Maybe we should go easy on Hollywood.

Hollywood has got a pretty poor reputation these days. Gone, the days of Monroe, Wayne & Heston, or Capra, Hitch & Wilder. What we get now is Tatum, Pattinson & Worthington, and Ratner, Harlin & *shudder* Bay. No more Some like it Hot, no more The Apartment, no more Vertigo or Casablanca. Now we get Transformers, American Pie: Band Camp and all manner of sequels, prequels, re-imaginings, adaptations, remakes, or films based on comics, fairground rides or toy lines.

All too rarely does an Inception, a Pulp Fiction, or a Wall*E come along. The truth of the matter is recently I would have agreed with that view, but recently a friend recommended a video to me. The video make me re-evaluate the Hollywood machine, and showed me that things are so twisted, so messed up over there, that it really is a miracle they make anything worth watching at all. Ever. It’s an anecdote told by Kevin Smith about the time he was asked by Warner Bros to write a script for a new Superman film and the things the producer made him include in it. Smith has a real talent for writing and speaking to audiences, and the 20 minute anecdote is truly great.

It’s incredible that with producers like that Hollywood ever manages to release anything of quality. So give Tinsel Town a break – any release that’s even half-way decent is a minor miracle.

Wading in to another pointless debate.

So, I overheard a conversation while out in the world. That conversation was regarding circumcision. A woman was talking about her little boy who she is taking to get circumcised for medical reasons – didn’t hear it all, plus I was trying to enjoy a cup of tea at the time, so I didn’t really want to hear the details – there are apparently problems with the foreskin being too tight and rubbing the little fella’s little fella painfully.

There were two or three other women around this table who then chimed in to the conversation. One of them declared that her husband’s looked so much better so she had her boys subjected to it. Another, whose husband was circumcised for religious reasons, admitted that it was better, and easier to clean (can he not clean his own?), although she couldn’t bring herself to do it to her son.

I sat there, drinking my tea, saying nothing. I was rather proud of my self-restraint. Wouldn’t want to make a scene. I did feel like asking the woman who thinks it looks better whether she was circumcised. Did she think lopping her clitoris off would result in a minor subjective cosmetic improvement? Or her daughter’s, were she to have any? No, that would be barbaric, wouldn’t it? Go ahead; mutilate your boys, no problem. I also felt like turning to the other woman and pointing out that my own uncircumcised knob is very easy to clean – it simply requires washing regularly, just like the cocks without hats. And that having it done for religious reasons is staggeringly bizarre, and further comfort for me in my wholly atheist standpoint. How is it possible that an omnipotent, supernatural creator of everything would give a gnat’s fart whether it’s creations went round with a bit of skin over their bellend or not? Why create it that way if it needed to be cut? If it was decided god didn’t like fingernails, would they have to go as well? If you thought people looked better with only four toes, would it be alright to snip the little one off without waiting for the child to be old enough to be able to make their own decision?

Of course not, so why is this OK? I don’t know, but it's none of my business, so I stayed quiet, finished my tea and decided to moan about it here while subjecting you to altogether too much information.

Dear Capitalism.

Thanks, but no thanks. No thanks to The Apprentice and Dragon's Den. No thanks to a never-ending parade of wannabe pricks using their bottomless supply of innovation in greed in an attempt to impress the 'Dragons' or Sir Alan 'Sir Alan' Sugartits, who having established their own uber-prickness and obscene greed, now seem to think they have the right to sit in judgement of others. (Amstrads: among the very worst computers ever made. Who are you to fire anyone?) Fuckers. No thanks to millionaire, tax-avoiding chancellors making unnecessarily harsh decisions to forward their own regressive ideology, regardless of what it does to millions of others born (through no fault of their own) into lives unimaginable to the chancellor and his privileged friends. No thanks to being forced into propping up an unsustainable global economic system to keep the richest richer at the expense of basic human rights for others - who seriously thinks that a system based on constant and unending growth is really supportable? Who seriously thinks that if Thatcher and Brown, or the bankers and the hedgies had made different decisions, the system would work perpetually? Dicks, that's who. No thanks, IMF. No thanks to forcing poor countries to open their markets to international corporations, the only possible outcome of which is to make Coke, Pepsi, Nestle, Wal-Mart and others more profit and leave the average person or local small scale trader even more destitute. No thanks to charging compound interest on Third World debts, making them pay back many times the amount that was originally borrowed. No thanks to near genocidal economic policies of debt repayment - Nicaragua spends a quarter of the amount it repays servicing debt on health. One in five children in Mali die before the age of five, and yet Mali spends more on debt repayment than it does on health. Zambia spends more repaying debt than it does on health and education combined. In April 2002 the IMF forced Malawi to sell 28,000 tons of maize to repay debts. Three months later three million people were facing starvation. No thanks to compound interest on Third World debt, which causes much unnecessary death and grief. No thanks to China's special brand of communist capitalism. No thanks to a horrifically corrupt nation exceeding the West in all kinds of markets, filling every space of their country with motorways, buildings, hotels and restaurants. No thanks to arms dealers propping up revolving African despots, bestowing cash loans and palatial homes on the new dictators. No thanks to the overproduction of products, flooding the world with tat and baby clothes, driving down the cost until nobody can afford to do anything but work. No thanks to a West which is, of course, morally outraged by the human rights atrocities carried out daily in factories, sweatshops and copper mines (but obviously not outraged quite enough to stop trading - they make so much stuff! Think of the money we could lose! What's basic human dignity and enough wages to prevent workers from starving compared to that? 'Cunt' is an insult that barely scratches the surface of just how cunty subscribers to the idea that this is the only rational way to behave are.) No thanks to the Chinese Communist Party - essentially a ruthless money-hungry elite bleeding its country and its people dry. No thanks to a communist state less socialist than Germany. No thanks to a communist Government spending less than half its GDP on its people, allowing 120 million migrants to work without welfare, actioning mass state redundancies, with a beating or a jail term for those who might consider striking. This is a demented communist state taking the global capitalist economic model and just running with it to ridiculous extremes, on the verge of eating the world. No thanks to hedge funds. I would rant about them for a bit but even after researching them I, much like the FSA, don't really know what they are, only that it's money for nothing like Knopfler could never have dreamed of and that when they go tits up, banks and countries the world over get fucked. So, in conclusion, dear capitalism, go fuck yourself hard in the eye. Love, Dave.

Sources:
The Little Earth Book (3rd Edition), James Bruges.
Is It Just Me or is Everything Shit? Vol. 2, Steve Lowe & Alan McArthur.