Emissions

Divisive internet personality and former professional kickboxer Andrew Tate has been detained in Romania...

Earlier this week, ... he told [Greta Thunberg] he owned 33 cars...

"Please provide your email address so I can send a complete list of my car collection and their respective enormous emissions," he wrote in a tweet, taunting the activist.

Thunberg replied, "yes, please do enlighten me. email me at smalldickenergy@getalife.com," she wrote.

It was in response to this that Tate then posted a video, smoking a cigar in a bathrobe before a box of pizza was placed in front of him.

Internet sleuths believe the pizza box, from a well-known chain in Romania, helped police confirm Tate was in the country and played a crucial role in his arrest.

I remain pleased that the insanity of our current moment still frequently proves entertaining.

Culture

I have a theory about the “romantic nations”. Those were nations … dreamed into existence by philosophers and writers … and the long struggle for nationhood … promoted by the idea of a certain people and language having primacy, creating a home...

In all these cases, you can detect a cycle: the nation exists as a culture before it exists as a nation; as a nation, it increasingly legitimates itself by an appeal to the superiority of its people; and in the final phase, the nation as an entity actually attacks its culture and what it stood for.

Roger Gathman writes about the history of self-determination, everyone's favourite stroke-word for ethnonationalism.

Right of Reply

I'm just reading Mark Steel's memoir about his early career in comedy, It's Not A Runner Bean, and I am struck, as usual, by the ever present evidence that our current cultural moment has been current for a veeeery long time.

[Despite the obvious absurdiy of later mainstream media hysteria about political correctness, i]t was true however, that an assortment of councillors, social workers and people with massive pine kitchens and spice racks had won influence in some lower strata of society, and were using it to pursue aims that would later be labelled PC. Mostly these people were ex-university students who ... had been politicised by the events of 1968, and ... retained their support for campaigns against sexism, racism and nuclear weapons. But as they'd climbed the ladder of respectability, they'd abandoned all attempts to win working class support...

[Their] new strategy ... was to win positions in local government, hold discussion groups, argue with each other about whether certain words were offensive or not, and often spend their free time at alternative cabaret nights.

...

A string of venues was founded under the banner of New Variety and, funded by the GLC, they soon became the heart of this circuit. One of my first professional jobs was compering at these places, and I probably made a pretty awful hash of it.

On my first night, the show ended with an all-woman band called Jam Today. After they'd come off stage they marched downstairs to where I was starting to load some equipment into the van, and screamed a marvellously eloquent tirade of abuse about how I'd deliberately given them a shit introduction because I was a man. I tried to explain that the reason I'd given them a shit introduction was because I was a shit compere, but that only made it worse. Once I was approached in the interval by an angry white couple who demanded to know why there wasn't a black compere instead of me. Again, if they'd asked why wasn't there a half decent compere instead of me, I'd have probably thought it a fair enough enquiry.

A room above the Crown and Castle in Dalston provided the setting for a typical example of this kind of thing. Almost every week the show broke down into a debate about the political justification for something or other. One night a comedian began a poem which usually went:

I do not love my girlfriend because she is pretty.
I do not love my girlfriend because she is good in bed.
I do not love my girlfriend because I see her as a fastfood restaurant with take-away sex on the side.
I do not love my girlfriend.
Because I do not have a girlfriend.

Except that on this particular night he completed the first two lines and received a barrage of abuse about how he had no right to be so sexist about his girlfriend which made it impossible for him to carry on the act.

The audiences were like kids playing snap, eagerly anticipating each card, so anxiously ready and waiting to shout 'snap' that they'd frequently blurt it out in a fit of over keenness at the wrong moment. But at least kids then admit they're wrong and carry on with the game. This lot would try to compose an argument for why the jack of hearts and the nine of diamonds was 'snap,' and if only you weren't so macho, you'd be able to see it.

What made this all the more ridiculous was that at the same time as this scrutinising of each individual syllable for imperialist overtones was going on, mainstream comedy was genuinely sexist and remaining relatively unchallenged. At about the same time there was a new talent show on early evening weekend TV. One night a brash young club comic came on and opened with: 'I've never hit my wife in anger. It's always been a pleasure.' Had a posse of protesters followed him around barracking his act, it would have been justified.

An added problem for some of us was that the main target of the favourite acts on this circuit was the white working-class male. So if you were white, male and spoke with what seemed a working-class accent, it was assumed you were a drunken, fighting, car mechanic.

There are plenty of white working-class males who, like me at seventeen, deserve any lampooning sent their way. But there are also some who have black friends and who don't join in leering at Page Three.

Having to assert their ideas in their daily lives, they embody the opposite of the middle class bimbos at their cabaret evenings. For the most unpleasant side of these events was the smug self satisfaction shown by a layer of society that would make no effort to relate to anyone outside their own circle, but remain content that they were the minority who knew the true and only path.

Many of the faithful at New Variety would attend their weekly gatherings with the genuine ardour of cult members. So eventually I decided that if I was going to get harangued even when I was being as right-on as they were, I might as well gain some pleasure out of deliberately annoying them. One of my favourite lines from the time was: 'What I'd love to do to a middle class lefty is say I was going to come round their house with someone who worships a dictator and thinks all women are whores. So I could watch them going "Well no, oh please don't bring them, I'll be sick," and then, turn up with a Rastafarian.'

Another that I was pleased with was: 'These people love feeling guilty. They feel guilty for being white, guilty for being male, guilty for being middle class. Why don't they just feel guilty for being wankers.' How therapeutic it was to feel a sea of hostility that I'd caused on purpose instead of one I'd caused because they'd misinterpreted me. One night in Cricklewood, a Scottish woman stood up in the middle of my act and said I'd been racist, sexist, misogynist, misanthropic and abusive to minorities. 'Wait till I start on the Scottish,' I told her.

And in soooo many ways.

[A] section of the National Union of Students were holding an annual conference at Manchester Polytechnic and three of us had been booked to do twenty minutes each for their evening's entertainment. Many of them, being student activists, were involved in a variety of campaigning groups or political parties and there was clearly an undercurrent of hostility between some of the opposing factions. It can be extremely disheartening to watch political activists reserving their most vicious moments for each other rather than for whoever it is they're supposed to be opposing. I can only imagine that the same process takes over which leads some people in small towns to hate everyone from the next town up. The real world is ignored and the enemy becomes those who are almost the same as you but not quite.

The woman who came into the dressing room to greet us that night was a chronic sufferer of this affliction. Here she was, talking to three people who she'd never met before, having no idea of their own beliefs. And yet her opening remarks were not to ask us to support any initiatives the conference might be taking against racism, student poverty or the arms trade. Instead she launched into a tirade of abuse about every left-wing group represented at the conference, except for the one that she was a member of.

Aware of the importance of finishing on a big laugh her breathless rant ended with a joke. 'If an SWP member and a Militant member jumped off a tall building who'd land first? Who gives a fuck?!'

Even without the element of in-fighting, this was an extremely weak joke. Had she said, 'If Ronald Reagan and Henry Kissinger jumped off a tall building who'd land first? Who gives a fuck?!' it would still have not been funny. But here was a woman who presumably at some point in her life had taken up the cause of political activism in order to oppose the injustices around her, but was manically frothing at the prospect of two other activists jumping off this imaginary tall building.

I found out later that the group this woman was allied with was a supporter of the state of Israel, which had just carried out some particularly unpleasant attacks on groups of Palestinians, which included the shooting of several teenagers for throwing stones. In fact her group was linked with a Zionist student group noted for its hostility towards Arabs.

There are of course many decent people, among them a great many Jews, who agree with the idea of the Israeli state but are infuriated by what they see as that state's excesses. What her group was known for was the way in which they responded to any critics of Zionism by accusing them of being anti-Semitic. A somewhat untenable position given the millions of Jews who opposed the formation of a country which could only exist by forcibly expelling hundreds of thousands of people and agreeing to act as a highly-armed puppet for America.

The considered response to this student would have been to mutter something under my breath and forget it. The problem was the mischief gene. The gene that makes certain children tip up their father's neatly organised box of papers on to the floor, just to see what would happen. One of my earliest memories is as a two year old letting the budgie out of the cage just to see what would happen. (It flew out of the window and away.)

So just to see what would happen, half way through my set I told the story of the woman in a socialist group who'd come into the dressing room and delivered her rant, and that it seemed she was a supporter of this Zionist students society. 'No-wonder there's so few socialists around,' I said. 'If people ask what would happen in an ideal socialist state and the answer is: "Well, every couple of years we'll invade the next country along, do whatever the Americans told us to, and anyone who chucked a stone would be shot dead".' About three-quarters of the audience began whooping and clapping and the rest began screaming abuse. By the time I came off stage, a picket line had formed across the dressing room, and a motion had been prepared that the Zionist group should be allowed a right to reply.

The mischief gene was ecstatic. A right to reply to a comedian. Surely if you stopped to think for one moment, you'd realise that this was completely silly. But all around was uproar. There were arguments about the right to reply, arguments about the dressing room picket, someone screamed that they were going to kick me down the stairs and someone else said that if he did, then he'd kick them down the stairs.

Eventually, despite receiving little support for the right to reply, a leading member of the offended group got on stage and began to speak. 'I can't believe we've had to sit here listening to this anti-Semitism,' she began. 'Especially not today, because today ...'

There was a pause. She brought out a handkerchief and theatrically struggled for composure. What would it be? Today what? She was clearly aiming for a big sympathy number. The room went quiet with expectation the way courtrooms do on the telly just before the verdict.

'Today,' she said, 'is my birthday.'

There followed further attempts to link my act to Kristalnacht and other outrages of the Third Reich, but the birthday line had blown it. I did ask however, if I could just deny publicly that I was quite the fascist I'd been portrayed to be. For surely if anyone was insulting Jews it was her and her performance.

Another meeting took place about whether I should be allowed to return, and a chant of 'Let him speak' began to circulate the room. The whole situation was now so wonderfully surreal that only student politics could have created it. But the comment that summed up the evening was yet to come.

I did get back on the stage but someone pulled the microphone lead out of its socket and someone else tipped over the mixing desk.

The chanting started up again and through the cacophony of stamping, screams of 'Let him speak,' and screams to the effect of 'Don't let him speak' one voice rose above the others. 'For God's sake, let him speak,' it bellowed and succeeded in quietening the whole place. Here, I thought was a major ally.

With the room at his command, he said his piece: 'I'm hard of hearing. Has no one any respect for the disabled?'

This book was written in 1996, and the events described occurred in the mid '80s. Just so we're clear.

Lifted from pages 88 to 90, and 97 to 101, in the 3rd edition (The Do-Not Press, 2004).

Reason for the season

I look at this home-made Christmas card, and all I want is context. (And an armful of rats.)