| Wednesday, November 10, 2004 |
 | (Written yesterday)
This is what you want, this is what you get.
Oh, Christ. I thought at the time that W's call for unity was welcome, but was going to be difficult for me at least to put my shoulder behind when I keep seeing dead Iraqis. All around me. They don't know they're free. Despite the sterling efforts of the media, this remains the case. And now we can look forward to an absolute dickload more dead on all sides. Whether when you subtract the number of insurgents and Iraqi rebels killed from the number of insurgents and Iraqi rebels created you get a negative number, I'm not yet sure. I do know that the civilian population of Fallujah, and for that matter the ranks of the US and British military, will be harder to replace. Even a broad agreement on the need to combat international Tairrrrrism might not be enough to support the offensive in those terms.
Of course, it is fair to ask what exactly I or any of my pinko friends would have done in this situation. To which the answer is of course "a bake sale".
It's not been a good morning, really. On the way into work I passed a poster, tacked up with special "stop crime" stickers, asking for witnesses to the murder of David Morley. I mean, fuck. To survive one loathsome hate crime just to end up kicked to death on the South Bank.
Maybe this is just a very bad month, or maybe this is part of a trend. The progressive tendency tends to comfort itself with the knowledge that it is progressive - that, for example, the "Red states" exemplify a neanderthal trend that can be seen as the death throes of an old order before it is swamped by a new, exciting, multicultural polyverse of infinite variety.
But what if, not to put too pointy a pin in it, that's complete self-delusion? What rights the formerly oppressed have obtained are recent: how long has a woman been able to vote in the UK? Compare that to how long a scholar of King's College Canterbury has been entitled to walk on the quad. Essentially, the face of human civilisation has long been privileged, despotic, monocultural and male. Actually, quite a lot like Alan Hansen. The period during which this face have softened to create a kinder, gentler arrangement of similar features - what we cultural historians call the Hank Azaria period - is a Christmas scene carved on a grain of rice, and perhaps no more likely to survive a vigorous assault with heavy boots.
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