There’s a certain bellicose right-winger who has taken offence at my last post, The Middle-Eastern Despot Challenge. I would like to assure NZPundit, and anyone else out there for whom English is a second language, that the post was written in a sense of deep, bitter and hopeless irony.
The neo-Reaganites have raised the issue of Saddam’s slaughter of muslims on several occasions, seemingly to divert attention from their own mounting tally.
Let me shout for the hard-of-hearing: such statistics are ridiculous and immoral! Are we to accept that as long as George W Bush kills less muslims than Saddam that makes it all A-okay? How many less should there be? If there's only a few, is that still okay?
Saddam may already be in his rightful place, but devout George's chances of going somewhere different when the reaper comes a-calling are approximately zero.
Anyway, I went out to Newtown today, got a haircut and went to see 24-hour Party People, which I found surprisingly good. The treatment of Ian Curtis’s suicide brought back some of the sense of shock at the time.
For those that weren’t in the world yet, you had to listen to late night Hauraki to hear any of this stuff. I was working at an Uncles burger bar and used to hang a little radio from the handlebars of my bike to listen to Barry Jenkins on the way home in the wee small hours. (If there’s ever a retro NZ movie there has to be an Uncles in it.)
Joy Division records weren’t even being distributed here – you had to pick up small import batches or get someone to send them over. The record companies ended up screwing themselves though: when they finally relented and released Love Will Tear Us Apart, the pent-up demand was such it went straight to number one and kept the Rolling Stones out of their “rightful” spot for two weeks.
Maybe it’s because I’m of a certain age, but I had to race home and stick some of my old Joy Division on. I did so only to discover Girlie has wrecked my stylus.
After bawling her out, she informed me it was our anniversary. She’s been over here exactly one year. So, to kiss and make up we went out to dinner at Bronte, a quiet beachfront between Bondi and Coogee. Fabulous.
That post wasn’t ironic, okay?