Thanks for the ping, Pokey ;-)
Posted on 04/05/2004 3:15:48 PM PDT by Pokey78
"We're Sending You A Cluster Bomb From Jesus." I can't quite believe my old Loose Ends confrere Alistair Beaton has written a song by this name. But apparently so: Bush and Blair sing it in his new satire of the war on terror at the Birmingham Rep. Charles Spencer pronounced the show a stinker. "There is," he wrote, "one kind of laughter I loathe, and Follow My Leader is full of it. It is the smug, complacent laughter of theatre-goers revelling in their own sense of moral superiority as a dramatist shamelessly panders to their prejudices."
Alistair was always a terrible old Leftie but I don't remember him as such a panderer. The last time I saw him he was doing a Radio 4 show called Fourth Column and I did a little bit on it one week which he liked. "That's what we need more of," he said. "Comedy that's edgy and dangerous." It was so edgy and dangerous and radical and exciting that I have absolutely no memory of what it was. But in those days that was his general line on comedy. In the pub one Saturday morning after Loose Ends, he explained his approach to writing Ned Sherrin's monologue. "It's not enough to say, ‘Fergie. God, what a fat cow.' There's got to be more to it than that."
I forget what more there had to be. But, even so, "We're Sending You A Cluster Bomb From Jesus" sounds awfully like the war on terror's answer to "Fergie. God, what a fat cow". Indeed, the show's big sing-along Fergie-ises an entire nation: "Let's all be anti-American.
What's so wrong with that? They're much too loud. And they're far too rich. And one in three is incredibly fat." Wouldn't that lyric be even more hilarious if it were "two in three"?
Now I should declare that I haven't seen the show, and I've no plans to be in London during the run, assuming it runs until 2017, and it could be that our man Spencer is all wrong. As a rule, the urge to pander is the great weakness of comedy, and fatal in a satirist. Satire depends on stretching and thereby illuminating reality. "We're Sending You A Cluster Bomb From Jesus" is a flight from reality. Indeed, in its perverse evasion, it's the sort of satire a real satirist would satirise.
One can be pro-war or anti-war, but the notion that the fundamentalism that's threatening the world is Bush-Blair Christianity is so far off the mark as to be pathological. I mean, OK, it was pretty funny when Paxman asked the Prime Minister if he and the President prayed together. Those goofy fundamentalists, eh? But then it's also pretty funny surely when Jack Straw goes to Teheran to hang with the mullahs and, even though he's not a Muslim, he's obliged to do that "peace and blessings be upon his name" parenthesis whenever he mentions the Prophet Mohammed. I mean, what's the deal with that? Anyone would think they were a coercive theocracy like Washington, right? Maybe Alistair Beaton could write a comedy song about that. Right after he moves to a secure location.
The contours of our epic clash of civilisations are clear now: Christians are a cheap laugh and in control of the Bush Administration, Jews are sinister and in control of the Bush Administration, and Muslims... whoa, best not to mention them, man. You don't want to be Islamophobic. You can sing "We're Sending You A Cluster Bomb From Jesus" because there are no "fundamentalist Christians" within 20 miles of the Birmingham Rep - or at least none that is going to be waiting for you at the stage door. "We're Sending You A Schoolgirl Bomb From Allah" might attract notice from a livelier crowd. If you're going to be provocative, it's best to do it with people who can't be provoked.
Fortunately, there are still a few genuine satirists around - for example, the chaps who put together the EU report on rising anti-Semitism. "The largest group of the perpetrators of anti-Semitic activities appears to be young, disaffected white Europeans," said the official summary, introducing us to the concept of Euromaths. If you troubled yourself to look inside, it turned out that some nine per cent of anti-Semitic attacks were by young white males. The remaining 91 per cent were by... well, let's not get into that. In the EU, nine per cent is enough to make you the "largest group". One day, there will be only one tattooed knuckle-dragging white skinhead left on the continent. But he'll single-handedly be officially responsible for the majority of anti-Semitic attacks.
Did you see that story the other day about the Florentine Boar in Derby? His statue was put up in Arboretum Park in Derby in 1840, but he got his head blown off during the Second World War. And now plans for a re-capitated model have been dropped "for fear of offending Muslims", as the Mail On Sunday put it. As Councillor Suman Gupta put it: "If the statue is put back in the Arboretum, I have been told it will not be there the next day." Much like Alistair if he added a Muslim vaudeville routine to the Second Act.
I wonder if the Florentine Boar will be one of those small historical footnotes, marking the beginning of the banishment of porcine representation from British culture. In the new movie Looney Tunes: Back In Action, Porky Pig sits in the Warner Bros commissary complaining that he's been told to lose the stutter: "It's not easy b-b-b-being p-p-p-politically correct." Maybe for the UK DVD release it would be easier just to lose the pig. Perhaps in a year or two's time, Alistair Beaton will be living high off the hog bringing home the bacon because he got the gig to write the replacement scenes for the more multiculturally acceptable Mustapha Mongoose. Or perhaps he'll be listening to a BBC commissioning editor tell him: "Sorry, the governors nixed the Pinky and Perky revival. But what can you do? I like edgy and dangerous as much as the next man. But that's too dangerous. Hey, how about Edgy and Dangerous? One's a hamster, one's a neutered tom."
I feel honored to breathe the same air as Mark Steyn.
Thanks for the ping, Pokey ;-)
Mark Steyn's pin-pointed the character of Hanoi Jean Kerry's shrinking base of support...MUD
Good line
tagline material!
I cant tell you how many times I see you pinging me as AdminMod, SidebarMod, (UnKnown), and my personal favorite, "JohnHuang2"
John, You are an "ACE" at being spot on with you "2 Cents" but you need to work on who you signed on as :-)
P.S. God Bless You John :-)
Absolutely.
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