Plaza, Poll, Petition

two days old

source

 "Performative distraction" acknowledged, I still find the reality of the Mayor of DC commissioning this outside the White House incredibly powerful, not just the idea of it. What else is changing? According to a poll in the New York Times "76 percent of Americans — including 71 percent of white people — called racism and discrimination 'a big problem' in the United States. That’s a 26-percentage-point spike since 2015" and that tastes like spring water, even if people always do play nice when it comes to polls. Something else that's changed - I've started bothering to tick the "Yes! Tell me if this pettion wins" and here's one you might like: "Teach British children about the realities of British Imperialism and Colonialism"... I was walking along Regents Canal again this evening, conscious that as a Londoner - even under lockdown -  I'm incredibly lucky to benefit from centuries of infrastructure built for the receipt and distribution of resources taken from countries suffering infrastructures built solely to extract them, and I thought that that was probably as worth knowing about as, say, the Spanish Armada. That "resource extraction" overview by the way is a total theft from John Green. I get everything from youtube.

I Don't Want To Sleep Before Wishing Breonna Taylor Happy Birthday

Thanks to my sis Aunjanue Ellis for sharing this gorgeous video with me. The Black People’s “Happy Birthday” for #BreonnaTaylor. Sounds beautiful. I know she hears it. May we not have to sing in absence of our sisters and brothers. But in their presence. Living fully + joyfully. pic.twitter.com/cDniDb4Ibc

— Ava DuVernay (@ava) June 6, 2020

 

VIEW FROM ABOVE: Easily the largest group of #BlackLivesMatter demonstrators yet in Portland, Maine tonight. #NEWSCENTERmaine pic.twitter.com/YvrwOYQoJj

— Zach Blanchard (@ZachBlanchard) June 6, 2020

 

It’s nearly 10 p.m. in Louisville and the birthday party for #BreonnaTaylor continues. pic.twitter.com/PkYyT3zRD4

— Mandy McLaren (@mandy_mclaren) June 6, 2020

 I could go on.

 It's 4:10 in Britain on the night of what would have been Breonna Taylor's twenty-seventh birthday, and it looks like a hell of a party. And sure, I haven't wanted this blog to be the news because as I said wayyyyyyy back, when Cameron became Prime Minister and I made a gif of Brian Haw that no longer loads, "who wants to be the news?" but maybe that's changing. Again. As long as there's new hope I'll post hope, but I have little to report because I'm still staying in, apart from the night walks, but tonight as I walked to Portabello Road and back, what life I saw on the streets bore both an absence of fear and an absence of tutting. I stopped missing South London, although that said this is a new walk for me, so maybe it was always like this before the isolation. I also want to share this by James McMaster before I sleep: "You’ll want to know what happened last night around the capitol building of the country’s most segregated state..." and he's right, because it was exactly what I wanted to read...

 "I saw so much pent up joy released. I saw young people meet new people, entering into new friendships and flirtations founded in the possibility of a better world... It was the world as it could be, a rehearsal for the world we’re all fighting for. It was an autonomous zone, a racial rapprochement on black terms... All of this was unthinkable just a week ago..." but I really recommend reading it all.
 And I'm glad I took a break from the Shakespeare in time for this.
 Shakespeare's a great critic of systems, but absolutely no believer in change, even if he secretly desired it. Both his tragedies and comedies depend upon that hopelessness but I don't blame him for keeping those desires a secret, even from himself, there were on heads on spikes a stone's throw from his theatre. I might give it another week though.
 And I'm less worried about civil war than I was. But I might still post about it. Oh and the Lindsey Graham thing is fun too! This has been the news.
 I hope you're all doing tremendously. Stay safe.

Surviving "Surviving Edged Weapons"

 Possibly the greatest insight I've received into American Policing, in general as opposed to what's happening just now, was – well actually, it was probably when I was on a student exchange to Milton Academy Massachusetts when I was seventeen, and we were reading Going To Meet The Man by James Badwin, and I asked the English teacher who "the man" was, and he answered "You're rooming with Lamont Sample, aren't you? Ask Lamont" and so I asked Lamont, who slept in the bunk below me, and was really into Abdullah Ibrahim, and played waves to fall asleep, and he told me what had happened to him two weeks ago while I'd popped into the ninety-nine cents store and he had waited for me outside... 

 But my second greatest insight into American Policing – well actually, that was probably from my gap year, when I was nineteen – I know, amn't I lucky! –

Rube, 1994

 And I was sharing a ride from Atlanta to Chicago because I had the deposit money but no American driving licence, and Jamal had a license but no deposit, and Doug Dick joined us because he'd just fled New York with chicken-wired wrists because he didn't want to cook for the Mafia any more having received a message from the actual Devil while trapped in a crack den and because he was good for morale, so we were all delivering a car, and we'd stopped to get gas in Kentucky, and a policeman turned up and asked us for ID because he'd received reports of "three strange-looking guys", and he said "put your hands where I can see 'em", and I'd heard "put your hands on the ceiling" and reached up, and Doug gripped my hands and pulled them down, and when I chuckled an English chuckle at the officer because he couldn't read Jamal's licence because he wasn't wearing his glasses, Doug nearly drew blood from digging his fingers into my arm and vigorously shaking his head in silence, and I could see that the silly man was fearing for his life... 

 But my third greatest insight into American policing in general, as opposed to necessarily what's happening just now, definitely comes from the excellent circle of score-knowing slobs at RedLetterMedia whose great work, randomly viewing old VHS tapes for Wheel of the Worst, led them to the police training video from 1988 Surviving Edged Weapons. To quote this trutorial: "Adding to the threat are a host of improvised weapons: sunglasses that can be flicked to poke out your eyes..."

 "Fish-hooks hidden in earrings are stuck through pant legs to rip your fingers on a pat down..."

 "Boots with protruding spikes..."

 "A baseball cap with razor blades sewn to the back..." 

 And to quote Mike Stoklasa and Rich Evans: "It's not a wonder that cops are paranoid motherfucks that shoot you to death! Because they show them videos like this!" A mouthful was said there. Doug Dick saved my life. Here:

Today I'd Like to Remoan About Hostile Environments

 Hi. Twitter Simon here, beginning to wonder if the fall in (aways mild) abuse I receive when sticking my nose in might have anything to do with the new profile picture. I'd love it if people thought I was actually a lawyer from. Who wouldn't love being mistaken for a lawyer?

 NO FURTHER QUESTIONS etc. But why was this headlining my twitter side-bar last night? What even is "Nine News"? Ever since I read, a couple of months ago, that a Trump mega-donor had bought a "sizable stake" in the site, I've become very threat-level-whoah-now about what the site promotes. So, when I returned from last night's quiet walk to see #londonriots trending, I checked the hashtag, and indeed most tweets accompanying it were also wondering why it was trending, as there hadn't been any riots. I did also see footage of the anger in Whitehall. Sure. But I'd witnessed that before, any weekend over the last two years in which I'd been down to do a bus tour, and the Brexiters had had one of their "marches" – not marches so much, as a crowding into the Wetherspoons as early as possible to drink and drink and wander around with a flag and hurl abuse at buskers, looking for fun, or a fight, or a fun fight – and I would stand there, hoping that London might be a cure for this, and that these racists – I saw their banners and I saw their caps, these were racists – would see how alone they were. 

 But anyway, yes, I saw last night on twitter yesterday's outnumbering of the police outside Downing Street, and I saw some commentators express "boggled minds" that this "brutality" was in response to a shooting on another continent, and I tappity-tapped, in my little lawyer's wig, a reminder to those commentators just what Downing Street had been up to for the past four-years-plus: the Windrush scandal, the "Go Home" vans, "pickaninny smiles", "letterboxes", and the much discussed "hostile environment", and I hoped – again, hoped – that these protests might illuminate what that blithely bandied-about phrase "hostile environment" actually meant, and how instantly intolerable everyone should find it. Here's another hostility:

 

 "Ending freedom of movement". And a Union Jack.  

  As I wrote on Monday (okay, Tuesday morning) us pinky grey men never really have to think about "freedom of movement". I suspect this tweet knew exacty what it was doing though. Division aways benefits the Right, which might be why so much government messaging seems purposefully designed to ruffle liberal feathers, but while I still believe Fascism Thrives On Division, and while I still suspect the PM – and definitely POTUS – would rather see a civil war than their own resignation (for the same reason Hans Gruber blew up the Nakaomi Tower), I'm also very happy to see pressure applied, proper pressure, because no police officer was charged with anything relating to the killing of George Floyd until people marched. 

 Also, I'm not sure what we're seeing here is Division. I hope. After the December election, I decided to turn this blog into a Politics/Anxiety tag-free zone, because the increasing shittiess of all things seemed such a given, I wanted to spare anyone who came here any more of it. Also, I still had plans for a series of Time Spanner in which an avatar of the demiurge – President Guff Goofy – declared a zombie apocalypse, saying "you know who the zombies are", and I was saving up my politial anxiety for that. But that was six months ago, and now there feels something like a tugging at the monolith, slow work, but potentially effective, an awakening of care, which I find invigorating, and it needs to be kept up. So, I remain a remoaner. 

 I looked up what I'd been doing during the last #BlackLivesMatter protests in 2015. I'd voted for Corbyn. Again, I'd been hoping for an awakening of care, but we know how that turned out – care became discredited, and those who'd spent their entire political lives attempting to orchestrate a more just environment became associated with bullying and intolerance. So this probably does have to be led from the bottom. And, while I have Santa's knee, I'd also quite like a government intent on kerbing the manipulation of democracy through online misinformation, rather than one led by gamers seeking to become a world leaders in it. That seems another fair demand. 

 And finally, here is my favourite twitter interaction for a while. Elizabeth Jackson's not cowed by a wig. It's important to remember this is also an option.

A Pertinent Point About Behaving Suspiciously For Money

 My late night walks are getting later and later, so it's still Monday for me, but, before I go to bed, there's a bunch of half-thought-out drafts I keep in reserve, and the one accompanying this picture seems the most apt to post before #BlackOutTuesday. 

 The picture wasn't taken today. It's me heading into the City to do a Ripper Walk earlier in the year. I love the job. It's nice pay, and you're very exposed, but you get to be scary, and I love being scary – maybe because I'm not very active: There's no Point Break-type activity I practice to feel more alive, or in touch with the sea, or the air, or the earth or whatever, but being allowed to be scary is a proper taste of the bigger freedom. I turn up to these walks in "costume" – a long, black, cheap mac, black shirt, tie, trousers, and shoes, clutching a lumpy, clanking plastic bag that secretly holds my hurricane lamp, and here's the point: Every time I took to public transport in this clobber, or hovered round the railings of the Square Mile, waiting for my group to turn up and working on my skulk, dressed like a middle-aged high school shooter, I knew that I would never be stopped and asked what I was doing, or where I was going, or what I was carrying or why, no matter how egregious or inexplicable I looked. And I will pay myself the compliment of saying that I also knew this was what white privilege looked like, that these were the freedoms I enjoyed, freedoms everyone should be able to enjoy: the freedom to raise questions without being questioned, and the freedom to be scary, but still listened to.

#blacklivesmatter and #blackhistorymatters and #statuesofrealpeoplearemainlydumbandscary

 Here's nothing. I'm keeping vampire hours again. Lacking both heat-reisistant gloves and goggles as recommended by the excellent Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and unkeen on combing through fourteen years of my social media to wipe it of "personal details and anything that could be perceived as inciting violence" as recommended by the excellent Varaidzo, oh and also, you know, just being a hoverer, I didn't get to Trafalgar Square on Sunday to mourn George Floyd until two in the morning. 

 But General Napier was still there, and Major General Sir Henry Havelock, and the fat prince. The fourth plinth was empty though, I noticed, fleeced of its Ninevite Lamassu... "Statue lovers" someone said knowingly of the torch-wielding protestors at Charlottesville, and I've thought about that quite a bit since, and decided yeah, I don't like statues of real people I realise, not really, not any more. Any of them. Even the lovely ones just look creepy and wrong, even Eric Morecambe. Unmistakably unalive. Borne of a tradition intended to literally deify tyrants. And I suppose I'm just retreading my moan from the last post, aren't I, but, like Mark Gatiss, statues fetishise the past without a shred of interest in history. Don't get me wrong, I like creepy things as much as the next fantasist. And I warm to the decor of a haunted house. But I wouldn't say I'm a statue lover. I also saw a fox. He looked shiny and unafraid. I think foxes are having a good lockdown.