I’m a middle-class child of immigrants. I’m told we were poor when my parents emigrated from Scotland to Canada in the 70s, but I don’t remember any of that. All I remember is a bucolic childhood where I was never in want for anything I needed.
Everything I wanted, however, was another matter entirely. You see, like most middle-class children of immigrants, my parents were born and raised working class. That means they were never quite comfortable in the new world they created for themselves. It also meant problems. I didn’t have the kind of problems they had. I didn’t have to fight every day in Glasgow’s slums like my father did, and I didn’t have to make my own meals at 13 because my single parent was on vacation again, as was the case with my mother. That doesn’t mean my problems weren”t problems, though.
For example, you”re not allowed to use the front door. Unless the president is coming for dinner, everyone has to walk around to the back and take off his or her shoes there. There’s also a fancy living room nobody sits in unless front-door guests arrive, which is basically never. Here are ten more problems they created for me.
1. FOOD
Scottish people are cheap. Boomers who grew up with parents from the Great Depression are stingy. Immigrants are frugal. Put them all together and you might as well have a tattoo on your face that says, “Take care of the pennies and the pounds take care of themselves!” But you can”t get a tattoo because Scottish immigrants still think it’s the 1950s when tattooed people were uneducated and doomed to a life working on the docks.
Despite the low price of food, the meals my mother made looked like a dietitian put them together for someone dying of obesity. You”d get a third of a potato, a slice of meat, maybe a few leaves of spinach, and that’s it. My brother and I coped by pigging out on apples and ice cream for dessert and then making a ginormous bowl of popcorn. But my parents were also hungry after dinner and they”d loom over us like vultures. My father has a degree in physics and was able to somehow fit 80% of the bowl’s contents into one handful. As he pulled his hand out and balanced this Dr. Seuss-like tower of popcorn away from us, my stomach would growl, “You bastard.”
2. FACE CLOTHS
Automatic dishwashers often use less water than doing the dishes by hand, unless your parents are Scottish immigrants, in which case the same Tupperware container of tepid water will do you just fine for several days. The washcloth that sat in this disgusting mess smelled like rotten garbage because it was. When my mother would wipe my face with this thing, it was like getting a facial with a used diaper. I could smell the thin layer of fermenting food for hours afterward. I still can. Today, when my kids have dirty faces, I take a silk handkerchief from the linen chest and wipe them with scented orange soap dipped in rose petals.
3. BATHS
Immigrants don”t have showers. Why let all that money go down the drain? Instead, they have baths and who goes first is based on the family hierarchy. That meant my brother and I were last, and getting clean consisted of lying in a lukewarm tub of dead skin and old pubes.
4. BEDTIME
I used to love going to bed because it meant I could stop going through my times tables. 8 x 7 is 56, but if you didn”t say it fast enough you had to do a dozen more including that dreaded 13 x 13, which I had to work out aloud every night. “OK, first I”m going 13 x 10,” I”d say nervously, “and now I”m adding 13 three times,” to which my father would reply, “No you”re no. That’s bloody ridiculous. You know 12 x 12 is 144, so just blah blah blah,” then my mind would start dreaming of my sheets which I no longer cared were not the Star Wars kind.
5. TOYS
I think my mom might have had a doll when she was growing up but all my dad had were these short cylindrical wood blocks his father used at the printing press to keep the newspaper rolls in place. He didn”t even know they weren”t toys until he invited a friend to play with his cool toys and his friend said, “These aren”t toys!”
When I would ask them for the awesome action figures I saw on commercials, it was like I was asking to have a chandelier installed in my room. Going to a friend’s house and seeing all his incredible Star Wars stuff was like visiting FAO Schwarz on “Everything is Free” day. Not only did they have all the figures, they had Millennium Falcons and Death Stars in which to put them. I was in awe.
They even thought the Six Million Dollar Man doll was too expensive but after a year of begging, I got his boss for Christmas. That’s right, his BOSS. Oscar Goldman was the guy who gave Steve Austin his assignments and he came with a desk and a cardboard façade of an office. Oscar also had an exploding briefcase but that came separately so I didn”t get it.
I recently asked my mother if I ended up with Goldman because it was near Christmas and all the Six Million Dollar Men were sold out or was it because he was cheaper and she said, “I have no idea what you”re talking about.”
6. CLOTHING
Because my parents came from a world where you were either working class or upper class, they were very strict about clothing. In their mind, my brother and I were one jean jacket away from a life in the gutter. I drooled when I saw Dale Aiken’s Iron Maiden baseball hat and Donny Hickling’s Def Leppard shirt. In my teens, this lust exploded and I got into punk rock just to spite my parents. I wasn”t allowed to wear my Sex Pistols shirt to school, so I stored my punk clothes in a plastic bag in the hedges by the bus stop and would do an impromptu wardrobe change there every morning before school.
7. SLEEPING
In the daytime, my dad has an affected posh Scottish accent that sounds like Sean Connery. Things are very different at night. He talks in his sleep and his mind goes back to Glasgow’s violent slums, where his accent sounds like a cross between Groundskeeper Willie and Beelzebub. Waking him during this time is suicide as I learned in 1979 when I flashed the side table light in his face because I wanted to watch TV. (For some reason the family TV was in the bedroom, not in the living room.) In his dream, he thought going toward the light was death and someone was trying to kill him, so before I knew what was happening, a naked man had leapt out of bed, put me in a chokehold, and smashed the lamp against the wall. Uh, take it easy, guy. I”m just trying to watch CHiPS.
Do any of you still like the dreaded word “diversity,” which is proudly flung around by those who squirm when the great Enoch Powell’s name comes up? If anything, Powell was a prophet, and after the latest London outrage, his so-called “Rivers of Blood” speech sure comes to mind. He got it right while midgets such as Heath and Howe sold and keep on selling the country out to diversity. Can any of you imagine a time when a British soldier was unsafe wearing a military uniform in his own country? Well, yes, when the IRA was blowing up horses and soldiers off the Hyde Park barracks, but Tony Blair made nice with them and those same nice guys collect English pounds and don’t even bother to attend Parliament. This same war criminal Blair, who lied and got Britain into two unnecessary wars so he could play big international statesman alongside the idiotic George W., is out collecting millions, none of which will go toward Drummer Lee Rigby’s two-year-old son or the rest of his family.
There is something very, very wrong here. Blair lies and plots and ends up getting thousands killed and crippled, making millions out of it. Rigby follows orders, does his duty, and gets hacked to death.
Channel 4 News invited the scumbag Choudary, a self-proclaimed imam, to speak his mind, and he sure did. Not a word about the victim and the cowardly crime of hacking a defenseless man to death with knives and meat cleavers, but plenty about what victims he and his fellow Muslims are. The idiotic woman interviewing him should have jammed the microphone in his ugly bearded face, gouging his eye out; instead she politely let him get on with it. Yet as a fellow panelist pointed out, the scumbag Choudary makes more than 25,000 pounds a year on benefits alone, far more than Private Rigby ever made while risking his life for his country. But I have yet to hear one of those pompous assholes in Parliament stand up and ensure that hatemongers such as Choudary have their benefits rescinded.
Britain is paying more to those who preach hate and encourage scum to go out and kill in cold blood than their victims earn while working and making an honest living. This is such an outrage, I’m happy not to be in London as I write this. Especially not in the vicinity of those pretentious types who sprinted toward the microphones to tell us that this murder most foul will make our community stronger. Like hell it will. Not as long as filth such as Choudary are allowed to live among us.
Socrates was the greatest of philosophers because he was the first to recognize and teach that virtue is knowledge and that we cannot be good until we know what is good. Enoch Powell knew full well what England was getting into by opening her borders to Muslims and Afro-Caribbean races. He also knew that the welfare state encourages indolence, lack of initiative, and the exploitation of the public purse. It also discourages an independent mind. The two subhumans who hacked an innocent young man to death are ignoramuses. They believe the rubbish that their hate preachers instill in their mini minds—hate preachers that our elites have tolerated all these years out of fear of being called racists.
Probably it’s just my simpleminded arithmomania, but years ending in the numeral three seem to be more memorable than average, both publicly and personally, for reasons high or low.
In 1953 the public became the personal. This was the year of the Coronation, the first public event to impinge on my consciousness.
We kids all got Coronation mugs“my sister still has hers. There was a street party with free cake and desserts. Most people were happy for the pretty new Queen, although my Dad, a sour republican, took it all as one more opportunity to grumble about “those bloody Germans.”
England was bursting with children in 1953: My elementary school overflowed, so that my class was decanted to an annex in a local church hall. England was still a real nation, too, not yet a flophouse and welfare office for all the world’s beggars, thieves, and lunatics. We were named after kings, queens, and Bible characters. The street games we played were centuries old. That a citizen might be arrested for carrying the nation’s flag was beyond inconceivable in 1953.
Coronation aside, the public world came filtered through the tabloid newspapers my parents favored. Tabloid headliner of the year was John Christie, who had murdered at least eight women. Christie was arrested in March, tried in June, and hanged in July. Justice was brisk back then. Abundant, too: Twelve other people were hanged that year in England, one a female.
1963 was the year when sexual intercourse began, according to Philip Larkin. Sex certainly had top billing in the public sphere.
For me personally, Larkin got it precisely right. Sex didn”t come easy, though: I had to walk for it.
My partner in exploration and I were both living at home. Neither of us had a car. I would spend evenings with her in her parents” living room”talking, reading, listening to music, and writhing with lust”until the parents went to bed at ten-thirty. Then we would copulate on the living-room carpet, whose color for some reason I remember with perfect clarity: a fetching pale shade of cerulean.
By the time we finished, the town’s meager bus service had shut down for the night, so I had to go home on foot. Her house and mine were on opposite sides of the English country town we both inhabited: four miles as the sated lover stumbles. I didn”t mind. To this day I have found nothing so conducive to a good night’s sleep as a long post-coital walk.
One minor additional inconvenience was a certain aid to male sexual hygiene that my fastidious mistress would not allow me to deposit in her family’s garbage. Nor in neighbors” hedges: She made me promise to walk at least the length of the street before I discarded the thing.
On one occasion I still had it when, halfway through the walk home, I passed the town’s General Hospital. King Edward VII had dedicated the place, and there was a bust of him on an inscribed plinth in an alcove set into the hospital wall. Feeling irreverent and perhaps having internalized my Dad’s republican scorn, and the streets being perfectly deserted, I fixed the unwanted item, loaded with its pale cargo, over His Majesty’s nose. Then I staggered on homewards whistling a happy tune”quite possibly indeed one from The Beatles” first LP, which had come out that spring.
1973 is best forgotten. I spent much of my late twenties in the grip of a shameful psychological affliction whose symptoms have been described by much better writers than me. The year 1973 was the lowest trough of the thing, a chronicle of wasted time.
But even in this misery there was a silver lining: I came to the USA for the first time and fell in love with the place. I went back to England five years later, but I think that from 1973 on it was foredoomed that I would die an American.
The only man I know who belonged to more gentlemen’s clubs than Eddie Ulmann was the late Bobby Sweeny of amateur golf fame, who once pleaded poverty to me while signing checks to something like twenty clubs spread around the Western world. Eddie was the quintessential clubman. He cherished his clubs, took part in club activities until the very end, and was as popular with the members as he was with the staff of the various establishments he frequented throughout his life. Before I go into his sporting accomplishments, I want to take the time to tell you about Eddie’s “secret” life, that of a writer. I”d also like to pat myself on the back for discovering him. It was about fifteen years ago, and we were having lunch at the old Mortimer’s, and Eddie was criticizing some article that had appeared in “Taki’s Top Drawer,” a section of the New York Press, a weekly that has since bitten the dust. As editor of the section, I realized that he was right. “So why don”t you write it?” I asked him. “Oh, no,” he said, looking shocked, “my dear fellow, it simply wouldn”t do; club members might suspect me of being a secret ink-stained agent.”
That’s when I had the most brilliant idea since Leopold Mozart sat his son Wolfgang down on a piano stool. Use a pseudonym, I said. If it was good enough for Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle), it’s good enough for you. Eddie was delighted by the comparison, and after couple of more stiff Bloody Marys, he agreed. So began a long run of more or less wonderfully droll and sophisticated essays by “Classicus,” a name he plucked from the Greeks in my honor, or so he said. The owner of the New York Press, Russ Smith, a very good writer himself, soon wanted to know “Who the hell is this guy?” I was not at liberty to divulge.
Classicus was a hit because he wrote in a style that evoked gentlemanly prose, and it stuck out because next to my section were rows and rows of ads for all sorts of sexual enticements. Eddie used to tremble with contrived panic, “Can you imagine if any of my friends ever found out that my byline appears next to an ad selling dildos?” This went on until the New York Press was sold and eventually shut down, but then Eddie followed me and began writing for Quest, again under a pseudonym, although by now his cover was blown.
After I started Taki’s Mag, a website run out of London by my daughter which has suddenly caught on with a million viewers, I enticed Eddie to write a quasi-gossip column about manners”or lack thereof”among the new rich. I insisted he write under the name of Bunky Mortimer. “If Dickie Mortimer ever finds out I”ll have to resign from half my clubs,” was his response. “If the Mortimers didn”t mind when Glenn Birnbaum named a café after them, they won”t mind you writing under their name,” was mine.
Bunky was a great success right off the bat, and my little girl loved it. She wanted more, but Bunky by then was not feeling his best. The few pieces that appeared about what a gent wears as underwear and how a gent behaves in our brutal and coarse society were terrific, but, alas, too few. I”ve been trying to find another Bunky Mortimer but it’s like trying to discover another S. J. Perelman”not an easy task. (My daughter, in desperation, asked me if a real Mortimer”Dickie or Topper”would do it, but I have as yet to approach them for some strange reason.)
Which brings me to Eddie Ulmann, the man about town and sportsman. Here’s Chuck Pfeiffer on Ulmann:
I was a green cadet at West Point and had a date with a beautiful girl by the name of Nancy Gillon. This was the early sixties. Nancy had a sister, Priscilla, who was going out with a man I had never heard of. When the three of them arrived to pick me up I almost dropped my cookies. The man was driving a Ferrari, was impeccably dressed in a Dunhill Tailors suit, and was wearing driving gloves. He smelled of some exotic cologne, was extremely friendly, and the first question he asked me was what prep school I had attended. I had never seen such a sophisticated fellow before. I was a jock, and jocks don”t wear driving gloves nor drive Ferraris. It was the start of a great friendship.
As a college student I would buy copies of The New Yorker to sample the sparkling prose of James Thurber and S. J. Perelman and to appreciate the clever cartoons that graced each issue. Despite the magazine’s veering toward the trendy left thereafter, I could still find material in it worth reading well into the 1980s, such as John Updike’s elegantly phrased erotica or the occasional vignettes of interwar Hungary by John Lukacs. Then The New Yorker took a further slide into sheer madness, and the results are visible in a libelous obit that came out last Wednesday by a certain Judith Thurman. Seething with rage syndrome, Thurman announced the “Final Solution” of my onetime correspondent and one of France’s most illustrious historians of the last century, Dominique Venner (1935-2013).
On May 21, Venner, acting desperately in the face of events he could no longer control, committed suicide by shooting himself in the mouth in Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. Venner left behind a suicide note explaining his horror at the gay-marriage law that French President Francois Hollande had just pushed through the National Assembly. Venner further lamented the self-destruction of his country and of European civilization that he ascribed to gay marriage and to Western Europeans” unwillingness to keep Muslims from resettling their countries.
It continues to be disputed whether Venner was a believing Catholic, although the “Catholic traditionalists” in whose company Thurman places Venner admired his cultural stands and continue to hope that he”ll make it into heaven despite the mortal sin he committed by hastening his departure from this world.
Venner was also a hero to the neo-pagan European right, and since the 1960s he was active in laying and extending the foundations of the emphatically anti-Christian French new right, together with his frequent collaborator Alain de Benoist. Venner had a clear record of standing defiantly in the face of the French Communist Party. Unlike the communists and other French leftists who supported the Algerian rebels, Venner fought gallantly and was decorated as a sergeant in the French forces in Algeria.
Contrary to what Thurman tells us, Venner did not get his political start as a fan of the Nazis and their French collaborators (although his parents had once rallied to Jacques Doriot’s French fascist party). He rose to fame as a fervent anti-communist and European nationalist. The young Venner risked his life as a volunteer in the Algerian War, went to Budapest in 1956 to stand with the outnumbered Hungarian rebels against the Soviet occupational forces, and later was caught sacking the premises of the French Communist Party, whose allegiance to the Soviets he detested.
In the last twenty years of his life, this “unapologetic Islamophobe,” to use Thurman’s phrase, showed the audacity to characterize both the takeover of European inner cities by a hostile Muslim population and “the declining white birthrate in France and Europe” as “a catastrophic peril for the future.” Several blog respondents to this screed noted the embarrassing coincidence that Thurman’s expression of rage against the “Islamophobe” Venner appeared at the very time that predominantly Muslim riots had broken out in Sweden and a Muslim convert cut off the head of a hapless off-duty soldier in London.
The golden age of television sitcoms petered out in the late 1990s when NBC couldn”t convince Jerry Seinfeld to come back for one more season despite offering him a salary of $110 million. (His three costars would have been paid a total of $66 million.)
Similarly, as the salaries of the cast of Friends approached over $140 million annually (one million per episode for each, with Jennifer Aniston getting more), networks began to search for business models that weren”t as dependent upon the expert interplay of unique personalities.
In 2000, the triumphant debut of Survivor on CBS demonstrated that audiences would be almost as fascinated to watch nobodies compete for (as Dr. Evil would say) one…million…dollars.
Meanwhile, cable networks such as HBO and AMC found that they could ensnare higher-end viewers in long-running soap operas.
Yet old-fashioned sitcoms remain potential money-gushers because they are best suited to syndication. Once a viewer finds out who wins American Idol or what happens to Don Draper, nobody is particularly interested in watching again. On the other hand, the likable, competently made sitcom about Caltech nerds, The Big Bang Theory, is on track to rank first in the Nielsens this year in both primetime and syndication.
The shot at that kind of money continues to attract tremendous talent to the sitcom, even if the genre doesn”t generate much buzz. Thus, perhaps the most brilliant sitcom of the decade is ABC’s almost unknown screwball comedy of 2012 with the unwieldy title Don’t Trust the B——in Apartment 23.
ABC pulled the plug in January with eight episodes left unseen. Fortunately, ABC.com, Hulu, and iTunes will be offering the lost episodes online through June 2.
In the show, June (played by Dreama Walker) is a nice, wholesome blonde from Indiana who moves to Manhattan to start her dream job working for Bernie Madoff the day he’s hauled off in handcuffs. Defeated but undaunted, she gets a waitress job and a roommate, lovely ex-model Chloe (the slightly pop-eyed Krysten Ritter, a cartoon Audrey Hepburn), who turns out to be a sociopathic Holly Golightly fleecing naïve newcomers.
But amoral Chloe is also cooler than everybody in Indiana put together”for instance, her best friend is June’s girlhood crush, Dawson’s Creek star James Van Der Beek (as portrayed by Dawson’s Creek star James Van Der Beek). Will Chloe corrupt June before June’s corn-fed decency reforms Chloe?
This comedy was created by Nahnatchka Khan, who got her start with Malcolm in the Middle, the high-energy live-action Simpsons. She seems to identify more with her male supporting characters in a manner reminiscent of Camille Paglia. Van Der Beek, for instance, is affable in his masculine arrogance. (“Because I”m a celebrity” is his levelheaded explanation for every privilege he’s afforded.)
Apartment 23 treats virtually every sacred cow in current American culture with gleeful contempt. June’s boss at the coffee shop, meek mulatto Mark (Eric Andre), who worships June from afar, is virtually the only Obama parody in American entertainment. The joke is that, unlike the president, poor Mark inherited his white parent’s level of self-esteem.
Has anybody apologized to Enoch Powell yet?
The British establishment declared the Conservative MP a nonperson back in 1968 after he warned that unchecked Third World immigration would engender catastrophic domestic unrest.
His address was dubbed the “Rivers of Blood” speech. Powell, a classical scholar, had alluded to the Tiber and to Virgil’s Aeneid, but opponents and supporters alike omit that detail. Powell, they all came to believe, had predicted “rivers of blood””that of battling blacks, browns, and whites”flowing through London’s streets.
Which brings us to last Wednesday’s beheading in Woolwich.
We’ve all seen the footage of killer Michael Adebolajo, 28, born a Christian in England but now a Muslim “revert” radical with an “innit” Ali G. accent.
Caught on tape literally red-handed, Adebolajo averred that he was simply avenging Western invasions of Muslim lands. That ever-popular alibi for Islamic violence is, paradoxically, both theologically sound and historically illiterate.
To tackle the latter: From the Crusades to Afghanistan, the West has been obliged to respond to Muslim aggression. Recently, we even fought on their side”thanklessly, it turns out. (Ditto our compulsive embrace of Muslim “refugees.”)
Islam declared war on America shortly after the nation’s birth, back when America’s leaders still officially disapproved of “foreign entanglements.”
Next time Muslims threaten to kill over a cartoon or a teddy bear or the “swirl” on Burger King ice-cream packaging, recall that one Muslim Brotherhood founder swore eternal enmity toward the United States in 1949 after he witnessed men and women shamelessly dancing cheek-to-cheek at a dry church social to the tune “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.”
(To those who still wonder why liberals are so forgiving of every Islamic idiocy, that single song may offer one accidental answer.)
When I think about colonialist invaders massacring innocents by the millions, somehow neither Indonesia nor Sweden spring to mind. What are they, then? The “Microscopic” and “Subatomic” Satans, respectively?
The British-born killer’s fixation on “his” “lands” is particularly pathetic. Canadian Muslim (and tireless anti-neocon) Tarek Fatah points out tartly that due to the color of his skin, Adebolajo “wouldn’t get a job as a janitor” in a “Muslim land” such as Iraq.
You see, Muslims mostly kill other Muslims, something Adebolajo neglected to mention.
Many were astonished that bystanders did little to help Adebolajo’s victim (except pray for him after he died) and that it reportedly took Woolwich cops almost twenty minutes to show up.
Hell, forget the notoriously ridiculous British constabulary (three of whom, on or about the time of the beheading, were cautioning an 86-year-old woman against manufacturing a comically large wheel of cheese). Think about it: This soldier was murdered outside an armory, a place which, one might be forgiven for assuming, is stocked with arms and perhaps even a few fellows trained in their use.
The thrice-promised land it has been called.
It is that land north of Mecca and Medina and south of Anatolia, between the Mediterranean Sea and the Persian Gulf.
In 1915—that year of Gallipoli, which forced the resignation of First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill—Britain, to win Arab support for its war against the Ottoman Turks, committed, in the McMahon Agreement, to the independence of these lands under Arab rule.
It was for this that Lawrence of Arabia and the Arabs fought.
In November 1917, however, one month before Gen. Allenby led his army into Jerusalem, Lord Balfour, in a letter to Baron Rothschild, declared that His Majesty’s government now looked with favor upon the creation on these same lands of a national homeland for the Jewish people.
Between these clashing commitments there had been struck in 1916 a secret deal between Britain’s Mark Sykes and France’s Francois Georges-Picot. With the silent approval of czarist Russia, which had been promised Istanbul, these lands were subdivided and placed under British and French rule.
France got Syria and Lebanon. Britain took Transjordan, Palestine and Iraq, and carved out Kuwait.
Vladimir Lenin discovered the Sykes-Picot treaty in the czar’s archives and published it, so the world might see what the Great War was truly all about. Sykes-Picot proved impossible to reconcile with Woodrow Wilson’s declaration that he and the allies—the British, French, Italian, Russian and Japanese empires—were all fighting “to make the world safe for democracy.”
Imperial hypocrisy stood naked and exposed.
Wilson’s idealistic Fourteen Points, announced early in 1918, were crafted to recapture the moral high ground. Yet it was out of the implementation of Sykes-Picot that so much Arab hostility and hatred would come—and from which today’s Middle East emerged.
Nine decades on, the Sykes-Picot map of the Middle East seems about to undergo revision, and a new map, its borders drawn in blood, emerge, along the lines of what H.G. Wells called the “natural borders” of mankind.
“There is a natural and necessary political map of the world,” Wells wrote, “which transcends” these artificial states, and this natural map of mankind would see nations established on the basis of language, culture, creed, race and tribe. The natural map of the Middle East has begun to assert itself.
Syria is disintegrating, with Alawite Shia fighting Sunni, Christians siding with Damascus, Druze divided, and Kurds looking to break free and unite with their kinfolk in Turkey, Iraq and Iran. Their dream: a Kurdistani nation rooted in a common ethnic identity.
Shia Hezbollah controls the south of Lebanon, and with Shia Iran is supporting the Shia-led army and regime of Bashar Assad.
Together, they are carving out a sub-nation from Damascus to Homs to the Mediterranean. The east and north of Syria could be lost to the Sunni rebels and the Al-Nusra Front, an ally of al-Qaida.
Last week saw prolonged riots in Sweden and a surreal midday beheading in England, while the paid parrots of the Multi Cult spared no effort in blaming everyone but the rioters and the murderers.
Sweden has long been held up by naïve proponents of statist socialism as a blonde, suntanned example of how high taxes and cradle-to-grave welfare are effective. This has always been a simpleminded delusion that ignored the Scandinavian nation’s small population and”until recently”ethnic homogeneity. But now an estimated 15-20% of Sweden’s population consists of foreign-born immigrants, and deep wrinkles are starting to appear in the country’s Big Brother smiley face.
After Swedish police shot dead a Portuguese immigrant who was variously reported to be aggressively wielding either a machete or a knife on May 13, disgruntled immigrants used the incident as an excuse to smash and loot and burn and beat their way through Stockholm and its environs over several nights. Much of the mayhem took place in Stockholm’s Husby district, where an estimated 80-85% of residents are not indigenous Swedes. Automobiles were torched, windows were smashed, and a policeman was beaten while a joyous child filmed it and exclaimed “Allahu Akbar!”
In the London district of Woolwich last Wednesday afternoon, a pair of English-born black Muslims rammed their car into a white British soldier who was wearing a “Help for Heroes” T-shirt, then proceeded to stab, slash, and behead him with a machete and a meat cleaver. His hands warm with his victim’s blood, murder suspect Michael Adebolajo”who was reportedly born into a Christian family but later converted to Islam”delivered the following soliloquy to a passerby who was filming him:
The only reason we have killed this man today is because Muslims are dying daily by British soldiers, and this British soldier is one, is a eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. By Allah, we swear by the Almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you until you leave us alone….I apologize that women had to witness this today, but in our land our women have to see the same. You people will never be safe. Remove your governments. They don’t care about you. Do you think David Cameron is gonna get caught in the street when we start busting our guns? Do you think the politicians are going to die? No it’s going to be the average guy, like you, and your children.
In Sweden, England, and elsewhere, the excuses came quickly and predictably.
Rumors spread like fire through charred Volvos that Swedish police had used slurs such as “rats,” “monkeys,” and “niggers” to taunt and inflame the rioters, although it has been alleged that the latter term may have actually been neger, the Swedish equivalent to “Negro.”
Swedish Integration Minister Erik Ullenhag noted that there was “discrimination in these areas” where the riots occurred. Swedish Justice Minister Beatrice Ask tried explaining that “Social exclusion is a very serious cause of many problems, and we understand that.”
Other pundits blamed white flight and unofficial “segregation,” “marginalization,” “institutional racism,” “disenfranchisement,” “Thatcherite trickle-down economics,” “cuts in state benefits,” and that old standby, “wealth inequality.” Again and again, the paid megaphone-mouths of multiculturalism blamed Sweden’s government and native citizens for “failing” to integrate a largely hostile, pervasively unskilled, and resolutely unassimilable horde of parasitic cultural invaders.
No one seemed to note that Sweden boasts one of the cushiest social safety nets on Earth and that in nearly all cases, the immigrants enjoyed a level of safety and prosperity completely unknown to them in the homelands from which they fled. None dared to point out that whatever wealth they accrued at the expense of indigenous Swedish taxpayers was highly “unequal” compared to the meager existences they”d scratched out in Somalia and Afghanistan.
Although Swedish police adopted a non-intervention policy when dealing with most rioters, it did not stop meter maids from issuing tickets to the owners of cars that had been torched.
Last Week’s Most Captivating and Infuriating News Stories
HATEFUL COMMENTS FROM THE RIGHT (FINALLY!)
After enduring decades of accusations that they relentlessly spewed out boiling rancid vats of hateful vitriol”accusations that were long on hyperbole but short on evidence”two right-wing pundits finally stepped forward with a pair of comments that actually seemed to encourage violence against their political foes. Radio host Pete Santilli said the following about Hillary Clinton’s vagina, which we’ll assume is a big target:
I want to shoot her right in the vagina and I don’t want her to die right away; I want her to feel the pain….I’m supporting our troops by saying we need to try, convict, and shoot Hillary Clinton in the vagina.
Ms. Clinton’s vagina was not available for comment.
Santilli also said that “Barack Obama needs to be tried, convicted, and shot for crimes against the United States of America.” A Secret Service spokesman (try saying that ten times fast) vowed that his agency will “take the appropriate follow up action” in regard to Santilli’s remarks.
Radio host and Fox News contributor Andrea Tantaros, decrying recent revelations that the IRS was targeting conservative groups and the Justice Department was spying on reporters, encouraged the physical assault of Obama voters:
This is Obama’s America. It’s like the Soviet Union. He said he would change the country. He said it…and a lot of people voted for him. And if you see any of those people today, do me a favor and punch them in the face.
WHITE POLS ON DOPE
In response to a Toronto Star story (try saying that ten times fast) alleging that reporters had seen a cell-phone video of the city’s corpulent mayor Rob Ford “inhaling from what appears to be a glass crack pipe,” the oleaginous Ford finally broke his silence and said, “I do not use crack cocaine, nor am I an addict of crack cocaine.” It bears noting that Ford did not at any juncture mention whether he eats crack cocaine. In Pennsylvania, former Washington County Judge Paul Pozonsky has been charged with stealing cocaine that was used as evidence in cases over which he presided. In Illinois, St. Clair County Circuit Judge Michael Cook appeared in court wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the words BAD IS MY MIDDLE NAME to face counts of heroin possession and firearms infractions. The charges came only a few weeks after a colleague of Cook’s, Judge Joe Christ, was found dead of a cocaine overdose in a hunting lodge that at the time had been inhabited only by Cook and Christ.
MAKIN’ IT GAY ALL THE WAY
The Boy Scouts of America voted to accept openly, mincingly, screamingly gay boys into their ranks while maintaining a ban against gay Scoutmasters. Tellingly, the increasingly pushy and flamingly hypocritical gay lobby has not yet sought legislation that would permit straight Boy Scouts to attend adult gay bars. Texas Governor Rick Perry refrained from picking his nose long enough to say he was “greatly disappointed” in the BSA’s decision.
In Florida, the usual suspects are screaming HOMOPHOBIA regarding statutory-rape charges filed against Kaitlyn Hunt, an 18-year-old who allegedly had sex with a girl four years her junior. A Florida state attorney responded by saying that the state prosecutes 25 to 30 such cases every year, most of them involving heterosexual couples.
An estimated 100 gaybirds engaged (engayged?) in what is described as “Ukraine’s first gay pride march.” Counter-protestors allegedly chanted “Ukraine is not America, Kiev is not Sodom.” At another unsanctioned gay rally in Moscow, police detained at least 30 protestors and their furiously icon-waving antagonists. In both stories, news reporters used words such as “homophobia” and “homophobic” as if such terms had even a smidgen of objective, journalistic meaning.
MEXICANS (AND MEXICAN’TS)
In the same week that Barack Obama and Joe Biden were feting illegal aliens in the Oval Office while apparently snubbing Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, A federal judge ruled that Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s office was guilty of racial profiling. As Congress plans to shove through so-called “immigration reform” legislation like a fist through a colon, Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions warned that such a bill would “hammer working Americans.” And coke-scorched actor Charlie Sheen, set to star in Machete Kills, will use his birth name Carlos Irwin Estévez in the feature. White America could not be reached for comment about whether it lamented the loss.
