My pathetic understanding of guns in America

Hmmm, not sure if this is enough evidence.

On a recent US TV show, two large men ponder over a World War II machine gun. “Wouldn’t wanna geddin the way of that,” one says. “No, that baby can sting,” counters the other, before both men fall into raptures, buy the gun and promptly test it out on a remote firing range.

Boom! Fuck yeah!

The euphemisation of the gun is a baffling concept to someone who, from a largely gunless state such as Britain, hasn’t really come into contact with one bar the odd clay pigeon shoot (I didn’t wear a deerstalker and swore my tits off, so it’s ok). Equally, the personification – even sexualisation of guns through terms like ‘baby’, ‘miss’, ‘mama’ and others – is zealotry bordering on psychosis. I mean, I know Americans know that guns kill people. But why can’t they just fucking say it?

I’m not reporting anything new: the American obsession with the firearm is literally written into its constitution. Despite this year’s many, many tragedies involving guns, American approval for a handgun ban is at an all time low of 26 per cent (compared with 60 per cent in 1959, according to Gallup). Every time someone walks into a US public area – a cinema, a Gurdwara, a shopping mall – and mows down a handful of his or her compatriots, every politician in the land ups their gun rhetoric. ‘Tight controls’, ‘troubled individuals’, ‘self-protection’ are just three of the identikit phrases rolled out.

But nothing changes, and the bodies keep on pilin’ up: so far this year just under 10,000 people have lost their lives (or should I say ‘been blown away’?) in firearm murders. This ranks it just off the global podium of ignominy (1: South Africa, 2: Colombia, 3: Thailand) ahead of the Philippines and Mexico. Firearms incidents usually account for around two thirds of all yearly homicides. The UK ranks 39th with 14 deaths, by the way. But that didn’t stop Fox News Forrest Gumpalike Bill O’Reilly (seen in this video chewing some anti-black, anti-yoof fat with hate-on-a-stick Ann Coulter) advocating wider gun use in the wake of the London riots. One person was shot dead in those depressing events. 53 were killed in the 1992 LA Riots.

You can buy a gun in America for around $70, or about the same price as a Topman jumper. Today a ‘disgruntled employee’ shot dead five people before killing himself, at a small signage firm in Minneapolis. There will be no calls for tighter gun laws; not in an election year. That might piss off the likes of Lori Klein, the Arizona senator who proudly displays her pink (pink!!) handgun at all times – even pointing it at a journalist ‘to prove a point’ (‘I can shoot you in the face right now’ perhaps?). Or maybe Samuel ‘Joe the Plumber’ Wurzelbacher – yes him, of 2008 election fame – who faced little censure after laying out his delicate policy on immigration, ‘build a damn fence and start shooting.’

I don’t want to seem like some Imperialist redcoat. And every time I chat about a part of American life I fundamentally disagree with, I always hear Werner Herzog’s weird, cloying monologue at the start of ‘On Death Row’: ‘Ze death penalty is zomesing that as a German zitizen I cannot agree wiz. But zis is America…’ But the numbers don’t lie: rappers don’t kill people, guns do. A lot of people. And a lot of guns. Barack Obama has proven year after year that the constitution matters bugger-all when you can claim that American lives are at stake. Yes, some farmers in North Dakota need shotguns to protect themselves from coyotes and wolves. But last time I checked, there weren’t many of those things on Chicago’s South Side Street. Or watching Batman premieres.

It took 9/11 to get America to change its constitution this time round. What price gun control?

Libya attack shows little but the fragility of our post-9/11 world

Last night the twin beams that stand where the World Trade Center once did, shone out high above the Manhattan sky. A few hours later and halfway across the world, an incendiary reminder that the world we live in now is very different from the one we enjoyed before 8.43am, eleven years and one day ago, played out. One wonders whether such violent clashes could have consumed Cairo and Benghazi before that crisp autumn morning. But they did today. And while the US counts her dead, and the vitriolic straw that broke this particularly deadly camel’s back, a shameful ‘movie’ called The Innocence of Islam, is debated in a media nethersphere of blogs, videos and comments, one fact remains: Earth 2012 is a fragile, Faberge Egg of a place, on which one tiny crack can cause the entire weak shell of stability to implode.

Chris Stevens’ death, and those of three other US embassy colleagues, pours shame on vile individuals who until recently had assumed the protagonist’s role in their nation’s Arab Spring (who would have though that a leaderless, desolate desert nation could erode into such barbarism so early?). There is no excuse for attacking a foreign embassy with guns and rockets; not least the production of an Islamophobic video nasty some 7,000 miles away. As someone who has researched and met hundreds of Muslims over the past few years, I’m glad my inbox was chocked full of official and unofficial reproaches of the attacks by a Myriad faith groups. No-one who breathes air should countenance the notion that this sort of violence constitutes mainstream Islam, any more than the idea that all Christians are white supremacists in pointy cloth hats.

Neither do today’s events legitimise the carpet-bomb foreign policy of the United States over the past decade, sweeping aside anything vaguely Islamofascist – and anyone unfortunate enough to be standing nearby – with a fist so ferrous you could smelt it. The bombing of wedding parties in Afghanistan, interminable detentions at Gitmo and countless other infringements of basic human rights shame the US just as any act of terror on foreign soil (go to the Guardian’s Comment is Free section, close your eyes and click the mouse buttom randomly if you want in-depth criticism of these state-sanctioned techniques). Neither are these worrying events limited to the world outside the 50 states: I have personally witnessed, and reported on, the shocking crimes and prejudices offered to America’s own Muslim population in the years since those towers fell.

But the most terrifying aspect of today’s events, unless you know anyone personally involved, is not that a foreign embassy’s sacrosanct turf was breached, or that a fledgling, triumphant city could harbour such atrocity. We surely knew these two things were inevitabie. What is most worrying is that all it took to trigger such violence was the snippet of a botched-together vanity project posted to YouTube. Judging by the murky, ephemeral past of the alleged filmmaker it sounds like this was exactly the response he envisioned. And judging by that response, it was exactly the trigger Benghazi’s butchers were hoping would allow them to cower behind a bastard child of their religion, feigning exoneration on behalf of billions who think them just as wicked as any cold-blooded murderers.

There is no need to point fingers. Each event on either side is so increasingly brazen that we do not need to look for a smoking gun; merely the person holding the gun and smiling. Likewise our media world has thrown itself into a world of bipartisanship; rival media networks who would once have found common ground now forcing their readers into the trenches of right and left-wing across a vast, vacuumous no-man’s land of moderation. One only has to look at the upcoming US election for evidence of this, seen through the eyes of Fox News or MSNBC. Or look at Egypt, or Tunisia, or a glut of other nations whose popular revolutions have given sway to politics driven sharply across lines of race, religion and civil liberties.

9/11′s perpetrators weren’t made religious martyrs the moment they headed towards Manhattan. They were political murderers. Neither did their actions necessarily light the touchpaper for this horridly fragile world we now find ourselves in, where at any moment nations may be flattened and thousands killed. They put that match in our hands, and we lit it. And now we, with our televisions, Mars missions and skyscrapers, are no better than the deluded bigots that fought in the Crusades; hiding behind religion when any fool can see the political motives.

We collectively have the power to make a difference, to fight prejudice, hate and subversion by those who would have us kill others in their name. But we must look beyond the bullshit, the hugs, the lies and the bias. In an age of withering attention spans and instant gratification, taking the time to be critical is saintly. For as much as some things may anger us and others may merely piss us off, it is worth noting that we all have to share this planet, sharing with it the innocence we were all born with. I’d love to bookend this with something poignant of my own, but it would only be a poor substitute for what this Oklahoman sang in 1945.

Assange fiasco undermines Manning’s plight

It is Manning, not Assange, who is facing a kangaroo court.

Today, Ecuador granted political asylum to Julian Assange, founder of whistleblowing website WikiLeaks. Assange has been hiding out in the Ecuadorean embassy in west London since June, having jumped bail on charges of sexual assault and rape surrounding a night in Sweden. Assange believes that he is in danger of facing persecution, particularly from the US government, whose members have infrequently accused him of being a terrorist and a spy. Assange’s fear is that, should he leave the embassy, he’d be duly arrested by the UK and sent to Sweden, where he would in turn be rendered to the United States to face the aforementioned charges. Two chunks of ‘evidence’ hang over Sweden in this respect: its refusal to question Assange in London, and its violation of human rights in sending two men to Egypt, where they were tortured by local authorities at the States’ behest, over a decade ago. In other words, Sweden has form and the accusations are far from baseless.

But regardless of whether you’re a drum-beating Assange aficionado or someone for whom the WikiLeaks scandal is a violation of efforts to rid the planet of terrorism, two issues appear to have been overlooked in the brew-ha that has accompanied Assange’s extended stay in Knightsbridge: First, that the whole shabby affair seems to have conflated an alleged sexual assault with political persecution, and secondly that Assange’s white-collar concerns have largely overshadowed the tragic and somewhat shadier situation facing the whistleblowing US soldier who supposedly supplied Assange with his incendiary fodder, Bradley Manning.

While the Guy Fawkes mask-wearing brigade hail Assange as a beacon of free speech in a world of cover-ups and dirty wars, it is Manning that has spent almost a year in pre-trial solitary confinement, Manning who is facing 34 charges ranging from ‘aiding the enemy’ to ‘sedition’, and Manning who, in all likeliness, will spend the rest of his days behind bars or, at best, under some sort of ersatz existence under surveillance for exposing events that are difficult to defend. In contrast, Assange has conducted a series of high-profile interviews with thinkers and politicians under the self-serving banner ‘The Julian Assange Show’, travelling from country to country promoting himself as the saviour of the free world and, if the Swedish episode is anything to go by, dipping his Liberty Bell in more than a few leaky sources. If Manning has fallen on his sword for free speech, Assange has at worst pricked his thumb on a paperclip.

The only way for Assange to prove to the world that the US, UK and their allies are hell bent on shutting him and his allies up is by surrendering himself to the authorities and facing trial in Sweden. if, upon being found innocent or guilty of sexual, not political, crimes, he is whisked to Guantanamo and offered a similar fate to Manning, the entire world will know their agenda and Western hegemony will inch another few paces to the East. If I were the US I wouldn’t touch him with a barge-pole, far less a baton: as long as Assange holds the title ‘alleged rapist’, his words will have far less impact than they ever would if he stepped out of his smoking jacket and faced the music.

The efforts of Ecuador, Britain and Assange are arbitrary now: save your fears, and your protests, for Bradley Manning. This is about Kabul and Baghdad, not Quito and Stockholm, after all.

I wanna live like common people

Clegg: bookies favourite to win Big Brother 2015.

Hear that? That’s the silence of 650 MPs, after Treasury minister David Gauke told the BBC he thought cash-in-hand payments were ‘morally wrong’. It’s not often an elected politician says something we can’t argue with, but Mr Gauke has managed it perfectly.

He’ll probably be sacked tomorrow.

It goes without saying that everyone in Westminster is trying to bag the as many votes as possible, at a time when the chips are as down as they’ve been in three decades. But telling tradesmen they can’t diddle the taxman over their hard-earned wedge? That’s just not cricket. Go after the Fred-the-Shreds and the City boys, no-one likes them. Even George Osbourne has had the noodle to do over his old Oxford classmates, a bit.

Except we all know it’s wrong to fiddle our taxes. I’ve done it, and I expect most of my peers have done it too. Remember that Christmas Day you put in down the pub, or the month you spent knocking up cement for the Wilsons between terms? You know bloody well you didn’t declare that. You probably cleared that old girl’s purse out while you did it, before taking a piss in the rose bush and strangling Tibbles, their mute but charming 13-year-old tabby. You thieving fuck.

Ok, Gauke has probably just surrendered a small chunk of his next electorate for telling a moral truth. This isn’t the Labour of old, walking kids to their deaths in sweaty countries or calling old women bigots. This is a Labour that has to scrounge about in the dirt for extra votes, pawing around in the muck like a bunch of crack-addled beggars.

Obviously the Tories’ll keep schtum too: they don’t want the poor folk who were duped into voting for them last time to turn away. No, what this issue needs is Nick Clegg: a man so consumed by apathy nobody would noticed if he asphyxiwanked himself to death wearing a schoolgirl uniform

during PMQs. This is a man who has gone from flogging everyone in the election debates to being David Cameron’s Groom o’ the Stool. Why doesn’t he come out and tell us all off for dishing out cash-in-hand payments?

Fuck the bankers. What Cleggy and his yellow lot have got to do is go after the common man. Fuck builders, plumbers, traders, nannies, cleaners. Fuck them all! We won’t get our deficit back chasing Cristal-swigging City boys. What we need is to turn everybody upside-down and shake them til dirty tax-dodger cash falls out of their pockets.

Or maybe I’m dreaming. Maybe what we need to do is impose tighter financial regulation, ditch the NHS reforms and stop paying nine billion quid to have the world and his dog round for tea.

Whatever, it’s just a blog.

The soothing poetry of Mr Robert Kelly, Esq.

Now I’m not attempting to be forward
But hey attractive young woman I’m feeling you
The way you do those things that you do
Reminds me of my Lexus coupe
That’s why I’m moving to within close proximity of your face
Attempting to persuade you to spend a night in a local bed and breakfast
You must be a football coach
The way you’ve inadvertently spurred me towards a plethora of random sexual acts.

So baby please give me a toot-toot
Then in return I shall give you a beep-beep
Running her hands through my African-American foliage
Bouncing upon 24-inch wheels
While they say on the radio…

[chorus]

This is the rejigged version of Ignition
Hot and fresh from my kitchen
My mother is really working her figure
Getting each man to do her bidding.
Sipping on a Coca-Cola and rum
I’m like, ‘throw caution to the wind young charge, I’m inebriated.’
It’s the bloody weekend young lady
I’m about to enjoy some mirth.

Bounce-bounce-bounce-bounce-bounce-bounce-bounce.

Bounce-bounce-bounce-Come on.

Now this is like Murder She Wrote
Once I disrobe you
I’ve hung the ‘privacy please’ note on our door
But still, the staff can hear your howls of sexual ecstasy
Madam, I’m feeling the same way you are
No more resting on serendipitous laurels
I’m about to take my key
And put it in the ignition

So baby please give me a toot-toot
Then in return I shall give you a beep-beep
Running her hands through my African-American foliage
Bouncing upon 24-inch wheels
While they say on the radio…[chorus]This is the rejigged version of Ignition
Hot and fresh from my kitchen
My mother is really working her figure
Getting each man to do her bidding.
Sipping on a Coca-Cola and rum
I’m like, ‘throw caution to the wind young charge, I’m inebriated.’
It’s the bloody weekend young lady
I’m about to enjoy some mirth.

Cristal being drunk inside my Stretch Navigator

We’ve got food everywhere, imitating a genuinely-catered party

I’ve got men to my left and women to my right

I’m going to bring them all together and have them drink and socialise

Then after my show I’m putting on an after-party

Then after the party we’ll move things to the B&B lobby

But the staff require us to vacate the lobby at 4am

So you can take that as your cue to secure someone for an evening of sexual adventure.

So baby please give me a toot-toot
Then in return I shall give you a beep-beep
Running her hands through my African-American foliage
Bouncing upon 24-inch wheels
While they say on the radio…[chorus]This is the rejigged version of Ignition
Hot and fresh from my kitchen
My mother is really working her figure
Getting each man to do her bidding.
Sipping on a Coca-Cola and rum
I’m like, ‘throw caution to the wind young charge, I’m inebriated.’
It’s the bloody weekend young lady
I’m about to enjoy some mirth.

Balls everywhere

It’s not the first time Shane Warne has sweated behind a blonde barmaid. But you’re more likely to see him eat a Salad Nicoise than play on screen in New York.

New York is great in the summer, despite a nagging humidity. You can lose entire days tramping around Manhattan, making your way across the Brooklyn Bridge or lounging in one of the city’s many parks, wine in hand (brown-bagged, of course). But the advent of Euro 2012 has lent the city an additional edge, at least from a British perspective.

Football has its place in the States. The long-suffering MLS is finally beginning to look like a formidable league package, teams largely play in football-specific stadia and kids, I’m told, grow up here with football often their preferred school sport. Despite this, however, the beautiful game is wedged firmly behind baseball, American football, basketball and ice hockey in the nation’s homes and hearts.

Which makes watching a major international tournament in a city that for the most part couldn’t care less such a joy. So often as an Englishman in New York, sports are watched by proxy, pint and minimal NFL chatter to hand. Football, though, must be sought. You might find the odd venue showing it in the corner, commentary eschewed in favour of Paul Simon. But to find somewhere chocked full of beer-swilling French, German, English or Mexican fans, match on every screen, sounds of the crowd blaring through oversized speakers, is amazing. It feels like you’ve cheated the system, somehow.

The other day I watched some of the England vs France game in the Pig and Whistle, lodged somewhere in the traffic-heavy fug of midday Midtown. It was great: throngs of Frenchmen sat allezing upstairs while a load of lumpy Brits in white shirts swigged and swore their way through the 90 minutes. There was rivalry and ribaldry as there would any bar in London or Paris, while yellow cabs flew past and sirens sobbed out the front door. New York might not give a shit, but we’d all just found a tiny slice of Europe in Manhattan.

But if football flies beneath the radar, cricket is subterranean. The fact that cricket conversations are almost always had in fleeting chats with south Asian cab drivers makes it seem all the more liminal a subject, when in fact there are over half a million people of cricketing nation descent in the five boroughs. Of course, cricket bears more than a passing resemblance to America’s national past-time, baseball. So I was really looking forward to comparing the two when I went to my first ballgame last weekend.

The new Yankee Stadium is barely three years old, but it feels as American as apple pie.

What an experience it was. From the second we jumped on the uptown 4 train, a day out at Yankee Stadium, which sits astride the Bronx like some alien craft, is as New York an experience as hailing a yellow cab in Times Square with an everything bagel in one hand and a Dean & DeLuca coffee in the other. Unlike most modern stadia which are largely soulless identikit caverns on the edge of town, Yankee Stadium, which opened in 2009, is wedged into the heart of urban New York. From our nosebleeds at 161st Street and River we dined on overpriced beer and hotdogs while watching late evening sunlight bounce off brown Bronx tenements, drenching 50,000 half-cut fans in a blood-red summer sun (there’s something of the Middle East about the Bronx: all sunburnt, rough-hewn husks of buildings, popping up like thinly-cut slices of brown bread).

The game, of course, was largely incidental. The Yankees beat their crosstown rivals, Queens’ Mets, by three runs to two. Some guy smashed a home run over right field (I missed it; I was too busy stuffing my face). Every player announced seemed to have a name comprising a monosyllabic grunt followed by an impossibly foreign surname (‘up next – Kiiiiiiiiiirk Nieuwenhuis!’ ‘From Portsmouth, Virginia – ‘Claaaaayy Rapada!’). The atmosphere was electric throughout, showing that while baseball and its limey cousin have veered wildly apart in a sporting sense, they share a sense of occasion that only a sport one can dip in and out of at will can. We went home a tiny bit browner, a lot less wealthy and hugely happy.

I could, at this point, run off on some tangential rant about how cricket is better than baseball, they cheat with those big gloves blah blah. But I’ve chosen to live in America. And until this country adopts my beloved cricket, with its lilting Caribbean flair, obdurate Aussies and showman Sri Lankans – about as likely as plucking hens’ teeth – I’ll take Crackerjack, caps and hotdogs in the New York sunshine any day.

Top Five Differences Between New York and London

Different skylines, famously similar cities.

I’ve been in the States for a while now, and while this blog seems to portray me as a withering, curmudgeonly old git I’m actually a pretty happy young chap, as starry-eyed, vacant and optimistic as any young person with a pair of shoes and teeth (I still can’t bloody stand Jack Johnson, though).

Everyone in my office, and just about everywhere else, is always asking me what the differences are between New York and London. Well, aside from one city shooting up like concrete bamboo and the other splatting out sideways they’re pretty similar. London, as the elder, stately cousin, is slightly more refined and tranquil than its American cousin, which at times resembles a six-year-old on speed. Actually it resembles that all day, all night and well past the weekend.

But there are some pretty glaring idiosyncrasies that I’ve noticed over the past nine months, the top five of which I’ve listed below in a list succinctly titled ‘Top Five Differences Between New York and London.’ This is for SEO purposes, of course – and absolutely not because I’m a lazy, half-baked hack with too much spare time and far too little intelligence.

1. The tramps really are tramps here.

Look at London. Even the dogs that shit in the street have stiff upper lips. Ain’t no-one gonna dance, shimmy or sway to beg, steal or borrow a quid (except for that guy who does Bob Marley covers on London Bridge. Is he still there?).*

But tell a tramp (hobo) he’s in the land of the free and he’ll bend over and suck his own genitalia for a dime, it seems. Here the tramps just do ‘tramp’ so much better than their British counterparts. Three true examples. 1) Where I used to live, in Alphabet City, there was a bloke down the street who used to read poetry to a ghettoblaster playing Brahms at full whack. 2) There’s a guy near my office who screams baleful abuse at passers-by, usually tourists and always to brilliant effect. 3) A fella near my new gaff in Brooklyn, who stands outside Popeye Chicken every night, sings ‘Ain’t got a dollar ain’t got a dime,’ over and over and over and over and over again, all the while smelling of something far worse than he could’ve produced alone.

*I’m not, by the way, saying that all homeless people are funny. Only some of them are. The others are just boring. Joke.

2. Underground trains arrive on time

And, you don’t have to stand ten-deep at Bank station in the morning, hoping to catch the third late train that arrives! The New York Subway is smelly, dirty, crummy, dank, full of rats and almost ubiquitously painted sick-green. But it’s almost always on time, it’s air-conditioned and it’s bloody cheap. A few months ago I rated the Tube better than the Subway. Having just spent two months in London, I’m not so sure.

3. There’s no 11pm closing time

Who actually enjoys the sound of a bell ringing and a fat barman calling time on your night when it was just getting going? Me neither. Which is why the city that never sleeps – and that’s as true a statement as any about New York – is so much better if you want to have a night that lasts beyond bedtime but doesn’t necessarily involve thumping club music and illicit drugs. One of my favourite things about this city is that you can happily while away seven or eight hours putting back pint after pint of creamy lager and having increasingly jingoistic conversations without any interruption. Suddenly it’s 2am and, alright, you’re all going to a club. But you didn’t have to. And that’s the point.

4. The neighbourhood is EVERYTHING

You might be next to a decent block. But next to is nothing. If I’d have lived about 200 yards from where I was before, I would’ve been in a nice area. As it was, I wasn’t. With the way New York’s social housing estates (the ‘projects’) are laid out, right next to, and largely incognito from, the brownstoned terraces, it might be all bars, clubs and boutiques on Avenue B, but decrepit delis and drug havens on C (actually this is pretty much true). While this is similar in London, it’s not as stark: I currently live among the most fashionable areas of Brooklyn (don’t be jealous, it’s a studio). But just a five minute walk away is crumbly Downtown Brooklyn, where the queues outside the social security office tail round the block with ne’er-do-wells at 7am (I’ve been one of them, twice) and blokes deal crack like they’re dishing out fresh edamame at a TED conference.

5. People are bloody rude

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing: I love New York’s cut-and-thrust, and how its proud inhabitants like to ‘cut the bullshit.’ But when you’ve had a long, crap day, you’re covered in sweat, hungry and it’s 30 degrees and muggy as hell, when you’re trying to get off the subway and some dick smashes into you, apology remiss, it makes you want to a) cry or b) kill everyone in sight. It’s weird that there’s this lack of ‘English’ manners (although if you read the Mail English manners consist of a six-pack of special brew, a middle finger and an ASBO) here, while service is positively charming. I know it’s all about the basement wage, tips and all that. But you’d think it’d rub off somewhere.

I’m sure there are tons more differences between New York and London (they drive on the wrong side of the road and they speak all funny, like, for starters) but these are the main ones. I’ve also found it funny that here I get complimented on my accent at least once a day, whereas an American brogue in London often goes down about as well as an own goal in Columbia.