PC vs RC

It’s extraordinary the way the people who complain about political correctness (without which it would still be perfectly acceptable to call a person with Down’s syndrome a Mongol) are the first to get their holy knickers in a twist when someone says something tasteless about religion.

The Italians have a useful phrase in this context: due pesi, due misure (two weights, two measures). It’s fine, in other words, to insult a person, or group of people, or life-style, or accident of birth. Just don’t touch the revealed truth lobby…

Good riddance to…

…Bernard Manning, admirer, among other things, of Mother Teresa. And before you get sentimental and talk about his perfect comic timing, read this, taken from a Guardian blog posting by Strunt:

A charity dinner was held in 1995 near Manchester to raise funds for the police. One entertainer invited was Bernard Manning (then 65, pictured left), one of the standup comedians who do the rounds of working men’s clubs in Northern England and notorious for his anti-ethnic jokes.

The dinner was attended by some 300 policemen – all white except for one black officer. Targeting this single Blackman, Bernard launched into a string of racist jibes. His audience (yes, the police audience) all whooped with delight and cheered him on. Here’s a sample of the jibes reported in News of the World (April 1995):

“Where is he? How are you, baby? Having a night out with nice people? Isn’t this better than swinging from the trees? – You’re black, I’m white. Do you think colour makes a difference? You bet your bollocks it does!”

“They actually think they’re English because they are born here. That means if a dog’s born in a stable, it is horse.”

“They used to be happy people in the cotton fields, singing their bollocks off day and night. A fella used to go around with a whip… ‘Oh, massa, give us another crack of dat whip. I love dat whip’…”

“A Liverpool docker went to South Africa for a job. The boss tells him: ‘It’s people like you we want here. Here’s a test. There’s a revolver, go out and shoot 6 niggers and a rabbit.’ The docker asks: ‘Why do I have to shoot the rabbit?’ He got the job.

Laugh? I could have died.

Blood and sperm

An exhibition in the once-red city of Bologna has been closed after complaints of abominable blasphemy from the catholic church. The offending collective was named La Madonna Piange Sperma (The Madonna Weeps Sperm). This would be unremarkable if the reference were to Mrs Ritchie née Ciccone, who has surely done this and everything else that can conceivably be done with sperm, bar produce it herself. But, rather naughtily, it isn’t. As the original Madonna’s representatives on earth, the local Bishop and various other ecclesiastical (and not) bigwigs have huffed and puffed and the show has duly been taken down. The organizers have managed to defend the right of art to say whatever it pleases while rubbing their foreheads on the ground in abject apology. The church has staged an expiatory mass, the high camp solution to gross offence. And so everybody’s happy.

Oddly enough, when a garden statue of the Madonna wept blood some years ago in Civitavecchia, blood that was subsequently analysed as male, the church was more circumspect. I quote from a site called Visions of Jesus Christ:

The city’s bishop, Monsignor Girolamo Grillo, said the statue cried in his hands.

“We have not proclaimed that the tear-shedding of the Madonna was miraculous,” Grillo told the ANSA news agency Sunday. “But the facts speak for themselves.” Corriere quoted the Rev. Stefano De Fiores, a Madonna scholar and professor at the Vatican’s Gregorian University, as concluding: “There’s the hand of God here.”

Endangered species and how we can help

Tofa is a language spoken by nomads in the Eastern Sayan mountains of southern Siberia. To be precise, it’s spoken by exactly 25 nomads, all of them old and unlikely to live much longer. When they die, Tofa dies with them. Languages are dying out at an unnerving rate, but what makes the loss of Tofa particularly poignant is that it possesses the suffix -sig, meaning ‘to smell like.’

We can’t do anything to keep the entire language alive, but I suggest we make a concerted effort to help such a charming and unique linguistic creature survive a little longer. It isn’t hard. You walk into a room that smells of, say, socks, or your grossly obese ex-boss. You sniff, you pull a face, you turn to your companion and murmur: socks-sig or grossly obese ex-boss-sig.

You see? It’s easy. And that way you’ll have done your bit to keep this unparalleled linguistic item breathing for a few more years.

After which, the deluge. Hmm. Sewage-sig.

Gay Pride 2007: The interview (part two – the proof)

I’m ten lines down in the last column. You can just about see my name (and age).

Gay Pride 2007: Reasoned response from the right

Gay Pride 2007: The interview (part two)

More from the Rome pages of Il Messaggero:

«Io sono etero, single, con un figlio – spiega Michaela Parris-Lord, 55 anni, ex assistente di volo – sono qui per protestare contro il Family day, perché l’Italia è ancora arretrata rispetto all’Europa». Vicino a lei, Charles Lambert, 53 anni, insegnante d’inglese a Roma Tre: «Sono 21 anni che sto col mio compagno, trovo molto irritante ancora discutere dei diritti dei gay. Qui si parla della laicità dello Stato». «E a me non piace l’idea che l’unico mix valido sia la famiglia – aggiunge Sally Mac Laren, 52 anni, anche lei insegnante di inglese – io sono single e sto bene così».

(Translation: I’m heterosexual, single, with a son, explains Michaela Parris-Lord, 55, ex flight assistant – I’m here to protest against Family Day, because Italy is still left behind compared with the rest of Europe. Near her, Charles Lambert, 53, English teacher at Roma Tre university: “I’ve been with my partner for 21 years and I find it extremely irritating that we should be discussing gay rights. The issue here is the laicism of the state.” “And I don’t like the idea that the only set-up considered valid is the family,” adds Sally MacLaren, 52, another English teacher – “I’m single and happy this way.”)

Gay Pride 2007: Information?

What’s most interesting today, after yesterday’s euphoria, is the silence of the midday television news programmes (TG1 and TG2). Family Day triggered days of attacks and counter-attacks, as does almost every political event in Italy, however trivial. But today? Not a single word.

The centre-left clearly doesn’t know what to do with a demonstration that accused the entire coalition, justifiably, of cowardice and inertia, while directly attacking some of its most prominent members as out-and-out homophobes. (Yes, I’m thinking of self-harming Senator Paola Binetti.) The still-to-be-born Democratic Party emerges from yesterday’s demo looking even more sickly than before. If ever there a need for a therapeutic abortion, this is it.

The centre-right, on the other hand, astute enough to realise that, with a million people people in the piazza, no news is good news obviously prefer the event to be forgotten as rapidly as possible so that it can get back to the real business of re-assuming power for its own nefarious purposes.

The television has also been curiously silent on the announced divorce of post-fascist leader, Gianfranco Fini. Ah, Family Day…

Gay Pride 2007: The interview (part one)

This comes from Il Messaggero, the Rome-based national daily. I was interviewed at the beginning of the march yesterday and said an awful lot, as you can imagine. (If you can’t, just click on the label homophobia.) The comment quoted, which means “I feel threatened, a few years ago there was a greater sense of freedom”, was part of a larger attack on the impunity with which homophobic comments are made in Italy in ever increasing numbers, with no political response in favour of gay (human) rights, and the way this shameful silence chipped away at our hard-won social space. As it stands in the article, it sounds more whiny than I’d intended, above all since I’ve never felt particularly threatened on a personal level (although this may now change as a result of the article: I seem to be the only marcher whose surname and, in part, address has been provided in any of the three newspapers I’ve read today).

I particularly like being described as colourful, happy and innocuous… as of course I am. Although I’m not quite sure about innocuous… I like to think I can be a little dangerous when the occasion demands. In any case, you can see for yourself in this photo, taken by Michaela. Thanks, Mike!)

Gay Pride 2007