Banging Thoughts for Guilty Friends
Racism comes in many forms. The type of racism I experience is the type exclusively levelled at jowl-encrusted 50 year old men from suburban England who leap out of the Question Time audience, ready to emphatically jab a sausage finger towards whichever cultural icon tries to erect a wind turbine within a 100-mile radius of their house.
Did I choose to be this way? Am I pleased that my skin looks like pâtéand my grandchildren call me a 'wasteman' because I can’t operate an iPad? Of course not. But I take solace in my quiet, calm lifestyle, a rose-tinted misremembering of the past and the wealth I’ve accumulated from living through the post-war economic boom. I’ve never hurt anyone directly, so forgive me if I’m taken aback by the vitriol being hurled my way by the true wastemen of our society: people younger than myself.
When I was a lad, there were no bad things. If memory serves correctly, bad things only began happening in this country at some point between the first time I saw a tamagotchi and when my nephew explained to me what sushi was. That’s when it all went downhill. Now meat has been banned from shops, Roy Chubby Brown has been sent to Alcatraz, and young people are allowed to call me gammon, just because I attacked a young Bangladeshi boy because I mistook a fidget spinner for an improvised explosive device.
|It is long overdue that the British Left addresses its blind spot when it comes to anti-semitism. Yes, there have been some advances made, but I would like to see more effort to stamp out the most pernicious anti-semitic dogwhistle of all: any form of criticism of the state of Israel.
Is Israel perfect? Who amongst us is?! But from disliking hummus all the way to looking away when Israeli defence force snipers joke about killing children, let’s call this behaviour what it truly is: demonic possession from Hitler’s ghost.
To me, these things are obvious. I can relate to the situation Israel finds itself in. I happen to have built my house in the middle of a primary school. Whether or not it is correct that I was able to build a two-storey semi-detached here in the first place is by the by, and perhaps a matter for historians. Yes, it is also true I have continually expanded - first an observatory, then an extensive patio, and the solarium is due to be fully complete by mid-November - to fill a majority of the playground.
Should I have done that? Should I not have done that? It’s hard to say. But what I can say is that children in the playground have been throwing stones at my windows and spraying rude words on my brickwork since day one, so it’s pretty rich to suggest that I’m in any way remiss to take pot shots at them from the second floor with a 9mm pistol.
Sean Morley (@seanmorl)
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