Cultural Criticism of Rap

 

Rap has persevered in the decades since the decline of its predecessors, the end of what used to be called Black music, in the 1980s, in conjunction with the predominance of pop music, which had been manufactured and sanitised to maximise sales. Only once the music scene became totally dominated by music which had no relation to anything outside of its bubble do we find rappers could lay claim to authenticity. The success of so-called 'Gangsta Rap' comes down to its drawing upon a certain view of the lives led by the Black American under-class. The fact that these rappers then go on to celebrate their success in a rags-to-riches narrative meshes well with the false promise of meritocracy. We now live with the worst of both worlds, where it seems no one is pushing boundaries far enough.



"Better to burn-out than fade away..."

I could have written a piece for the twentieth year since Kurt Cobain killed himself. I have no time for the debate over whether or not Cobain did kill himself. I think it's much more important that we remember Cobain's work and not his death. Especially, as the man's suicide note stated "It's better to burn-out than fade away" and there may be something in that. In regards to mortality we shouldn't despair so much, finite lives make their mark and in the case of great artists they have their own piece of eternity. For the twentieth anniversary of Nevermind's release I posted an article (see extract below) drawing upon Fred Pfeil's observations of Kurt Cobain's swipes against repressive masculinity.

The example of choice is the music video of In Bloom in which the band are introduced on an Ed Sullivan-esque TV show as "three fine young men from Seattle" complete with combed hair and matching sports coats. The video is shot in grainy black-and-white to give it the feel of the early 60s, the days before there was such a thing as MTV, Heavy Metal or Punk Rock never mind Grunge.  The effect is a Brechtian distance, the verfremdungseffekt, the point of which was to encourage the audience to take a critical view of the events on stage. So the trio bob about cheerfully as the crowd of pubescent girls get all hysterical as the quiet opening line stands incongruous to the scene "Sell kids for food, weather changes moods". The immediate subject of mockery is the "one" who "knows all our pretty songs", who likes to sing along and shoot his gun but "knows not what it means"; later adding "We can have some more, nature is a whore". The position to be ridiculed is that to comprehend these lyrics is to "shoot a gun", e.g. to possess a phallus.

My anarchist buddy Ted says I should've brought up the fact that the songs Polly and Rape Me were really about highlighting atrocious violence towards women. Originally, the two tracks were to be paired together, played back-to-back, in memory of a teenage girl, who was kidnapped, raped, and tortured. Fortunately, the girl escaped and the rapist Gerald Friend was arrested and is currently rotting in prison. Far from being works celebrating violence against women, as they have been confused for in the past, the songs are very much anti-rape and ultimately life-affirmative.

What the Schmoo?

I'm going to start with a story which was told by the American cartoonist Al Capp. The story is about a creature called the Schmoo. The Schmoo was 10 inches high and something like a pear in shape and a beautiful creamy white in colour, it had no arms, tiny feet and big whiskers under it's nose. The Schmoo had only one desire, to serve the needs of human beings and it was well-equipped to do so. Its skin could be made into any kind of fabric. Its flesh was edible. Its dead body could go brick-hard and be used for building. And its whiskers, well its whiskers had more uses than you can imagine. If you looked at a Schmoo with real hunger in your eye it dropped dead in rapture because you wanted it, after first cooking itself into your favourite flavour.

Well, since they multiplied rapidly there were plenty of Schmoos for everybody and they even looked good in the environment. Almost everyone approved of the Schmoos. But some people weren't keen on them. The rich capitalists hated the Schmoos. Since Schmoos provided everything people needed nobody had to work for capitalists anymore because nobody needed to make the wages to buy the things capitalists sold. So as the Schmoos spread across the face of America the capitalists began to lose their position and their power. And this made them take drastic action. They got the government to tell the people that the Schmoo was un-American, the Schmoo was causing chaos undermining the social order, people weren't turning up for work and they weren't going to the department stores to buy anything.

Well the government propaganda convinced the people and the President ordered the FBI to gather the Schmoos and gun them down.

          GA Cohen, Against Capitalism

Nevermind 20 years of Nirvana.

"I wouldn't wear a tie-dye-T-shirt unless it was dyed with the urine of Phil Collins and the blood of Jerry Garcia." - Kurt Cobain

It is 20 years since the release of Nirvana's second album Nevermind which soon shot Michael Jackson down from the Number One spot and launched the band from relative obscurity into the mainstream. The band had clearly moved forward from the screeching anger and darkness, the almost metallic sound, of Bleach in 1989. Before the album came out Kurt Cobain filled in NME about his ideas for Nevermind. When asked to explain the title Kurt said "Most people would just as soon forget or say 'never mind' than to take a can of spray paint, or start a band. People just don't do things very often anymore. I'm kind of disturbed by it." This is a desperate complaint typical of Generation X, for whom all great ideas had been diminished in some way as the "End of History" was heralded and pop culture was reduced to just another market. The angst hangs in his words as he goes on to add "It'd be just as easy to spray paint 'Kill George Bush' over and over again. Whether that would have any impact on anything or not, it doesn't matter, it's still fun."

Bare this in mind when you hear the lines in Smells like Teen Spirit "Load up on guns, bring your friends" and "It's fun to lose and to pretend". Cobain later claimed it was a mockery of the thought of "having a revolution" (note not 'starting' a revolution) though it is a "nice thought" the song remains sarcastic. The song itself consists of contradictory sentiments which range from the restless calls "Hello, Hello, Hello..." to the passive demands for "entertainment". We might designate the song as rudderless, for it is without clear direction, but then we will have missed the point. Teen Spirit was an attempt to encapsulate the feeling of angst when confronted with the Absurd - the indifference of the universe - which entails contradictions and in turn can provoke a certain reaction. It is a work of subversion. In the interview with NME Cobain describes the song as "posing as the enemy to infiltrate the mechanics of the system, to slowly start its rot from the inside. It's an inside job, it starts with the custodians and the cheerleaders."

Before Kurt Cobain decided to give up the ghost, and suck on the end of a shotgun, Fred Pfeil noted the potential in the rock masculinity posited by Nirvana. In his preoccupation with white straight masculinity Pfeil contrasted it with the versions of rock masculinity that had come before in the music of Bruce Springsteen and Guns N' Roses. For Pfeil there is a complex message of racial and sexual differentiation in both Bruce's and Axl's version of masculinity. Fred Pfeil argues Springsteen's moral authenticity is in part the nostalgia which contains it; the viciousness and instability of Axil are in bed together. The attitudes of Kurt Cobain might be described as individualist in the profoundly anarchic, anti-masculinist and anti-homophobic vein. It is not that Nirvana presented an alternative masculinity, at least coherently, though it did thoroughly reject and mock what had come before it. So the band goes to the gender breakdown from sexualisation. Rather than a simply refusal to be sexually fetishised (e.g. to cover up and avoid nudity) Nirvana looks to subvert the conventional equation between white male band and white male fan.

The example of choice is the music video of In Bloom in which the band are introduced on an Ed Sullivan-esque TV show as "three fine young men from Seattle" complete with combed hair and matching sports coats. The video is shot in grainy black-and-white to give it the feel of the early 60s, the days before there was such a thing as MTV, Heavy Metal or Punk Rock never mind Grunge.  The effect is a Brechtian distance, the verfremdungseffekt, the point of which was to encourage the audience to take a critical view of the events on stage. So the trio bob about cheerfully as the crowd of pubescent girls get all hysterical as the quiet opening line stands incongruous to the scene "Sell kids for food, weather changes moods". The immediate subject of mockery is the "one" who "knows all our pretty songs", who likes to sing along and shoot his gun but "knows not what it means"; later adding "We can have some more, nature is a whore". The position to be ridiculed is that to comprehend these lyrics is to "shoot a gun", e.g. to possess a phallus.

Suddenly the video jumps to footage of the same band on the same show in quite a different get-up. The long ragged hair is back, the sports coats swapped for dresses. The leap away from the neat and clean-cut Americana which preceded such a wild lurching genderfuck of a performance. A mock duel follows only for Cobain to straddle Novoselic, soon the guitar is discarded by the lead singer as the stage is trashed and he makes it back to the microphone with his hands pressed into his groin as if from some great pain - a kick in the nuts or is it that time of the month? The audience remains enthralled, the screeching of the girls is incessant, as if they're watching a totally different show. As the show comes to a stop the host re-emerges to inform us that these fellows are going to be "really big stars." The break is made with the traditional rock masculinity with its populist appeal to the white working-class market, the hidden haunts of Eric Clapton's racism. Cobain refused to "be a man" in this sense, while Nirvana turned this into a collective refusal. Perhaps if Cobain had lived longer we would have more than just this blue-print that hints at a new masculinity.

The Zeitgeist of '68.

Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era — the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. . . .

History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time — and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.

My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights — or very early mornings — when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder's jacket . . . booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that. . . .

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

Interlude: The above excerpt is the 'Wave Speech' from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas written by Hunter S Thompson in 1971 just as the zeitgeist of the 60s came crashing down to earth. The cultural revolution of '68 was assimilated into the dominant ideology where sexual liberation, free-speech, equal rights for black people and women became secondary parts in the system as a whole. The individualism of the 60s burst through the old hierarchies of power and prissy conventions to establish itself as the status quo. The rise of a ferocious turbo-charged capitalism came a decade later after the stagnancy and disappointment of the 1970s. Fear and Loathing is about the collapse of the zeitgeist in the early 70s as Hippie spiritualism is subsumed in hedonist despair. The 60s left to us a lesson about power which was summed up by Thompson as "the essential old mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody - or at least some force - is tending the Light at the end of the tunnel."

David Starkey, Black Culture & the Riots.

Wiggers with Attitude?

In the aftermath of the riots David Starkey decided it was wise to bring up Enoch Powell and argue that a specific point made in the 'Rivers of Blood' speech was "absolutely right". He was keen to reassure the audience that Powell was wrong in that it was not "inter-communal violence" and that it is cultural rather than racial. It would be generous to David Starkey to designate him as a cultural chauvinist, which is perfectly consistent with the monarchism and nationalism to which he subscribes. David Starkey is a provocateur in the tradition of an insolent dinner guest crowing just to offend and shock. In this instance the bespectacled historian was at dinner with an Oxbridge liberal, a leftist and a crime novelist. The outrage was over comments such as "The Tiber did not foam with blood but flames lambent, they wrapped around Tottenham and wrapped around Clapham." As if that were not bad enough Starkey went on to claim the problem is that "the whites have become black" and that the black politician David Lammy sounds "white" when you close your eyes.

At first he pinned the riots as an "extension of commercialism" and the exuberant consumerism of British society, though he is intelligent enough to understand that the consumer boom was born out of the implosion of social democracy and the emergence of Thatcherism in it's wake. Therefore to manage the contradiction between rapacious individualism and the moral opposition to senseless violence Starkey wheels in racially charged rhetoric which will scandalise the liberal intelligentsia and split the commentariat down the middle. At which point the working-classes can make a cameo appearance in the guise of the angry crowd yelling "Enoch was right!" It is now highly unlikely that there will be any debate over the issues behind the riots as the media discusses whether or not David Starkey is a racist. Notice David Starkey asks of Owen Jones "You glorify Rap?" and then backs off as Dreda Say Mitchell points out that the rappers only reflect the materialism of the world. Brian Cox was right to call Starkey "utterly corrupt" last year.

It could have been a conscious effort to further derail the political discourse away from any meaningful discussion of inequality and police brutality. It could just be a simple case of racism masquerading as cultural conservatism. Time will tell if David Starkey distances himself in the future from such remarks. The insinuation of a respectable historian that this is somehow related to an imported "black culture" of crime is just false. In the halcyon days of vanilla Britain, at the finest hour of our country, back in 1940 juvenile crime accounted for 48% of all arrests and there were over 4,500 cases of looting from then until 1941. There were even cases of firemen looting burned-out shops, teenagers stripped the clothes off of corpses to sell and some even cut-off the fingers of the dead to get at their rings. These could not have just been the "wiggers" who had watched too much MTV and absorbed an awful lot of 50 Cent's anger before going out to spit it out into society. As a result of this level of bullshiting we're unlikely to see any real solutions in Britain, just a right-ward shift that will lead us down the road to more riots in the future.

Cultural Blackness?

Originally the issue of race was raised on Newsnight before Starkey crawled out from his hole, it was Gavin Esler who wondered if the riots had anything to do with "black culture" or even MTV. We should bare in mind the relations of base and superstructure when we're talking about culture in this way, that the superstructure is generated by the base in order to justify and defend itself. Simultaneously the superstructure has the potential to undermine the base in spite of the interdependent relations between them. Take Rap music, usually it defends the status quo in it's portrayal of a anti-political and anti-intellectual form of underground capitalism in which collective organisations (e.g. gangs) can still function meaningfully. It at once embodies society's institutional corruption and it's opposite with an emphasis on a warped set of codes and rituals. The misogyny and homophobia found rampant in the music videos and lyrics is born out of a thoroughly impotent masculinity.

It is not coincidental that Rap music becomes incredibly popular and influential in the late 1980s onwards at the peak of Reaganism. Look at the socio-economic situation for young black men in particular, especially in the US where there was a brief opening for black people in the 70s as civil rights were gained through harsh struggle. But with the financialisation of the economy millions of African-Americans became part of a superfluous population. The black economy of drugs provides an alternative to the business system which has excluded black people for decades. Not only is it an alternative to financial capitalism, where the wasps of Harvard still thrive, it provides a welfare system that has been completely destroyed in the US. It is also an expression of rage against the police for the murder and persecution of black people, NWA captured the anger bubbling beneath the surface just before the battering of Rodney King sparked the LA riots in 1992. Ultimately, mainstream rappers are only looking to establish a black aristocracy which stands as a reflection of the white elites.

Rap music is not the source of riots and crime, rather it is linked to it through economic circumstances. The riots were not a coherent and organised expression of political dissent. It was mass-rage against the police along with elements of the same consumerism we have all indulged in. Where does this anger come from? In 1997 and 1998 there were around 8,000 stop-and-searches, by 2008 to 2009 that had risen to 150,000. The use of Section 60 between 2005 and 2010 has increased by 300%, originally Section 60 was introduced to combat football hooliganism; over the same time period the stop-and-searches of black people increased by 650%. From 1998 to 2010 over 330 people have died mysteriously in police custody, surprisingly 75% of the people who died were white and not so surprisingly 90% were male aged between 25 and 44. Let alone the level of unemployment and economic stagnation in this country which has plagued the poor for years. The decisions undertaken by the rioters were not justified, but the grievances are legitimate and real.

The Media Diagnoses of the Riots.

The commentariat have peddled a variety of theories around the recent riots we have seen in Britain. The common characteristic across the mainstream media, with a few exceptions here and there, specifically The Guardian and The Independent, is that there are no excuses for the violence. Inequality and police brutality are not excuses for this kind of behaviour. But generally the media have been scrambling around in search of answers for the explosion of rage onto the streets of Britain. These are just some of the bizarre theories that the press are running to prop up the easy answers of the political class, as well as some of the views popular on the internet these days about every issue and this issue is no different.

Living on Benefits, Why not loot JD Sports? A culture of dependency and entitlement has been engineered to secure votes for the Labour Party. The end result has led to a significant number of the British population scrounging and lying idle with impunity. Then these pampered scum decide to get up off of the sofa and raid JD Sports even though they're loaded from all the generous benefits they've been showered with for years and years. Why shop at Ted Baker when you've been thousands of pounds to piss away in tax-payer's money? Why not trash JD Sports even though you can afford better? Perhaps these people would grow better values rather than ganja if we cut off all state-benefits. While we're at it we might as well sell-off the schools and the NHS for these ungrateful yobs.

It's all them Bloody Foreigners! The riots are the result of uncontrolled mass-immigration and the state-doctrine of multiculturalism. The participants are black and this is not just a coincidence. It has gone on for long enough, the problem is "feral black gangstas and Islamist fast-breeding sex pests are the problem." Multiculturalism has failed, we need to return to British values and start with shooting rubber bullets and firing water cannons at the mob just as we have done in Northern Ireland for so long - and with sexy results! The time has come to send these people back and sort our country out! Because isn't that what we really defeated Hitler for? If only it wasn't for the international left-wing conspiracy to subdue the unremitting greatness of the White Man by telling not to use the n-word and reminding him about the suffering of black people.

It's not Blacks, it's Black Culture. On Newsnight Gavin Esler turned the debate about causes to the "black culture" of short hair, bling, guns, drugs, gangs, bitches and Rap music. So these young people have been riled up by the sounds and sights of "black culture", Paul Routledge identified rap music as "the pernicious culture of hatred around rap music, which glorifies violence and loathing of authority." These youths have been watching far too much MTV which has led them to leave bookshops intact only to steal immodium on mass from Boots. We better tell 50 Cent to tone down the violent anti-police and pro-crack rhetoric because it's gone too far. Better yet for the country, shoot rubber bullets at anyone who can say "innit" and bring back Showaddywaddy!

It's the Blairite Bullshit! The Labour Party has been soft on crime for years but never so much as it was when Tony Blair led it in government from 1997 to 2007. David Hughes informs us in a minuscule article, almost as minuscule as his Johnson, that it is Tony Blair who led Britain down the road towards bleeding-heart liberalism. "A year before he became Prime Minister he delivered a speech on law and order that came close to condoning shop theft. Blair said that "hard-pressed" single mothers or pensioners pocketing "treats" were not a serious concern. He told a meeting of retailers that the real threat came from organised gangs." Before you could say tiny Johnson the Labourites were giving jacuzzis and X-Box 360s to hard-core criminals.

There's just too much Fucking! The breakdown of family values, which in turn led to the collapse of moral values, was inevitable as the liberal elite has instigated a cultural revolution of permissiveness. The "chickens have well and truly come home to roost" for the liberal experiment of letting people fuck around led to the shameful rise of the Single Mum! No wonder the kids of today are running amok in the street and burning cars, if only their parents had sexual ethics then they wouldn't have even been born! Melanie Phillips claims the Labourites introduced "the sexual free-for-all of ‘lifestyle choice’" and "told girls that they could, and should, go it alone as mothers." The rest is history, from single-parent family to stealing a carpet.

Bring Back Sir Paul and I don't mean McCartney! At The Daily Mail James Slack (an appropriate name for such a fopdoodle) wondered if the departure of Sir Paul Stephenson from the Met over the phone hacking scandal contributed to the riots in any way. After all the "vast experience" of Sir Paul could have come in handy against these bastards. The carnage had to be stopped and only Sir Paul could help them, he was a 'good copper' with an "iron will" by all accounts but then the political class ripped him from the heart of the Met in a fit of "lust for media blood" in the midst of the phone-hacking scandal that has engulfed The News of the World along with the whole of News International, the Conservatives and the Met. The left-wing establishment is determined to undermine the police and let off these rent-a-mob rioters.

This is Generation GTA! An unnamed police officer, speaking to The Evening Standard, blamed the riots on the ultra-violent game series Grand Theft Auto in which players are encouraged to commit mass-murder. The officer told the paper that these "Kids out of control. When I was young it was all Pacman and board games. Now they're playing Grand Theft Auto and want to live it for themselves." The entire GTA series has taught the adults of tomorrow that it is proper to go for a good looting just for fun, even if it means shooting innocent bystanders and killing hookers after you've banged them in your Volkswagen GTI. It has turned them into philistines! Where's the decency of Pacman gone? Shoot the Houser brothers! Life would be so much simpler if we were all colourful round objects bouncing around in a maze...

These people are lacking in... intelligence, aspiration and responsibility. This is what led to the looting of stores! It is what has made them unemployable, so they languish on the dole or get involved in dealing drugs. A "stunted feral view of the world" is behind the violence and looting, which was nurtured by a rampant entitlement culture that rewards the undeserving "vermin" that make up the under-class in Britain. There was no police to stop it, so the irresponsibility and stupidity of these people was allowed to run amok. The lowest of the low do not deserve the houses they've been given by the state and we should seize them back. That's the way to combat homelessness before the Olympics! The rights of these fucking muppets outweigh the responsibilities they endure and the only way to deal with these animals is to restore consequences to their actions. There are literally thousands of undeserving pricks in our society and we shouldn't tolerate them stepping out of line.

I blame Wayne Rooney. The former editor of The Telegraph Max Hastings blamed the poor role-model that Wayne Rooney has been for kids today and wrote in The Daily Heil, he said: "How do you inculcate values in a child whose only role model is footballer Wayne Rooney -- a man who is bereft of the most meagre human graces?" Sure they can learn a good ork impression, master the language of the Scouser and maybe kick a few through a window or two... but where are the morals going to come from?! The "wild beasts" in the streets are no better than the polar bear that had the audacity to eat an Etonian called Horatio, it was only the natural instincts that were being followed and no one will shoot them for it "unlike the bear". Oh if only Diana were here!

The Animal Spirit of Rupert Murdoch.

Risk and Reward.

Originally, Rupert Murdoch won the bid to takeover The News of the World in 1968 from old money Sir William Carr and soon cornered the shareholders before shoving Carr out of the picture completely in 1969. Sir William Carr had picked Murdoch over Bob Maxwell because Maxwell was a Czech and he found Rupert Murdoch to be a "gentleman", the Establishment found Murdoch most "ungentlemanly" for giving Carr the boot. Murdoch went on to buy The Sun and drag John Profumo through the mud once again for shagging Christine Keeler back in 1963 when Profumo was Secretary of State for War. The affair had scandalised high society and wrecked a government. The issue for the Establishment was that Profumo had been rehabilitated after his charitable work in the East End, Murdoch was simply out to destroy a man for profit. Now with the public disgusted Rupert Murdoch has slashed off the infected limb of his own media-body, there is no room for sentimentality with this old fart. There are bigger things at stake, as in BSkyB.

Everyone was just so appalled to find that the media empire of Rupert Murdoch is not just limited to a narrow right-wing agenda to prop up his favourite politicians and it has reflexively hacked the phones of not just the rich and powerful but dead soldiers too. We find that the Conservative Party and the police - both of whom have helped Murdoch crush a strike in the past - are entangled in the conspiracy ran out of the Murdoch red-top. It is clear that there is no low that the parasites in the press will not stoop to for a good yawn. Of course, it took the revelation of bugs in the phones of the victims of terrorism, warfare and serial killers as celebrities are fair game and politicians are the scum of the earth to most people. It should be no surprise if we consider that it was the Murdoch press that published vicious lies about the Hillsborough disaster, including the smears that fans robbed the dead, attacked police officers and urinated on paramedics. To some it would seem that Rebekah Brooks has proven that gingers have no soul! But it is Rupert Murdoch who has no soul whilst the lower minions would only be replaced if they were not complicit.

After the most recent revelations in the phone-hacking scandal I wonder if Kelvin MacKenzie is still thanking God for Rupert Murdoch. No doubt the answer from that meat-headed shit sack would be an emphatic "YES!" Murdoch would express no less from a Thatcherite pig he has fed well over the years in his role as editor of The Sun. MacKenzie maintained The Sun as a buffet for the working-class where they were spoon-fed a diet of sex, death and football meshed in a conservative agenda on immigration, gay rights, multiculturalism and welfare. Kelvin MacKenzie once said of his readers "You just don't understand the readers, do you, eh? He's the bloke you see in the pub, a right old fascist, wants to send the wogs back, buy his poxy council house, he's afraid of the unions, afraid of the Russians, hates the queers and the weirdos and drug dealers. He doesn't want to hear about that stuff (serious news)." Whatever pays the mortgage is alright at News International.

The public outrage struck as the Yuppie Mephistopheles was on the verge of the biggest deal of his life and it has been delayed until September, which gives the Mephistopheles some breathing room and some time to do a bit of "spring cleaning" to ensure a smooth deal before the year is out. There is little chance that the Coalition will oppose the demands of the man who threw the support of 40% of British media behind the Conservative Party in 2010 and, as usual, Murdoch's man won the election. This should not be a surprise as Murdoch backed Margaret Thatcher, John Major and Tony Blair. That is the reason we found David Cameron was ever so keen to put Jeremy Hunt on the job after the hilarious outburst from Vince Cable, who would apparently act as a "Gang of One" against Rupert Murdoch. Of course, Vince Fable was not meant to be biased against Murdoch so the government found someone who could ease the deal through in a quiet way. That's where Jez Cunt came in handy!

In his article in The Guardian Kelvin MacKenzie inquired "Cynical eyebrows were raised when Murdoch gave assurances over the independent future of Sky News. Why?" First of all, out of the 247 editors who work for Rupert Murdoch none opposed the Iraq war. It is clear that there is no problem of independence when all the editors are reactionary pigs. Even Rupert Murdoch has admitted that News International supported the foreign policy of the Bush administration on the Middle East in particular. It was Rupert Murdoch who immediately throw Fox behind the Republican Party in the 1980s and even more so in the 1990s, beginning with a fawning tribute to Ronald Reagan at the Republican Convention. There was a cultural shift in emphasis at Fox when Murdoch took over, race issues and AIDS were at the top of the list at the time. The channel became a lot more sophisticated after Roger Ailes, a long-time mudslinger for the GOP, was put in charge of the newly launched Fox News Channel. It was Rupert Murdoch who contributed $1 million to the Republican Party in 2010.

Remember this is the same man who has meant to have taken on the Establishment, it took "guts" and "management skill" to do so according to Kelvin MacKenzie who has nothing but celebratory words for the Murdoch monopoly. News International is a family business which Rupert built up from his inheritance and will no doubt be passed down to young James in a few years. This is not particularly different from the Old Boys' Network of the Establishment, which Murdoch has railed against only as a buccaneer capitalist with no time for tradition and society. It was not "risk" that the Murdoch press was built on, but cold calculations which oiled the wheels and restrained anyone who got in the way of a smooth running operation. Notice as soon as the advertising goes AWOL there is an immediate reaction from Murdoch, we find Glenn Beck has been axed as his rating dwindled and Waitrose boycotted his lunacy. It is the same at The News of the World, Murdoch was "standing by" Rebekah Brooks and the paper until the public disgust was too costly.

Just as Kelvin MacKenzie wishes that there were hundreds of Rupert Murdochs in Britain to "wipe out" unemployment, as if the cure of unemployment is entrepreneurial adventurism, we find that it is the staff at The News of the World who are paying the price for the contemptible practices of a media outlet. Though it must be noted that the individuals who write for the Murdoch press are there because they hold particular beliefs in most cases, otherwise they would be somewhere else and this goes for the BBC crowd too. At the same time, it is not the case that every employee (particularly the lowest of the low) of News International is a right-wing maniac who has enriched themselves at the expense of the political discourse. It is not a concession of the 'trickle-down' variety to be concerned for the jobs that have been destroyed by Murdoch to secure a grubby business deal. This is precisely what the "animal spirit of capitalism" is all about, Rupert Murdoch kills jobs not creates jobs.

As Laurie Penny points out it is imperative that the momentum of rage against News International is allowed to fade away only for the Mephistopheles to assimilate BSkyB. The Conservatives want this all to go away for obvious reasons given the close relationship between government and media, let alone Andy Coulson's role in Cameron's anti-climactic rise. The Labour Party are clearly impotent with Ed Miliband making a pathetic call for Rebekah Brooks to resign, it looks even more pathetic as the entire newspaper is thrown away just a few days later. This means that the media oligarch is at least responsive to public outrage against his odious rags. Perhaps it is time to build a bonfire out of copies of The Sun and The Times, for we cannot allow this man to buy 60% of BSkyB and dominate over 40% of the media in this country. The concentration of such power in the hands of one man is intolerable just from a slight glimpse at his record.

Sign this petition and attend any protests you can!

Race and Private Property in Clybourne Park.

Clybourne Park begins in 1959 just as Russ and Bev are selling their desirable two-bed room house in a respectable neighbourhood for a knock-down price. The low price offered by Russ enables the black family to move into a predominantly white area of Chicago, which alarms the neighbours and Russ finds himself arguing with Karl over what should be done. As the play was written in reaction to A Raisin in the Sun and that would lead us to conclude that the family about to move into the neighbourhood are the Youngers. The Youngers had come into a great deal of money and decided to move into a better neighbourhood, which just so happened to be white only to find they're not welcome. Clybourne Park then jumps forward 50 years to 2009 and the tables have been turned. Now it is a white couple, about to have a child, looking to move into the same neighbourhood, which is now predominantly black, with the intention of knocking down the same house to build their own family home.

America changed a great deal from 1959 to 2009, particularly in regards to race and property relations. In 1959 the conflict was still raging between the US and the Soviet Union and the "red scare" McCarthyist witch-hunts were still in the back of people's minds. Typically Karl invokes the Soviet Union when Russ tells him to leave. JFK, the first Catholic President, was about to be elected. The Civil Rights movement had just got started, segregation was still in place in the US and African-Americans were still deprived of the right to vote. Fast-forward 50 years and there is a black family in the White House, a presidential palace built by slaves. The references to the Korean war are swapped for references to the war in Iraq, from the Cold War to the "War on Terrorism". Kevin has three relatives fighting abroad and has a support the troops attitude to the war. Russ and Bev left Clybourne Park to get away from the house where their son Kenneth hung himself after coming home from the Korean war.

Since 1959 the US has become ever-increasingly unequal as the social democratic policies initiated under Roosevelt have been eroded. The brief opening of jobs and rights for African-Americans began to be closed in the 1970s when job opportunities dwindled as finance has replaced manufacturing in importance in the economy. Formally rights remain intact, but for millions of blacks these rights have been stripped away in the judicial system. The election of the first Black President has been construed to represent America's shift to a post-racial era. Thus, the elephant in the room in Act II of Clybourne Park is race and racism. The eruption of racist jokes represents just how real issues of race still are in America, whilst the patronising tone of liberals towards black people is depicted very well with hammed up acting, absurdly euphemistic language and the way characters generally avoid the elephant in the room. The flaw of liberal multiculturalism comes across clearly, we officially accept the non-invasive Other so we can go on ignoring the Other in our daily lives.

It is typical of American conservatives to advocate a meritocratic attitude of colour-blindness on matters of race, which provides a convenient platform from which affirmative action can be shot down as "racist" to white people. Note that the conservatives are colour-conscious enough to spot a black person calling for affirmative action or dares to remind white people of the injustices of the past. There are some conservatives would go even further to increase the constraints on Blackness, opposing the label 'African-American' and instead arguing that the label 'American' should be used to describe everyone. The invasive Otherness of slogans like "Black Power" unsettle conservatives, because it makes reference to black people and not coloured people, the immediate reaction is to pin the label "racist" on Malcolm X. The "colour-blindness" of the American conservatives like Ronald Reagan has space to revoke the Civil Rights act and place Nelson Mandela on a list of "terrorists".

The importance attributed to home ownership in American culture is related to liberal notions of meritocracy and private property. It's a contradiction of middle-class aspirations, colour-blindness and classlessness which collide in Clybourne Park. There is a correlation between race and class in the US: 50% of white children in the US will live on food stamps at some point in their lives whereas 90% of black children will live on food stamps. Discrimination hangs in the background of the American Dream, with the white urbanites act to "protect" the interests of the community when a black family move in next door. It was the aspirations of the family which led them to take up the opportunity of an affordable house in a respectable neighbourhood, it was a chance to make it up the ladder from one social class to another. American meritocracy was only intended to allow white people, if anyone at all, to rise up the ladder. It provides a retrospective justification for white privilege, a meritocracy in which the meritorious are almost all white by coincidence.

Interestingly, it is only after the explosion of racial tension into racist jokes and a full-blown fight that the spirit of Kenneth can leave the house. The suicide note he left for his parents remains a mystery to us. We might interpret the events in between as a vanishing mediator. From the black family moving into a white neighbourhood up to the white family moving back into the neighbourhood, which is now predominantly black, all of this had to happen in order for Kenneth's letter to be read and understood by someone. Though not by the audience. The letter is confessional in content and might offer up a catalogue of atrocities which he committed in Korea. From the thematic focus on race and private property we might surmise that the crimes in Korea may be a stand-in for a submerged history of violence in the US. Then we might infer that it is only after tensions, along the lines of race and class, have been resolved can Americans understand the past without the nostalgic filters of self-serving apple pie and freedom-loving rhetoric.

The Narcissist Chef and the Oliver Army.

The Messiah is Back!

Cower, brief mortals, in the face of Jamie Oliver, the kitchen-dwelling Messiah who will lead you away from your life of sinful indulgence and into the promised land of raspberry vinaigrette and shaved ginger in everything. After smiting the Turkey Twizzler from our school kitchens, Jamie has set his shoulder to the wheel to rid the world of fat people forever. And he’s absolutely right to do so. Those fucking fatties, who needs them? Wasting space, sweating profusely, clogging up malls, encouraging rogue parts of the brain to visually speculate on their sex life, I hate those fat bastards. And Jamie’s got help; David Starkey, an arsehole with horn-rimmed glasses, taking a break from taking massive liberties with history and annoying everyone with even the vaguest knowledge of the Tudors, has decided to join the crusade against the well fed.

So we’ve got not one, but two celebrities telling us that lard-arses need to slim down or risk a trip to the fat-gulag, and they’re damn right to do so. If any of our readers are fat, then we want them to put down this paper and go be fat someplace else. Now. NOW! SCHNELL! The one word that keeps echoing inside the cranium whenever Jamie Oliver does anything these days is “Masturbation”, of a vigorous and mightily offensive variety (except for Jamie’s ego). He just jerks and jerks and jerks until his great pillow-like face is puffy and red and the nation is on its knees lapping up his ejaculate and crying for more, because it’s as delicious as one of his runny meals.

Really, there’s so much wrong with his “Dream School” (bearing in mind that dreams aren’t real, and can be extremely harrowing) that we would need a flow chart rather than an article to show all the ways. For one thing, it’s cropped up at a bad time for education, and the government, rather than funding a proper school with real teachers for a year, is blowing just as much money on a weeklong school with celebrity teachers touted as “brilliant minds”. Ellen Macarthur sat on a boat that sailed itself, eating muesli bars and intermittently bursting into tears for a few weeks, and now she’s a brilliant mind. I spend all my time in my apartment eating Pot Noodles and having intermittent psychotic breaks. How long is it until I’m declared a “brilliant mind” by the middle-class twat brigade? Or perhaps you’d prefer Alistair Campbell, architect of New Labour, spin doctor and professional goat-fuck? Perhaps Simon Callow, a shrieking ponce masquerading as an actor. Still not satisfied? We’ve got Cherie Blair, who I just can’t look at anymore after the descriptions of the filthy Catholic sex she shared with our erstwhile Prime Minister. This immediately leads us back to that little man with blood on his hands who still hasn’t learnt that you can take a horse to water but you can’t make it suck you off. But we digress…

So, we’ve assembled our rogues gallery of “brilliant minds” we proceed to browbeat kids into swallowing the ideals that Oliver espouses. And it’s utterly, utterly harrowing to watch. The sheer moral presumptuousness of it all is enough to make us spit out our Turkey Twizzlers, compounded with the horrific bigotry against people who are more heavy-set than the national average which curdles the blood. Jamie Oliver isn’t doing this out of goodness. He’s doing it because he’s a zealot. He knows better than you, and he’s going to make you follow his ideals because you’re a moron. There’s also the aforementioned self-glorification. His masturbatory ideals aren’t marketed to the people he’s trying to convert, they’re made for all the upper-middle class mothers with small children called Jake, driving around in Chelsea tractors with the radio perma-locked to The Archers, who can nod sagely whenever Jamie declares that fat people should be locked up until they learn, the stupid fat cunts.

The Oliver Twizzler.

What Mr. Oliver and the Twat Brigade have missed is the fact that people have every right to be fat. More than that, the fact that the working classes can afford to be well-fed, and can afford to have a constant supply of food, is a sign that our society is truly successful. Jamie Oliver is doing what Morgan Spurlock did in the USA; having a smug little laugh behind his sleeve at the lower classes, and he should be ashamed of himself. While people of all incomes can afford the occasional McDonald’s or KFC meal, not everyone is able to afford fresh imported ginger or cilantro dressing to drizzle over their noisettes of goat’s cheese and beetroot quiche.

Jamie’s oft-touted line that “people in Africa eat better than we do” is either grossly misinformed at best or a fucking insult at worst. He’s living the celebrity lifestyle as the Yuppie Messiah, and has seemingly forgotten that people just can’t relate to the kind of ideals that he’s spouting. At the same time Oliver seems blissfully ignorant of the fact that in more unequal societies there are higher obesity rates, which we’re all aware of whenever we picture the average Yankee though Jamie’s head seems to be devoid of such imagination. Celebrity chefs are on TV to turn cooking into a spectator-sport that can fill in the innumerable gaps between adverts – which are what really matter to the producers – they’re not there to save us all from the horrors of cholesterol. The famous school dinners campaign which “liberated” our generation from the Turkey Twizzler (which were delicious by the way) and in the end it only succeeded in driving people to ingenious lengths of smuggling junk food into the glorified factory farms for little robots, otherwise known as primary and secondary schools. Just like with obesity there are real problems in education, which cannot be resolved through nutrition and narcissistic feel-good trips.

In education there is a contradiction between jumping through hurdles, by memorising what is just needed to pass exams and then regurgitating on command, versus the kind of critical thought essential to education. Many good teachers try to stimulate thought and creativity, which is often incongruous to the rigid curriculum of ideas of a few “brilliant minds” that we must dutifully ingest. Rather than looking to resolve this contradiction, which often produces conformity on mass, Jamie Oliver emerges with a “quick-fix” solution to massage his ego. Note that this is at a time when pressures of intellectual conformity are being intensified by the government. Funding for the humanities is being cut whilst science and maths are being prioritised, because innovation and creativity in science and maths will contribute to the running of the economy whereas sociology just might lead to greater criticism of the economic order. In the midst of this Jamie Oliver affectively jumps on the Tory bandwagon to have kids swallow the ideas of the ‘brilliant minds’.

At the risk of sounding cold, callous and malicious, which we are, we would not hesitate to say that this whole Dream School project has only redoubled our desire to see Jamie Oliver lowered into a gigantic meat grinder and then moulded into an enormous Oliver Twizzler (please, sir, I want some more) after which we can have David Starkey fired out of a Napoleonic cannon into the side of the HMS Victory, Ellen Macarthur can be placed in a death maze, and Alistair Campbell can be repeatedly kicked in the crotch to the tune of ‘Things can Only get Better’. All of which would conclude with Robert Winston being sawed in half in the name of making science ‘fun’ for kids. We hate to be less eloquent than normal, but Jamie Oliver, you can fuck off.

Note: Originally written by JT White and Josh Ferguson for the Heythrop Lion about a week ago.

In the Temple of Stanley Kubrick.

Kubrick's filmography spans many genres and themes, from horror to comedy and war to costume drama. A multitude of themes and messages can be found in these films, often concealed through semiotics and steganography, in Kubrick's works. Kubrick's first big hit Paths of Glory which, as  noted by Žižek, was a pacifist film in that soldiers are depicted as exposed to suffering and death without meaning as sacrificial lambs slaughtered for "an obscure and manipulated Cause." Contrast this with Spielberg's Schindler's List in which the Nazis represent the material rage of the paternal superego and Schindler is the paternal figure of the Jews, who are helpless children for which Schindler has be transformed into a responsible father. As Hannah Arendt pointed out that there is nothing fundamentally evil about the character of bureaucrats like Adolf Eichmann. The psychological and personal profile of Eichmann tells us nothing of why he committed such atrocities against Jews. Similarly the attempt by Spielberg to investigate Amon Göth as a person and not a cog in the most homocidal regime in history.

The work of Kubrick is far less simplistic and can actually convey fascinating ideas to the audience. Just take 2001: A Space Odyssey which begins with the dawn of man, the apes handling bones and encircling the monolith. Near the end of 2001 we encounter the imponderable X, which Lacan would describe as objet petit a, when the view penetrates the monolith and an intense abstract visual sequence follows. It soon turns to a hyper-realist representation of fantasy-space. As Ager pointed out, the monolith of 2001 is actually symbolic of the cinema screen and correlates with the fetishisation of art that Walter Benjamin identified within culture. Originally art became fetishised out of the way it exists in one place and can be seen only in that place at any one time. Through its own uniqueness in space and time, the work of art resists becoming truly available to the rabble. This is captured by the incomprehensible nature of the monolith and it's unexplained fetishisation by apes and spacemen alike, which is constant throughout. In a sense it is a meta-fictional aspect of the film, it's presence an insightful joke about art at the expense of the viewer.

On this blog I intend to review in depth specific films and novels, in the past the works of Chuck Palahniuk and JG Ballard been the subject of articles. There will no doubt be many more analyses on this blog, especially when it comes to artists of Kubrick's calibre. So far I have looked in depth at The Shining and Full Metal Jacket so far, both of which are adaptations of books and great examples of the two genres of war and horror:

The Shining and the Slaughter

This is Vietnam, the Movie!

These two articles look at the films in socio-political terms. In The Shining the "founding crimes" of the American Republic emerge from the elevator as a river of blood, whilst Kubrick ignores the perspective of the victim in his take on Vietnam - with unsettling implications. The critical look at Full Metal Jacket is appropriate as it is devoid the bravery shown previously to fill The Shining with hints and themes related to the genocide of Native Americans. A general suspicion of all forms of authority runs through Kubrick's work, although his earlier films are more liberal than his later movies. From lampooning a campaign by the John Birch Society against fluoridation in Dr Strangelove. Though this suspicion of authority led him to permit the atrocities committed against the Vietnamese in the name of anti-Communism. The mockery of the red fear rampant in America throughout the Cold War is almost totally absent, except in the form of the drill instructor's absurd jingoist rhetoric.

It also may be the reason for the conspiratorial themes throughout many of Kubrick's films, which were displayed most overtly in Eyes Wide Shut. In a scene reminiscent of the widespread rumours of orgies, organised and attended by the KGB, in Stalinist Russia the super-rich and powerful meet to engage in ritualistic sex. The faults of the system cannot be a result of a systemic flaw that inevitably produces certain consequences over time. Instead, there must be some meddlesome entity which disrupts the system and must be stopped. For Kubrick is the authorities, who are responsible for nuclear weapons and indulge in orgies at an obscure estate in New York. At the same time, The Shining reflected the emergence of the angry white male phenomenon which would dominate American politics years later. It would represent a new take on the right-wing authoritarianism Kubrick mocked in Dr Strangelove. Except it was Timothy McVeigh who learned to love the bomb in the 1990s.

This is Vietnam, the Movie!

First to Go, Last to Know.

After 20 bloody years of US military intervention in Vietnam, the war ended and the country was united. The understanding of the war is that it was undertaken to prevent the spread of Communism from North Vietnam. However it was South Vietnam that was the major target of US aggression in the early years of the war. The Diem regime, which was installed and supported by the Eisenhower administration, was overthrown at the behest of the US in 1963. Even still it is the only war which the US did not come out of officially the victor. But it was a success in that the currents of independence in the region were crushed and Vietnam was prevented from emerging as a positive model of independence. To help soothe the wounds of this loss Hollywood has pumped out flicks like The Deer Hunter and Platoon which depict the American experience of the war. Oliver Stone tells us the first casualty of war is innocence, not the Vietnamese who died first, whilst Michael Cimino tells us that the Vietnamese liked to force American POWs to play Russian roulette - a lie of proportions fit for the Third Reich. These films take the side of the aggressor, not the victim.

Full Metal Jacket is in part a deviation from this trend. It is not a tissue of lies rarefied by the American national anthem, a tear sodden tale of lost innocence or a roid-pumped theme park for the white man to go "wild" in. Essentially the range goes from the jingoist celebration of violence to the shibboleths of liberal cinema, which see the need for thousands of deaths for the sake of a character arc. But it is still a film which takes the view point of the aggressor and, in doing so, inevitably sides with the oppressor. Where the Vietnamese perspective should be, there is only the American experience. The central focus of Full Metal Jacket is the process of training and indoctrination through which civilians are turned into killing machines - complete with nom de guerres like Cowboy and Joker - which is a way for the soldiers to be humanised for the audience. By contrast the Vietnamese are presented as faceless drones all too deserving of a death at the hands of American troops. The only real appearances made by the Other are of Vietnamese women, again only as prostitutes and killers.

The work of Stanley Kubrick is far too complex and so polysemic that to write it off so soon would be to ignore his ingenuity, greater discussion is required. Rob Ager argues that the scenes set in Vietnam are a satirical take on pro-war propaganda. Joker is writing for Stars and Stripes and in one scene the Chief Editor bluntly instructs the team on how to distort the coverage of the war. Behind him a banner reads: first to go, last to know. Joker and Rafterman enter the field to cover a platoon in battle, but they are part of a propaganda outlet and therefore we get a biased take on the story. Take the first battle of the film. It is an unbridled display of firepower and machismo, which quickly subdues the invisible enemy, which necessitates a piece of 1960s surf-rock soon after. The surf-rock continues to play as we see Joker's camera team filming the platoon in battle, the soldiers are lying down as if using concrete rubble for cover from enemy gunfire. But the camera men are not shot and are undeterred to carry on filming, there was no danger from enemy fire and the platoon was putting on a show for the press. A soldier even shouts "This is Vietnam, the movie!"


The "verfremdungseffekt", a distancing effect, which keeps the audience aware that the story is not of reality but an artefact of it. It keeps the audience in a state of heightened awareness, that prevents a emotional attachment with the story and keeps the theatrical set up from "naturalising" what appears as so unnatural. The dialogue of the soldiers is risible, particularly evident in a set of mock-interviews, contrasted with the serious and tragic nature of warfare. Before all of this we have observed the indoctrination process and not to mention the cynical instructions to rewrite a story and give it a "happy ending, say one kill". The satirical battles of previous scenes are cut away to make room for real combat as the squad descends into cowardice when faced with a sniper - who picks them off, one by one. After Cowboy's death the remaining members of the Lusthog Squad seek revenge on the sniper. Joker is caught off guard as his weapon jams and the sniper turns around - it's a woman! But she is swiftly gunned down before she can do him any harm and Joker puts her out of her misery.

The Shadow of White Men.

In the scene in which Joker and Rafterman cover a recently unearthed mass-grave, an atrocity committed by the Vietcong, a Colonel states "We are here to help the Vietnamese because inside every gook there is an American trying to get out." The depiction of the Other in the film is not just a simple case of "faceless drones" but of shadows which represent what the American troops have repressed as part of their training. This is down to the Jungian influence on co-writer Michael Herr, which made way for the concept of the Shadow - consistent of repressed weaknesses and instincts . The enemy is almost always to distant to see in battle, and when the enemy can be seen they are depicted as faceless silhouettes. It could be that the silhouettes of Vietcong killed in the film represent the weaknesses and instincts that the American soldiers have repressed as part of military training. Back at the mass-grave, the bodies of the deceased have been covered in lime and have been laid out in a similar symmetry to the recruits sleeping in their beds in previous scenes.

The objective violence of war is absent and filled by the subjective violence suffered by American soldiers. The suffering of the Vietnamese remains in the background and only occasionally comes to the forefront of Joker's story. The unearthed mass-grave is a crime committed by the Vietnamese against other Vietnamese, but similar crimes are absent in the film or only arise in allegorical forms. As is the case with the shooting at the end in which it is still Joker's perspective which matters and, like the prostitutes, she was asking for it and her death will be his burden to bare. We should build on the interpretation of the Vietnamese as a kind of Shadow for the Lusthog Squad and conclude that the women in the film are the realisation of man's guilt. This radical anti-feminist theme goes back to Adam and Eve, woman is conjured up out of man's desire and so if man "cleanses" himself woman will cease to exist. This is man's lowest mythology. In killing the Shadow the Lusthog Squad "purge" themselves of such desires and thus absolve themselves of guilt. 

There are plenty of Vietnamese who die at a distance in the film, but Vietnamese women are given greater screen time (out of the victims). Out of these women two of them are prostitutes and the third is a soldier who wastes three marines before being killed herself. Three soldiers killed for each appearance of women, one of whom is also killed, the cost of their sins is implicit and we might even interpret the sniper's killings as a form of violence which differs from the objective-subjective distinction. Similar to the Biblical locusts which comes seemingly out of nowhere, a means without an end, the divine punishment for man's sins - divine violence. The Benjaminian divine violence should be understood not as the vengeance of the People's Will, but as a sovereign decision to act made on the assumption of absolute solitude. The decision to risk one's life and strike blindly against the oppressor, enacting the point of non-distinction between vengeance and justice. It is Judgement Day for all the rape and carnage so flippantly indulged in by the Squad. Tragically the swarm of locusts is cut short as the sniper is wasted.

We could view the sniper as a vanishing mediator for Joker, a necessary even in his arc and we might generously note that in the context of a satire on pro-war propaganda the kill is necessary. The kill is the "happy ending" demanded by the Chief Editor, it is the inhumanity of Joker's institutional role - that of a war correspondent - revealed by Kubrick for the viewer to judge. So the death of the woman was a necessity in the narrative. In the ending we watch as Joker and the Lusthogs march onwards and childishly sing, oblivious to the depravity of their actions. Joker's mind turns to fantasies of a home-coming fuck with a "Mary Jane Rottencrotch". It does not seem as though this conclusion required the killing and that might be a testament to the meaningless and absurd nature of war. But it still feels too generous to Kubrick, the indifference of Joker at the film's conclusion is hardly noteworthy. Though Kubrick was interested in the indoctrination of young men which turns them into killers, it cannot be glossed over, this is not the side of the victim.

Ablution of the Oppressor.

When Joker encounters the first of the two prostitutes he remarks that half of Vietnamese prostitutes are members of the Vietcong. This comment is not meant seriously but hides a certain truth which is expanded on later. In the scene in which another prostitute is encountered, this time by the Lusthogs and we might infer that the death of the sniper is actually an allegory of the gang-rape of this prostitute by the soldiers. In war sexual deviancy and gang-rape are not uncommon, for instance in the Second World War Russian soldiers committed mass-rapes in Eastern Europe. The Vietnam war was no different and so we can make the assumption that the prostitute was subject to gang-rape by the Lusthog Squad. The sniper is taken by surprise, but Joker's weapon jams  and he can't fire and has to take out a smaller handgun while taking cover from her retaliatory gunshots. It is then that the sniper is cut down in a blaze of gunfire by Rafterman. When viewed as an allegory this scene changes and becomes particularly despicable.

We can see as Joker is about to pull the trigger, the peace symbol on his jacket is concealed behind his collar as he turns slightly. The shot fired is on the surface a crime which he has participated in, at the same time it symbolises his part in the sexual humiliation of the Other and the merciless destruction of Vietnam. In defence of Joker we might point out that he is a reluctant participant in this crime, there is nothing inherently monstrous about him nor malicious about his intentions. It is just a by-product of the indoctrination process and so on, which of course may well be true. There is still the troubling mystification of the victim, a killer yearning to be killed as a prostitute yearns to be fucked. Joker is devoid of a basic level of decency in the end, there is no grand reflection on his part in all of this. The juxtaposition of the sniper sequence and the scenes involving prostitutes may be an intentional hint on Kubrick's part, it is impossible to tell, that the sexual degradation of the Vietnamese in this way is equal to killing them. Again, this feels too generous but it is a possibility.

We could also read the sniper's death at Joker's hands as an allegory for the role he played in Pyle's descent into madness and eventual murder-suicide during the training scenes. It might even be a direct allegory of the scene in which Joker takes part in the beating of Pyle with soap bars. Out of the guilt for his conformity in beating a fellow cadet emerges the Other - a Shadow of this guilt that must be "cleansed" - which functions as a vanishing mediator. Once it has challenged Joker and he rises to that challenge, it can cease to exist. The challenge is the divine violence of luring the Lusthogs one-by-one to a drawn out death. But just as he failed to disarm Pyle, and "stomp" his guts out, Joker also fails to waste the sniper when it finally comes down to it. There is a sense in which Hartman took Joker's place in the murder-suicide which Joker was unable to prevent. We might go further to say that the sniper took Joker's place in being killed and that is the greatest humiliation for Joker. Note that the focus is still on the suffering of oppressor, even as he commits murder or fails to do so.

From this only a fractured normality can be restored, things will never be truly the same, in the aftermath. A reversion to youthful memories of Disney cartoons and immature sexual fantasies, coupled with the indifference to the magnitude of war crimes, is ultimately where the American troops are left. The indifference is all that is left over after the guilt has been "cleansed" and the Vietnamese, in all forms, no longer need to exist. A lot like the flushing of a toilet, shit is problematic only when there is a blockage and once this blockage is gone we can continue as normal. This is the horror of war cinema. The Other is just the filth conjured up by the American desire to fight Communism, promote democracy and freedom etc. The consequent guilt can only be "purged" with a full bucket of fake blood, strident imperial arrogance and persistent self-pity. The crimes can be recognised only to reassure us that we were the true victims all along. The Other can then be flushed away, it is no longer needed once it has served it's purpose in the narrative.