Maybe there’s a God above...

Three years ago I wrote a book about Leonard Cohen and if you haven’t read it you really should, but first read this article I wrote about LC and religion for Aeon magazine.

Amnesty Interactive

Amnesty International in New Zealand has come up with a neat idea. If you go to this site, your Facebook history is scanned and you find out which of your activities will mean you fall foul of the authorities in specific countries, and how many times you might risk imprisonment, torture or even execution. Of course, their app is simply searching for specific words, so it’s potentially as clunky as Facebook’s own attempts to determine what sort of person you might be from what you post, and thus which advertisers might have an interest in you.

For example, because I had expressed a fondness for the popular beat combo XTC, the Amnesty bot decided that I take drugs. XTC = ecstasy, geddit? Also in the likes list was gospel music, as a result of which I am assumed to be a Christian. Now neither of these is the case, which at first implies a certain flaw in the whole thing. But then you realise what it really means; if a state decides that being a Christian is against the law, you don’t actually need to be a Christian to fall foul of that law. In just needs an authority figure to infer that you’re a Christian, perhaps from your CD collection. Oppression is just as bad when it’s incompetent, arbitrary and misinformed as it is when it’s ruthlessly efficient.

And if you’re interested, by Amnesty’s calculation, for my online sins I’d be beaten 55 times, tortured 52 times, imprisoned 47 times and shot dead just the once.

Blessed are the Piss-Takers

Thousands of Muslims descended on Google’s London headquarters last weekend to protest against the apparent “age of mockery” in which we find ourselves. This could easily turn into another anti-Islam diatribe (Jeesh, not only are they opposed to gay rights and bacon sandwiches, they haven’t got a bloody sense of humour either!) but these tiresome, beardy placard-wavers are far from the only ones. Indeed, some of the most unlikely people seem to have developed unusually thin skins recently.

Frankie Boyle, for example, scourge of political correctness and all that, is suing a newspaper because it said a horrid thing about him. And check out the guidelines on the comments thread of the Liberal Conspiracy site: “Abusive, sarcastic or silly comments may be deleted.” So silliness is a threat to liberal values now, is it? Some have argued that the problem is about excessive reliance by the police and others on section 5 of the Public Order act, under which a student was arrested for calling a police horse gay, among other travesties. I just think it’s a sign of the coming apocalypse, which probably puts me in the same boat as some of the bores and loons of varying religious and ideological persuasions who are complaining the loudest. Funny old world, innit? Oh sorry, I forgot, you don’t do humour, do you?

It should be fairly obvious, and I’ve gone over it umpteen times before, but I’ll spell it out. If an institution, whether it’s a religion or a political party or a football team or whatever is liable to fall apart at the first hint of piss-taking, then it’s probably a pretty decrepit institution in the first place and the mockers are only hastening an inevitable decline. And if said mockery offends you or hurts your feelings, well just sit yourself down while I list all the things that offend me on a regular basis until you die of abject boredom.

Are we really entering an age of mockery? I don’t know, but looking around, I bloody well hope so.

A few words about gay marriage

I don’t think I’ve made any particular reference to gay marriage in this blog before, mainly because I didn’t see much point. I mean, I’ve long assumed that the whole thing would just trundle into existence eventually, to a few bleats of outrage and then within a matter of years we’d look back on the days when consenting adults weren’t permitted to marry someone of their own gender with the sort of bemused horror we now reserve for bear-baiting or child chimney sweeps. But apparently not. It seems that David Cameron is under pressure from Conservative constituency chairmen to abandon the whole idea.

Now, let’s be very clear. I support traditional marriage, which I take to mean marriage between a man and a woman. 12 years ago, I entered into such a traditional marriage. And if I thought that allowing two men or two women to marry would disrupt or destabilise my marriage or that of other traditionally married people, I’d be rather concerned at the prospect. But nobody has yet been able to explain to me how the legalisation of gay marriage would harm my own traditional marriage or any other traditional marriage to the tiniest degree. And since the so-called institution of marriage is nothing more than the sum of all those traditional marriages, past, present and future, I really don’t see the problem. Several million multiplied by zero is still, so far as I recall, zero.

I’m also baffled by the opposition coming from the Conservative Party. My hazy grasp of modern political philosophy tells me that Conservatives (see Republicans, right-wingers, etc) favour freedom as their guiding principle. Labour (Democrats, the left) lean towards equality. Many ideological clashes occur when these two great principles come into opposition. So you’d think that a law change that offers both freedom and equality would meet with rousing acclamation on both sides of the house. Apparently not.

Now, one argument against gay marriage that I do encounter is that it offends the sensibilities of various religious groups. Well, that’s a pity but, you know what? There are probably several thousand things about the modern world that offend me: reality TV; the smell of Kentucky Fried Chicken; fake tan; people who say “less” when they mean “fewer”; the brain-dead loudness of most action movies; my own increasingly saggy and decrepit reflection in the bathroom mirror. To be honest, I also get pretty offended by the inane platitudes of a lot of the aforementioned faith groups, and I’ve never quite understood why my aesthetic prejudices are less deserving of protection than their supernatural taboos. But it’s a modern, complex, interconnected world, with all the mess and noise that entails, so I just do my best to avoid KFC and my face and religious fundamentalism; and when such encounters are unavoidable I grit my teeth and remind myself that there are other, more delightful things around the corner that might compensate for the temporary glitch. Maybe those who oppose the idea of gay marriage because an old man in a dress tells them to could follow my example and just try to ignore it. It won’t go away, but you may find that it stops bothering you if you stop bothering it.

And it’s become something of a cliché, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true: if the idea of gay marriage offends you too much, maybe you should try to avoid marrying a gay person.

Hanbury Street: who nose?

Not entirely sure what to make of this. An LA graffiti artist, Mear One, has painted a mural in Hanbury Street, east London, which, according to how you choose to interpret it is either an attack on global capitalism or a collision of several different bonkers conspiracy theory tropes with a distinct stench of anti-semitism. “Oh, but those big-nosed guys on the Monopoly board aren’t meant to be Jewish,” say the picture’s defenders. “They’re just, y'know, capitalists. With big noses.” The fact that the mural appeared in a predominantly Muslim area has escaped nobody’s attention.

Without wanting to descend to a pointless game of whataboutery, maybe those Danish cartoons were just pictures of some bloke. With a turban. Oh, and while we’re there, check out Amazon’s Dachau jigsaw; and, from a free speech perspective, William Saletan at Salon. My view? None of these things should be banned; but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s sensible to do them either.

Meanwhile, on a cheerier note: over here, I write an entire blog post about one footnote.

PS: Panic over. The mural’s going. But not before it becomes the victim of another moment of impromptu street art.

Frescogate: Cecilia Giménez goes a bit Damien Hirst

More intrigue from the Santuaria de Misericordia in Borja, as that nice old lady who turned the image of Jesus into a sad-eyed monkeybeastling has announced that she wants a slice of the tourist revenue. If we are going to have such a socio-aesthetic construct as outsider art, creativity that benefits from its amateur, outlying, renegade status, does it cease to be worthwhile the moment the artist tries to cash in on it?

The needle and the damage done

Plenty of you will have seen the news snippet about the man who had a tattoo made of the passage in Leviticus that forbids homosexuality, oblivious to the fact that a few lines on there’s another passage condemning tattoos.

I would have thought that serious believers might be very much in favour of tattoos, because if there’s one thing I associate with permanent body art, it’s absolute certainty – fundamentalism, even. When someone has his predilection for Angelina Jolie or Gary Numan or Plymouth Argyle inked on his person, he’s not just saying that he likes them; he’s saying that he will like them until he dies. And there’s a paradox at work: most tattoos are done when the recipient is young, a time when tastes and desires are at their most passionate peak, but also deeply mercurial. The thing you love when you’re 17 may be the one you loathe five years later. And it’s only as the waste waist (sorry, Mum) thickens and the arteries harden that your If-I-Ever-Get-On-Desert-Island-Discs list stays the same from one month to the next. I mean, I know what I like and I like what I know, but do I really dare to ask for Evelyn Waugh on one scrawny, pasty bicep, TS Eliot on the other?