The Fanonite

George Carlin’s unsparing wisdom. (Watch it here)

‘The mayoral race is no joke when the Tory candidate can win the approval of the far right,’ writes Soumaya Ghannoushi.

When confronted about his infamous choice of language to describe black people - “piccaninnies” with “watermelon smiles” - Boris Johnson’s responses ranged from claims of being misinterpreted to apologies for the offence caused. And when, a few days ago, Nick Ferrari questioned him on his no less distasteful statements on Islam, the Conservative candidate for the London mayoralty denied ever making them. He insisted that Ken Livingstone, the mayoral incumbent and his fellow guest on the breakfast show, was seeking to smear him. Islam, he emphatically declared, was “a religion of peace”.

What a difference a mayoral race can make. Only two years ago, Johnson’s writings - readily available in the online archives of the Spectator and Daily Telegraph - were peppered with talk of the “paranoia of the Muslim mind”, of Islam’s “medievalism”, “heartlessness” and “disgusting arrogance”. Islamophobia was, he maintained, “a natural reaction” to “any non-Muslim reader of the Qur’an”. We must, therefore, dispose of the “first taboo”, he counselled, and accept “that the problem is Islam. Islam is the problem.”

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Charlie Booker is right on the mark. “What’s cool or fun about a thumping, sweaty dungeon full of posing idiots?” he asks.

I went to a fashionable London nightclub on Saturday. Not the sort of sentence I get to write very often, because I enjoy nightclubs less than I enjoy eating wool. But a glamorous friend of mine was there to “do a PA”, and she’d invited me and some curious friends along because we wanted to see precisely what “doing a PA” consists of. Turns out doing a public appearance largely entails sitting around drinking free champagne and generally just “being there”.

Obviously, at 36, I was more than a decade older than almost everyone else, and subsequently may as well have been smeared head to toe with pus. People regarded me with a combination of pity and disgust. To complete the circuit, I spent the night wearing the expression of a man waking up to Christmas in a prison cell.

“I’m too old to enjoy this,” I thought. And then remembered I’ve always felt this way about clubs. And I mean all clubs - from the cheesiest downmarket sickbucket to the coolest cutting-edge hark-at-us poncehole. I hated them when I was 19 and I hate them today. I just don’t have to pretend any more.

I’m convinced no one actually likes clubs. It’s a conspiracy. We’ve been told they’re cool and fun; that only “saddoes” dislike them. And no one in our pathetic little pre-apocalyptic timebubble wants to be labelled “sad” - it’s like being officially declared worthless by the state. So we muster a grin and go out on the town in our millions.

Clubs are despicable. Cramped, overpriced furnaces with sticky walls and the latest idiot theme tunes thumping through the humid air so loud you can’t hold a conversation, just bellow inanities at megaphone-level. And since the smoking ban, the masking aroma of cigarette smoke has been replaced by the overbearing stench of crotch sweat and hair wax.

Clubs are such insufferable dungeons of misery, the inmates have to take mood-altering substances to make their ordeal seem halfway tolerable. This leads them to believe they “enjoy” clubbing. They don’t. No one does. They just enjoy drugs.

Drugs render location meaningless. Neck enough ketamine and you could have the best night of your life squatting in a shed rolling corks across the floor. And no one’s going to search you on the way in. Why bother with clubs?

“Because you might get a shag,” is the usual response. Really? If that’s the only way you can find a partner - preening and jigging about like a desperate animal - you shouldn’t be attempting to breed in the first place. What’s your next trick? Inventing fire? People like you are going to spin civilisation into reverse. You’re a moron, and so is that haircut you’re trying to impress. Any offspring you eventually blast out should be drowned in a pan before they can do any harm. Or open any more nightclubs.

Even if you somehow avoid reproducing, isn’t it a lot of hard work for very little reward? Seven hours hopping about in a hellish, reverberating bunker in exchange for sharing 64 febrile, panting pelvic thrusts with someone who’ll snore and dribble into your pillow till 11 o’clock in the morning, before waking up beside you with their hair in a mess, blinking like a dizzy cat and smelling vaguely like a ham baguette? Really, why bother? Why not just stay at home punching yourself in the face? Invite a few friends round and make a night of it. It’ll be more fun than a club.

Anyway, back to Saturday night, and apart from the age gap, two other things stuck me. Firstly, everyone had clearly spent far too long perfecting their appearance. I used to feel intimidated by people like this; now I see them as walking insecurity beacons, slaves to the perceived judgment of others, trapped within a self- perpetuating circle of crushing status anxiety. I’d still secretly like to be them, of course, but at least these days I can temporarily erect a veneer of defensive, sneering superiority. I’ve progressed that far.

The second thing that struck me was frightening. They were all photographing themselves. In fact, that’s all they seemed to be doing. Standing around in expensive clothes, snapping away with phones and cameras. One pose after another, as though they needed to prove their own existence, right there, in the moment. Crucially, this seemed to be the reason they were there in the first place. There was very little dancing. Just pouting and flashbulbs.

Surely this is a new development. Clubs have always been vapid and awful and boring and blah - but I can’t remember clubbers documenting their every moment before. Not to this demented extent. It’s not enough to pretend you’re having fun in the club any more - you’ve got to pretend you’re having fun in your Flickr gallery, and your friends’ Flickr galleries. An unending exhibition in which a million terrified, try-too-hard imbeciles attempt to out-cool each other.

Mind you, since in about 20 years’ time these same people will be standing waist-deep in skeletons, in an arid post-nuclear wasteland, clubbing each other to death in a fight for the last remaining glass of water, perhaps they’re wise to enjoy these carefree moments while they last. Even if they’re only pretending.

Lions in these rolling savannahs struggled for reassurance and meaning after the humiliating rout of four of their number by a herd of Cape buffalo (Syncerus caffer). The entire episode was filmed by a human tourist, featured on Youtube (”The buffalo’s revenge”) and has now been viewed by a world audience in the millions. The footage shows what initially appeared to be a classic “cut out and kill” maneuver straight from the book collapse into farce as an unsuccessful attempt by a crocodile to snatch the targeted calf allowed time for the buffalo herd to regroup, surround the lions, toss two of them on their horns, rescue the calf and chase their assailants away into the bush.

“This is the darkest day for Panthera leo since Frank Baum wrote the Wizard of Oz”, said the leader of one pride. “We face the total erosion of our credibility as apex predators.”

Anger mingles with apprehension. Word has already spread across the veldt and now other traditional sources of nutrition such as gazelles are seeking protection amid herds of emboldened buffalo. Other ungulates such as Connochaetes taurinus (brindled gnu) , commonly easy prey, are already displaying uncharacteristic defiance and fighting back.

Some lions, speaking privately, concede that defeat at the horns and hooves of the tough and hefty Cape buffalo is not unprecedented. “Look,” said one, “Syncerus caffer is always a problem for us. The disaster here stemmed from tactical folly. They wasted precious minutes in that tug of war with the crocodile and that allowed the buffalo time to return and launch a counter-attack.”

Some thoughtful lions see a paradox in the fact that the episode was filmed. “Do you think any of us would be here if it wasn’t for the National Geographic and nature films on PBS?” an elderly male asked rhetorically.

(by Alexander Cockburn)

An exceptionally explosive exclusive:

It wasn’t Judas who betrayed Jesus with a kiss, we can exclusively reveal, but Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

“That was me. I did it. He looked at me funny and I said to myself “right, Jesus, you’re for it now”. When he was on the cross I just laughed. He looked so funny, and those Romans gave him vinegar to drink and that was when I had the idea to crash a big plane into a tower block. Then I ran straight to the grassy knoll in Dallas and shot Kennedy. It was me all right. Definitely. That bastard Kennedy, he shouldn’t have messed with Sheikh Mohammed, oh no. I just went mad, how you say, apeshit, and I pulled the trigger. Bang bang. Gone. Then I ran into a shop and stole some kitkats and a mars bar. Just like that, no conscience at all. Mars bars, fruit pastilles, I take them all. All gone. In my tummy.

Few doubt that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is a senior figure in Al Qaeda, with considerable blood on his hands. His willingness to confess to the outbreak of World War One, however (“that Archduke Frans Ferdinand was a shit-stabber, I tell you. A fudge packer. So I shot him. Bang bang”) has led some commentators to speculate as to the reliability of his testimony.

“Why didn’t I confess all this when I was arrested in 2003? Because I was busy, making carbon dioxide in secret. That was me that was, doing all that global warming thing. Oh yes, and I killed the last dodo. Shot him dead, because he looked stupid. You’re not going to put that thing on my cock again are you? The Battle of Hastings, that was me. Shot King Harold in the eye. Please don’t put that thing on my cock again.

Just now on Aljazeera I watched Britcon pro-War campaigner Peter Tatchell, famous for blaming all the world’s ills (including Russian antipathy towards homosexuals) on Muslims, being punched in the face by a Russian Orthodox Christian at a Gay Pride parade in Moscow. He was subsequently arrested by the Russian Police. We will no doubt discover that Iran was behind this attack, and the grand parents of the man who punched him had Muslims for neighbors.