The Accumulation Of Everything
I was asked recently what my photography was about? Looking at the naive student asking the question I drew a deep breath and said. “Well I had had enough of human stupidity by the time I was 13, and now that I am 54 I am drowning in it, so I would have to either say my work is about drowning or about human stupidity or both.” To which the student smiled and filed me away in her crazy old fart collection as she walked off. Looking at her disappearing back I realised yet again that honesty gets you nowhere. Really. Thinking further on just how stupid humanity can get is a depth that I have yet to witness, as we have been happily free falling through multiple layers of stupid since before I was born. I was born in 1966 and I am now getting a bit tired of it. If stupidity is an abyss? What really bugs me is we may not even be half way to rock bottom yet. Every day we explore new levels too, we plumb the depths of our own ignorance and convince ourselves we are not a bunch of primitive morons, yet without illumination we plough blindly onwards chasing the latest dumb assed ideas, whilst clinging limpet like to archaic concepts and institutions, institutions that didn’t serve us that well in the first place, and probably never will. Who knows maybe I was in a bad mood, I was in the clutches of a bastard dog of a migraine when she asked her harmless question, so maybe it was just pain talking, or maybe all old farts end up embittered by the human world, maybe it was Donald Trumps new definition of normal or maybe it was the chaos I was strolling through? Who knows? The student did deserve a better answer though, but protests and migraines are not good bedfellows.
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Point one of an article of one point. “Racism is stupid.”
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American police suffocated a man called George Floyd to death on a pavement. George Floyd was black. Before the public outcry about what happened to him, his death was going to be brushed under a carpet of American police, social and institutional racism and forgotten about. Forgotten about. In the decades since the Rodney King beating nothing seems to have changed. When Americas national pastime seems to be shooting each other what can an outsider like me say? “Protect and Serve,”Thats not what we are seeing in Europe. The them and us attitude of American policing is finally being acknowledged. Racism however is being hidden behind a freight trains worth of denial, whilst at the same time having its flames fanned form the top down, it wouldn’t surprise me if the president announced a hug your local Nazi day. There is no levity in these words, that is what we are all seeing. A broken and stupid man leading a broken country towards a broken civil war. I am not American, I don’t understand America, I don’t even understand American politics. I can’t write about America but I can write about Britain.
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Across the pond in the sleepy country called the UK, Boris Johnson the Prime Minister stated. “Britain is not a racist country.” Possibly thinking he was on a roll he also announced his biggest porky to date. “I have never told a lie.” Then today he has said to the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protesters. “I hear you.” Being a conservative he is blind to the disabled and unaware of growing child poverty rates, but if he was in Downing Street during the protests then yes he would have heard them, so at least he isn’t lying about that. I was worried he may have memory loss though. Surely he couldn’t have forgotten about the racism during the recent Brexit campaign? Seriously I seemed to spend every weekend surrounded by Tommy Robinsons hoard of Islamaphobes, (Racists) chanting and abusing freedom of speech at every turn. I wrote more than a few words about how we are in danger of normalising racist extremes again, words which generally fell on deaf nationalistic ears. Watching the right wings verbal and physical abuse of the constabulary became a new normal. Watching a white man in a Union Jack suit give a speech about the dangers of “The Muslim.” Albeit surrounded by police on horseback the hate speech continued. On Parliament Green. Outside Downing Street they screamed whilst a Weatherspoons pub at the top of Whitehall became a no go zone for any one outside of their happy racist clan. That had become part of journalisms new normal. Empowered by Brexit the extremists are now an emboldened force, and Tommy Robinson is their evangelist.
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Had Boris Johnson forgotten all of that whilst hash-tagging his way incompetently through the pandemic? Was he in denial of the political party called UKIP? A party that employed Tommy Robinson as an advisor. Created by Nigel Farage, who stood in front of a deliberately racist anti immigration poster spilling bigotry at every street corner he could. Has Boris forgotten Stephen Lawrence? Has he forgotten the rhetorical and implied racism hidden within his own party members? Or can he delete his memories like a lot of politicians delete their ill advised tweets? What about the British Chinese people who were repeatedly and racially abused at the start of the pandemic. If his memory is really short term he may not even remember this weeks news. One story stands out about the banned racist organisation National Action, where members were found guilty in a court of law. One of them went to new heights when she entered the Miss Hitler beauty pageant as Miss Buchenwald. Buchenwald was a Nazi concentration death camp. The only good thing I can say about Hitler is that he is dead. Oh yeah right, Britain isn’t a racist country? Anti semitism, anti Islam, anti everyone. You name it we seem to have it here in the UK. To claim otherwise is a new level of stupid in it’s own right.
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Another level of stupid is the moral rhetoric being levelled at BLM protesters by many British Media outlets and papers. Having read a lot of them I now feel like I have passed a White Privilege Propaganda Master Class. Seriously if I read much more I could have a masters degree in indignant self righteousness. A regular trope is All Lives Matter. (ALM) Hold the front page or what. Seriously and without intent of causing harm or having my words reinterpreted by the stupidity of racism, that argument misses the basic point that, no, not all lives are equal in the eyes of public perception or capitalism itself. We have accepted a value system that is not fair. How many famines has the world failed to respond to, how much is a Syrian war refugee worth as our civilised navies leave them to drown. Ask yourself how often you have been forced to shrug because thats just the way the world is? It isn’t, it’s just the way humanity has framed itself. So Black Lives Matter becomes a concept of racial equalisation. Nothing more and nothing less. Yet this acknowledgement of Reality is offending some people out there, they are probably in a greater denial than the whole of America is right now. Grow up, denying your own faults means you can never fix them. Racism is a stupid psychological fault. It’s as faulty as having a statue of an influential slave trader in your lovely racially/culturally accepting city. Yes another chain of stories focussed on the revolutionary hotbed city of Bristol, where local BLM protesters tore down the statue of a slave trader and tossed it into the local waters. Big up to Bristol, but reading some articles you would think our entire culture had been scarred by this event? So lets throw a counter idea out there for everyone to think of. In Britain we have blue plaques to mark where famous people lived, Florence Nightingale lived here, for instance. So why not have a different colour plaque for the bad guys of our nations history. The language and colour is up for a debate but in Bristols case I would’ve gone for, slave trading bastard, as the logo. As for scarring a nation, well after all the Brexit and pandemic blues, this was just light relief.
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Another argument I call the Pandemic variation, where BLM protesters were accused of accelerating and increasing the second wave of infections for the UK, yes equality in infection is the argument in play here. This story will do the rounds as regularly as the corona virus will. Forget the official incompetence that guaranteed the country was wide open to a high infection rate, a rate that becomes unstoppable if you accept the concept of herd immunity, which is another excuse for a govt to do nothing after all, but don’t forget to forget that the lockdowns have fallen apart as I type anyway. We even have crowded holiday spots all over the UK. Seriously it’s almost like pre-pandemic crowd levels in London from what I can see, yet the articles imply the second wave will be BLM’s fault. The selfish protesters will spread the infection. Ok but the right wing tried that several times over the last few months, protesting against the lockdown. However its a lot of the right wing press using this argument. It’s true, the protests will have increased infections, but those levels were going to increase naturally because our get out of lockdown free policy is a turn of a gambled card. Its not even fifty fifty. All that before we mention the minority of malcontents who showed up for a fight. Angry, teenagers never make the best decisions, and teenage boys are the pits, I know that because I was one myself a long long time ago. There were exchanges, and a police woman was hurt because her horse got spooked and bolted smacking her into an overhanging traffic light. Luckily she is going to make a recovery and that I am glad of, but the riderless horse itself, showed more sense than our Prime Ministers cabinet and our media, by going home to it’s stable on it’s own.
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The truth of it is that Britain is not America, but many on different sides of the argument blur that reality. This weekend our right wing and many a racist will be counter marching against BLM’s protests, Tommy Robinsons people have organised to combatively protect statues around parliament and London, whilst many publications and online orators are defending the long lost British empire, that is another argument because, yes, there were worse examples than the British Empire, but the fact is that that does not make British colonialism right, righteous or a good example. However this weekend will be a conflict, between racism and equality, it will be a nasty and probably violent one too. The other difficult truth is that what happens this weekend in London and the UK is in the hands of what Donald Trump does and says. His actions and words will by default effect what happens on streets all over the world. Whatever you may think of my words here understand that we have all been effected by distant history, a history that has shaped our cultures and created winners, losers and victims. When politicians with a colour clouded mindset speak it impacts all of us, and those effects can be felt through any society all around the world. When a Prime minister can claim that the UK is not a racist country, that is equally felt as it reinforces racist mindsets whilst disarming freedom. I can hope the majority of Britains people are not racist, but honestly how would I know? Ask yourself in the mirror after you read this, am I a racist? If your answer is I don’t know, at least you are honest. Respect is the easiest thing to lose and the hardest thing to earn, if we cannot respect each other, then we have lost touch with the true strength of humanity, which has always been our diversity.
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