Haikusday

[thermalsatsuma]

Amidst the Tall Trees
I hunt a legendary
Scarred leviathan

After the heat wave
Frank the cat reclaims his spot
Indoors on the bed

Is the Express on
A grand crusade to offend
Common decency?

If you want to rile
An ex pat Ozzie housemate
Just call him 'Crab Eyes'

Pair of nesting doves
Provide more simple joy than
Satellite TV

Note for Haiku fans
Some bonus skeptic poems
Available here

Comments

[tchernabyelo.livejournal.com]

Dammit, you made me go to the Express website.

While I'm not remotely pretending that the US is free of incipient racism (far from it, and its racism towards Mexico and people of Hispanic/Latino/Meso-American culture and origin is now arguably worse than its anti-black racism), there is no way that the strident hate-filled front pages of the Express or Mail would appear over here.

So, 1 in 5 Britons "will be ethnics". Good. It's called a dynamic multi-cultural society.

[thermalsatsuma.livejournal.com]

My view is that you can't get much more ethnic than the population of the British isles - we're a glorious mixture of thousands of years of invasions and migrations, and richer for it. I suspect that they only used the word 'Ethnic' because they couldn't fit in 'Darkies'. They really are scraping the bottom of a very nasty barrel.

[tchernabyelo.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the subtext was pretty clear. Although very white people from Eastern Europe are probably also considered "ethnic" too, in the current climate, and that's a comparatively new thing.

You say "we're a glorious mixture of thousands of years of invasions and migrations", but the trouble is, that influx of fresh blood was actually stopped about a thousand years ago and only restarted, really, post-WW2. We were stagnant, culturally, for a VERY long time, and we're still dealing with the results of that and will be for generations to come. In some ways, the UK is actually a lot like Japan - another island and isolationist nation - with the significant difference that we ran a successful overseas empire for 200 years, whereas the Japanese tried it very briefly and got nuked for their trouble... but there are a lot of very similar attitudes to history, culture and foreigners.