household items more deserving of a knighthood than Sir Prince Phillip

Firstly, how odd does it sound to call someone ‘Sir Prince.’ It’s a bit of an archaic, monarchist title overload, almost tautological in a sense. That is, unless you’re Prince the pop-star, who, let’s face it, is in serious need of some Knighting. Only then would 'Sir Prince' make what I consider to be acceptable sense; or, The Knight Formerly Known As Sir.

            Secondly, I really enjoy that this was a so-called ‘captain’s pick.’ Abbott decided to anoint a foreign royal as a knight of Australia not through careful deliberation with the rest of the Liberal party, but because he, as self-appointed Captain (presumably of Australia), decided he would. I can only wonder if he insists on acquaintances and underlings referring to him as Skipper, or Cap’n, or just plain old Captain Tone.

            Thirdly, why the hell didn’t he choose me? I thought my argument for knighthood was compelling,[1] particularly next to that inbred, narrow-faced racist, Phillip, who, lest we forget, asked an Indigenous Australian if they still throw spears at each other. Well, yes, of course they do Phil. Just like you royals insist on sending each other to the guillotine, occasionally engage in a casual full steel armoured joust, and lick mercury to cure yourselves of scurvy.

            Even then, I thought Cap'n Abbott’s intention was to knight preeminent Australians. Phil is about as Australian as a polar bear yachting down the Amazon telling tall tales of Paul Bunyan to the enchanting tune provided by a choir of Mongolian throat singers.

            In the spirit of my frustration that The Skipper elected to knight the closest thing I have seen to an actual walking and talking cadaver—a walking and talking cadaver whose wife is the figurative head of my nation no less—I have decided to come up with a list of household items surely more deserving of a knighthood than dear old Sir Prince Phil.

• Some brooms
• Vegetable crispers
• A rusty fire poker
• Cutesy, occasionally innuendo-laden signs some people hang in their toilets
• 6m extension leads
• An out-of-date tub of kiwi fruit yoghurt
• Your family portrait hanging slightly off-centre in the entrance hall
• Full rolls of aluminium foil
• A cutting board laced with salmonella
• That almost racist picture book from the 20s given to you by your grandmother
• $2 razors
• The VHS collection you still haven’t thrown out that dwells in your cupboard
• All of the breastsummers[2]
• That awful picture of a gorilla given to you by your three-year-old child/niece/nephew/sister/brother/student
• The exposed wires in your living room lamp
• A Bertie’s showbag from 1994 which used to store twine for knitting, but is now forgotten and weirdly mouldy, left under the house
• Robot vacuum cleaners
• An out-of-tune piano
• Gramophones
• All the racing car beds

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[1] http://arantingdistraction.blogspot.com.au/2014/03/a-letter-to-tony-abbott-expressing-why.html

[2] “a horizontal beam supporting an exterior wall over an opening, as a shop window” - http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/breastsummer?s=t

the Charlie Hebdo attacks - changing the language

(image found at http://junkee.com/cartoonists-around-the-world-respond-to-the-attack-on-charlie-hebdo/48284 - drawn by Glen Le Lievre from The Sydney Morning Herald on his twitter account)

I woke up this morning to the news of the attacks in Paris on the offices of the satirical newspaper, Charlie Hebdo. 12 people shot dead, 11 more seriously injured, by masked men sporting assault rifles generally reported by the media to be self-proclaimed extremist Islamic militants or terrorists or gunmen or whatever title best suits their violent actions.

            I have another term for them: fuckwits. And another: dickbags. And another: cockheads. And another: the crusty skidmarks in the undies of an obese man whose diet consists only of cranberries, protein powder and deep-fried goat. And another: frothing insane trumpet cunts.

            For what I felt this morning, after a moment of (what will surely be everlasting) grief and sadness that such violence can be so senselessly committed, was an intense anger.

Of course, there is always present a certain fury after these kind of events: a frustration at the world and the handful of its idiotic inhabitants incapable of any kind of expression beyond their own misguided rage, who hide behind religion and their twisted interpretations like it is some kind of impenetrable mask uttering justification.  

            But this morning was slightly different. This was not just a senseless attack to provoke fear, as most terrorist actions are, but a retaliatory action directed at a media outlet well-known for savagely satirising various religious institutions, including, but by no means limited to, extremist Islam. My anger was driven by a kind of disbelief that anyone, even these raging fuckwits, could be so callous and fearful that they would strike out at a group of people who merely had the gall to call them out on their inconsistencies and the farcical nature of their existence, where they are crouched behind a text and a prophet one gets the distinct idea they do not understand.

This was in one sense an attack on freedom-of-the-press, which admittedly can be treacherous terrain, but perhaps more importantly it was also an attack on the ideas of provocation and image, and an utterly insane defence of this (and any) extremist group’s notion of its own infallibility.

            In the crudest possible sense, and with no intention of cheapening the horrific nature of this incident, it was no more than a group of people incapable of taking a joke, whose reaction was not to ignore it, nor meet it with neutrality, but violently punch back as if this would take the humour out of the situation; as if this would eliminate the gag from memory; as if this would deter more people poking fun at their expense; as if this would prove they cannot be laughed at for they are impregnably armoured against laughter.

            Terrorism is by its very nature over-the-top. In some sense it is designed to be more fearful spectacle than reality. And it relies on the maintenance of this illusion of being feared or even being fear itself. No one should be able to laugh or poke fun at fear. Perhaps nervously, never confidently. They should be too frightened, cowered in a distressed ball, unwilling to venture out into the world.

But by targeting Charlie Hebdo as they did, a magazine that even under the duress of numerous threats continued to publish satirical cartoons and articles about extremist shitheads, they exposed their own fear. They were violently responding to the fact that, yes, they are as suspect to being made fun of, belittled and laughed at as any other person or institution. If their mask of terror and ‘religion,’ which apparently gives them some kind of divine right to their bloody thuggery, is suddenly challenged, then the ground upon which they preach their absurdities looks a hell of a lot less stable; the world a hell of a lot less threatening.

People have less fear for something they can make fun of.

And this is why I refuse to call them militants, gunmen, terrorists, or any other name that leans on connotations of fear and hatred. Language creates the reality we all have to live within, and to do them the service of pandering to their reality is only to continue to implicitly position them above mockery: as totems of a gut deep terror.

But if I refer to them in a language that refuses this fear as anything other than the shiver one gets when a wanker in a bar has the odd audacity to think anyone really gives a shit about his opinion and, moreover, identify their essential dickheadness, their symbolic resonance as agents of fear is, at least partly, torn apart.

They’re not terrorists. They’re trumpet cunts with a seriously messed up vision of the world, too frightened to admit that they’re the ones who are perpetually terrified as it dares to change around them and fail to fit into their myopic perspectives.

It is heartening then to see various cartoonists’ reaction to this atrocity. They have not gone back into their shells or suddenly decided these people are beyond satire. No. They have come out in numbers to prove exactly what this attack was on and what it was afraid of: the pen.

It is proven that the pen, and the ideas it will continue to fearlessly espouse, is mightier than any hopeless notion that fear will still it strokes.

My heartfelt wishes and thoughts are with the victims and their families.