Is It Just Me or Is Everything Shit? (7 page)

NEW MOM:
G
REAT. DO THEY DO BABY SOCKS IN, LIKE, GOLD THREAD?
T
HAT’D BE GOOD
.

NEW DAD:
Y
ES, IT’S SO IMPORTANT TO DRESS THE BABY RIGHT—YOU KNOW, TO DANGLE WEALTH OFF IT
.

NEW MOM:
M
MM
. O
THERWISE, WHAT’S THE POINT?

NEW DAD:
M
AYBE WE COULD GET A HEAD-TO-TOE OUTFIT FROM
M
OSCHINO
? I
S THAT WHAT
T
IM AND
C
ANDELABRA GOT FOR LITTLE, ERM, BABY
? O
R WAS IT
DKNY?

NEW MOM:
T
RICKY
. W
HAT WOULD
G
WYNETH DO
? O
H, AND THEN THERE’S
I P
INCO
P
ALLINO
! T
HEY’RE
I
TALIAN, SO THAT’S SOME EDUCATIONAL VALUE RIGHT THERE
.

NEW DAD:
A
ND WHAT ABOUT THOSE
$1,000 S
ILVER
C
ROSS STROLLERS
?
I Want One!
I Mean . . . The Baby Wants One.

NEW MOM:
Fucking awesome, yeah!

NEW DAD:
We could pimp it up real good—jack up the wheels, get some 26-inch rims on those babies, some leopardskin goin’ down . . . Cristal, pick up some bitches . . . ooh, yeah! I’m all excited . . . I think I’ll put the Jay-Z CD on.

NEW MOM:
Um, darling, you know what? I’ve been thinking . . . I’m actually quite bored with the baby now—I mean, we’ve had it for, like, eight weeks or something. Maybe we could drop it off at a Salvation Army or something? Like with shoes.

DICTIONARY SERVICES FOR TEXT MESSAGING

Dictionaries: not exactly in the spirit of the texting age. If these mobile dictionary services are meant as an enticement to stick strictly to the rules of the language, they conspicuously are not working.

Or maybe they’re there to inspire greater linguistic flourishes when working out where to meet up and who has been doing what to whom. In which case, maybe we could fit other great reference tomes onto our mobile phones—like dictionaries of quotations for when the time has come to stand on the shoulders of the giants of erudition.

“I believe it was aphorist and clergyman Charles Caleb Colton who first said, ‘Wen u hav nutn 2 say, say nutn :)”

“Gr8”

DIDDY DAY

Anyone still wondering whether America’s moral code has gone through some particularly rusty scrambler should consider that Las Vegas has now instituted May 14 as Diddy Day, a special day to commemorate that latter-day Martin Luther King, P. Diddy. “Our hope is that he continues to bring his electrifying presence to Las Vegas,” said Mayor Oscar Goodman.

What he might have done instead was to declare May 14 as Dido Diddy Diddy Dodo Day—a special day dedicated to the female singer-songwriter, the “electrifying” urban music mogul, and the extinct flightless bird formerly native to Mauritius. We’re not saying that would have been better, but it would have been different. A bitch to organize, though.

DISASTER RELIEF DISASTERS

When it comes to disasters, Western governments are like drunk uncles: forever making wild promises they have no intention of keeping.

When Hurricane Mitch devastated Central America in 1998, nearly $100 billion was pledged by governments, but only 33% was ever delivered. After floods struck Mozambique in 2000, $439 million was pledged by governments—but only $219 million, or around half, was delivered.

Most startling is the fact that, of the $1.1 billion pledged after the Bam earthquake in Iran in 2003, only $17 million ever turned up. That’s 2%. That’s one seriously drunk uncle talking some serious drunk shit about taking you to the zoo and stuff.

“We never get all the money we are pledged,” says Elizabeth Byrs of the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. As well as simply not paying up, governments also pull neat accounting tricks like diverting money that was to go to other needy situations, or making a big fuss of suspending affected countries’ debt repayments but all the while allowing the interest to mount up, so when the country does start repaying it has a ginormous sum to pay back.

Harry Edwards, a spokesperson for USAID, the U.S. government agency responsible for distributing humanitarian and economic assistance funds, said: “A lot of countries don’t pay. The United States isn’t the only one.” He later claimed that, anyway, a bigger boy made him do it.

Another trick is to count money spent on the military, which may offer assistance, as part of the total. That is, use the disaster as a way of subsidizing the military, recouping military expenditure from your supposed charitable donation. Is there nothing the U.S. will not milk to fund the military? We’re surprised there aren’t neo-cons wandering round the White House looking for stuff to melt down: “This big stamp and the pad—the one with the eagle on it—do we actually need this? We do? Okay. What about this picture of Abraham Lincoln? No one remembers who the fuck he was anyway, let’s put it on eBay.”

Of course, even when the money is paid, there’s no guarantee it’ll actually help the victims. Take, for example, the most fucked up of all motherfuckers, Hurricane Katrina. Following the disaster, the U.S. State Department received $126 million from thirty-six countries and international organizations. One year later,
Foreign Policy
checked in to see how that money was spent and found that $66 million was allocated to FEMA, which then gave it to the nonprofit arm of the United Methodist Church, which distributed almost none of the money to Katrina evacuees. During those critical first 365 days afterward, the nonprofit disbursed only $13 million of the money, and that mostly to pay employee salaries. Because nobody should help homeless hurricane victims for free.

Oh, and as for the remaining $60 million of that international aid? It languished for over six months in a non-interest-bearing account at the U.S. Treasury, before being signed over to the Louisiana Department of Education, which one year later—can you guess the next few words?—had yet to spend a dime! Listen, teachers, we know you guys aren’t used to seeing money, but please, share it with the entire class.

DOCTORS

In June 2005, a UK documentary offered a compelling reason why so many general practitioners manage that trademark double whammy of talking in slow, patronizing tones while also being utterly hopeless in the actual “helping people” department: They are either drunk or high on drugs.

Or rather, one in fifteen of them is, anyway. The others are just pricks.

DOCTORS ON DAYTIME TV

There’s something that doesn’t really scream Hippocratic ideals about being paid cartloads of cash for sitting around on a sofa chatting about hysterectomies. Also, they’re always so fucking nice to everyone, which makes us think they can’t possibly be real doctors.

PETE DOHERTY BLOOD PAINTINGS

Romantic rock rebel, Kate Moss enabler, and poet Pete Doherty speaks to his generation. And what he mainly says is: “Give me some money so I can go and buy some crack with it. I’m literally crackers . . . for crack!”

When Doherty was imprisoned for his various cracky crimes, UK newspapers ran extracts from his prison diaries: “I’m an innocent man. Wiggy only goes and gives me a stretch in chokey! Oh, my stars, the curdled days of toil and distress—lay me down my rivers of blue chalk and tears. And that.”

Doherty has famously broken down the historic barrier between musician and fan. Sometimes, he does this by removing blood from fans’ veins with which he then produces useless paintings for his Web site. In response to pictures of him seeming to inject an unconscious girl with heroin, he revealed that he was only taking blood from the girl’s arm for another painting—kind of the blood painter’s equivalent of running down to Pearl for some more watercolors. He wrote on his site: “The photos are stolen from my flat so . . . upsetting and personally catastrophic . . . how rude, secondly it’s a staged shot and what a fucking liberty to suggest I’d bang up a sleeping lass.”

Yes, how rude. Says the man who went down for burgling his best friend’s flat. Of course, removing someone’s blood while they lie on the floor for a blood painting is the height of modern etiquette.

Doherty has famously built back up the historic barrier between musician and fan by failing to turn up to many of his own gigs. Asked about this by
NME
magazine, he explained: “Yeah? In what sense did I miss gigs? Missed them as in fondly missing them? I didn’t miss any fucking gigs.”

When the
NME
pointed out that he’d “missed” them in the sense of “not turning up,” Doherty countered: “And who did? Who did? Who did turn up? Let them show their faces. What do they want, blood?”

Well, we know he’s got some.

But maybe there is hope. During a 2005
NME
interview, he refused to speak to the journalist until he gave him money to score drugs. He then jumped on the
NME
hack and tickled him and coercively removed his jacket because he liked it, then suggested that the journalist’s drink had been spiked with acid, then boasted about head-butting someone. By July 2006, he just wanted to tell the
NME
about his exciting new direction. So he’s moving away from drab mumbling of dull nonsense over listless strumming to . . . rap.

So, rap, then. Oh, and—wait for it—reggae. Thankfully, here in the United States, we’ll never hear any of it. “Kate Moss’s crackhead boyfriend makes music? I thought he just smoked crack!”

DUBAI

We’ve seen the future and it works! Well, with the help of slave labor it works, anyway.

Through a combination of ambition, sunshine, not levying taxes, and old-fashioned lunacy, Dubai has turned itself into the fantasy-world holiday destination of the age, offering ample parking, shopping, and money-laundering opportunities on the side. There are underwater hotels plus the world’s tallest building, and the whole thing is being run off slave labor. It’s what Vegas would be like if it had any kind of gumption at all. Have you seen all the amazing things going on over there? It’s almost like, only eight hundred miles away from the chaos in Iraq, there’s this awesome, glittering haven that’s . . . well, it’s chaos, too—but mighty fine chaos.

The new opportunities and cheap flights are attracting people of all descriptions: 15 million of them visited Dubai in 2005, of which the largest single group were the Brits (650,000 of them). Richard Branson has an island there; Gordon Ramsay has opened a new restaurant; David Beckham, Posh Spice, and her implants have a villa. This dusty, quite deserty garden of earthly delights has become our closest terrestrial equivalent to those casino-planet pit stops the Starship
Enterprise
was forever stopping off at in the original
Star Trek:
a place where all species can kick back and where Captain Kirk’s eye will be caught by a woman with big hair and blue skin before the facade cracks to reveal the kingdom’s dark secret . . .

In Dubai, being big is big. The most famous landmark is the sail-shaped Burj Al Arab hotel, the world’s only self-styled
seven
-star hotel built on its own man-made island with a helipad on the 28th floor. Everything is covered in gold. It’s the last word in luxury.

When finished, the $5 billion Dubailand theme park will be the world’s biggest, bigger even than Manhattan. There’s the world’s biggest mall, commonly called The Mall, soon to be supplanted by an even bigger mall inside the world’s upcoming tallest building, the Burj Dubai. The world’s largest indoor ski resort will be supplanted by another, which will feature a revolving mountain (great news for all those who see a mountain and think:
Hmm, if only it revolved
).

Not having much real coastline, Dubai has built more: The artificial island shaped like palm fronds, called The Palms, adds another seventy-five miles. Soon to arrive will be an archipelago of three hundred human-made islands, roughly reflecting a map of the world, called The World. This World is a funny old world: Rod Stewart has reportedly already bought up Britain. And there’s no Israel.

For many, this energetic display is a demonstration that only when you cut the brake cable does capitalism get really good. “In the next ten years,” reckons free-market journal
Liberty,
“Dubai look-a-likes will spring up around the world like variations on a theme . . . it’s either imitate Dubai, or become a petting zoo for those who do.”

So how does it all happen? Well, through a kind of magic: an ancient form of magic called serfdom. Workers (largely Muslims from the Indian subcontinent) hand over their passports, work twelve-hour days, and live eight to a room, then send home their wages to families they don’t see for years at a time. Work is supposed to stop whenever temperatures top 100°F, which they do often, but that never seems to happen. This is because of one of the truly magical aspects of the Magic Kingdom: Whenever it exceeds 100°, there is officially “no temperature,” so work continues. “Hot, you say? I grant you, it might
feel
hot. But to be off the scale would require a scale to be off. And today, there is simply no temperature, scaldingly hot or otherwise. Even though we are, as you say, sweating like a pair of bastards.”

But look, they’re happy! Oh no, sorry, they’re not. Like slaves throughout the ages, the construction workers in Dubai are often very unhappy. Puzzled by a recent wave of strikes, interior ministry official Lieutenant Colonel Rashid Bakhit Al Jumairi declared: “The workers are demanding overtime pay, better medical care, and humane treatment from their foremen . . . But they agreed to their employment conditions when they signed.”

Poor workers enslaved by the forces of kitsch: It’s very much the future! “Can I have my passport back so I can see my family again?”

“No! You must finish building this water park made from gold . . .”