Quick Fix-ism – A Lack of Method and Rigour

The vast majority of us, even Little Jimmy Osmand, have at some point in our lives experienced what is commonly known as achievement. Achievement is that triumphant feeling arising after one has overcome all odds stacked against one to record a feat of magnificent attainment. It is commonly followed by an almighty piss up in which he who has attained will succeed in getting so damn blind drunk that even a woman of gigantic waistline, festooned with fluttering flabbiness at every turn, becomes attractive. But hey, every silver lining has a cloud, right?

Now, this sense of success can be brought about by many things. Speaking from a personal point of view, one such instance was the day I graduated from university. I did well, too, in a subject that your father would recognise from his time at school and from a good university. No degree in Golf Management, American Studies or Sociology for me. To this day that stands as my finest achievement, although the day I found out that a woman is warm inside inevitably ranks up there with it.

But not every person who feels like they have succeeded in a given field has had to endure such an arduous path. The world is littered with idle bastards who have an inflated feeling of self-achievement. They’re everywhere – like those annoying people in city centres who always seem to stop you at the most inconvenient of times to conduct a survey on your favourite colour for house doors. They’re so commonplace that you probably know one. They’re the people with those excruciatingly smug faces that would look so much better with a swiftly propagating fist between the eyes. Prince Charles, for example.

Ah, the Royal Family of the marvellous realm I call home. Never will you ever clap eyes on a family that values it’s collective worth so highly. The Duke of Edinburgh (or Nick the Greek as he’s known) is drowning in war medals and has “attained” the honorary ranks of Admiral of the Fleet of the Royal Navy, Field Marshall of the British Army and Marshall of the Royal Air Force. When he parades himself in full military regalia he bears the look of a veteran who has looked death in the face with steely eyes, who has cradled a dying comrade in his arms as shrapnel explodes violently from all directions. He’s a good actor. Old Nick hasn’t seen a day of active service in his pampered life and yet struts around Britain like he deserves those medals. Oh, he’s a right Richard the Third is our Nick.

Academia also falls over itself to reward our beloved royals with unearned success. Prince William, for example gained entry to St Andrews University – which last year ranked 7th out of 99 universities offering an Art History degree – with A level grades of A, B and C in Geography, History of Art and Biology respectively. The University of St Andrews website itself stipulates that an A and two B’s is mandatory to gain entry. There is a name for this: achievement without rigour. Or alternatively: mummy’s rich let me in!

But it isn’t just the royal and regal upper crust cronies of Britain who have a sense of success for no God damn reason. Plebeians also suffer from this terrible affliction. Take your average council estate rottweiler – we’ll call her Chantelle. Now, Chantelle is, unfortunately, a tad overweight. In fact she’s fucking enormous; so fucking enormous that I certainly wouldn’t let her into my humble abode unless my refrigerator was ensconced within a plethora of protective padlocks. One day, Chantelle decides that picking up her dole cheque each week is not really ranking that high in the grand scheme of achievement so she decides – not to get a job, that would just be folly! – but to lose some weight. If she could just lose one or two tonnes it would be a good start.

So she trots (when I say trot, I mean stumbles, panting for what could be her very last breath) into her local slimming club and is told the somewhat unsurprising news that she should technically be dead already. Urgent action is needed, and she cuts out one of her dozen rashes of bacon each morning and opts for just the three helpings of chicken vindaloo at dinner time. Feeling proud to the gills – and sweating it out through every pore as she rumbles her way to slimming club the next week – Chantelle steps on to the scales for a second time to reveal that she will live for a further week due to losing three pounds of flesh. “Congratulations Chantelle you’ve lost three pounds in weight!” the slimming expert shrieks. Well, Shylock only asked for a single pound of flesh so it must be an achievement. But what the howling banshee neglected to tell poor, enormous Chantelle is that she still remains in possession of an arse the size of a red giant going supernova. Fear not, Chantelle is happy and has achieved a minor miracle – it matters not that I can offload at least two pounds with my first dump of the day – Chantelle is a winner.

These are examples of people who have this sense of attainment thrust upon them by others and who are then subsequently happy to relish in their perceived achievement. I don’t know who is worse; those that thrust the triumph onto others like a horny dog his affection to his master’s leg, or those that gladly accept it despite fully knowing they have not earned such adulation. It seems to be one big back slapping exercise between people who are intrinsically inept at everything they do.
In terms of smugness, however, there can be none more so than those that can achieve by applying neither method nor rigour. The bastards. These are the sort of people who turn up for exams without doing one jot of revision and still not get a single question wrong. The bastards. But even these types of self-satisfied bastards are usurped to the throne of conceitedness by those who believe that they have achieved their aims through no application of method or rigour when in reality they are just another hapless Chantelle or Charles clogging up the aisle to attainment. How very bastard of them, I’m trying to get past here.

TOPIC - Due 2/28 - 'Quick Fix-ism'

We live in a time when everyone believes he can accomplish something. It really doesn't matter what; the belief itself is what matters, as it engenders a lot of high targeting with no concomitant growth of effort. The easy, wrong way is de rigueur accepted as the only plausible path to these lofty goals, and the ground is littered with the heaving bodies of high-reaching pretenders.

This week's assignment is on method and rigor, and how these two things seem to be missing from the lives of the very people who have assigned themselves the tasks that most require it - and how annoying this is for the people who actually have seriously and with an understanding of the dedication required set themselves to the same goals, only to catch the whining of this dumb, enthusiastic lot.

1000 words, due 2/28.

FREE SPEECH, PISS AND HERRING

The internet is both the future of human communication and a monumental waste of effort. It has unlimited potential and, in its current state, infinite frustrations. It is a boundary condition of the democratic process – any shitkicker with more than two fingers to type can have their own quarter-acre of cybernetic space, which is instantly and reliably accessible from anywhere on Earth. And while this means gay schizophrenic furries who like to be choked by fat women smeared in double cream get their own corner of the web, so do any number of the intelligent, the disaffected and the interesting.

Most of us who spend any appreciable amount of time online greatly pare down what sites we visit, in an attempt not to go completely batshit crazy with information overload. As a consequence, an issue’s importance to our own little cross section of the online world can be seen by how it reveals itself, where it becomes important.

This cartoon commotion raped and pillaged its way through my personal online world like Mongol horsemen through the Garden of Eden. No matter where you’ve been in the last week, online or not, I bet this story has been exploding like a sweating stick of gelignite right in front of you. And, of course, it’s another one of those tiresome issues where everyone has an opinion.

My opinion is simple: this is one of those rare issues where I see no benefit whatsoever in any of the arguments, and could cheerfully take the parties on all sides and gut them like trout.

Here’s a brief and vaguely accurate timeline:

• A Danish newspaper publishes cartoons of (or concerning) the prophet Mohammed. This is contrary to some versions of Islamic law.
• A local shit-storm ensues, and the paper apologises.
• The Danish Prime Minister blows off the issue completely, and refuses to discuss it with a group of local imams.
• These imams fit up a dossier (which included extra cartoons that weren’t in the paper) and a shower of abuse alleged to be the opinion of the Danish people.
• This dossier is widely distributed in the Islamic world, and starts a torrential downpour of shit which we still haven’t seen our way out of.

In fact, as we speak, some hijab-clad twat is vandalising a Swedish embassy because the Danish embassy is already in flames, and shit! those white people are all the same, really.

The whole thing is a grimy mess of painful mistakes and misunderstanding, and it says a lot on many topics, such as cultural pluralism, the divide between moderate and radical Islam, or just how much everyone should be killed. But we need to talk about the mother of them all, the grand old bitch whose bitten and scarred underbelly is the exposed nexus of this whole furore – free speech. Especially of interest to me is its relationship to bad art.

One issue has been largely ignored in this whole finger-pointing shambles... these cartoons really suck. At best, they’re marginally funny and at worst utterly gratuitous and completely pointless. They’re bad college journalism, wearing pants that are far too big, parading around the traps pretending to be Daddy. Have you actually seen them? Google them. Prepare to be underwhelmed.

I first saw this kind of hysterical fagdance when Serrano’s photograph Pisschrist toured Australia. There seemed to be two opinions...

*CUT TO STREET CORNER*

[White, fibrous hippy woman, wearing natural fibres and ‘earth tones’ holding a sign that says ‘HANDS OF OUR ART”. The “R” in art is backwards.]

“It’s ART. The Church has NO RIGHT to tell us what to think. This photograph is IMPORTANT. Wah, complain, spittle, etcetera. Also, choose natural childbirth.”

*CUT TO CHURCH RECTORY*

[Constipated-looking priest with three chins, dressed in full regalia, surreptitiously trying to brush the bloodstains off the front of his robes of office]

“This is OBSCENE. This is SMUT. This is MANY OTHER DOG-WHISTLE WORDS. This broadcast should inflame all primitive idiots within earshot. Write to your MP. Wah, complain, spittle, etcetera. Also, condoms are the Devil’s work.”

As with these cartoons, there seemed to be no middle ground between this is art and therefore important and this is obscenity. There is a position which comes before and excises this ugly wound like a scalpel...

This is not good art. This is tripe. This is the kind of querulous, talentless fluff that made Tom Wolfe write The Painted Word, the kind that grows entire generations of new artists who manage to mistake controversy for content, the kind which feeds that field which is the fucking abomination of the modern university, Cultural Studies.

Jesus in urine? You utter fag. What a boring, safe medium. Manzoni put his own shit in a can, priced it at the market price of gold and beat you in the deification of scatology by an entire quarter of a century. Get a new idea, you hack, you fucking coward. Preferably one which hasn’t lost its teeth on the back on the takings of a hundred thousand museum admissions, meaningless art prizes and associated merchandising.

Am I being too harsh? Let’s take the man’s own words on the subject.

“...Urine in this context is parallel to Catholicism's obsession with ‘the body and blood of Christ.’ It is precisely in the exploration and juxtaposition of these symbols from which Christianity draws its strength. The photograph in question, like all my work, has multiple meanings and can be interpreted in various ways.”

You’re missing the point, hairball. The Catholic tradition is entirely concerned with flesh. The body of Christ, the blood of the Lamb, the mortification of the flesh, the consumption of man by the Holy. God and man AS ONE, “at one with the Lord”! The symbolism of excreta has precious little to do with the obsession with flesh.

Here’s my interpretation – you’re a boring little turd with the artistic endowment of an accountant, and your art is a tired old gummy-smiling whore entirely propped up by controversy. You want the Body of Christ? You want to mortify the flesh? Enlist the help of a forward-thinking surgeon and weave a nativity scene out of strips of your own flesh and viscera. Swallow a lead crucifix and get a thoracic X-ray, so the Son of Man raises his head to the heavens next to your pyloric sphincter. Get a thobbing knot of hairy male fags to fuck in the shape of a crucifix and adorn them with a wooden female Jesus. A miserly message is no message at all. You can’t gently butt up to the boundaries of propriety, wait for the screaming to begin and expect people to understand, you have to crush these boundaries entirely and create something. You have to stop thought in its tracks, and make people being their own narratives again.

The crowd sheltering under the welcoming umbrella of free speech is by and large an unpleasant one. It is required to defend the actions of religious kooks, borderline psychotics and serial masturbators like Serrano who is by no means the worst offender in a modern art lexicon which has disappeared so far up its own arsehole it can tickle its own sinuses to sneeze. But unfortunately, these halfwits and hacks are our crew, and protecting them protects us. They are the people who exercise their right to speak, rather than merely observing how pretty that right is. They’re on my side by default.

But I’ll be damned if they’ll them get away with doing it badly. These cartoons and their resultant fracas is yet another one of those issues where the only thing that lets me sleep is the hope that I will outlive all the principle participants.

Fuck, I need a hug.

Dr. Cuntsworthy.

Bombing Cartoonists

Democracy has few perks. In its purest form one of its results was the banishment of any dangerously exceptional person for ten years. Even in modern form it functions based on the assumption of an equality that can never exist in practice, but which is nevertheless forced onto the political reality of democratic states in a way not entirely dissimilar to the ancient practice of ostracism. The opinion of a goon and a savant are made equivalent, and, as the electorate in virtually every country man will ever found has a disturbing tendency to resemble the cast of characters in a zombie movie – a handful of people with brains bickering amongst themselves while being slowly surrounded by an ever-increasing, unstoppable legion of the brainless – the democratic government is a bit goonish (‘A bit goonish’ being the nicest, most euphemistic way of stating this. Slightly more accurate would probably be ‘scrotum-tighteningly goonish’). There are balances against this tendency, and some people in government are perhaps neither execrable human beings nor slack-jawed dupes, but rather an accurate reflection of an educated electorate. I can’t think of one off-hand, but they may exist.

Democracy has other problems as well, but for us to be willing to accept these, the few perks serving as counterbalance must be rather heavy. The heaviest, I feel, is the freedom of expression; it founds the basis of all the others, even the ones I don’t like. It is essentially the public sphere promising not to control how you are allowed to speak, and, as we tend to think in language to a great degree, how you think, no matter how subversive or offensive, with the exception, usually, of substantive cases of libel and treason. Very cool, and should be the fundamental right and guarantee of every democratic state, serving as the guarantor of our ‘equality’ and of our freedom. Naturally enough, it is instead opposed by every group within these democratic states that wants to control the thoughts of the remainder, resulting in a lot of empty controversy (we really do have a wonderful freedom of speech despite the media carnival revolving around video games and whatnot) and a few genuine threats. There are a great many of these groups, each one having a ‘cause’ to mask what they really are: bald attempts at forcing entire populations into constrictive thought boxes. Which one is chosen hardly matters.

Recently, an actual threat presented itself against freedom of speech. This all began with the recent publishing, by a Danish newspaper, of twelve caricatures of Muhammad, whose countenance is never to be depicted according to Muslim law. That the nature of a caricature is to be disrespectful and controversial certainly did not make this infraction any more acceptable. So we have some cartoons of Muhammad, sometimes shown as ridiculous, or violent, or a terrorist, but never particularly funny. In response, Muslims the world over rioted, called for Bin Ladin to attack Denmark, called for the violent deaths of the cartoonist, burned down Danish embassies, and actually in all this hubbub ten people were killed. Which makes it slightly less than one human life for each caricature of the prophet. Oddly enough, this is not the threat mentioned above, but only the catalyst for it, as the caricatures themselves were the catalyst for this violent, enraged response.

We probably remember the incredibly dumb phrase coined towards the end of 2001 as something of a slogan for continuing to live a normal existence in the wake of the 9/11 attacks: ‘If [banal action] stops, then the terrorists have truly won.’ This is a stupid thing to say in many ways, especially since it essentially was created by a committee of phrase-shaping experts in order to stimulate the flagging economy (something about saying ‘stimulate the flagging economy’ is so satisfying in a childish, ‘I said something dirty!’ sort of way), but there is a truth to it: outsiders cannot actually dictate our actions unless we choose to allow them to do so. Meaning angry Muslims cannot force us to deny a newspaper the right to publish some unfunny but religiously controversial unless the powers-that-be in our countries decide that freedom of expression is not worth standing up over. In other words, if our countries’ leaders puss out, then maybe we should begin to worry about freedom of expression. All the arsons and suicide bombers in the world can’t dent or damage an idea if its believers are similarly devoted.

The threat I mentioned above is that many of our leaders, one of whom has been quoted as saying ‘there should be limits to freedom of speech’ because people on the internet don’t like him, really aren’t being the kind of representatives of democracy we’d want them to be. Representatives of the US and the UK have decided to come out against these dumb little cartoons in what can only be interpreted as a misguided attempt to repair relations with the part of the world they’ve been bombing and whose citizens and other residents they’ve been killing. Seems silly to me. Then again, England has a law on the books that prohibits blasphemy against the Christian God and in America today a new simple conservatism that desires to rein in the trend towards increasing freedom to offend is flowering. People who don’t particularly care for this aspect of democracy – which, allow me to remind you, is its fountainhead – really can’t be expected to risk offending people by defending the right of a newspaper to print offensive but harmless – yes, harmless – images.

If the government really doesn’t consider this issue one worth taking a controversial stance over when its history is of making self-servingly controversial stands virtually whenever possible, we’re in for some ugly times. Especially troubling is that it took such a stupid, pointless, meaningless controversy to expose this.

The whole Danish cartoon controversy is a somewhat fascinating study in how stupid and wrong everybody involved in something can be. Wherever you turn your head, people are being idiots, with the possible exception of the leaders (except Jacques Chirac, the cunt) of continental European democratic countries. Let’s take a look:

- The Danish Cartoonists: They apparently chose to make these cartoons as a test of the freedom of speech in the face of Muslims fundies, who have been particularly active in Northern Europe of late (the murder of Theo Van Gogh). This is fine, and, in fact, admirable if considered in these terms. Unfortunately, they did not seem prepared for the consequences. As noted above, the Koran itself specifically prohibits the realistic depiction of any Muslim prophet, with special weight given to the prophet Muhammad (for some reason they ignore and are not offended by realistic depictions of other religious figures recognized as prophets by Islam, such as Jesus and Moses, but that’s neither here nor there). Muslims are not known for a rational response to what they perceive as blasphemy. If you’re going to set out to offend, know what you’re getting in for and be prepared to deal with these consequences. Be Lenny Bruce. Don’t be a group of Danish cartoonists who didn’t realize how serious what they were playing at is.

And, goddammit, be amusing. Crossing lines of taste is an art, one that is degraded if you do it for no reason, or a poor one, or don’t cut deeply when you arrive on the other side. Humor’s essential purpose, aside from being funny, is to find these lines and cross them in an attractive enough way that other people want to come along and new territory may be explored. But to do this well, it has to be FUNNY. If not, everyone is focused on the line, which isn’t destroyed but highlighted by the joke. Strong humor shines a light on false principles so that they may be targeted; weak humor does nothing more than shine a light. We need strong humor in this case, and these cartoons are weak as they come.

- The Muslims: According to some sources a Danish imam named Abu Laban toured the Middle East to dredge up this fervor, bearing far more offensive caricatures of Muhammad, including ones of his as a pedophile, he claimed to have received from undisclosed sources in Denmark. This accounts somewhat for the months-long time lapse between the publishing of the cartoons and the Muslim response. Syria and Iran have since followed suit and appear to be responsible for much of the violent response. There is a long history of demagoguery using fundamentalist religion – it’s in fact the basis of fundamentalist religion and the reason Pat Robertson founded a film school with billions in funding – but it gets no less despicable. Propaganda is sometimes fascinating stuff, but when it fails and provocateurs are smuggled into neighboring countries to create the impression of a widespread Islamic reaction, it’s boring. Moderate Muslims are just shaking their heads, or worried that the fundies are trying to spread a message that they’re not worthy of such things as free speech, or that they’re spreading the idea of Islam as being fundamentally irreconcilable with Western values. Whether or not this is true isn’t within the scope of this article; what’s important is to note that these people and their worries wouldn’t exist if there were some good propaganda out. Instead we just have ruthless demagogues doing what ruthless demagogues do: dress up their thirst for power in the robes of a Serious Issue. But poorly, this time through.

They’re also harping on the fact that Western democracies disallow such things as Holocaust denial and Christian blasphemy, pointing this out as hypocritical. And it is. One should be as free to blaspheme against the Christian God as any other, and certainly be able to deny the Holocaust. No need to legislate and save them the embarrassment.

- Bush and Blair: These people are the leaders of the countries that are supposed to be beacons of democracy. They are not supposed to be criticizing the newspapers for exercising the right to be offensive. Free press is essentially dissident, offensive, and contrary; its job, which it tends to neglect, is to do things like this. The government’s job is to make things like this possible. That both of these people have come out against it is aggravating; how do you go about spreading democracy abroad when you refuse to defend it at home? The answer to this shouldn’t really surprise anybody: there is no concern about democracy; it’s just empty rhetoric they ride like the fundies ride their simple ‘West v. Islam’ binary, and for the same reasons.

So we have crusaders for freedom of speech who don’t seem to be all that committed, angry Muslims who appear to be using this as a political opportunity and not responding out of genuine outrage, and some cowardly ‘leaders’ of the free world riding the pony of democracy while abandoning its fundamental tenants out of fear of offense. All these people stirred up into a potentially dangerous frenzy, and over what? A few cartoons that at depth are no more subversive or risky than what you see every day in the cartoon section of your newspaper; in fact, some of those are genuinely subversive. And as for being offensive? Everything about this debacle is offensive except for the cartoons themselves, which may only be called offensive in the manner in which their total blandness masquerades as something daring.

In closing, a few ideas for genuinely offensive Muhammad cartoons, many of which will probably have to be multi-panel:

- Muhammad the Prophet taking advantage of a Muslim praying to Mecca to rape him anally, showing the original motive for the five bent over prayers a day requirement.
- Muhammad the Prophet raping and then eating a pig, raw, tossing the finished bones at Hasidic Jews, thereby knocking their hats off of their heads.
- Muhammad the Prophet wallowing in pig shit, using it as the site for a romantic rendezvous with a Catholic Priest, a Rabbi, and a Buddhist monk, in succession.
- Muhammad the Prophet trains in a stereotypical Libyan terrorist training center obstacle course, but struggles and falls from the overhead bars, prompting a caption questioning his manhood and devotion to Islam.
- Muhammad the Prophet raping the corpses of Muslim suicide martyrs in Western morgues.
- Muhammad the Prophet giving oral sex to George W. Bush, who comments on the pleasant friction of bearded head.
- Muhammad the Prophet learning to fly a plane in a simulator, telling the teacher that he has no desire to learn how to land.
- An All-Muhammad-The-Prophet burlesque show, somewhere between a Moulin Rouge floor show and a Busby Berkeley musical number featuring many bearded Muhammads in drag dancing into what looks from an overhead shot to be a giant gray-bearded cunt.
- Muhammad the Prophet converting to Reform Judaism and singing the blessing for breaking bread in Hebrew.
- A shaved Muhammad the Prophet, wearing a Savile Row double-breasted gray suit, a flashy tie, spats on his shoes, and glossy sunglasses selling several oil fields to Western interests and proceeding to sodomize a blonde hooker.
- Muhammad the Prophet sits at a Playstation 2, playing the original version of GTA III and flying the plane into Donald Love’s skyscraper over and over again with great glee.

Hopefully some artists among this audience will be inspired to use one of these ideas or a much better, more meaningfully offensive one, and give us some great Muhammad cartoons to use as the banner in defense of free speech. The ones we have at hand won’t cut it, but have unfortunately volunteered themselves to do so. With some of the greatest, or at least most shameless, manipulators in history bearing down on an issue of enough actual importance to get someone like me to write a political article, we can’t leave it all in the hands of these incompetent pretenders.

TOPIC - Due 22/2 - "Those Fucking Cartoons"

You can't have missed them. I don't even need to say their name properly.

"Those fucking cartoons". Read and respond.

Welcome to Word Wars

THE WORD WARS MANIFESTO:

There is a specter haunting the field of human interaction. It isn’t a particularly impressive specter. In fact, it’s rather meek, timid, and superficially unthreatening, and most of us are so used to it that we’ve forgotten its spectral nature, thinking of it perhaps as a natural part of how we deal with other people. Certainly not a ghoul aimed at strangling spontaneity, honesty, and good writing, speaking, and art, yes? Unfortunately, no; it most definitely is involved in a death struggle with these things of value. Though this is perhaps not the most precise name for it, we can simply call this specter ‘politeness.’

Being polite does not seem to be a bad thing, at face value; just a matter of treating the other members of our species with simple dignity and perhaps keeping quiet when we might speak and offend. Simple enough, and in moderation perhaps harmless. This is hard to say, though, as this is not an area where moderation has ever reigned. Even now in our soi-disant rude modern era where civility is commonly acknowledged to be dead we are unbelievably polite, perfectly willing to napalm brown civilians but thoroughly reluctant to refer to them as ‘sand-niggers.’

As you can see, a primary concern is that being polite limits our use of language, as well as other expressive arts (we need not get into the obscenity circus swirling currently around the publication of those infamous Danish cartoons). The English language is magic, having a large and ever-increasing vocabulary, an incredible flexibility, continuing innovation, and the ability to integrate neologisms as well as foreign words into perhaps the most impressive linguistic stream in human history. We do not have the clicks and pops of San !Xu, but we have a language capable of an incredible variety of poetry – compare G.M. Hopkins to Milton to see two extremes of our language, and keep in mind that it’s continued to grow and change since they were writing.

We also have a uniquely large lexicon of insults, offensive phrases, and dirty words. We have at least a half-dozen disparaging terms for any ethnic group, and if we don’t have one of our own we run down a language that does have one, tackle it in a back alley, steal its vileness and leave it wallowing in our foetor. Open your ears to the barbed words of the bastards around you, and virtually every day will bring you fresh obscenities so savagely delightful it makes you glad to be alive and listening. Insults have a creative dynamism which necessitates continual reinvention.

However, we are asked to forget this rich and evil poetry because, we are told, words hurt. They hurt and offend deeply and we should avoid being offensive. Actually, this brings us to another point about our language: we have so many words, with such broad definitions, that two people might appear to agree in subscribing to a particular sentence that each interprets so differently that in practice they violently disagree. Politicians, the invertebrate whores at the zenith of the postmodern ziggurat, are the masters of creating such flavourless concoctions which allow them to avoid expressing any opinions whatsoever.

It is a basic tenet of humanity that we should avoid being offensive. All evolved species have social structures which involve the taboo. But ‘nigger’ is not an offensive word. ‘Nigger’ is neutral; what’s offensive is hiding the truth that you can’t walk down an American sidewalk for a block and not pass dozens of racists, hiding behind their house fronts. ‘Cunt’ is not offensive. It is, again, neutral. What’s offensive is to pretend that cunts, literal and figurative, do not exist, or are some kind of unmentionable obscenity , or should be thought of as existing in some alternate reality, halfway between the real world and the unseen, exposing themselves only when we execute that particular combination of actions that slide down those hip-hugging jeans or hike up that plaid skirt and shove the panties aside and just allow you to jam your cock (not penis and definitely not pee-pee) in there with all the bestial brutality that standing rear entry demands. Hating something is not offensive; sugar-coating, ignoring, denying, or betraying that honest hatred is.

Being polite is the Lower Paleolithic stone shard tool directed at the castration of honest expression and art. It is essentially palliative, a frantically scribbled prescription from a frightened doctor so convinced of the potency of the placebo effect he’d prescribed sugar water for prostate cancer. It’s soma. It’s shit. It’s replacing the kind of government censorship dismantled for us by men like Lenny Bruce and George Carlin with a kind of ‘lion laying down to his chains’ censorship. We are remarkably free, legally speaking, to be offensive at the moment. Let’s take advantage of it, shall we?

To be perfectly clear: this is not a call to arms for unconstrained rudeness. As said above, being polite is all right in theory and probably would be in moderation. Words have a certain power, and prohibited words more so, that they lose with familiarity, and this sense of modesty in language helps to preserve that. Being nasty just for the sake of being nasty, or for no reason other than to shock, breaks down the barriers we have built between ourselves and these powerful words. When this happens, we use up the stored magic they have for the febrile joy of a twelve year old boy’s illicit excitement upon first hearing, without even understanding it, some naughty word, and reproducing it in an inappropriate context.

Still worse is the teenaged attitude – called ‘teenaged’ but really reproduced at any point in life after the teen years – of rudeness as pointless rebellion against a parent’s world, an attempt to shock that world with one’s independence by deliberately breaking its more obvious taboos. But this is nothing more than the inverse image of the affected politeness, a pointless affectation for effect, and, again, the degradation of language. That it is by overexposure rather than rigid, unrelenting restriction is all the worse; the artificially separated profane has the magical power of the sacred. The everyday profane has nothing. These words and the offensiveness in them are dulled by overuse, and we need them kept sharp for the artist’s deft carving.

Here at this site we’re in the business of writing, using all the available avenues of language. This means we will use ugly words with relish and invention. We will be crude and nasty. And you, dear reader, will unhinge your jaw like a hungry python and accept the pipeline of our mental filth we tunnel into you, and will damn well like it.

One love,

The Word War III Team