I was in the supermarket the other day when what should come over the PA but the Stones’ ‘Ruby Tuesday’. I stopped in the aisle. Brian Jones’ recorder is among the lyrical wonders of the epoch of rock and roll.
But – it’s come to this, I then thought, the Stones subdued and subsumed into muzak.
Later, I bump into a member of one of our greatest-ever punk combos. You’ll never guess what I’ve just heard, I lamented. He thought for a moment. “I wonder how you get onto that...”
Then I discover that the two-bellied bollocks from Eton, Boris Johnson, in his capacity as London Mayor, has launched a year-long “punk heritage” event, funded by the national lottery.
Heritage? Punk is now or it’s not.
I was sitting in a London flat on the day in 1976 when Johnny Rotten, if it wasn’t Sid, called Bill Grundy a cunt on tea-time television... and felt the tremble of the air as every teenager with pimples in council estates across the septic isle leapt from the sofas they’d been slumped on, fists pumping, eyes on fire, shouting “Yesss!”
Punk wasn’t music to listen to but to live by and act on. It was the least alienated genre ever. Nothing coy or contemplative, everything furiously febrile, demanding all within earshot join in.
Joe Corre, offspring of Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood, is going the burn his vast collection of punk artifacts and memorabilia in Camden on November 26th, the 40th anniversary of the release of Anarchy in the UK, as a protest against Johnson’s scheme to secure the bourgeois future by colonising the rebel past.
Corre has invited all other punk practitioners still alive to join him on the day, bring their own incendiary items, make a bonfire of Boris’s vanity, clear space for new rowdiness.
Updates on the Irish contingent as and when.
With hours of Muamar Gadaffi being sodomised to death with a bayonet in 2011, Hillary Clinton cracked her face open in a broad grin and chortled to the cameras: “We came, we saw, he died.” From the outset, Clinton, Secretary of State at the time, had been gung-ho for military action to bring the dictator down. Now she publicly revelled in the manner of Gadaffi’s death. The sadistic glee did her no harm with her Irish devotees.
I wonder did her response to Gadaffi having had a bayonet rammed up his arse and then twisted so as to mangle his innards have anything to do with him being an Arab and a Muslim? She has also been a huge fan of sending war-planes to blow Iraqis, Syrians, Afghans, Yemenis etc. to bits and then tut-tutting unconcerned as the chaos detonated by the bombing swamps whole countries in blood.
Clinton is also a strident supporter of the oppression of Palestine. She regularly libels supporters of the Boycott, Disvestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign as “anti-Semitic”. Addressing the annual conference of the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee on March 22nd, she called for a stepping-up of US support for Israel and intensification of efforts to isolate and demonise BDS supporters. Boycott campaigners in colleges were “bullying” Jewish students, she alleged.
“Particularly at a time when anti-semitism is on the rise across the world...we must repudiate all efforts to malign, isolate and undermine Israel and the Jewish people.”
Eitan Peled, a Jewish leader of the BDS movement in the US, commented: “Such characterisations do a disservice to any Jewish people who have been subject to true forms of anti-semitism. There is nothing anti-Semitic about promoting equal rights for Palestinians...If there is any institutional exclusion regarding this issue, it is the exclusion of Jewish activists who support BDS.”
Jews who support BDS are barred from membership of Hillel Israel, the largest Jewish campus organisation in the world – a political litmus test specifically applied to Jews to separate the sheep from the goats, good Jews from bad Jews.
I may be doing Clinton a disservice in suggesting she is anti-Arab and/or anti-Muslim. She revealed apparently genuine emotion in mourning the death in January last year of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, the main source of financial and ideological support for the cut-throat sectarians of Islamic State and also the most lucrative customer of the US and British arms industries.
Clinton referred to the corrupt and perverted misogynist as “a friend” whose death had left her and her husband “saddened...We join the Saudi people in mourning his loss and sending our heartfelt condolences to his family.”
It’s possible that, actually, the Saudi people were over the crescent moon to be rid of the suppurating old thief and torturer and mourned only the fact that he had dragged out his presence on earth for far too long. But there’s no way of knowing, the Saudi people having no mechanism for expressing views on such a matter.
And yet I hear where’re I go across the land that “Hillary” becoming president would be a great day altogether, for Ireland and, even more so, for women, it apparently being assumed that Irish people and women everywhere have no identity of interest with Palestinian women or men.
On Palestine, as on foreign affairs generally and on trade policy, on the basis of their statements during the primary campaign, Donald Trump is to the left of Hillary Clinton. Mind you, to say that is to say next to nothing.