2. Ash Dieback, the fungal disease laying waste to the trees of the British countryside, sounds very much like the title of a Rammstein song.
3. A death in the family forces us to contemplate our own mortality. I've been doing that a lot and getting very maudlin. Wade Kojo Williams passed away on Monday. He was my Uncle on my Mother's side. The 'Williams' part is very important. When we were growing up ANY virtues or talents we expressed were explained by Mater as being "like the Williams", whereas any missteps, plainly, were due to us being "so Creese".
I can't speak for my Sis, or my Bro', but as a youngster I was of the opinion that these Williamses were a little bit up themselves, until we eventually met them when we took a family jaunt to St Vincent. They were pretty all right actually (apart from the relative who said I walked like a "bow-legged bitch"), and Uncle Wade was a bit of a legend: a journalist, a celebrated songwriter, parliamentarian and an active member of the community. In his time in Winnipeg he served as:
- President of the National Black Coalition of Canada (Winnipeg Chapter);
- President of the National Council of St. Vincent and the Grenadines Associations in Canada;
- President of the St. Vincent and the Grenadines Association of Winnipeg;
- President of the Manitoba Intercultural Council (MIC);
- Representative on The Visible Minority National Council on Canadian Labour Force Development;
- Chairman of the Black History Month Celebration Committee;
- Member of the Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination - Social Planning Council of Winnipeg;
- Chairman of the Martin Luther King Memorial Committee;
- Executive Member of the Afro-Caribbean Association of Manitoba;
- Founder and Chairman of the Manitoba Coalition of Organizations Against Apartheid and Racism;
- Founder and Chairman of the Forum for the Awareness of the Minority Electorate;
- Multiculturalism Director of the Liberal Party of Manitoba;
- President of the St. Norbert Liberal Association;
- Executive Member of the Assiniboine-Fort Garry Residents Advisory Group (City of Winnipeg);
- Founder and Chairman of Students Against Apartheid (University of Winnipeg);
- President of Caribbean Students Association (University of Winnipeg);
- Founding Executive Member of The Calypso Association of Winnipeg;
- Co-Founder of the Winnipeg Calypso and Reggae Competitions;
- Co-Founder of the annual Winnipeg Soca-Reggae Festival and Member of the Manitoba Senior Provincial Cricket Team.
- He was also a member of several Caribbean Folk Groups/Choirs in Winnipeg.
Truly an exceptional man, and a bit of an inspiration. He will be greatly missed.
His funeral is taking place in Winnipeg, Canada, and I'll be accompanying my Mother, which'll be a laugh riot. I get my sense of humour and sunny disposition from her. Ask my sister. She calls me 'Smiler'.
4. So I skipped over to Liverpool to sort out my passport. The last time I was in the city was a few years ago to rehearse with an early line-up of Damaged Gods, which disintegrated when the guitarist and bassist started banging each other - Gina, the bassist, went on to play briefly for all-girl metal maidens McQueen - so I was surprised at how well I was able to navigate its streets.
Having about four hours to kill before my passport was ready I popped into a Tesco Express to grab some overpriced sustenance, and scanned the newspaper stand for a publication which would entertain me whilst I sat in my car waiting for the paperwork to be completed. Obama's face beamed triumphantly from the front pages of the newspapers whilst, on the shelves above, a scarlet tressed Holly Hagan proffered her sizeable mammaries like shoddily constructed Blancmange desserts. I decided that Roger Moore's autobiography would prove more engaging and stuck with my Chicken and Bacon sandwich, Strawberry and Banana smoothie and a pack of Cool Breeze Extra chewing gum, resolving to check out the Obama reaction to, and analysis of, his re-election online when I got home.
Ah, Obama... He's as war mongering and as slavishly bound to the notion of the expanding American Empire as his half-wit predecessor. That Hopey/Changey thing didn't really pan out, did it? Drone attacks and Guantanamo aren't going away anytime soon, kinda proving that even if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck it still might turn out to be a bit of a cunt. On the subject of cunts, seeing the response of the sore loser Republicans was definitely worth it.
Donald Trump called for revolution. A subdued and sombre Ann Coulter intoned, "I'm pretty pessimistic about the country. We have more takers than makers and it's over. There is no hope," whilst Ted Nugent tweeted, "Pimps whores & welfare brats & their soulless supporters have a president to destroy America". Fox News host and attack dog of the bigoted right, Bill O'Reilly, lamented the erosion of the white establishment:
"The white establishment is now the minority. The voters, many of them, feel that the economic system is stacked against them and they want stuff. People feel that they are entitled to things and which candidate, between the two, is going to give them those things? Obama wins because it's not a traditional America anymore. The white establishment is the minority. People want things."Poor fella. His whole world had fallen apart. He looked devastated. I almost felt sorry for him, even as he employed the stereotype of ethnic minorities being feckless spongers. And that's the Republican Party's problem: its hijacking by the extreme neo-cons means that it isn't inclusive enough and as a result Mitt only made inroads into the hearts and minds of the electorate each and every time he moved to the centre, which left him open to charges of 'flip flopping' and hypocrisy. Ronald Reagan would be too moderate for his own party now.
They and the purblind others of their type need to wake up and recognise that times are changing. Watching one's parents forced at gunpoint to engage in sexual intercourse in a bath of warm excrement would be more fulfilling and better for one's conscience than voting Republican. Compare their separatist language with the following from Obama's acceptance speech:
"The idea that if you're willing to work hard, it doesn't matter who you are or where you come from or what you look like or where you love. It doesn't matter whether you're black or white or Hispanic or Asian or Native American or young or old or rich or poor, able, disabled, gay or straight, you can make it here in America if you're willing to try."Much nicer and genuinely inspiring, isn't it? But then, he meticulously employs a lexicon designed to be inclusive, which is a very good thing indeed. Just try to avoid looking at the detail, eh? At the very least the average American woman will have control of her own uterus for the next 4 years, which I shall address during my 2 hour stopover in Chicago later today. BOOM!
I'm kidding.
Or am I...?
Yes. Yes, I am.
* The Monkey Obama t-shirt comes courtesy of the white supremacist website Tightrope. Also in this series "Fight Crime. Abort Black Babies."and "Bureau of Negro Control."
