Not One Less: Female Rappers in Oaxaca & Violence Against Women

In Oaxaca, a group of female rappers channel an intersection of gender, economic and social injustices in Mexican life. By calling out the problems that affect everyone in the food chain, and by being a supportive rap collective where MCs don’t battle or dis each other, they live a joined up, communal model for change in Mexico. Their rhymes skewer both problems and potential in the country’s present and past. 

I was born a woman in the times of breast cancer
When machismo killed many sisters
When lesbians were hunted as witches
Amongst secret abortions, AIDS and sex trafficking

And life advances
Existing in an arid land with a tragic history
Keeps us alive and living is hope

Mare Advertencia Lirika - ¿Y Tú Qué Esperas? (What are you Waiting for?)

& Mi Gente (En vivo) SiempreViva (My People Always Live)

 

An intersection

From one direction flow key topical realities of the country: crime, gangs, murder, kidnapping and rape in Ciudad Juárez and the US-Mexico border (and elsewhere), domestic violence and feminicide, and Western/American neoliberalization of the economy and culture and resultant inequality. From another direction flows the good and bad of traditional culture – the power and dignity in the street culture and of a collective society living off the land, but also the oppression, patriarchy, machismo, domestic violence and social and institutional control of women’s roles and everyone’s sexuality that came (comes) with that.

The stats in these particular areas of Oaxacan life, Mexican life, are getting worse (lockdown has done wonders for domestic violence worldwide). Feminicide has doubled since 2015, with the number of women killed daily in Mexico rising from 7 to 10 between 2017 and 2019.  As Mexico has moved into a world of foreign investment and privatization, wife beating farmers have become wife beating factory workers or service sector employees, or wife beating sub employed men. Women cannot win – domestic violence is higher still for more economically active women - beaten, it seems, because they go out to work and belittle their husband’s role as bread winner.

The woman, Ingrid Escamilla, 25, was stabbed, skinned and disemboweled and the girl, Fátima Cecilia Aldrighett, 7, was abducted from school, her body later found wrapped in a plastic bag.

Ingrid was 9^th February 2020, after an argument with her partner about his drinking.

Fatima was actually 2 days later. The 7-year-old had been taken from outside her school, delivered by a woman to a man who’d asked for a young bride (she figured taking a stranger would let her own kids off the hook). He put her in a dress and painted her nails, raped her and tortured her. The woman then suffocated her.

This is a world, no, these are districts, where women get disappeared – grabbed straight out of the subway or off the street, and taken to be gang raped, beaten, tortured, burned to death. In the Ecatepec barrio of Mexico City it’s been a ratio of at least a woman a week since 2012.

We are becoming a society without rule
This is a time when there is stalking outside our house
We allow everything when the rules end
When the violence is thrown into the city
The priority should be to stop this
Pandemic of forced disappearance
That attacks anyone

Mare Advertencia Lirika - Se Busca (Wanted)

 

Sometimes women haven't quite died by the time the police find them, tied up and sizzling after being burned. Good enough to fuck but not good enough to live, apparently. Sometimes the police note that these women were not respecting gender roles with their lifestyles.

Women are killed by spouses, they are killed by strangers (and over 70% of feminicides are the work of strangers). Men from all walks of life, whether headless cartel gangs who’ve gone rogue since the cops busted their boss, or tanked up teens on drinks and drunks, or violently disaffected men with a bloody grudge.

It’s not so much that these fuck awful things are connected but that they are COMMON. Now over 10.5 women a day are being killed in Mexico. They are raped, they are mutilated, they are burned alive. On average across Mexico, 5 men a day will kill their intimate partner.

Ni una menos - Not one (woman) less

In a country where sexism dials all the way up to that level of violence, gangsta rap’s dominant masculinity and lyrical treatment of women… snags. The bad boyish charm of guns, prowess, and execrably sexist rhymes that maybe/maybe don’t make a political point about treating women as badly as how the system treats men, is even more uncomfortable here.

Mare Advertencia Lirika, Doma Press, and the other female Oaxacan rappers that make occasional appearances in US and UK media have adopted the confident, articulate flow of western rap, but they’ve dropped the gender domination and rampant self-made individualism. If gangsta expresses masculinity through an MC bigging himself up, these rappers express femininity through their allegiance to womanhood, and beyond into indigenous and Mexican rights.

You better see nuances I'm not here to be famous
I’m serious, bitch, I am the queen and I am a goddess
And pay attention to what I come to say giving a response
But I did not come to compete
For me the essence of the mike is to share

Doma Press - La Escena (The Scene)

 

The communal approach stops rap becoming another Americanization that damages Oaxacan culture. They might brag about being the smartest and sickest with their flow, but these women don’t annihilate peers in rap battles or drive bys, or wax about their parties, clothes, jewelry, money. They see that kind of individualism as culpable for the problems in Mexico, and for women. Mare:

“I believe that rap is part of a society that has these problems. Society as we know it today is a consumerist, individualistic society, based on competition. And […] education is also based on that competition. So how can we expect young people to have another vision?

Actually, this works very well for the state. It suits them that you do not think as a society, and that you are absorbed only in yourself. Thinking all the time about how you look prettier or what you are going to buy. And this also happens within Rap and in many other sectors of society.”

If governments and businesses enjoy and promote a culture of empowered individualism, reaping the benefits of the resultant purchasing power and atomized society with no dominant mass movements rocking the boat, rap’s a product of that.

“Up until a couple of years ago, hip hop events (in Oaxaca) were dominated by government institutions. … they used to brainwash young people into believing that “You need that help because we have the money, and because you can only gain spaces through us.”

Mexico’s economy since the ‘80s has increasingly stripped communal assets and looked to individualist, neoliberal models for wealth creation. Largescale agreements like NAFTA, the PPP (Plan Puebla Panama) and Proyecto Mesoamérica set the scene for miles of freeway, oil lines, dams and airports - infrastructure which would have once been publicly owned - being built by private companies on once collectively owned farmland.

Everything’s funded by foreign loans and investment, with a general understanding that Mexico in turn deregulates its markets and privatizes its resources.  Instead of having a joint stake in your farm or community, you’re free to get as rich as you like (or as poor as you like).

Free trade meant subsidized American agriculture could export to Mexico and undercut indigenous produce. After NAFTA was signed in ’94 Mexico’s agriculture shrank by 2 million jobs, and the country shifted from being a net exporter to a net importer of food. The service sector now dominates the economy at 70% of GDP and over 60% of the workforce. More women have found themselves in work when communities migrated or were moved off the land.

For my people there may be no money
But there is always atmosphere
We know how to enjoy even if everything is spoiled
We know how to live even if we live oppressed
They wanted to remove our roots
But we are still the people of the country

Mare Advertencia Lirika - Mi Gente (En vivo) SiempreViva

 

Oaxaca has Mexico’s largest indigenous (largely Zapotec) population (2.02 million - 48% of the state’s population). 77% of Oaxacans are considered poor, with nearly 40% unable to read or write and 58% of young people suffering from malnutrition. Mexico’s healthcare system has long treated indigenous women as culturally backward. There were sterilization programs in the ‘90s. Indigenous women seeking reproductive care continue to have their support programs ransomed if they do not agree to sterilization. In 2013 27% of indigenous women using Mexico’s public health services were sterilized without their consent.

We were born free but we live on our knees
We make up our wounds in pink tones
No respect, no dignity, in our lives
That is why our struggle is not over yet

Mare Advertencia Lirika - ¿YTú Qué Esperas? 

Oaxaca is highly rural and communal - a legacy of postrevolutionary land reforms back in the 1930s. Farmland from large estates was redistributed for people to own in the ejido (common tenancy) model. Over 75% of the state is socially owned, split between communal lands and ejidos. When we say ‘for people’, it was given back to the men. 

As the agricultural economy disintegrated in the ‘80s and ‘90s women helped fight for indigenous communities and the UCIZONI organisation. They facilitated marches and meetings, particularly during the armed EZLN (Zapatista Army of National Liberation) uprising in Chiapas in protest of NAFTA in 1994. Beyond logistics, however, they were excluded from community leadership, whether that of the indigenous movement, the justice system, communal property, or religion.

Most of Oaxaca’s municipalities are run by indigenous governments that only men can vote for. While Mexico’s constitution can supersede indigenous politics where it discriminates on gender, women are still often left off voter lists and barred from office. In 2004 Guadalupe Ávila Salinas, the female candidate for mayor of San José Estancia Grande in southern Oaxaca, was assassinated by the sitting mayor.

I’m like you, I knew what violence was
And I also saw what respect costs
But I decided to change all that shit
And now I'm just asking, what are you waiting for?
I don't want to wait for myself or for my sisters,
I don’t want to be dominated
Today I raise my voice against all the lies
And I invite you, woman, to raise your fist

Mare Advertencia Lirika - ¿YTú Qué Esperas?

With gender roles heavily prescribed, Oaxacan women were carrying double the amount of water from wells to homes in 2020, trying boost sanitization during Covid. Ayutla in the eastern mountains has been without running water since 2017 when armed men took control of the spring, also razing homes and farms – 23 of which belonged to women.

Being a more isolated and highly rural state, education in Oaxaca falls behind the rest of Mexico. The region doubles down on older cultural traits, particularly machismo and patriarchy. Societal forces like the church and wider gender prescription also survive stronger here. Women preserve family honor by remaining pure.

“From everything I experienced in my community, from my infancy through everything I have lived, I learned about how religion makes you a conformist. … It is as if god made us poor and made me a marginalized woman. … I already did not fit in at school, my family did not fit in, but on top of that I did not meet the standards of a good Christian or a good daughter, within the church. … It is limiting as a woman. You are not allowed to play an important role within religion, because there are no priestesses, the are no goddesses, all the important roles are for men.” 

President López Obrador, AMLO, is keen to diagnose the deadly treatment of women in Mexico as being less about gender and more the product of neoliberal policies that preceded him. Monied elites and corruption, which contribute towards an increasingly isolated culture in which people vent ‘grievances’, are what need fixing. Feminism, he says, is not the route. His support for a candidate accused of raping and beating women continues to undermine his stance this year.

The indigenous culture the rappers experience is neither 100% noble nor 100% backward. Their lyrics fuse all the above to show Oaxacan women facing oppression from both within indigenous culture, excluded from land ownership and political power, and from without, with Mexico’s economic changes and outright attacks on indigenous culture undermining the people. 

“The idea of ​​romantic love in fairy tales has been one of the things that has harmed women the most in society … we continue to wait for men to solve our problems because the reality is that most of us are macho. To varying degrees, perhaps. But that's how it is. And as long as we continue to educate girls with Disney, as long as we continue to watch soap operas that reproduce those fairy tales, this will continue to exist.”

These women represent a far more modern Oaxaca, or a more modern economy in Mexico. They are working women, students, young mothers, activists. They attend university and study medicine, art, design. They grew up on Oaxaca’s music markets, mixtapes, poetry and stencil graffiti. Doma Press’s website showcases her artwork and where her journey of self-expression began: “That is my particular vision of Rap, it is manifestation, union, criticism and brotherhood, for me sorority.”

These women are rooted as much in hip hop and graffiti as they are Zapotec heritage. Their message promotes Oaxaca’s indigenous culture, but with a voice for change. They draw strands from hip hop, feminism, progressive politics and traditional culture together, rekindling a passion for the better parts of native culture (community, richness of street culture, people power). They take this over neoliberal economic initiatives that set everyone on an individualist consumer bent. They run rap workshops to educate and enable musicians, they hosted the first events for the fledgling scene, they do social work. It’s rap as a second job, and with a conscience. It may be an American import, but it comes with a local, educated filter.

“We have to stop being so individualistic and become communal once again. We are already free. We are. The problem is that we don’t believe that we are. The problem is that we still think that we need something more to be happy. That I need to be white, tall, and have a nice car, and a good-looking boyfriend in order to be worth something, without realizing that I am already worth something.  I can go out on the street and look, think, act, and live in a way, which is in balance with others; that doesn’t offend anyone or hurt anyone. That is a truly dignified life.”

Quiche At Camden Fringe: A Comedy Slice Of Sexual Politics

Lotus Productions ‘Quiche’ has come to the Camden Fringe, and offers punters a sharp hour long play punctuated with hysterically funny lines and well placed poignancy. The audience were laughing loud and settling back comfortably for more every time.

Over the course of one night we see couple Jenny and John explore every facet of their love when their friends, Jo and Jake, pop round for some quiche. Alcohol, power plays, dissatisfaction and desire all do their work.

While the comedy is laugh a minute (with a higher ratio than that in places) the themes are very adult and intense. Is being in a couple the start or the end of your sexual identity, or both? How satisfied should we, or do we, feel in our lives, at work and at home, and slotting between other people?

The play moves along nicely, and the cast really gels together, all of the emotions, all of the gags: they fit perfectly, and the entire cast renders everything so well that the characters win you over, even where their actions perhaps shouldn’t.

Ella Turk-Thompson and Michael Williams admirably anchor the play with their independent yet intrinsically linked characters Jenny and John. Wherever the night takes us, we can see at least one, but often multiple, angles of their relationship bouncing alongside – whether nicely, nastily or comically.

Ellie Mason’s Jo and Frank McHugh’s Jake are wonderful creations. Ghastly, horrifying, then sad, both actors have to fill a lot of differently shaped spaces in the play, and they do so flawlessly. Jo trips between comically awful and crass and vulnerable. Jake has to be a sod, a formidable lover and a mate, and constantly pitches between friend and foe to the others in different ways.

Quiche is a fantastic little play with a very warm heart. You’re really rooting for Jenny and John, and so the comedy can really take you anywhere, hysterically, without you feeling mean for laughing at the highs and lows of their evening, love life and social skills.

Quiche is at the Etcetera Theatre in Camden until Sunday. Shows at 8:30

http://camdenfringe.com/show.php?acts_id=504

Who Governs Britain?

It just doesn’t feel like any of the people around now will be our voting options at the next election.

Jeremy Corbyn was an unlikely leader before he got in, it was a shock (good or bad) when he did, and he’s stayed precarious and unlikely ever since. Theresa May is seen as a competent politician, but that doesn’t put her in front of others. As a candidate she didn’t stand out so much as have no competition. She isn’t idiosyncratic or a conspicuously unlikely leader, it’s more just… ‘why her?’

So both parties feel as though they could just as easily be led by somebody else, rather than having leaders who are the spearhead of a particular direction the party is currently taking. Admittedly maybe Corbyn could have been a spearhead, if he had had a following louder than any other division or faction currently vying for exposure in Labour.

But then it’s refreshing that a lot of the likely leaders that have been gestating in the politics of the last 10-15 years have almost all gone. We hadn’t been managing staggering margins in election results with them as leaders or cabinet/shadow cabinet figures. This doesn’t really feel like something new, though. Something old has gone, but without there being replacements.

Jeremy Corbyn appears to be publicized and managed by the same crass team that clearly jizzed to West Wing as kids and wanted to inject ass kicking procedural confidence into Ed Miliband – regardless of the material they were working with. Jeremy Corbyn is noble on paper and in deed, or in track record, but he isn’t his PR team, who clearly use the same rules of engagement as Miliband’s team – they look at top ten lists of stats on Twitter and Buzzfeed, think the public also wants politics reduced down into that (and intelligence and morals and ethics and debate), and then copy and paste. ‘People will love this.’ This was how the remain teams helped us out of the EU.

Theresa May is who we have for the moment, regardless. Her inaugural speech was a promising mix of bring me your black, your gay, your poor… inclusiveness and confidence. In her recent past she was big enough to admit to changing her mind on gay adoption, and supported same sex marriage ahead of a lot of her colleagues.

On the side away from liberal, Theresa May became notable a few years back for high profile deportations and attempted deportations. The media liked to portray her as a tough figure who’d get it done, who wouldn’t take any nonsense from foreign leaders. She’s noted that the status of EU nationals in the UK is negotiable.

Without irony, rather a lot of countries use this vocabulary of competition, of having to look out for ourselves because otherwise we will get stamped on. Because all the other countries are selfish, we must be more selfish. This is why Boris Johnson’s fans are also fans of Boris’s new position post Brexit vote – he puts Britain first, others behind.

Brexit. We were a nation in thirds it seems. A third wanted in the EU, were liberal and internationalist and multiculturalist; a third were concerned about immigration and its economic and cultural impact, coupled with the cultural and (costly) economic impact of being in the EU, enough to want to leave; the last third felt the same as the second, but were unsure about leaving because of the uncertainty of having Britain going out on its own.

A potent two thirds, it seems. A momentous decision that wasn’t really made with that much momentum. Nobody really had to change their opinions. Nobody really said anything to change anybody’s opinions, either. The EU, the referendum result: everything was a given to all involved (whether they were for or against). So we’ve now perhaps woken up with the shock of a surprise result after mental listlessness. Although it’s not really as though politics is springing to action.

“Theresa May seems to think her main task is to reunite the Tory Party, an impossible alliance of people with wholly incompatible beliefs, and a major obstacle to intelligent thought or useful action.  Surely that’s the last thing Britain actually needs? Many of her party (perhaps Mrs May herself) would surely be happier in New Labour, or merging with it, if unity is what they want. What's quite certain is that New Labour would be happier with Mrs May as their leader than with Jeremy Corbyn, which I for one find quite funny”

Peter Hitchens, ‘Why Blairites Would Rather Be Led By Theresa May Than Jeremy Corbyn.’ 

No particular leaders, no particular leaning towards either party (at once both different and interchangeable: Conservatives and Labour – radically different ideas packaged the same way (sometimes vice versa)), soundtracked soundbites, emotive and six words long. Obsessed with getting the message across, less the message.

Even if May v Corbyn is here to stay, what are the big themes now? The last government or so had the Economic Crisis to deal with. Now it’s more just (just!) the economy, which is far more nebulous to affect, understand or report news on. Everything’s still stinging: flukey property market, b-all interest rates… but that’s almost become normal, rather than post financial crash. We’re kind of out of or kind or ‘meh’ with any foreign interventions. Even the EU is sort of settled, although its ingredients will still be in our vocabulary – split opinions on immigration, foreign aid, money going abroad to investments and business contracts. Just because we’re ‘back in control’ it doesn’t mean that we won’t make the same choices we used to blame the EU for.

One by one we are ticking off the things that preoccupy people when they try and volunteer their interests in politics and in voting a particular way. We are going to run out of concrete things to say are making us unhappy and messing up our private lives. We’re heading towards nuance.

We can’t get majorities out of elections. I guess there’s a nice pluralism in that – saying none of the parties speak to you means, in another light, that there are certain things you like and certain things you don’t in all of the parties. Similarly with leaving the EU – at least it wasn’t a huge majority in one direction. People had things they liked and things they didn’t.

If we were rabidly anti-immigrant and nationalistic exclusively... man... and with having such potential to live a modern, open life where it’s easy to be informed about all events and cultures in our country and the world, so easy to be little l liberal, and easier to have free time and some money to pursue a fun life outside of work. Having all of that going for us, and yet still being preoccupied with migrants and pounds and pennies being creamed off tax payers’ money? Boy, that would be grim.

Pounds and pennies. We do seem to have a strange fixation on using up time and money, and finding someone to blame the constant shortfall on. So we set up migration as an opponent in this fight for resources, this idea that Britain is too crowded, that our personal lives are being made difficult by too many people needing the same things, or that our favourite goods and events and memories are being taken away by the dilution of culture.

Is our culture being watered down by the lifestyles of the 13% of our foreign born population? Culture is almost as nebulous as the country. What is culture? Food, art, dancing, slang… is any of this shit uniform nationally? Or even shared by a majority?  Are there things that everybody shares?

I mean, regions have differences, north and south has differences, people live in various combinations and economic levels everywhere. Apart from, like, breathing air, there are hardly any experiences shared by the majority of the population. We’re not all sitting down in front of Corrie with a mug of tea and talking about the rain every night. Look at the stats.

Transatlantically we’re looking at politics that’s charged by, feeding on, the immigration issue. It’s the only thing left to hold on to while the parties (both British and US) endure a long term lack of direction and unity as their most recent narrative changing, bona fide leader figures slip into history.

And while what’s up next might appear to be a quest for party unity (for Labour: uniting behind a leader; for the Conservatives: uniting on what Britain’s interface with the wider world and population should be), that’s hardly new, and who really cares? It’s only really a story when there’s no other news story to trump (Trump?) it. Maybe America needs to iron out its presidential results before we can see what’s about to hit us.

Beyond Reason: Politicising Killers and Mental Instability - Thomas Mair and Omar Mateen

Jo Cox death: Thomas Mair, accused of murdering MP, gives name to court as 'death to traitors, freedom for Britain'

Orlando gunman Omar Mateen raged against 'filthy ways of the West'

When someone carries out an atrocity, why do we take their stated reasons as gospel? If someone who shoots up a gay club is solely a homophobe, or an Islamist, or if someone who shoots an MP is just a right wing xenophobe, then you are selectively choosing to politicise those actions. If those minds are as reeling as any mind who can carry out those kind of acts should be, the fact that their brain can land on a political motivation one minute means as much or as little as the unintelligible gibberish they might say a minute later. Even a lost mind can pick up the odd quote and mimic the context now and then.

These killers are not freedom fighters, they are not world changers; they are people who can’t cope, and who can brutally trample on other people through cruelty and intellectual laziness and mental infirmity.

“My name is death to traitors, freedom for Britain.” Thomas Mair, who shot Jo Cox. They are not even his words. It’s just something that’s bubbled up to the top in a confused, angry mind. He’s heard similar phrases bandied about generically and tried to attach a specific, personal meaning to them.

What does ‘freedom for Britain’ even mean? Freedom from other countries and cultures? Freedom from complications? From nuance, from being wrong, from learning, from other people’s opinions, from having to understand, freedom from reality (freedom from Britain).

It’s freedom to rubber stamp and act quickly, easily, selfishly and self-absorbed, and not feel guilty about it. Freedom, or a mandate, to think that you represent people’s opinions, over and above others, to a bloody conclusion.

Embed from Getty Images

Jo Cox was killed outside Birstall library as she was about to hold a constituency surgery – come one, come all, and tell me your problems, whether macro or micro. It’s as direct as our democracy gets. And here’s all that civics and philanthropy and cooperation being broken. Almost broken: beautifully, MPs still don’t think we should have knife arches and US-esque security filtering the contact time.

Shot three times and repeatedly stabbed. The hatred, the punch bag repetitive outlet of that. I don’t have the time, brain, personality or concentration to work out my problems thoughtfully, so I kick ass to pump some new chemical feelings into my experience instead.

As the law has it, it’s not about the personal for Thomas Mair. He’s being charged within the legal framework surrounding Terrorism, which the law has as its goals: “made for the purpose of advancing a political, religious, racial or ideological cause.” It’s where his ideas meet a wider conceptual framework, that’s what he’s up for. Not for his personal motives.

Protect me from what I want.

Mair had a haphazard interest in white supremacy. “Despite everything I still have faith that the White Race will prevail, both in Britain and South Africa.” Prevail against the liberal media, prevail against the white traitors letting the movement down. Mair took an interest in white-abulous movements in both SA and the US in the 1980s and 1990s. From 1999 - 2003 he spent £400 on literature from the largest neo Nazi group in the US. Explosive and gun making manuals, it seems. But these activities are short-lived wherever the facts are grounded with dates.

Then there’s the other Thomas Mair. The sufferer of mental health problems also had a quiet way of living with and dealing with things. He was a reserved neighbour offering gardening tips (neighbours can’t equate the man they knew with these acts). Back to the library again – he loved books, his house was full of them, “he practically lived in the library.” Mair’s brother had not noticed any particular political leanings, let alone extremism.

The man volunteered at a country park to help his mind, there are quotes:

“I can honestly say it has done me more good than all the psychotherapy and medication in the world. […] Many people who suffer from mental illness are socially isolated and disconnected from society, feelings of worthlessness are also common, mainly caused by long-term unemployment.”

No troubles with articulation and composition of thoughts there.

It’s all a soup, all interlinked, you can’t have one without the other – except in law and the media, I suppose. The negative card-carrying highlights make more sense of a person’s awful actions than the conflicting context. If he was unhinged with an interest in the far right – that’s easier to digest. Mental illness can be an insult when the bastard’s evil. Otherwise there would be some nasty logical extensions.

Omar Mateen

Embed from Getty Images

So you might be gay and you might not be. You don’t understand, you’re afraid, you’re angry, you’re lying to your family and your dad and your dad is standing up for you (and killing you) in the only heartbreaking way he knows how. Then you decide to shoot the people you are but don’t want to be, assuming other people can be you in the first place. BANG a beautiful teenage brain full of heart and hope goes all over the wall before he gets to tell mom he loves her BANG another BANG BANG BANG BANG mother fucker. Visceral pleasure, totally blind, totally false, totally cruel.

You can’t have what you want, you won’t let yourself have what you want, and so you disprove what you want. You make it something that’s wrong, you make it ugly, but you prove you still want it by killing it, blasting it out of life, rather than walking away indifferently.

It’s only dilemmas that make people rant.

All those dicks you like, those beautiful bodies that mean more to you than all the hate inside and what do you do? You shoot them because they are wrong, because you think they are impervious to the homophobia you’ve experienced and internalized, because they rejected you (yes, all of them), because you think they think they are better than you, because the US invaded Afghanistan, because whatever.

Nothing really adds up, other than a problem with other people. Either a problem connecting with them, or a problem with being nice to people. Mateen would linger around women, unsettling them, he would stare impassively at aggrieved husbands, beat his wife, go to gay clubs to either flirt with men or hurl abuse about homosexuality, and a few minutes before pulling triggers, he said it was all in the name of IS.

Islamic State even played along, calling Mateen, ‘one of the soldiers of the caliphate.’ But then “Mateen also appears to have been a deeply conflicted and possibly self-loathing homophobe who drank heavily, took drugs, dated men, frequented the same club he later attacked, Pulse, and used a gay dating app.” Quite a blemished Islamist.

Mateen’s ex wife, describing the beating and the violence, and the bipolar shifts, was backed up by her fiancé: ‘I hear the media trying to make this about Isis or Islam…but it is about imbalance, it’s about society, it’s about parenting, accepting each other.’

How do you call it with mental illness? How does either the good or the bad win out, and define the person or their motive/actions when you want to sum up. What’s so wrong with a killing being done for complex, conflicting personal circumstances? Is that less of a crime, or less of a death for the victims? Why do we like a mental illness to be coupled with unpleasant political affiliations, so it is more definitely the killer’s fault? Do we need to be angry at them, rather than at a situation, where there would be nothing to grab hold of?

Because it’s not as if there isn’t a situation. It’s not as if the sick (mentally ill) thought processes that have gone on here aren’t terrifying exaggerations of sick (fuckwit) thought processes that go on in the minds of non-criminal people every day:

The [BNP] was accused of posting leaflets near the West Yorkshire town where Labour MP Jo Cox was killed, accusing her of taking "misguided action" by "helping Muslims".

Shooting, killing, obliterating someone for having a different opinion to you. Blaming them for all the manifestations in reality of the things you dislike theoretically. Wow. So mad you need to stamp on something. So mad and incapable of understanding. That’s why you get mad enough to kill someone. Your whole life is frustration because you don’t understand anything you profess to hate with knowledge/experience. You grab at random bits of it for a quick fix. If only we could leave Europe… You hate the gays, you hate the people letting in the immigrants, you hate the Western powers, you hate the Muslims. Everything in your life would be alright if they could only just fix this one problem you see.

You align your anger, which is personal, which is your problem, with a cause – which has nothing to do with your inability to cope with the world without stamping on people and things. If you’re not careful (and if your mind’s like this you’re not going to be careful) you’ll get recruited to a cause that is led by people who are more rational than you and who want to feed on/exploit your anger and set you off, while they take the leadership credit. They might run a political party or movement; they might lead a terrorist cell. They might not all condone your killing, but they’ll happily make use of your anger and deny any responsibility for it – or its consequences.

My generation

The '90s didn't end at the end of the '90s. It was too soon at the time, and they've felt near-distant-near in the years since.

The '90s actually end when your parents die.    

There's a medical room waiting for you, where they will stay ruthlessly awake - sometimes alongside you in the palliative space, but mostly talking to and at some scene only their misfiring headspace can experience. 

They talk at and about you as you were, as they look sideways at you as you are. They can't return smiles, but they can smile. They worry and you can't comfort them. But then they stop worrying anyway. Brain soup is all.

Why would you hold on to 1997 rather than 2012? Why do you follow my hand round the room? Why can't I lip read?

It doesn't even hurt. Lady next door is worse. 

I think I prefer it when your eyes are closed now.

Syria: A Slight Return

Syria. While Russia’s bombing campaigns get the thumbs up from Assad, the West offers civilian death tolls. What about our short lived bombing campaign? Have we calmed down since Paris now?

We hit the Omar oil fields, targeting the money and the funding, for a few days from the 2^nd December. Asides from that?

“There has only been one other British air strike in Syria - an unmanned Reaper drone firing a Hellfire missile at an IS checkpoint near Raqqa on Christmas Day.”

America gets the 90% figure when it comes to the action. And is making an $11 million a day spend on Syria.

What’s America up to there, and the UN? Well, the UN peacekeeping mission came and went in 2012 – things just got too violent for peacekeeping. The US has, like it often does, offered support. The American agenda that isn’t meant to be threatening, where American values and moral/human values overlap somewhat, somewhat. For over a century now America starts out with the support, verbally praising those seeking independence, change, freedom, and accompanying it with non-lethal supplies – food, clothes… and the CIA training selected leaders in the resistance groups, helping them to help themselves.

It’s a vetting process, because the US has this kind of meta- status, where it can go above the level of national to judge things on more global concerns. By 2015 the US had picked 1,200 people in Syria to train. It might be well intentioned, it might not be (and just disingenuous gloss and rhetoric), but either way, the reports by September had only 4 or 5 US trained fighters tackling ISIS. Others had handed their weapons over to the opposition, and a month later the programme was to be suspended. That’s been the US in Syria since 2011. From 2013 the training included handing over weapons. From 2014 surveillance accompanied the above, and towards the end of the year airstrikes – hitting ISIS, and a few other select Islamist groups, in Syria, and a few other countries. They’ve been attacking so long it’s normal. They wondered what all the fuss was about when we suddenly said the UK needed to join in to defeat ISIS. They’d had to carry on without us when the Commons vote failed in 2013.

What has been Assad’s take on this? The airstrikes were illegal and unhelpful. He’s quite often talked to and at the West’s media, and called any firepower coming from this way ‘terrorism’, or at least something that supports it. He dubbed any anti-government forces in Syria as the same, too.

He doesn’t have a problem with Russia’s missile accuracy though. And Russia has had its fair share of strikes, and civilian casualties, what with all those rebel leaders meeting in residential areas (this seems to be the residents’ problem, not the military’s). Although an Assad/Russia intelligence based mission killed rebel leaders on Christmas Day it seems.

“Am I backing the Assad regime, and the Russians, in their joint enterprise to recapture that amazing site? You bet I am. That does not mean I trust Putin, and it does not mean that I want to keep Assad in power indefinitely.”

As for us in the UK? We’d like to act, but it’s a mess – was our take on Syria before the brief flirtation with airstrikes. But while ISIS is ‘easy’ to openly criticize and attack, we seem to be (relatively) diplomatic with Assad. You could feel Gadhafi’s days were numbered back in 2011. There was no need for diplomatic selectiveness when criticizing ‘the situation’; there were calls for Gadhafi to go, Presidential and Prime Ministerial. Assad isn’t the most popular tinpot despot in the West’s eyes, but all the same he can sometimes be the unnamed leader of a bad situation we tend to bring up here and there. ISIS we could grab on to with gusto. Assad? Who knows, maybe we quite like him. 

Madaya has no supplies, people are starving. These are pro Assad forces blocking people’s passage, here. obviously they’re talking about the fighting forces but applying the rules to everyone, residents. Over a dozen people apparently shot trying to gather firewood. Children are starving, people are starving. Say you can actually find some rice in Madaya, that’ll cost you £170. Kids old enough to care about being cool are wheeled along in prams because they’re too weak to walk. What with the airstrikes and the infrastructure being used as a battlefield, school isn’t likely for many reasons. Kids in Madaya are taking to minefields to strip plants of leaves for food (the only places where other people haven’t already done this). Like they do everywhere, the minefields are taking limbs off the kids.

It's scary to think back on the last five years or so, and how many times Syrians from every walk of life have been quoted about what they think of the outside world. Homs? Aleppo? These things lasted for years, and the level of atrocity, daily, was astral, gut wrenching. Moral map redefining. Except that it wasn’t, of course. We couldn’t/wouldn’t pick a side (generously), or preferred the blood on Assad’s hands to the blood on his opponents’ hands (less generous).  Who knows, maybe we quite like him.  And the whole time with all these people burying their grandmother or their grandson, with fathers beaten to death for telling rebel fighters to leave women alone to boys thrown from rooftops by ISIS brave-in-a-crowd thug pools for being gay. The whole time these young and old relatives, hand wringing leaders and politicians, aid workers, community leaders have been saying what they think of the west’s inaction, and what they will go on thinking of the West once this is all over and they’ve had to just survive through not succumbing to their ‘opponents’ attrition.

You kind of get opponents thrust on you as a resident. You’re not fighting, you’re not even interested in sides and malice, all things being equal, but as someone’s hurting you then you have to admit you’ve ended up with an opponent. It’s just unfair, because you never wanted involvement.

What these people say about the west is harder to read or look at than the photos of the starved bodies or pulped men women and children sticking the rubble together. They give these sort of quiet hints that they will never forget our reaction, non-reaction, in the years ahead when it’s all over. Sometimes they talk like they don’t mind the non-reaction anymore. They know our reply, and now they are getting on with dealing with the situation themselves.

You could feel Gadhafi’s days were numbered back in 2011… Isis has around 150 miles of coastline around Libyan city Sirte now, too. It’s been covert reconnaissance for us and the States for the last few months, apparently. Libya’s looking to see Western action again. 

Leaders Bored: Syria, Corbyn and Foreign Affairs as Domestic Kudos

Syria has bubbled up to the top of the political agenda and news bulletins once again. Whether we act or not, it’s seemingly more interesting to us because of what it means for the leaders on either side of the UK political spectrum, rather than for what is happening – and what might happen – on the ground or in the air in Syria.

When it comes to our response, we’ve been here many abortive times before. The short version is, as a rule: yes, it’s terrible, yes, it’s been going on in mass, bloody daily civilian death tolls since, gosh, 2011 (back when people were self-immolating and we got all excited about an Arab spring), but it’s complicated. Yes it’s a 200k+ body count about now, yes Assad’s bad, but ISIS are worse (and also huge and complex – vaccinating and handing out aid with one hand and killing soldiers, journalists, civilians… with the other). Plus there’s all the other groups, and trying to decide if some, all, or any of them are preferable to Assad or Isis is too nuanced and verbose for anything that could be pitched to the nation prior to bombing the fuck out of shit. We would like Assad gone, worded carefully, but we don’t want Isis to take his place.

Westminster clocked up 2hrs 40 on the subject on the 26^th, though. Suddenly ISIS in Paris became ISIS in Syria.

“"That bomb in Paris, that could have been London. If they had their way, it would be London," said Mr Cameron.

[I hate to be inversely unpatriotic, but surely they did have their way, and they chose Paris].

"I can't stand here and say we are safe from all these threats. We are not. I can't stand here either and say we will remove the threat through the action that we take. 

"But do I stand here with advice behind me that taking action will reduce and degrade that threat over time? Absolutely and I have examined my conscience and that's what it is telling me."

Will this lens be enough to push a vote in for action?

2013 gave us demonstrations and a no vote in the commons for any action over Syria. Not another Iraq, we said, Libya 2011 airstrikes notwithstanding. Radio 4 would have weepy pieces about teachers who didn’t have to worry about their retarded pupils (they’d missed so much school from bombs/airstrikes they were mentally backward by preteen) any more (one last strike had blown up the school with the kids inside).

But that was then. Now we have a Labour leadership poised for self-destruction. So while there was a protest over the morality/effectiveness/motive behind Syrian intervention, the rights and wrongs of it are less interesting, it seems, than whether the Labour party agrees with Jeremy Corbyn about it all.

Who’s for and against action in Labour, who’s giving the juiciest quotes about dissention. Who’s namechecking Bolsheviks and dark ages and describing shadow cabinet meetings with all those words like brutal and bloodbath and hell and other things in all those disembodied quotes that always make for cracking news slots.

The former ministers are the ones who get to give the media what they really want. JC should resign! “How does Jeremy Corbyn and his small group of tiny Trots in the bunker think they've got the unique view on it all?” – mixed far left and right imagery there.

“BBC chief political correspondent Vicki Young said she was told Mr Corbyn was given a "thorough kicking" at the meeting with his shadow cabinet. 

“He had previously suggested he wanted to agree a united position within his shadow cabinet and for Labour to approach the question “as a party". The free vote means Labour MPs will not be ordered to vote with the leadership.”

Reading that back, stickler here, but I can’t help thinking that there’s either a ‘free vote’ or no vote at all.

But Corbyn was, it seems, bullied into the free vote, having thought to impose a three line whip to make sure the party toed the line. It seems a shadow cabinet meeting put paid to this:

“At an extraordinary meeting of Labour’s front bench team this afternoon, shadow ministers lined up to support David Cameron’s position and called for the party to vote with the Conservatives in favour of airstrikes. 

Those in favour of action are understood to include the shadow Foreign Secretary Hilary Benn, Mr Corbyn’s deputy, Tom Watson, as well as his Justice, Education and Health spokespeople. Only three shadow cabinet ministers out of 31 voiced opposition to air strikes at the meeting.”

And bullying apparently works both ways. Over eager left leaning supporters have been quite free with their angry encouragement/threats to airstrike supporters, including anti-war protestors sending a photo of a dead baby to an MP with a note to vote against the strikes - you know, like those illustrated, 250% opinions you get from certain contacts in your Facebook feed, when young, bright enthusiasm ends up hurting people, or at least their feelings.

Just because the youth and passion for your cause is pure and looks so winning and admirable (which is supposedly why the parties put people like this in charge of social media and smaller party/public interface roles), it doesn’t necessarily follow that the ways and means you come up with to express and act on that young (perhaps green) passion will be pure, or even particularly nice.

And on the other side there’s the rather unfortunate and hawkish: you’re either with us or with them. Once David Cameron says ‘terrorist sympathisers’ in a speech there’s no way of backing down or qualifying who was being referred to – if you use the term then you’ve allowed yourself the easy, mindless motivational soundbite and a disingenuous, fictional polarised rendering of the situation. If you object to military action against a terrorist group then you support the terrorist group. There’s another one of those 250 percent opinions. And see the ‘I’m a terrorist sympathiser’ social reaction.

It’s high stakes, though, isn’t it? David Cameron needs enough labour MPs to vote yes to cover his Tory dissenters. So the vote is to be timed for maximum support.

And it’s a long old one, though. Wednesday is to be the debate and vote, running from 10:00am to 11:00pm and some. Just imagine all those thick papery Few Good Men case studies the young, up and coming and caffeinated backroom boys are preparing round the clock right now. A precedent for every eventuality. These are the leader quality politicians of ten years’ time or so – this is what Cameron, Osborne, Burnham, Miliband et al would have been doing 15-20 years ago, for the Majors and the Portillos and the John Smiths.

Though it is a shame that career paths and the fate of a country and its people have to be so intertwined. Why is a fusty crisis of cabinet aggravation with mildy annoyed complaints from hitherto unheard of MPs to the media more interesting than what happens on the ground in foreign affairs?

Maybe it’s a leadership/ election thing, maybe when we’re all excited about how our domestic politics is going to turn out we have to go for this angle. Any foreign policy stuff becomes about the policy makers, not the foreign situation. So American foreign policy is now rendered through the Obama-before-the-election lens. Sort of, ‘what does Donald Trump say about it?’

The leaden gravity of the situation and the bloody reality of life and death on the ground in Syria aside, it’s not as if it isn’t exciting as an international relations gig, either. We’ve got a ‘we’re next!’ approach to the Paris attacks, with DC putting us at the top of ISIS’s hit list, so we may as well defend ourselves. (C4)

“He said there was strong legal justification for extending the current military action in Iraq on grounds of self-defence, and insisted that the Government saw military action as part of a “comprehensive” strategy to bring peace to Syria.” 

Do we think it will go Cameron’s way? Which IS Cameron’s way, exactly? Is he using ISIS outrage to try and get through what failed the last time? The government and the people opposed military intervention in Syria in 2013. “I get that” Cameron said in immediate response, with clear anger and frustration.

Of course, as with Iraq, where a humanitarian crisis was trumped by terrorism concerns, only to become once again about a humanitarian crisis when the terrorism threat looked a bit weak in retrospect, Syria never quite cut it as a humanitarian crisis we should put a stop to. It took the threat of ISIS for a convincing case to hit Syria to appear. We’ll worry about their territory in Iraq and elsewhere another time, perhaps.