Back to Normality

Or as normal as life gets post 9/11.


This last week seems to have seen a certain amount of normality returning to ones day to day life. If one looks at the news, the attack on the US still of course dominates the headlines (except of course for The Sun which was good enough to use it's front page yesterday to inform the world that Elton John like girls; rather dashed my hopes of living a comfortable lifestyle at the expense of a sugar daddy actually but I suppose it means my rectum can now live free from the fear of being brutally invaded by a faded rock star whose wigs and hair weaves get more press than he does...) but the rest of the news is gradually expanding to take up more than a few minutes on the 10 o clock news. We are also being exhorted by the great and good to carry on our lives. "Life must go on" is becoming something of a catchphrase amongst politicians now; Giulianni, Dubya, and Blair are all growing increasingly fond of it. So how does the world go about its daily business after such an apocalyptic event?

Well, seemingly it does so in pretty much the same way as it did beforehand. The Elton John headline is one example; one can rely on The Sun to distract us from our daily lives with amusing and sometimes well-written inanities. In Northern Ireland there were loyalist riots last night; presumably in the new climate of anti terrorism those good Protestants took it upon themselves to shoot and bomb those Catholics whom they considered terrorists (i.e. any and all Catholics that they could get there hands on). So we can content ourselves with the knowledge that at least one of the sides in that continuing saga remains as ignorant, stupid, and intolerant as ever.

Of course, some things have radically altered. The idea of the relationship between Iran and the UK developing in the way it has in the last week would have been unthinkable before September 11th, yet the press and political commentators are now pro-Iranian and act as if they have been all their lives. No-one seems to want to point out how unusual, not to mention fantastic, this is. Is that because after the events of that black Tuesday, we want to be reassured with certainties? And if that is the case, is that why events like this are talked of as if they had been expected for years and that no-one should worry themselves about it? That it is, in fact, business as usual?

This is also an opportune moment for me to say something that I never in my wildest dreams imagined I would. Dubya made a speech to Congress last week, and it was absolutely bloody brilliant. There, I said it. It was well delivered and displayed none of the usual mangling of the language that has become his forte. It also stopped well short of being the gung-ho, dead or alive, "I think I'm in a movie", rabble rousing diatribe that I had feared and expected. Yet this, when reported on, has had the subtext of "Well what else did you expect? He always makes excellent speeches." If I were a conspiracy theorist, I would begin to compare the media's behaviour with that of the Ministry of Truth in Orwell's 1984 which saw past newspapers being altered so that the predictions of the past gelled with the facts of the present.

With that in mind we also have the sight of certain people taking advantage of the current, rather peculiar social climate to say or do things that would have caused howls of either amusement or outrage (depending on whether or not you read the Daily Mail) before the 11th. Michael Jackson for example is threatening to sue the BBC over comments made by Iain Lee about Jacko's legendary fondness for children. There was a time not so long ago when this would have caused splutters of disbelief; the man who felt the need to give a multi million dollar settlement to a child who claims that he was sexually abused by Jackson trying to sue an almost unheard of comedian who made his comments on Liquid News which airs on BBC 24hr News. I feel the need to mention the program, as you may not have ever heard of it. I feel the need to mention the name of the comedian, as he is one of the most cancerously unfunny men in televisual history. Michael Jackson apparently feels the need to boost the career of one and the ratings of another by getting upset about comments that, until I read about him intending to sue, I had never even heard. This is pretty much passing by without any comment from the media about how ridiculous the whole affair is. I suspect that in the next few weeks, no-one will want to be seen to be making waves in the press and so Jacko, either by accident or design, is taking full advantage of this.

But, as there are two sides to every coin, one can also say or do good things that would have been unthinkable a few weeks ago. The best example of this would be one of my all time favourite bugbears; Israel and Palestine. Jack Straw (a man who looks more like a Gestapo officer every time I see him) wrote that Arab anger over Palestine was one of the major motivations of Middle Eastern based terrorists. He also visited Iran and Jordan to get support for the coalition against...actually, I'm not quite sure exactly who it's meant to be against but we'll leave that for now. In any case, both his statement and his actions are quite correct. Unless you're an Israeli politician in which case both are racist. Never mind the fact that Straw took the opportunity to state that the Iranian view of Israel as a racist and Zionist country was, in his opinion, utter nonsense. Israel brooks no criticism of it's handling of Palestine, however appalling it may be. It would appear that Israel is unhappy that the rest of the world, having been growing increasingly sick of the heavy handed brutality that is routinely used against Palestinians, has leapt upon the opportunity to point out just how ghastly the likes of Shimon Peres et al are. Of course there are those who use this as an excuse to trot out the usual anti-Semitic rubbish but if one discounts them, the mood of the media seems to be fast becoming anti-Israeli concerning their treatment of Palestinians. Peres has always been a jumped up little thug who, but for an accident of birth, would have been far more at home in the Nazi party. It is pleasing to see that message being brought into our homes by the press.

And finally of course, there is politics. Politics seems to have been put on hold since the 11th. This means that we have missed the election of Darth Tory as the Conservative Party leader as well as the fact that the only right-wingers that aren't included in his shadow cabinet are Hermann Goering and Dr. Josef Goebbals. Those great irrelevancies, the party conferences, have for once been under reported and (oh please let this be true) cut back to 2 days instead of a full week. However, this more than anything else is an area where doing strange new things whilst making it seem as if life has always been this way is the most dangerous. Whilst I am fairly ambivalent about the issue of compulsory ID cards, one must acknowledge the strong feeling that this issue causes. Yet there is the danger that an ID card law can be brought in whilst we're not looking. It seems somehow disrespectful to the public to do that, and I hold out hope that it will not yet be the case. But I would hope that people keep an eye on the political scene now more than ever. Not to protect us from our government, but rather to gently remind them when they're going wrong.

So would appear that, despite the spectre of war (worldwide or localised) life does indeed go on. It has become a case of everything is different and it all stays the same. Who knows, perhaps next time I'll be writing about how Jeffrey Archer was hard done by, how the Conservative party is the bright future of British Politics, and how impressed I am with the warm and humane treatment of the Palestinians in Israel.