On last night's show, Rachel pointed out (video) that as an audience member watching the wild Mary Poppins-meets-the-Sex-Pistols Olympic opening ceremony, Mitt Romney was forced to endure a singing, dancing celebration of the National Health Service a.k.a Romneycare. Awkward.
Turns out, the NHS tribute also left some English conservatives with knickers atwist. Aidan Burley, Conservative Member of Parliament for Cannock Chase was so incensed by universal health care that he dashed off the dodgy tweets pictured at right. "Leftie multi-cultural crap." Nice.
Cue: outrage. Prime Minister David Cameron called his remarks "idiotic." London's excitable mayor, Boris Johnson, who upbraided Mr. Romney just a few days ago for questioning London's readiness to host the Games now had a go at Mr. Burley, saying, "People say it was all leftie stuff. That is nonsense. I'm a Conservative and I had hot tears of patriotic pride from the beginning."
Faced with hot tears of patriotic pride, Mr. Burley is trying to walk it back saying, "We all love the NHS but really for all the people watching overseas, 20 minutes of children and nurses jumping on beds, that seems quite strange. And then we had all these rappers -- that is what got me to the point about multi-culturalism."
For the record, there was only one rapper in the performance, Dizzee Rascal, who grew up in East London, not far from where the Opening Ceremony took place. You know, multi-cultural.
Finally, there's this little anecdote from The Birmingham Post: "Mr. Burley was touted as a Tory rising star when he won Cannock Chase seat in 2010 with a huge swing from Labour. However, he lost his job as a parliamentary private secretary when details emerged of a stag do he attended in the skiing resort of Val Thorens last December. One guest was alleged to have dressed in an SS uniform while others were said to have chanted Nazi slogans. Mr. Burley, who is being investigated by French police over the incident, has repeatedly apologized for being present at the event but denied behaving badly himself or breaking the law."
Conservatives elected in 2010 saying outrageous things and refusing to apologize. Now that is multi-cultural.
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Is THAT where we got it? The whole "special relationship" role modeling?
Rupert Murdoch did start his Media empire over there you know.
Worst title for a pornographic novel EVER!!
WORST title for a pornographic novel ever.
Racism runs deep in the Conservative party. They've avoided overt racism for the last few decades, but it remains a significant undercurrent. As the comedian Stewart Lee said: "If political correctness has achieved one thing, it's to make the Conservative party cloak its inherent racism behind more creative language."
The reference to "multi-cultural crap" is exactly that. It's code for "I'm offended that there were some black people involved".
Some Tory twit caught sieg-heiling? Who'd a thunkit?
Trust me, there's no twit like a British Tory - they manage to make our wingnuts look like they have brains (reptile brains, no frontal lobes, but a brain is a brain in comparison to the total lack thereof). Of course, our Southern Tories are pretty close to their English forebear cousins.
So the English critic was caught attending an French party where they sang Nazi songs? No wonder he's hoping to divert attention by criticizing his own country's Olympics. Sounds like he's no stranger to controversy....just like Mitt.
I think the opening ceremony should have had a lot more Depeche Mode and a lot less of The Prodigy... ;o)
i love the Mode, but I thought breaking out Firestarter was absolutely brilliant. one of many, many moments i would have loved for the camera to find Mitt's face. i'm betting he spontaneously yelled out to no one in particular "get off my damn lawn!"
You've got a point there... Firestarter had to have had Mittens and wife hiding behind their seats! I would have loved to have seen their faces through a lot of the ceremony, it would have been awesome! Meanwhile, the Queen was cool enough to go along with the skydiving schtick! She's a hip old gal. :o)
One of the MOST fascinating sides of unconscious bigotry is sensitivity when minorities reach for things that tokenism doesn't normally give them.
You know, like the US Presidency.
Or how a single rapper becomes "all these rappers," because ANY rapper present at all seems disproportional to the "right and proper order of things."
One of my recent hobby horses has been to complain about how, in the teaching of math skills, students are herded relentlessly into cultures of decontextualized and endless machine-like calculation skills, with very little real math understanding, of things like differences of scale, weighting, heft. Fractions, the ability to VISUALIZE fractional amounts of things, and ratios, seems to be lost on a lot of people too. Perhaps they learned to do calculations with fractions, but have no concrete sense of what the fractional amounts entail, proportionally.
So I harp on "math understanding" as this great deficiency. Or else it is emotional, this reaction when minorities exceed tokenism, even by minute amounts. Maybe all the math understanding in the world can't help it.
The lightbulb went on over my head when I was reading about sociolinguistics and gendered online communications (love the excellent work of Susan Herring in this area).
What is commonly known in the discipline of interpersonal communications is that in small groups, men talk a great deal more than women. Women's participation in mixed gendered conversation tends toward about 21% of the conversation (see also the excellent book, referred to in academia as Belenkey et. al., "Women's Ways of Knowing." It looks at the role of silence and silencing of women as an almost controlled interpersonal phenomenon that sort of blows old Habermas's "Ideal Speech Situation" out of the water--somebody tell Chris Hayes, cuz he likes Habermas).
What Susan Herring found in online (listserv) mixed gender communications (not all genders were public-- names could be anonymous-- but they were usually known) is that the 21% level of participation by women was replicated online as well!
That is not to say that women didn't at times participate more than 21% of the time, when topics interested them or drew them into heated exchanges. BUT she found that in those times when women's participation went ABOVE 21%, after a while, men in the online groups started reacting with controlling behaviors, complaining, saying the "women" were "taking over," grumbling about "feminazis" etc.
All for participation levels that were not in the majority at all, but were just HIGHER THAN THE TOKEN NORM.
Think about that for a second. It is just so odd. So counterintuitive. So infuriating.
"All those rappers" indeed!
So..."Leftie multi-cultural crap" = Non-white people.
Good to know.
Sigh, another dog whistler!!!
But thank you anyway for proving Chris's point!!
I enjoyed much like the queen herself, the whole opening ceremony. So, I guess it is okay for The Right to disagree with the queen. To me it showed alot of the tribulations they faced and how by taking care of their people they are slowly but, surely progressing. They also have great difficulties recovering from a war brought on by The Right. You would think that the rich snobs would at least be a little appreciative, after all it is the people who have paid the high price, not them. The people are still cleaning up their mess, much like here in the States.
Not surprising since any gathering of nations without a war is considered left of conservative.