Bah Bah Humbug, Politically Correct Sheep (Warning! Contains a word used to depict the colour black!)

It seems Britain is trying to out-politically correct the Americans. That takes some doing, but how about banning the song “Bah bah blacksheep”? Because saying the word black can be offensive to black people? That’s right, it’s happened in British schools and kindergartens.

The latest one, funnily enough, also has to do with sheep. Animal rights activists complained about a sheep shearing contest in Kent saying cutting off the wool was against sheep’s rights and a ‘cruel practise.”

Well how are they supposed to get the wool off? Are the sheep supposed to walk around with three meter long coats? I think that would infringe on their rights more than being relieved of the matted morass of hair, no?

These politically correct people are turning into the Cultural Revolution in China, out-doing each other to find new things that can be deemed offensive to, anti- or pro-something, egging each other on.

At one stage Mao’s revolutionaries suggested changing the traffic light rules so that red meant “go.” Excellent idea, really revolutionary! Now let’s see… and let’s make owning more than one pen punishable by death, and then…

Because it’s so-called well educated, middle-class, well-meaning people coming up with all this politically correct insanity, often hiding behind the incredibly patronising cover-all shield of racism, they don’t get laughed out of the room, but listened to by other earnest sheep.

Where will it end?

Yeah I know the photo is of a goat. Just wanted to be unconventional.

De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum

That’s right, I speak Latin like a native of Latin America, in our friend George W’s memorable words. Or was it his soulmate, what’s his name again, the guy who couldn’t spell “potato”?

Anyway, I think the old Romans were wrong when they said “Taste is not debatable.” It so is! Namely: There’s good taste and bad taste and good taste is beautiful and bad taste is ugly and that’s definite.

Take this dress for example. Who in the innermost blackened-down hell came up with this design? I found it in a shop window in Shenzhen (yes! it’s for sale!) and when I stopped laughing enough to be able to hold the camera, a shop assistant came running out shouting not to take photos. She evidently thought I was engaged in industrial espionage or something, stealing the design to make my own dress out of cardboard and old beercans, making shitloads of money.

But I mean, who would wear such a thing?
People with bad taste, that’s who.

I’ve just come back from another foray into the hinterland of Guangdong province, and as with most of China, bad taste rules the roost big time. Formerly the most beautiful country in the world, China has in an astonishingly short period of time become if not the ugliest, so at least right up there in the top five. (Don’t know which ones the others are as I only travel to China these days, but I’m sure there must be other countries having succeeded in razing everything beautiful and interesting to the ground and replacing it with soullessness, dullness and excruciating bad taste the way China has.)

When Mao stood on that balcony in 1949 saying the Chinese people had stood up and that he wanted to see a forest of factory chimneys in the middle of Beijing, he set in motion a relentless drive towards bad taste put into system which today has more or less reached its goal.

Now even the villages of China all look the same, with garishly tiled monster houses, wrought iron railings, fake “grecian” columns and gardens complete with statues of Napoleon on his horse and writhing nymphs.

The Chinese have taken the worst aspects of European culture (think faux Louis XIV with a generous dash of Liberace and welded plastic chairs – Las Vegas with Chinese characteristics in fact) and resold it as the epitome of taste.

The result is a whole country, instead of embracing the beauty of this house

or this house

go all out to live in this house

Yeah yeah, so people don’t want to live in hovels, fair enough. But what about picturesque? What about gentrification? What about gutting the interior of a house and modernising it, keeping the general unique layout of a village and town?

It’s the same in Hong Kong. Raze entire neighbourhoods to the ground and fill them with one ghastly 400 storey mirror-encrusted monument to the wealth of Li Ka-shing, is the order of the day. Soon there will be nothing left of anything that makes China and Hong Kong unique, and bad taste will truly have won. And because everyone will by then have been brainwashed into thinking it’s actually good taste, it will be good taste. And everyone will be wearing that dress, being complimented on it.