December 2004 - Posts

Signs and Signifiers

Sometimes I think too much about The Text, and having been submitting myself voluntarily to reading John Major's Incredibly Tedious Memoirs (729 pages of remembering how very dull he really was at the time, and no mention of Edwina Curry...) I started looking for *anything* more interesting to read. So my favourite three pieces of graffiti from the weekend were, in reverse order:

1) "Smash Neo-liberalizm" [sic] - I would have imagined that before someone knew they wanted to smash neo-liberalism they'd already be so well-educated that they could spell it.

2) "Looting Takes the Waiting Out Of Wanting" - A nice piece of alliteration, and a bon mot which only lost points for being (a) painted not on McDonalds but in the safest and least relevant place to paint such graffiti I have ever seen (round the back of a stonemason/gravestone merchant) and (b) being a slogan and thus not original.

3) "Why don't you *** off back to Wales?" - This was a brilliant non-sequitor, as well as articulating an emotion we can all empathise with. This political cri de coeur had immaculate punctuation and capitalisation and was written in a well-formed and thoughtful script. There was no textual context: it stood alone and unchallenged on the wall of a disused Church. The author simply knew that someone Welsh would eventually walk by, and when they did... bang, he had them. If you paint it, they will come. And with any luck they'll then go.

Beheadings and P.R.: a primer for idiot Al Wahabbi cultists

My sister, who's in the police, frequently repeats their mantra that it's just as well criminals are stupid, or we'd really be in trouble. The same goes for islamic fundamentalists: when they get smart (c.f. the twin towers/Pentagon attacks) things get messy.

But at a moment when the well-meaning, liberal states you are fighting (the USA and UK) are torn by divisions over their conduct of the war on humanitarian grounds, and when these democratic states are at a tipping point regarding scattered and rare human rights abuses (of the sort all wars produce, although none the less wrong for it), you do not galvanise public and governmental opinion by videoing yourself hacking off the head of an unarmed, bound and terrified civilian.

Berlusconi was uncomfortably close to the truth when he stated that this is a war of cultures: a culture which can be paralysed into inaction by pictures of its soldiers doing little more than is involved in college hazing rituals set against a culture where many people will undoubtedly be rejoicing the beheading of a defenceless man, simply because he is an American Jew.

Socrates said that no man is capable of intentionally doing evil: that what is clearly evil to us is to him an act perfectly capable of rationalisation within his own moral framework. It wasn't one of of his better arguments at the time, and it doesn't look any better at the moment.