’ve had throughout this series so far has been that Yaz has felt largely superfluous. She’s not a bad character by any means. It’s a problem common with many of the ensemble casts Doctor Who has had over the years. There’s always at least one cast member reduced to being the spare part. So it was great to see Yaz finally get a chance in the spotlight and Mandip Gill rises to the occasion as she portrays her character’s internal conflict. Obviously she doesn’t want Prem to die. He’s a nice guy and her grandmother clearly loves him, but he’s not her grandfather. In order for Yaz to exist in the future, Prem has to die. I love episodes where the Doctor and his companions can’t interfere as they often serve as great moral dilemmas as well as the means of exploring internal strife. Watching Prem die, knowing she can’t change it for risk of damaging her own timeline, is painful and gut-wrenching, and Gill gives her best performance to date.

Demons Of The Punjab I think is my favourite episode so far this series because it shows just how flexible the Doctor Who format is and what kind of stories you can tell. This is a very human story that packs a massive dramatic punch and has great relevance to today. As I said, the effects of the partition of India are still being felt today and the radicalisation of young people is something we’ve sadly become all too familiar with (see ISIS and the alt-right). It’s what makes this episode’s central theme, to love and respect everyone regardless of cultural differences, all the more poignant. If Demons Of The Punjab teaches us anything, it’s that we could use a lot more Prems in the world right now.

How do I start this?

Fark me!

What a world we live in. Inspired by Jordo to get back into my writing, I have created this blog... or at least re-purposed it from it’s prior job of being a blog for my teaching. What larks!

13 years since I wrote my first online blog, and with speech being stifled, I feel it’s time to let it all out again.

I live in Vietnam. My first blog was from the Middle East - my adventures in Israel, Jordan and Egypt. Many years later, and many countries later, I find myself in balmy Saigon, packing up my (shared) apartment to relocate back up to misty (a kinder word than ‘polluted’) Hanoi. Hanoi is not without its charms - mature trees, lakes dotted around the city like potholes,  cafes housed in old colonial houses, people on their way to work stopping for a quick cup o’joe perched on squat plastic chairs on the sidewalk, women in conical hats selling freshly-baked baguettes, oh.... and motorcyclists whose apparent ambition is to obliterate as many pedestrians as possible in a single day.

Anyway, I digress.

It’s 2019. Donald Trump is the President of the United States. This appears to be somewhat distressing for some people, who bring it up at intervals without prior warning at the most unrelated times. Your coffee is too bitter? Better scream about Trump! You stubbed your toe? Again, Trump! Trump is Hitler! Missed out on a better flight price? Did you know Trump wants to steal the babies of all ‘undocumented citizens’ (that’s “illegals” to you and I) and roast them over an open flame? You think that sounds unlikely? I READ IT IN THE NEW YORK TIMES!!!! 

I would say ‘of course, that’s an exaggeration,’ but really... is it?

I would go off on a deep philosophical rant about the current globalized world, the ills of social media, and the lack of personal responsibility... However, I think it can all be summed up by the term - ‘HATE SPEECH’

I used capitals because generally this is the tone that is adopted when anyone utters this odious terminology.

And, dear future Mel, what is hate speech, pray tell?

Ahhh... now let me tell you...

Hate speech is generally anything said that an overly sensitive man-child (or woman-child, I don’t discriminate, bigot!) deems to be against what they believe. This generally includes any criticisms of lefty-causes:

Islam - this is 100% immune from criticism. You want to bring up FGM (female genital mutilation) - did you know the Christians killed some people during the Crusades! SO much worse than anything a follower of Islam has ever done. Women wearing the burka actually do so because they are so elevated in their status within Islam! (indeed donning a hijab has become a favoured way to virtue-signal among the chattering classes, and a way to wear your compassion and tolerance on your sleeve). Don’t think about associating a terror attack (generally when a mohammedan shouts “alluha akbar” and stabs or bombs a sh*t-tonne of infidels) with Islam, you islamophobe! The man was a ‘lone wolf’ or had ‘mental health issues’ (that’s a pretty roundabout way to criticise islam, if you ask me). Don’t think about raising concerns over how poorly Islamic communities generally assimilate into Judeo-Christian culture. The onus is not on them to assimilate, it’s on you, the person who follows the native culture!

So, while the places of which ‘cause’ holds the most power changes with quite frequency, generally Islam is near the top - something to do with associating the religion with brown people, and thus having lower expectations of brown people, so not holding them or their religion accountable whenever something abhorrent takes place...

Fighting it’s place to the top of the victim pile last year was the transgenders! Remember ‘trannies’ from yesteryear? Can’t say that now! Someone who is born male, is now just ‘assigned’ male at birth, and can become female at any point, and is just as female as someone born with all the female body parts.

Confused?

You don’t know the half of it. What would have been mocked as utter lunacy just a few short years ago is now influencing a number of anti-hate speech laws. In Canada, a MAN (F*ck you with your censorship) called Jessica Yaniv has made a habit of visiting various spas, requesting a bikini wax (yes, he does indeed have a penis), and then suing the spa when the female (mainly immigrant) staff refuse to do so (disgust aside, it is a completely different procedure than waxing a female’s genitals, so they would lack the training). Never fear, however, because Taylor Swift is pushing for an Equality Act in the US, which would see similar scenarios no doubt take place.

I don’t know if I need a disclaimer to note that contrary to pro-tranny activists beliefs, I do care about the welfare of trannies - I just don’t think encouraging their fantasy to be helpful, and perhaps psychiatric help would be of greater benefit. Perhaps there’s a reason (other than the supposed lack of acceptance) behind the post-op high suicide rates.

Every time I look to the UK and shake my head as yet another person is arrested over something they wrote on twitter, I look back at the sheer derangement of the United States, and I genuinely don’t know which is worse. Perhaps the Brits are just more meek and less vocal.

On top of the transgender debate, are gay activists finding new ways to claim they’re not treated equally (damn you biology!), and further race-relation break-down. While there is a passionate group of conservative blacks making an impact in the US, sadly the majority have become even more bitter towards whites. This wasn’t helped by eight years of a black (technically he’s mixed race) president stoking the flames of division.

Alright, I feel like I got some of that off of my chest. Actually, I’m supposed to be studying. 

Will rant more again soon. Toodles!

to everyone here who doesn’t think you can be racist/xenophobic/bigoted towards white people let me inform you that i’ve just read a comment section on some article where people were callings us, serbians - primitive, illiterate, animals, uncivilized, and my personal favourite - subhumans/untermensch (the last one was made by a brit). all those comments are upvoted. 

there you go.

The Cleansing Comedy of “Cum Town”

To paraphrase a point Canadian All-American Hero Norm MacDonald laid on a then-alive Larry King, comedians used to aspire to be funny, now they aspire to appear smart. While political humor, ostensibly a stage to show off one’s intellect and humanity by the empathetic tackling of modern topics, has been a thing as long as humor itself, there was time in the not-so-distant past where the goal was the display of comedy chops, not compassion*. This significant shift in the mainstream started with Jon Stewart’s reign as host of The Daily Show. A far departure from the wackier Craig “Dance Dance Dance” Kilborn’s approach to the Comedy Central staple, Stewart treated TDS as a megaphone in which he could espouse his political views. Nightly challenging W’s hawkish take on foreign policy, liberals the country over championed their new clever-if-not-amusing hero- but at some point during Stewart’s ascension, reflecting a certain acceptable viewpoint became more important than reflecting a sense of humor.

*Back in the early SNL days Chevy Chase suggested that Gerald Ford sustained significant brain damage playing football to mock Ford’s bumbling persona, not excoriate him on the tenets of his agenda.   

Consider Last Week Tonight with John Oliver or the zeitgeist-shifting Nanette. The former features some of the best reporting on the planet, displaying a willingness to cover potential viewership-poison like prison reform or, on a recent episode, black hair and its connection to the systematic racism African Americans face daily. The show is relentless, passionate, and is about as funny as that sounds. John Oliver is clearly a witty person, but even he often acknowledges how “Erudite Brit Shames Americans over Racism” isn’t exactly the blueprint for a yuckle factory*. Much like his old boss Stewart, Oliver is more dedicated to espousing the correct viewpoint over a funny one. To this point, most “jokes” in the show feel jammed in like a satirical sausage, often coming across as after-thoughts that can mess with the tone**.  As a show it is unquestionably a success, opening myriad eyes to plights once unknown. As a comedy show, which is what it at least originally marketed itself as, it is a failure. 

*It is, however, pretty perfect Monday Morning hiding-in-cubicle watching 

**While he does try to infuse some zaniness into the program by talking about fucking animals or whatever, I don’t think Oliver realizes how genuinely funny it is watching a bookish Brit get upset about coconut oil hair products, although not in the way he probably hopes it would be.

An even purer example of Norm’s point is Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette. The buzzed-about stand-up special is essentially a takedown of white male-ism, albeit one that seems allergic to laughing. Gadsby is trying to woo you with her intellectualism, not her ability to make you chuckle. Some called this approach brilliant- turning a male-dominated form on its head to put its practitioners on blast for things ranging from sexism to transphobia. Widely decorated around the world for its innovative and sharp honesty, Nanette asked the big question: is the next wave of comedy not meant to be funny? Is cutting edge humor not humorous at all? Are we entering a Metal Machine Music era of comedy? And if so, is merely criticizing the perceived powers-that-be now considered comedy?

More like No-nette

This desire to display empathetic enlightenment has gone well beyond the world of stand-up and political comedy. It can be seen by the yanking of episodes of comic cornerstones such as It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and 30 Rock that feature blackface, or animated programs recasting characters so that voices are both more inclusive and representative. Even The Simpsons has all but abandoned its once trademark balance, its current form essentially the wet-blanket Lisa, a far, far cry from the Homer-centric past of the show’s glory years.   

All of these decisions have been made by the shows’ respective creators, a mea culpa for insensitive liberties taken in the recent past. Blame the internet for the long, indelible digital footprints, but people are now more worried about how the future will remember them, in some enlightened far-off utopia where comedy is really about nothing being funny, and everybody is judged by the language you used when no one really gave a rat’s ass about what you had to say.

Entertainers are far more concerned with looking good fifteen years from now than making people laugh now. Ironic detachment- the reason a lot of the questionable humor existed in the first place*, isn’t a big enough distance for comics to get away with racism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry, chuckles be damned.

*Racists have been the butt of the joke- and not the jokesters- for as long as I can remember. I find it hard to believe that anyone could watch an Always Sunny and think they’re mocking minorities. While the meme-ification of America has robbed many of these jokes of context, it’s a waste of time to criticize creators for devolving consumption habits, especially in the name of inclusion, compassion, etc.    

It’s not my place to say whether this is good or bad. As self-censorship isn’t really censorship, it’s hard to argue that an artist willfully pulling their work from the marketplace is some sort of injustice. It’s their reputation (read: livelihood) after all. There are things I would probably delete/hide if anybody gave enough of a shit to do a deep dive into my past babblings. But while I certainly applaud the idealistic efforts to make a more welcoming society for all, it does kind of suck that it comes at the expense of comic mana such as Lethal Weapon 5 (and 6).   

At the risk of kicking dusty horse bones, this does boil the whole “cancel culture” debate down to one consideration: what is acceptable to laugh at?

Insert the podcast “Cum Town.” Starring the trio of Nick Mullen (the bitter one), Stravos Hilias (the bigger one), and Adam Friedland (the butler?), “Cum Town” is the least political of the “Dirtbag Left”* wave of offerings*. If you can’t tell by the name, “Cum Town” isn’t for the crowd that regularly uses the word “problematic.” Employing a fairly new media in the podcast, the three NY-based comics shoot the shit on pretty much all matters, keeping the atmosphere loose and the unapologetic laughs flowing. 

*Which also includes the hugely popular “Chapo Trap House” and “Red Scare,” shows that are both fairly funny... and can often be accurately described as  “permanently congested neck-beards talking tough about revolution or whatever in between rhapsodizing about time-old yet currently posh talking points (distribution of wealth, liberalism vs. leftism, etc.)”.

As bad as the Olivers and the Gadsbys of the world want to change your mind, the trio at “Cum Town” are much more focused on tickling your funny bone (and/or prostate). Its setup gives the show an air of Howard-Stern-in-the-90s danger, where things that probably should never be thought are said with glee. They’re the type of guys who find the humor in places that make others uncomfortable, such as the connection of the Clintons to Jeffrey Epstein’s murder or, in one particularly great skit, how Trump would undoubtedly try to smear Robert De Niro as a non-Italian homosexual.

Devoid of the pretension other “enlightened” modern comedy wears so proudly, the show can focus on being being funny in ways that spur a gut laugh, not a guffaw.   

“Cum Town” works because its as self-aware as it is fearless. These aren’t Andrew Dice Clays winding up the Islanders stadium with bits about “the brothers.” They’re not just reliving old Stern bits, asking alcoholic little people and other societal pariahs to make fools of themselves. The show wouldn’t work if it was merely “saying racial slurs with the EdgeLord Crowd.” "Cum Town” operates like a savvy boxer- throwing shots, usually at modern idols, knowing that it leaves them open to counter punches.

The genius of this approach is that they know what the counter punches will be (being called “racist,” “sexist,” “fascist,” etc.)... and have a counter-punch for that!* It’s not like it takes Ali-esque anticipatory vision to know what the criticisms will be. While calling a (probably white, cis-gender, straight) male “racist!” or “sexist!” or “fascist!” surely feels empowering to the counter-puncher, the reality is a lot of those terms have absolutely lost their meaning or the damaging heft that used to accompany their utterance. With the mass acceptance of systematic sexism/ racism as prevalent in everyday life, all the (bad) -isms are supposedly so ingrained into the white male psyche that they’re bigots no matter what. Especially when you consider that laughing- actual laughing- is more of a neurological reaction than a considered response. Put another way: a skit depicting Tony Soprano as an Indian may not confuse anybody into thinking Stav is on a first-name basis with Noam Chomsky, but it is infinitely funnier than all the “Donald Drumpf”s shouted together combined. 

*Sorry, Mike Tyson’s Punch Out is about the extent of my boxing knowhow. 

The show operates in a world where performance compassion is a hell of a lot worse than genuine feeling. Where Donald Trump gets mocked- but less so than Hillary Clinton, who’s president campaign’s attempt to make her “cool” was, let’s say, ill-fitting. It gets mean and nasty because comedy does. So, did Adam Friedland get called out by Chelsea Clinton for calling her ugly*? Yep. And many came to Chelsea’s defense calling for Adam’s sexist, disgusting head, I’m sure in only pro-Semitic ways. Does Nick’s archaic (though quite good) impressions of various ethnicities  to a certain trope? Or does Stav talking about pornography and getting ass with a somewhat slimy tone? The three “Cum Town” hosts know that the list of the “powerless” has changed considerably in the last few decades, and that those who pay service to liberal ideals should be mocked just like the rest of us. 

The tweet in question.

Juvenile? Sure. Insensitive? Yes. But God Dammit, isn’t humor supposed to be that way? If there’s a killer joke where the punch-line is “bigotry is bad,” I’m not aware of it. “Cum Town” generates a type of laughter that feels liberating- like you’re shaking off the oppressive scowl of a world that blames you- person who has been around for about one one billionth of the world’s life- for all its ills. The more modern society weighs us with new considerations on language and decorum, conjured rules that dictate what you may have a reaction to and what you may not, the funnier the humor in its opposition flies. Breaking rules is inherently funny- thumbing your nose at society is at the core of comedy’s release. And the more it becomes taboo to say words like “tranny,” “fat,” “dumb,” “midget,” etc., the more comedic release will be given when we say the words that I’m not going to type right here. Because the further the joke is from the norm, the more space there is for laughter to form.

Some believe this humor can lead to hatred which can lead to violence. That the Capitol’s riots were a warped result of the Rogans of the world. That by hearing Dave Chappelle say the n-word, white people will start to adopt it, and chaos will surely follow. But there’s another school of thought that says being able to laugh at something is the genesis of being able to process something and eventual acceptance. 

I realize this is hardly a surprising point from a straight white guy, one who has said (regretfully and not recently) on more than one occasion that “I don’t get offended, I don’t understand why others do?” But I also think that a lot of the “hurt” these societal infractions cause are more of a smokescreen or diversion from bigger problems. It’d be easier to distract people with discussions over whether James Bond should be black or if Dr. Seuss books featuring offensive illustrations should be banned as opposed to, I don’t know, actually try to combat some of the systematic problems that propagate systems that truly stun growth?  Telling people they should feel guilty about something is a slippery slope as we have around 8 billion people on earth, there’s plenty of misery to go around. We should all probably feel bad about something.

In conclusion, “Cum Town” knows that just because something is bad doesn’t mean it can’t be funny. As mentioned before, humor is often how people cope with the hypocritical, values-starved planet we find ourselves on. Humor should delight our soul, not display our sophistication.   

Read until the end, it will make sense...

The Color of Redemption, A Story of Hope as told by a former Nazi

My name is Karl Loeffler. I was raised in the German countryside, the only child of a Protestant pastor named Wagner and his wife, Liesel. From the time I was young, I dreamed of escaping rural life and becoming a city boy. I craved the excitement of Berlin, and I was determined that when I was old enough, I would make it there, somehow.

In my early teenage years, I began reading literature and listening to radio broadcasts from an enigmatic man who was gaining popularity all across my country.  A boy in my village introduced me to the patriotic message that this man brought, promising a better, brighter, and purer future for my country.  I was enraptured, as so many other youth were, by his passionate orations and compelling words.  So, at 19 years old, I joined the ranks of Hitler’s Youth.  

My parents were vehemently opposed to my choice.  They held very traditional views and refused to understand the obvious truth that people are not all equal. They even showed sympathy to the Jewish plague that was infesting our nation.  I broke all ties with them, and instead poured my heart and soul and energy into my new family.  

The war that was brewing for years finally erupted, and I joined the ranks of the military.  Early on, I distinguished myself as having a talent for extracting information, so I was quickly assigned as an interrogator. At a turning point in my career, I proved my unswerving loyalty when I turned in my own father, who I knew to be harboring Jews, to the Gestapo. After that, I was granted the position of chief interrogator at a high security prison in East Germany.  

One year later, a man arrived at that prison who would forever change my life.  His name was Raymond King – as British a Brit as could ever be found.  He was a pilot who had been shot down while delivering intelligence to his command. The letters with the precious information had been burned, but we had reason to believe that he had seen the contents before destroying them.  

Right away, I knew this was a man who would not give up his information easily.  Conventional means of interrogation would not work on him. I could tell from the defiant look in his eyes that no amount of physical duress would compel him to give up what he knew.  I probed him a bit with some psychological techniques, but without much luck.  There was something about him that intrigued me. His flinty eyes held a steady strength in them that I couldn’t help but admire. I decided to try an approach that I had never before employed.  I determined that I would befriend this man.

As with all good relationships, one must give in order to receive.  I found myself telling Raymond things about myself, many things.  They were all true, for he was clever enough to see through a deception.  In time, his animosity toward me lessened, and eventually we began to discourse more as equals than as enemies.  He knew that I was working him, but I was determined to play the long game out with him, and win him over.  

He shared with me his own history – how he had been orphaned as a young boy and raised in and out of group homes growing up.  He had finally been taken in by the Church, and was given a good education when it became apparent he was something of a prodigy, despite having sporadic schooling as a boy.  He was drafted out of college and joined the Royal Air Force at 17 years old - their youngest pilot.  I couldn’t help but be a little impressed by his story – though I suspected some of it had been embellished.  

Raymond began to delve deeper into my own story, asking me questions about my faith growing up, and why I had chosen Hitler instead of God.  I tried to make him understand the wisdom behind what we were trying to accomplish, that communism was the only good future for the world – but I am not a gifted speaker, and for all his intelligence, he had the stubbornness of a mule.

The first time he tried to escape, I caught him and turned him in.  He was beaten and left in the cooler for seven days.  It didn’t deter him in the least.  He kept trying to get away and he kept failing, and I found myself looking the other way when I knew he was attempting another run for the fence.

I don’t know when it happened – it crept up on me so slowly – but at some point I ceased to become an enemy playing the part of a friend to gain knowledge, and simply became his friend. Soon after, I received word that my father had been executed in a concentration camp not fifty miles from where I was assigned.  The news split my soul to the bone.  For the first time, I truly questioned the cost of my ideals.  I was responsible for his death; I might as well have pulled the trigger myself.  

I found myself confiding not in my Nazi comrades, but in Raymond.  His initial response at learning my part in the deed was anger, for which I could not blame him.  But he did not stop talking to me.  On the contrary, he spoke to me more and more often, speaking of forgiveness and redemption. At first, I did not think that I needed redemption.  Yes, I had something very wrong, but I had done it for a good cause.  But the more I tried to justify it to myself, the more I realized I was on a slippery slope straight to hell and I had only myself to blame for it.

Time passed and I became increasingly torn and agitated.  I felt as much a prisoner as Raymond truly was.  I was imprisoned by my choices.  I was imprisoned by my sins.  I was imprisoned by my guilt.  I could not escape the torment that gnawed at my soul day and night.  I could no longer perform my duties as I had before.  My superiors began to watch me closely, and I could sense that I was no longer considered an ally to my own kind.  And through it all, Raymond was there, calling me back to the faith of my childhood and caring for me as a person, despite my sins and the fact that we were still enemies.

One frigid December morning in 1944, I told Raymond that I wanted to escape with him to Britain.  I can still remember the look on his face. He wasn’t surprised in the least – it was as if he had been expecting this for some time.  It took several months of preparations, but eventually our opportunity presented itself and we escaped the prison.  We managed to sneak out of Germany via France, where Raymond was reunited with his countryman.  For my decision to defect from the Nazis, and for aiding in Raymond’s escape, I was granted citizenship in Britain.  Due to the injuries sustained when he was shot down, Raymond was medically discharged from the RAF, and I found myself in a new country and a new home.

I wish I could say that it was a happily ever after from there on – but that was not the case.  As a German, I was treated with disdain and distrust by many.  Very few knew I had been a Nazi, but it made little difference.  Beyond that, I was eaten up with guilt and self-loathing for the actions that I committed in the name of Hitler’s ambitions.  Let alone the fact that I was responsible for my father’s death, the information that I had extracted from many people (German and foreign alike) had led to the deaths of countless Jews and any of those who harbored them.  Military intelligence that I had ferreted out had led to the deaths of many more.  I was a murderer.  I was a bigot.  By my own hand I had executed prisoners and by my work had gotten many more killed.  The darkest part in my life was not when I was in the midst of my greatest sins, but after, when I understood the full weight and consequences of my actions.

But through it all, Raymond King never left my side.  He opened his home and his heart to me.  He stayed by my side and defended me before all who scorned me, even at the cost of his own reputation.  He unashamedly held me in the night when my nightmares woke us both from slumber.  He comforted me when I discovered that my mother had passed away, before I could find her and tell her how sorry I was. He reminded me of the faith my father had taught me. Jesus had died for my sins – even my sins – and forgiveness and redemption lay at His feet.  I repented.  I accepted that God could forgive me.  I even accepted that Raymond could forgive me.  And last of all, with the help of my truest friend whom I loved more than myself, I finally forgave Karl Loeffler.

I’ll never forget the words that Ray spoke to me that one morning as we shared a boring British breakfast in our little London flat.  

“Nothing will ever change what you’ve done, Karl.  Nothing will ever make up for it. You deserve to die for what you’ve done.”

And as I contemplated where he could possibly be going with this positive and inspirational speech, he continued.

“Living.  That’s harder than dying.  It’s braver.  Facing each day and deciding that instead of brushing off who you were or ignoring what you did, you acknowledge it.  You accept who you were and you decide who you will be today, and the next day, and the next.”

I just stared at him for a while.  His words struck a chord with me and I never forgot them.  Ray helped teach me many things over the years – like how to exchange my bitterness for compassion to all people, my pride and supremacy for humility, and my brokenness for hope. Jesus saved me, but Ray pointed the way to Him with his patience and kindness.  Ray showed me that the only way to live life to the fullest was to save what you love instead of fighting what you hate. 

Redemption is dark, muddy, and messy.  It’s red with the blood of those who paid its price in your stead.  It’s gray, when the darkness of your past begins to lift from your soul like a stain.  It’s the brightest, purest white, when you find that salvation doesn’t come through punishment, but through abundant life lived for the love of all people. 

*             *             *

The story above is a work of fiction.  Karl and Ray are fictional characters, though some of their experiences are based on the lives of actual historical figures.  I want to pose the readers who stuck with my story to the end a question:

At the end of the story, did you find yourself feeling a) satisfied and glad that Karl was able to find forgiveness and love with Ray or b) angry that Karl did not die the irredeemable bastard that he was?

If the latter, please feel free to disregard the rest of this post and I apologize for wasting your time.  If the former, you may now better understand the part of the Star Wars fandom who approves of the relationship between Rey and Kylo Ren/Ben Solo.  My story was meant to pattern itself after the progression of the Star Wars sequel trilogy.  Obviously, we do not know how the third movie will end, but many of us hope it will end similarly to the third act of my story. Those who ship Reylo do so because we are looking forward to that third act, not stopping at the first or second.  

In the first act of my story, Karl and Ray are enemies.  Karl interrogates Ray using several methods to try and discover what he knows.  While they are on opposite sides, and Karl is employing interrogation techniques that would be labeled as “abuse” in a domestic setting, Karl also has a begrudging respect for his prisoner.  The Force Awakens.

In the second act, Karl finds himself beginning to genuinely like Ray.  Though he thwarts Ray’s initial attempts at escape, he eventually finds himself looking the other way.  Finally, Karl’s attitude truly begins to change and he dares to believe that he can change.  Ray, likewise, begins to realize that Karl is a person in need of forgiveness. The Last Jedi.

In the third act, Karl makes the decision to join Ray.  This is what we hope to see in Episode IX.  We want to see Ben escape the prison of the First Order and return to the light, just as Karl did.  But we also acknowledge that this will not be easy to portray in one movie and it will take time to achieve.  

My story has an epilogue. Karl escapes with Ray and they make it to Britain in the third act.  But that is not the end.  It is only the beginning of Karl’s journey. He had to completely cast off the hate and the lies that had governed his life as a Nazi. He had to change his thinking and his heart.  He had to understand how evil he had been - to accept forgiveness and to eventually forgive himself for the lives he had ruined.  Only then could he begin to move forward, loving others instead of hating them.  Forgiveness and healing takes time, and we know that time is the greatest threat to us ever getting a “happy ending” for Ben Solo…because, quite frankly, it’s far easier to just kill him off, as Lucas did with Vader.

I could have ended it with Karl sacrificing himself for Ray to get behind enemy lines to the safety of his fellow countrymen.  And that would be an acceptable, if not rather tragic ending to their tale.  It wouldn’t be much of a kid’s story and most people would walk away feeling rather depressed.  Is that how Episode IX will end?  I surely hope not.  It would be an okay ending.  But Star Wars is traditionally a story of hope and redemption.  

I surely hope that Han and Luke and Leia, our beloved characters of old, will not have died in vain, only to see the last Skywalker die a young man (as a hero or a villain). Nor would we want to see Rey forced to survive without her other half, the man who taught her that no one is ever truly gone and hope can be found in the unlikeliest of people.  Whether they should end up as friends or lovers is up to you, and the answer is not necessary for it to be a beautiful story (which is why I left Karl and Ray’s relationship ambiguous).  But I hope you can all understand why we want an ending where they both live.  

Here’s to hoping Disney will do the brave thing, instead of the easy thing.  Cheers.

if it's not too much trouble to answer, can I ask what's been the going on with doctor who that's bad? I've seen little bits of it when my parents watch it in the other room but not enough to really get a good sense of it?

heyyy sorry to keep ya waiting on this. i tried to keep this as short as i could, but it’s about five paragraphs long, sorry. it’s not in any way a comprehensive list of problems with the last few seasons, just a quick tour of the moments i shouldve let be my ‘i can’t keep watching after this’ point. i wanted to write it objectively but i got pretty aggro, bc this show that in some part i genuinely adore has been producing unforgivably bigoted content. (it’s kinda a ship of theseus situation, except where the parts of the ship were replaced with worse, shittier, fake-woke parts.) i ask ppl to avoid reblogging this, because i don’t want my words to contribute in any way to online buzz surrounding this show or make anyone want to see it, even if ONLY to hatewatch or criticize.

content warning for misogynoir/antiblackness, racism, bury ur gays, some shit with nazi germany (yeah lol) and just the slightest kiss of antisemitism.

(edit: i seem to be having some problems with the read more cut. it’s there on dash view and when i edit the post, but doesn’t show on some instances of my blog. i can’t fix this but gksfkgls. wanted to at least be overt that i wouldn’t post this kinda long ranty stuff without a cut.)

in the last season where peter capaldi was the doctor, two seasons ago now, he had a new companion, Bill. she was a black lesbian and literally the only reason i started watching doctor who again. i loved her, and i was really glad to see the show moving back towards the more diverse cast of characters that we saw in the late aughts. then the season had a repeated theme of FORCING her to either repress or not feel her emotions. there are two scenes that stand out most to me. in an ep set in like, early 19th century london, she and the doctor are talking to a racist rich white dude who is being super nasty to Bill. the doctor keeps telling her to cool it and not show how angry she is. then HE gets to punch the guy out and knock him to the floor.

this theme of the white man being the only one allowed to get angry was big all season, iirc. then at the end of the season, Bill is turned into a cyberman. they’re usually like. soulless scary automatons, but some characters keep their individuality, which has been explored in a few past seasons, usually leading up to a tragic/heroic death. in Bill’s case, they did this trick with filming where we could see her perspective of herself in some shots–an intensely emotional performance, Bill was completely traumatized and her actress was working her ass off–and in others, just this metal body incapable of expression, scaring people like she was a monster and monotoning these otherwise very emotional statements. it’s an interesting narrative device, but after a whole season of this show putting Bill through all kinds of terrible shit and forcing her not to show her feelings on the matter, it hit me as like. this nauseating exaggeration of how society treats actual black lesbians as monsters and tries to make them bottle up their emotions and especially their justifiable anger. anyway, then Bill died and got to be with her dead girlfriend from her first episode. wow, cool.

idk what made me watch the season after that. i guess i wanted to see the new doctor, and i liked her companions (one was like. a young man with disabling neurological symptoms, tbh even if i’d missed Bill’s season that might have had me back on board). i had plenty of problems with how the season played out, obvs, but nothing was standout horrible to me the way the shit with Bill had been (except maybe the episode that started out like ‘space amazon is a hellhole’ and somehow ended with ‘space amazon was taken advantage of by a broken AI that hurt some people and they didnt fix the infrastructure we explicitly showed harmed their workers but now it’s fine!’ if that sounds weird and heavy handed with an unsatisfying ending, it’s because it was). the new season tho? the OPENING EPISODES OF THE NEW SEASON, THO? it opens with alexa product placement, in an episode about how a fictionalized google was actually run by a black man who had ties to a large number of aliens who had secretly infiltrated our society, altered our dna, and shit like that. so uh, 1. brand war lmao, sellouts etc etc 2. y’all remember those conspiracy theories about jews? and white supremacist beliefs that black people are ruining the world but aren’t smart enough to do it on their own so they must be agents of jewish corruption? HUH. HUH! that’s not even my big problem with the fuckin thing, but it’s FOR SURE a suspicious writing move from a tv show with suuuuch a huge viewership. (and it’s just plain embarrassing for a show with alexa product placement to try to go all scary panopticon tropes specifically @ a google analogue.)

anyway, we run into an old recurring antagonist, the master, a time lord like the doctor. he’s a guy again after having been a woman for a few seasons, and now played by an actor of color. i figure the reasoning at least partly relied on “dude, how fucked up will it be if we force the doctor’s black friend to call a white dude master” but i was immediately afraid it might go to the like…. Righteous White Woman Gets The Better Of Evil Brown Man tropes and oh boy!!!! i tried to be good and give it the benefit of the doubt until i saw something racist but it wasted no time. the doctor got stuck in the past at one point, and met the master, who was currently a military official with the third reich. oh boy. so she asks him why they let him work with them and he explains he’s using a device to psychically disguise himself, they see him as white. (we missed a great chance for him to monologue about how they were willing to bend their morals when they saw how evil he could get or something.) this was awkward enough for me as a viewer, but i wasn’t prepared to go into it, in case there was some tiny shred of nuance somewhere that would make this situation anything but a clusterfuck.

well, the doctor executes a genuinely clever scheme and makes a radio transmission to the brits that she knows won’t reach em, talking about how helpful this officer has been–setting up the master to be falsely outed as a double agent when the nazis intercept it. she tells the master this and then skedaddles, letting him be arrested by his own men. could be a satisfying karmic victory where he presumably gets a military trial and weasels out of his fate, although i don’t like the implications of a white woman punishing a brown man for racism. BUT IT DIDN’T STOP THERE! she disables his psychic filter, causing his men to see his true identity as a man of color–she exposes her oldest frenemy and Basically The Only Time Lord Who’ll Talk To Her to nazi racism when he was ALREADY about to fall into their hands as a prisoner. what could have been a marginally satisfying defeat was instead a kind of emotional horrorshow for me as i had to stop and wonder what kind of hell they’d put him through and why the writers decided that the doctor (who has literally since the show began in like the sixties been set up as an enemy of naziism via allegory and has always been firm in the idea that NOBODY, including literal maneating space monsters, deserves to be treated as less than human) would DO that. IT’S LATER IMPLIED HE ESCAPED FROM A CONCENTRATION CAMP. the narrative DOES NOT allow time for that to sink in before moving on.

i dont have a conclusion 2 this. im just hurt as fuck about it. i hope i gave u the info u were looking for without getting too deep into my personal feelings, but it’s difficult, maybe impossible to be objective about stuff like this.

What r your thoughts on being a practicing Muslim and working in medicine in U.K. Hospitals. Like your last post about the persecuted muslims made me think of that.

That’s an interesting question, although it’s not one I’m ideally situated to answer, I’ll try my best. I can’t speak for my friends and my colleagues, only share what they’ve shared with me. So I’d need for any practicing Muslim medics following me to chip in if they can, and share their own experiences. There are a lot of Muslims working in the NHS; I’ve easily studied or worked with several on pretty much every rotation. From med students up to consultants and GPs, pharmacists, nurses, physios and everybody else.  So it’s certainly possible to be a practicing Muslim and work in the NHS. Many ladies wear a hijab, and I don’t believe the NHS dress codes cause any problems on that front, nor should they. Though I suspect that due to rules requiring us to have ID, veiling might pose more of an issue, though the ladies I knew at university who veiled didn’t go into clinical medicine but academia, so I don’t know anyone currently working clinically who wears the veil, in order to ask. We all need to be ‘bare below the elbows’, which means that we don’t wear any jewellery (except for maybe a plain wedding band), no watches, and no clothing from our elbow downwards. This is for hygeine reasons for patients, so we wash our hands frequently and don’t spread germs from one person to the next.  I expected that this might be uncomfortable for my Muslim friends, but they have all been OK with this rule when we talked about it.Ramadan can be a challenge, but many of my colleagues and friends manage to fast! Because I go for entire shifts without a meal break or toilet break when it’s terribly busy, I find my colleagues who fast inspiring, because I know it’s not easy to go without for long. The discipline, dedication and reflection they go through is something I respect immensely. It feels like a huge privilege when you’re on nights, and you get to eat with a friend who is breaking their fast, because you know the meal means a lot more to them than your night lunch does to you. Some of my friends have chosen not to fast, but plenty do, and I think it becomes a personal decision depending on that person’s health and situation. When it comes to prayers, every hospital has a chapel and prayer room with prayer mats; it’s not an issue if people take a break to pray. Most London hospitals seem to have a degree of halal food in the canteen, but this differs depending on where you are; outside of London this is less likely.  But lots of people bring packed lunches, anyway, and there are almost always vegetarian options, which my Jewish and Muslim friends tend to make the most of. Most importantly, how do people react? In terms of colleagues, most medics train in very mixed med schols, and rotate around many hospitals, so we’re all used to working with diverse peers. I’ve never worked with another doc or nurse who has said anything disparaging about Muslims behind their backs; though I don’t doubt that racism and xenophobia still exist, I feel that they are frowned upon enough that our less tolerant colleagues keep it to themselves. In a broader sense, you do occasionally hear of older consultants coming up with antiquated, bigoted views, so I’m sure it’s still something we have to deal with. But I hope they represent a dying breed; we need to make sure that our peers do not follow in their footsteps. But patients can be another matter; we deal with people from all walks of life; rich and poor, immigrants and Brits. People with every kind of view you can imagine. We also deal with people who are drunk, aggressive or unpleasant. As someone who is foreign but doesn’t look it, I occasionally have to deal with people ranting about foreigners until I cut off the topic, I know that other colleagues have it much worse. I can’t lie; sometimes the patients and relatives we deal with can be verbally or even physically abusive towards staff. And this includes racism; some of my Muslim colleagues have faced this firsthand. Notably, being told that the patent only wants to be treated by white doctors (when there are no white doctors even available), and racial slurs being used. It’s not unheard of for people to be told to ‘go back where you come from’, either. It’s a small minority of patients, but that doesn’t make it any more acceptable or appropriate, and it shames me to say that we still have to deal with this in 2017. I hate that my friends and colleagues face any kind of abuse or discrimination, and that there are people out there who would prefer a white doctor to an Asian one. We need to do more to ensure that this kind of behaviour  isn’t tolerated. Just as we respect our patients and their relatives, so they owe a basic respect to those looking after them, whoever they are. It’s not good enough to look the other way or pretend it doesn’t happen. I hope this helps. I’d be really interested to see if any of my buddies can chip in with personal experience.

Imagine receiving sage advice from a “teenage girl” with an awful attitude, a very narrow outlook on life and a charming sense of social awareness.

The idea is that Jessica Ray is here to impart what little wisdom she’s amassed over the years…her very short, but eventful, years. She believes in world peace, not beauty pageant world peace where pretty girls with fake teeth, 6 inch makeup that defy nationalities and weaves tight enough to pop brain-cells pretend to know about, but the kind of world peace that’s achieved one day at a time.

She packs it all in her very own, strange guide in not being “Hobo”. Her views are bizarre, her tactics uncalled for and pretty much derogatory, but she means well.

Also, the views expressed by this well-meaning, misguided young lady do not in any way mirror that of Andile and his general belief of…humanity.

STEP ONE

USE THE WORD HOBO CORRECTLY AND ENUNCIATE THE “B” OR GET READY TO BE PUBLICLY SHAMED.

I remember it like it was yesterday - the first day I ever uttered the immortal words “You’re such a hobo” - I was a four year old with the sass of an obese, African American forty-something-year-old with diabetes and a drinking problem, and my mom had a jerry-curl, hipster bell-bottoms that were indecently vajazzled (I fully understand in which context that word is rightfully used, but if you’d have seen those god-awful bell bottoms, you’d approve) and a god-awful rainbow coloured denim crop jacket.

It was every reason to hate the human race all rolled up in one and I instinctively understood the reason for my existence. I tried to fake a seizure, but realised, I’d have to see it through by dramatically foaming at the mouth and have my eyes roll back and do that spazing thing crack-heads do so well and it just seemed like too much work already.

She spun on her heel like she was proud of that mess of a decision and smiled that ridiculous “I did something right today” smile, and being the honest/forward/demon-spawn child I was, I let her know just how disappointing she was as a person and that she was “such a hobo”. She laughed it off, but there was a sadness in her eyes that told me she knew I was right, they always do.

So all through my life it’s been me valiantly setting the world straight and making sure that I wasn’t alone – like some one woman army against hobos the world over. Over the years I’d recruited other like-minded individuals who wanted to save the world, and so the revolution began.

Now step one is simple, I don’t feel like I have to explain much but I will provide examples on how not to do things. You’ll never go wrong under my tutelage, you can trust me. Now it’s very important that you not use the word hobo wrong. For example, when my good and possibly best friend Brittney had the gall to wear the same tank top I wore the year before, I had no choice but to call her out on it. Guys might not understand it, but to us girls there’s a law being broken here, one punishable by humiliation with a side helping of social probation.

This was an atrocity the likes of which cannot be left unchecked and unpunished and as the custodian of all things right in the world (Justice included), I had to do right by the laws that govern our very fragile society and set right the wrongs so carelessly dealt. We owe it to each other to fix one another, it’s what the Bible says somewhere – I’m almost sure it was in there.

Let me set the scene for you: the place, the school hallway opposite a bank of lockers, the time: midday, the offence: wearing an outfit previously worn and dominated by one of the inner circle members. The conversation went a little something like this.

“Hey Brit babe”

“Hey Jessie boo”

“Look, hun, there isn’t an easy way of saying this so i’m just going to come out with it; I think what you’re doing is uncalled for, it’s below the common denominator and it’s revealing your hobo tendencies” Brit gave herself the once over and then cocked her head to the side with a blank stare – one of those ‘say something before I make a fool of myself’ stares.

“What the...?”

“It’s not you exactly; it’s you wearing that tank top”

“I don’t understand” she continued.

“This isn’t about understanding; it’s about changing who you are because who you are, right now, is someone who’s made an unforgivable mistake. Do the right thing. Fix this” I insisted, this was serious business.

“I feel like you should speak sense now”

“Brittney, we have a responsibility to not look the way you look right now and to not make the kind of mistake you’ve just made; I wore that exact same tank top last year and it was amazing on me” I make no apologies for my pettiness. I’m almost an awful human being. So awful in fact that I three-sixty into being a great human being. It’s science, read about it.

“So you’re saying it doesn’t look amazing on me?”

“That’s not what I’m saying, friend; I’m just trying to tell you that you wearing that top now...a year later...is kind of hobo”

“Wait, Jessie...”

“You know what needs to happen now, don’t you?”

“You can’t be serious; I don’t have anything else to wear”

“I think you knew that, I think you wanted to throw yourself under the bus right? I think deep down you wanted to be punished.  I think your subconscious needed some attention so it led you down this unrighteous path. But we aim to please so in a way, I’m making your subconscious happy; consider yourself ‘attention given’...I know. Anyway, I’m sure lost and found has some tops in there that will suit you just fine. You’re sacrificing your happiness for that of your subconscious, you should be proud of yourself”

And just like that, it was done.

Call me what you want, but you cannot deny my genius. I could have very easily torn her down, had her stuttering scriptures and worshipping the ground I walk on, but no, I extended a compassionate hand and gave her the kind of boost girls like her need from girls like me.

Some will call me a bully, that’s a moniker I’ve yet to fully embrace. Many more will call me a bitch, now that I can and will own. Are my methods mean and slightly condescending? Sure, but my intentions are pure.

We live in a world designed by white men, for white men, to glorify white men. I don’t intend on being one of the boys, I plan on being the best damn girl I can be and that means being strong, smart and looking out for my sisters.

The top in question was a crop top that did everything to hide nothing in giving the pimple faced boys in our school a lot of something to whet their late night fantasies. I’d made the mistake of wearing it the year before, and not a soul warned me against that awful decision, but I wasn’t about to stand by and watch Brittney make the same mistake at the expense of her dignity.

I’d rather be ugly to her in private to protect her, then have her shamed in public and have her spirit ruined by the leering, disgusting, borderline unlawful looks she’d get.

As insane as it may sound to you, not being a hobo isn’t an insult to the homeless, it’s taking that word and assigning it the connotation it deserves; it means not allowing yourself to be led astray by the fickle social constructs, not being swallowed whole by ‘The man’ and his sexist, fascist and ridiculously bigoted ideals…and it means not being lame. That was the correct usage of the word hobo, the incorrect usage of the word hobo goes a little something like this. This is a typical conversation with the school idiot. He’s that almost deliberate type of stupid that shouldn’t be real, but actually is. He suffers from no form of mental illness, or so he says, but he acts like he’s forgotten. I’m not one to be unjustifiably mean or anything, but I strongly believe that his now deceased grandfather used to throw his pubes at him which made him crazy – I don’t know if that’s true nor do I understand the complexities of pube-throwing and its effects on people, but I’m glad to perpetuate that idea if it’ll help in dealing with him in future encounters. His name is Daniel.

“Hey Jessie”

“Go away”

“My mom made me peanut butter and jam for lunch, she’s so hobo right?”

This moment in time, in the world, in the universe, in my life is where my neck did a 360 and my eyes rolled to the back of my head and my tongue slithered out of my mouth and crawled into my nose. I was that appalled with his misuse of a perfectly simple and downright religious term.

“Why are you here?”

“Just thought you’d want to chat a bit, you know, find out what’s up with each other’s lives”

“I don’t find you attractive”

“That’s totally unrelated to what I just said” he whispered wide-eyed.

“It just so happens that sometimes we think we’re attractive, but we’re not. You are not attractive” it needed to be said.

“I just wanted to say hi really”

“That won’t work for me”

“Oh”

“Do you know what you just did?”

“Said hi, or tried...” he shifted his eyes from side to side, making sure that the coast was clear, he knew what was about to happen; they always do.

“You just insulted the entire institution of the proper use of the word ‘hobo’. You denigrated a sacred psalm, sullied a special saying and spat on the faces of those who did nothing but strengthen the backbone of forgotten society”

“I don’t get it”

“You did something very, very, very bad and now you have to pay”

“You kind of get scary when you’re like this Jessie” he backed away slowly.

“EEUWE! DANIEL I WILL NOT WATCH YOU MASTURBATE TO MIDGET GRANNY PORN! THAT’S DISGUSTING!” I shouted at the top of my lungs, not too loud that it sounded practiced or fake, but loud enough to turn some major heads and by major I mean every.

I stormed off dramatically with my luscious tresses dancing elegantly behind and he continued to use the word, but now he almost gets it right. That’s how you educate the ignorant. It’s like I’m Jesus, I took one saying, like he took one or two fish and shared it righteously with all those who need it.

Another very important point is that you should never, and I do mean never, use the word ‘hobo’ in front of an actual hobo. They don’t like it very much. I mean I get it, but I don’t at the same time.

We’re breaking barriers, appropriating that stigmatic word from the homeless and giving it life in a context that doesn’t degrade the men, women and children that have nothing as a result of a system and society that failed them. So should you find yourself in the company of your significant other with a homeless person close by, I’d suggest you not use that word in any way, shape or form. They’ll hit you, and they won’t go easy on you too.

It’s like they wait for some young fool to walk by and use it so they can kick the living crap out of them. They’ll beat you up and it won’t be pretty, there’s nothing more hobo than having an actual hobo throw his shoe in your face while you scream with all the masculinity of a tween girl at a Justine Bieber concert because he has your underpants in his fist. Nobody will help you, do you know how humiliating it is to be whooped by a homeless man in the street, and having the entire world bear witness to your very public lashing? That’s not how your life should be like. That’s not why the Backstreet Boys were made. That’s not why Mandela was released.

Here’s the perfect way to NOT handle a situation where you let the “H” word slip around the wrong ears. Bob and Tina were on their way to Bob’s place after a romantic date and it’s warm out so they decided to take a stroll to where he stayed, which wasn’t all that far.

“That was a very romantic dinner, thank you Bob”

“The night’s young and so are we; I can’t wait to make it an even better evening”

“You’re silly, but you’re right; I can’t wait either. Oh wait what about your roommate, won’t he be there?”

“You mean that fugly hobo, nah he’s on the other side of town”

“Say that again you little prick” came a croaky voice from within the darkness – that sounded like one of those modern, dark twisted, contemporary type...oh whatever, moving along.

This was the part where the actual hobo heard Bob and hell hath little fury like a hungry homeless man who got hold of the wrong stuff – drugs – and who feels insulted.

“I’m sorry, we don’t have any money for you man”

Two for one, now listen here kids, I don’t advocate violence, but Bob was asking for it. “You want to repeat yourself little boy, because I ain’t heard none of that?”

This was where the old man hobo stood up and Tina knew that shit was going down, so she stepped back and tried pulling her idiot boyfriend with her.

“Bob maybe we should go” she almost pleaded.

“No we won’t, let me handle this baby. Now listen here...”

That was all that the hobo needed to let loose a barrage of face pumps and pimp slaps with a few bitch slaps in there for good measure. Have you ever seen one of those videos where a squirrel eats a man’s face?...no? Well it was like that, but the hobo was much scarier. He was bigger too, and faster, and stronger. You know, drugs might actually give people superpowers…

“Nobody’s going to remember what you used to look like boy!”

He was like a drunk, high and crazy rabbit on meth and he just went for our poor friend Bob. He slapped him like he’d wanted to get him from the moment his life went down the drain and once Bob was on his knees, the hobo went straight for the rear.

“NO MR HOMELESS MAN, DON’T RAPE HIM!” Tina screamed.

That wasn’t part of his plan at all; instead he grabbed the back of Bob’s boxers in a tight fist and made sure that Bob tasted the thin material as he pulled them up with all his might – so high and so tight that they were almost swallowed whole by his abused rectum.

“How you like that boy? That’s what this hobo has for you”

“No, I’m sorry sir, please NO!” Bob begged for dear life.

That was the moment Bob became an internet star; as a small crowd made its way up to the scene and just watched in silent awe – the night air was filled with the sounds of slapping, screaming and begging...someone grunted, I can’t tell you who but there was a definite grunt. Many of them pulled out their smart phones and immortalising Bob’s humiliation. Many others just stood there in disbelief as a man was being made a bitch – non-sexually – by a hobo out on the street.

“Oink boy, oink like the pig you is”

“OINK!! OINK!!”

Nobody laughed, it was sad, it was hilariously sad so nobody wanted to be the fool that grabbed the hobo’s attention and had to oink. The crowd watched and Tina backed off slowly, disappearing into the now growing audience until she ran off, leaving Bob to his very public beating.

“I can’t do this with you Bob, not after this!”

Bob was too busy being had by the homeless man to notice that he’d joined the ever increasing number of sad, single people in the world. The hobo rode him like nobody’s business – not like a sex act or anything, mind out of the gutter please - and the insanity went on for a good few minutes until the hobo tired himself out and let go of an equally exhausted and thoroughly humiliated Bob.

“Go home!”

That part must have been the saddest of the entire situation, but Bob was too busy nursing a sore rear to even grasp the tragedy of what had just happened. That’s why you should never, ever, use hobo next to an actual hobo because you’ll be made an example of; the hobos around the world are getting angrier and nobody wants to give them any reason to retaliate.

Just imagine; every hobo alive and barely alive coming together and forming some form of revolt. It’ll turn so ugly so fast, they’ll pee on your children and laugh. They’ll throw stones at us and rummage through people’s homes; that’s why we need to keep the balance and not provoke them in any way…

Conservatives Should Be Cautious About Embracing Milo Yiannopoulos (UPDATE)

It was just announced by the American Conservative Union that Milo Yiannopoulous will be the keynote speaker at CPAC, the biggest conservative convention of the year. Milo has made headlines in recent weeks when his speaking event at UC Berkeley was cancelled after violent riots took place. He was seen as a victim as his right to free speech was stomped on by a bunch intolerant lefties. He has done numerous interviews, most recently on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher. So while the rioters’ mission was to silence him, their actions backfired as they only helped raise his profile. 

This wasn’t the first time Milo was seen as a political martyr for free speech. In 2016, he got himself banned from Twitter after he harassed Ghostbusters star and SNL performer Leslie Jones. 

Now, it’s easy for conservatives to sympathize with Milo, especially in this political climate where the left has repeatedly tried to silence those they don’t agree with (particularly on college campuses). And it’s understandable to allow him to have a platform to speak. However, conservatives should tread lightly when it comes to associating themselves with him. 

For those who aren’t familiar of Milo, he’s a senior editor of Breitbart News, a conservative news site that has practically become a pro-Trump cheerleader in recent years. While he doesn’t consider himself as part of the alt-right, a small but vocal group of white nationalists in right-wing politics, he certainly appeals to them, as did his former boss Steve Bannon, who used be the executive chair of Breitbart and now serves as an adviser to President Trump. He’s a professional provocateur, and while liberals label him as a racist/homophobic/bigot/Nazi/etc, he is a Jewish-born gay Brit who’s vocal about his sexual relations with black men. 

When you hear him speak, he’s actually pretty intelligent and humorous. That said, he boasts about being a troll. He loves throwing insults, particularly at liberal celebrities, and his followers go to the extremes to harass his chosen targets. He thrives on controversy and relies on political incorrectness to get a big reaction from the PC police. 

Milo has become a general of sorts in the fight for free speech, although he doesn’t have such nice things to say. It’s reminiscent of the 2015 “Draw a Muhammad Cartoon” contest hosted by political activist Pamela Geller. She knew perfectly well that organizing such an event would offend Muslims. Two Islamic extremists even tried to assassinate her the day of the contest but were thankfully stopped by police. The broader point that she was making is that she has her right to free speech and violence nor intimidation will suppress it. Milo sorta has the same philosophy, but instead of a drawing contest, it’s online bullying. 

Conservatives and the Republican Party as a whole has made a conscious effort in recent years to be more inclusive and diverse. In some ways they’re accomplishing such a goal as President Trump earned more black and hispanic voters than both John McCain and Mitt Romney. With that in mind, it’s a bit shocking of them to invite someone as polarizing and controversial as Milo Yiannopoulous to speak at CPAC. Maybe he’ll knock the speech out of the park, but the worst he can do is reenforce the stereotypes that many Americans have of conservatives. And with Milo being hungry for attention, anything can happen. 

UPDATE: New video has surfaced of Milo defending consensual sex between  adult men and minors. We’ll see if he'll still have this speaking engagement. 

DAVID BOWIE, PART 1 BY DAN WRECK

Photo: David Bowie, by Masayoshi Sukita

BOWIE #1 - DEATH

Anything you write could be your epitaph, as an artist.

If you're fortunate enough to have an audience, then the last public proclamations you utter are both eulogy and epitaph: imbued with whatever poignancy the audience wants to put into them. Whatever we want to read into it we can and we will because greedy consumers all, the customer is always right. It's sad and inhumane but when you've made yourself a product what else can you expect?

It feels tawdry to even discuss this, but seems obligatory: he managed to keep his cancer from the media right up until the end. He'd "withdrawn from public life", as the saying goes albeit a very extraordinary withdrawal from public life where he still released albums, appeared in music videos and gave his blessing to the huge Sound and Vision exhibition which exhibited many of his personal effects and revelled in his past.  

It's the kind of sleight of hand withdrawal from public life you'd expect from a man who, it is easy to forget now, came out as gay in 1972 on the front pages of the music press. This at a time when no one was really coming out: still a very brave thing to do. Not something you did just to get a slot on Ellen to plug your book. He later adjusted it to being bisexual (which would still be brave now given how many idiots don’t believe bisexuality exists), then told everyone he was straight when he was expedient for him to do so (in 1982 conveniently distancing himself from the gays when he wanted to be even bigger) then quietly years down the line came back out again when it was safe to do so.

This is also a man who once upon a time gave the gossip magazine HELLO! magazine an exclusive, having them cover his wedding to Iman. In September 2000, the birth of his daughter also merited a HELLO! exclusive. This is the kind of thing we bitch at footballer's wives for doing. So let's not pretend he was a shy and retiring man as we shake our heads and bemoan the circling ghouls and grief culture even as we lap it up. But just as it was his right to make his personal life a matter of public record, it was his right to make the end of it private and shared only with his close friends. Remember, he owed us nothing and gave us a lot.

POSSIBLE EPITAPHS #1 and #2 - I CAN'T GIVE EVERYTHING AWAY / LAZARUS

I Can't Give Everything Away.

A title that both makes a mockery of my point before about how he was as much of a media tart as anyone else and agrees with it. Depending on where you lay the emphasis.There's a well known critical theory of the death of the author which basically says that we, as the readers of a given text decide what it is about and all interpretations are equally valid. It's not one I subscribe to but it's an interesting thought, especially after the literal death of an author.

I Can't Give Everything Away is a beautiful song with motifs from the rest of his back catalogue sprinkled through it: a touch of New Career In A New Town in the harmonica intro, something of Thursday's Child about the vocal melody, hints of Black Tie White Noise in the arrangement. The vocal delivery, though, is purely Blackstar. It's not just a homage, it's the Sound & Vision exhibit in the form of a song. What a performance it is, too. When I first listened to Blackstar five times in a row, before the author was dead, I welled up hearing it then too. There's so much joy and yearning he fits into the repetitions of the title. Then biography bleeds into it and the repetitions of the word "Away" are the ascension of a soul.

“Look up here, I’m in heaven”

The same way that Jhonn Balance's repetitions of "It just is" at the end of Going Up from his own accidental epitaph Ape Of Naples say a lot in very little, it's all in the delivery and the space between the words. I mention Balance partly because he's one of the few artists I love and respect as much as Bowie, and someone I feel a close connection to despite never having met (maybe on the next bardo) and partly because of the very Coil looking black sun appearing very prominently in the Blackstar cover art and the video for this song. He must have known: this isn't the SS variant of the black sun you see used by right-wing morons who underestimate and wilfully misunderstand the power of this imagery. It's not a sun wheel. It's a black sun. The brightest of all Blackstars.

Of course Bowie was no stranger to using, dwelling on and disseminating the kind of occult imagery which has been misappropriated by incompetent, bigoted idiots at different points in history. There's been a thread of it running through most of his career: from the first verse of Quicksand's references to Crowley's Golden Dawn and “Himmler's sacred realm” to the magickal undertones running through 1.Outside that he unfortunately dilutes by couching in references to piss artists like the then contemporary Brit School of artists. Most explicitly, though, he was pre-occupied with these themes around the time of Station to Station and in the Lazarus video we get a more explicit link to Bowie past in the same outfit from the Station to Station back cover.

In the Bowie's Last Five Years documentary we hear that he found out it was, very likely, going to be terminal as he shot the video for Lazarus. Once again life and art merge and make something that was already moving into something heartbreaking. First I'm going to focus on the video before I get to the song itself.

If you're reading this I'm 95% sure you've seen the video a few times but there are two things which're particularly moving about it when art meets life so unfortunately this will at first seem like I’m just describing things for the sake of it.

The first is the joy and release with which he sings, bedbound but levitating.

The second is is the moment where, before, vanishing off into the cupboard, he looks up with pantomime worry before scribbling down some notes. He is shaking as he writes them as if battling to get these last thoughts, they're struggling to come and he laughs with relief before finally putting pen to paper and getting these last ideas out before the inevitable.

The thing about writing your own pitaph is that, well, presumably you're still alive after you've  written it and you can't stop there. Having put that to rest, as an artist, you move onto something else. There's always something else ahead, something which could be bigger and better and brighter until one day well there just isn't. You need to finish it now you've started even if it looks impossible because you can't just stop mid-stream or mid-word. But about when the full stop arrives before you do? Unthinkable. Before you're interrupted, before it's time to put your pen down the heart screams "But wait there's more."

Now onto the song itself. Another one of his many beautiful vocal performances but with a vulnerability you never usually heard from the man. The grain of the voice, the way you can almost hear his throat muscles teeth and tongue as he sings "I was living like a king", the k sound in "like" rattling with phlegm and the dying rasp of "king". It's hard to know when to be frail when you've lived as a king. In fact, even more than a king. Bowie was almost a construct. At points in this song we're hearing the man David Jones.

POSSIBLE EPITAPH #3 - THE NEXT DAY

The Next Day as a whole really plays with the idea of the ageing artist talking about mortality and despite the fact that it isn't as good an album as Blackstar everyone would've reacted the same way if he'd died just before or just after releasing The Next Day. For one it’s the first Bowie album not to display his face (even as distorted as it appears on 1.Outside it's still him, it’s just him after he worked out how to play with filters in Photoshop). We get an iconic image from his past with his face obscured by the title as if to say "The Next Day won't include my face" (good at this ascribing pointless significance to things which don't mean anything of the sort aren't I? Pitchfork should give me a ring. Or The Sun.).

The Next Day is rife with references to death, ageing, disease and dementia. The title track built around the refrain "Here I am not quite dying" and a chant of "And the next day and the next day" redolent of Macbeth's final "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow". As on parts of Blackstar he spends a lot of time looking back, more explicitly than on Blackstar in fact, particularly on the first single Where Are We Now, a lovely sorrowful song full of space and ache in a way he tried to do on Hours but didn't really manage. It was accompanied by a video of our ageless hero starting to look, well, look his age. On You Feel So Lonely You Could Die, which isn't a great song in my opinion, after talking about seeing a former foe's hanging body, he leaves us with that iconic Five Years drumbeat echoing out into nowhere. The album closer Heat bears a remarkable similarity to The Motel from 1.Outside and thus also to Scott Walker's Climate of Hunter or one of his songs off Night Flights. A great track, and another example of the great man not insulting his audience's intelligence / giving us something to go seek out and read (the Mishima references) but as epitaphs go not one worthy of the great man. The Next Day is an enjoyable album but fairly underwhelming once you got over the excitement of Bowie doing an album for the first time in a decade which was obviously something.

What really impressed me as a gesture was The Stars (Are Out Tonight) and particularly the accompanying video where Bowie and Tilda Swinton are a married couple and Andreja Pejic is in it being impossibly beautiful as Andreja Pejic is prone to being. After going back in in the 80's one of the things he did in this cycle was remind us queers he was one of us and he still cared. That he did so while at the same time skewering the same celebrity culture he fed into by uneasily straddling the boundary of Celeb and Celebrant is the sort of having your cake and eating it too genius we miss him for.

It’s also worth dwelling on how confrontationally gender-skewing the video (directed by Floria Sigismondi) is in a way you see from few artists as prominent as him even in this day and age: aside from the aforementioned inspired choice of Pejic, casting Iselin Steiro as a young Bowie is a master-stroke as is Tilda Swinton as Bowie’s wife: perfect. His video wife is the only person in the world who looks like him. It’s just a feast of androgyny.

POSSIBLE EPITAPH #4 - BRING ME THE DISCO KING

The closing track on Reality, pre-hiatus and pre-heart attack. Again a very youthful looking and sounding Bowie but for a long time it looked like it was going to be the last thing we saw or heard from him (apart from Little Fat Man in Extras of course which I'm sure some earnest journalist would've managed to contort themselves into calling a "dying man's final joke" or something).

A rolling, roiling jazz song with Mike Garson's piano playing the perfect foil. Full of intimations of doom undercut with an almost Zen resignation. An album closer opening with the words "You promised me the ending would be clear" and containing the line "Soon there be'll nothing left of me, nothing left to release". For a while it looked like there wouldn't be and that he'd settled into being human at last. Just like Damiel in Wings of Desire, an angel who walked among us who gave it all up in  favour of beauty you can only really appreciate if all things are finite. Wistful reminiscences of his past "killing time in the 70s" from a man who it was often said was resistant to looking back but you'd be forgiven for thinking (if you believed the critics that is) that he did nothing but.

Of course, as beautiful and sepulchral as the song is, it was written as far back (maybe further, this isn't Pushing Ahead of The Dame I'm not quite that good a writer or Bowie scholar) as Black Tie White Noise and an attempt was made at recording it in the Earthling sessions. It may be an epitaph but one there had been multiple drafts of. Still, it doesn't matter when you write it it just matters when you put it out and there's a certain grandeur given to something by it having been pored over for so long. To think of another great songwriter who died in 2016, Leonard Cohen, you don't think You Want It Darker or Treaty were just off the cuff from the man who spent years writing and honing Hallelujah, do you? No. Until it is written in stone an epitaph can undergo many revisions and be replaced by others, this to be replaced with The Next Day the way Heathen was replaced with this.

POSSIBLE EPITAPH #5 - HEATHEN (THE RAYS)

Yes, I know it would've been shocking for him to go at this age, especially considering how healthy and youthful he looked at the time (he was in his mid 50s, obviously a young age but looking even younger) but for the purpose of this exercise imagine he did. It would’ve been sad but he never would have had to meet Ricky Gervais. Imagine that the title track from Heathen is the last new song you hear from him. Mournful skeins of effects drenched guitar, a distant tribal throb then the man himself enters the picture.

"Steel on the skyline, sky made of glass"

A voice frozen with existential horror, glazed eyes fixed forward, the horror of Colonel Kurtz or anyone who has seen death and truly looked at it without flinching or looking away. A vision of their own death, maybe. All of our deaths. A man singing to his God or to the concept of death itself. Maybe to the angel he sang of as a younger man in Look Back In Anger on Lodger. Maybe the angel who renounced immortality knowing what comes next. Rhetorical questions.

“Is there a reason?”

"Have I stared too long?".

Then maybe he's singing to life itself:

"You say you'll leave me

When the sun's full

And the rays high

I can see it now

I can feel it die"

The way he sings these last few words and the wordless phrases after it, full of anguish and loss, is chilling even knowing he lived for a while after it. If he hadn't, it would've been his epitaph and it would've been a beautiful one, the Berlin synth atmospherics twinkling away, rays of cold electronic light in the short instrumental outro which fades out and ends as suddenly as....well, life. It can end at any moment you know (you know, you know).

Speaking on the song itself in an interview he describes the writing process as some kind of traumatic epiphany:

"In the distance a car was driving slowly past the reservoir and these words were just streaming out and there were tears running down my face. But I couldn't stop, they just flew out. It's an odd feeling, like something else is guiding you, although forcing your hand is more like it."

Some people talked about the remarkable synchronicity between him writing these songs pre-9/11 and the tragic events of that day but really, is there? Any more than there's synchronicity between any songs mentioning death and a skyline and 9/11? We feel this because he's a voice we look up to, saying these words, and we have decided that's what they mean. In the same way that if he had died after making Heathen it would have been a vision of his premature death. Funny phrase that. Either all deaths are premature or none are. We make the pieces fit and create our own context. Just to make my point.....

POSSIBLE EPITAPH #6 - ROCK AND ROLL SUICIDE

I'm not suggesting he committed suicide in this alternate past but what if Ziggy really had been it? What if he'd fallen silent after that. Knowing the man's love of being the centre of attention unlikely but what if?

Imagine you're a gay teenager in 1972. Something integral to your very being, the way you are has been illegal up until 5 years ago. Things are going to be shit for you in a very different way to the way they are now: although nowadays if you happen to have been born queer you're still four times more likely to kill yourself but that's okay because if you survive long enough to grow up you can get married now so get over it, faggot. Maybe Bowie / Ziggy would've been a ray of light when you saw him and realised that you couldn't be all bad because maybe the coolest and most beautiful man you'd ever seen was the same as you. He was obviously totemic for queer people of that generation. Dockers in Liverpool saying they'd give Bowie one oblivious or uncaring of the fact that was a bloke they were talking about because it's not a matter of gay or straight or bisexual: fancying early 70s Bowie is just a matter of common sense.

"Oh no love you're not alone"

If that's all he'd done, if he'd told us all he was gay, left us with Ziggy and then when he announced "This is the last show I will ever play" he'd kept to his word then he'd still have been more than a footnote in history. It's all context.

Everything that came later, his pathetic attempt at "going back in" the same way dear old Lou did when he sang Women on The Blue Mask, none of this matters now and it definitely didn't matter to the confused queer kid in a small town in 1972 who for once saw someone who moved the way they'd like to move. None of this shit had happened and even when it did it didn’t retroactively undo all the good he’d done for you. Sometimes that's all it takes. Sometimes that's better than a million It Gets Better PSAs from straight actors who think that the approval of someone a million miles away with millions of pounds means anything to someone who is getting it from all corners, inside and outside of the home. Than a million pro LGBT statements from politicians who work in education ignoring the fact that sometimes it's not just the pupils who're bullying you because they reckon you were born wrong. These words, so easy for them to say and so hard for them to believe.

“If I could only make you care” is the crucial line. There're no false promises, it's just "Gimme your hands 'cos you're wonderful" as Mick Ronson's guitar wails an echo of the words "Give me your hands". It's a romantic idea but maybe this saved someone. Maybe that’s the most fitting epitaph of all. If you can touch the lives of people you’ve never met and they feel something real when you die then you must have done something right. Being someone’s hero, that means the world.