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On the 'Deep Clean' of a City's Conscience

It is just after sun-down outside St Paul's Cathedral and an articulate young Scot is stood addressing city-workers from a megaphone. His tone is certainly not aggressive, rather satirical; that last recourse of reason when faced with the triumph of raw, brute power. The bearers of that power themselves are scattered about, MET officers bearing the shiny symbols of state power. They watch the young man carefully, so too the response of those passing by. Though they've really nothing very much to fear, with most of the passers by treating him with indifference, perhaps at most with a little derision. And well they might with the fate of the cause he represents so blatantly apparent. All those tents, together with the last of the the men and women who'd camped out outside the cathedral, having during the night felt the full might of the state being brought down upon their heads by the Corporation of London. After midnight they were cleared out by force, their camp torn down, and barriers set up against their return, defended by those police stood about there now. Nothing remains there now but a residual debris, together with the inevitable stench of a months-long human habitation; something that the Corporation of London promises us will be effaced from the city within what they call a three-day-long 'deep clean'....

.....But what exactly is it they are effacing during that 'deep clean'? What was it that exploded in that place from the otherwise orderly daily functioning of this sprawling city? Sure, we all know even in 'normal' times that the city has its problems. We see the homeless, the neglected sink estates from our our trains windows- some of us even live within them. We read of crime, of corporate and political corruption. We know that all is not so well within our city, but we know too that such problems- though real- can be micro-managed. That they are perhaps just a mild bit of indigestion within the bowels of the otherwise healthy organism of the city. That the disorderly elements can be managed by a few more police on the streets. That the plight of the homeless can be a little eased with a subscription to Shelter, along too with our consciences; allowing us to go on with our lives otherwise unabashed.

But then came the deluge. The world's financial melt-down meant that the problems of this most finance-led of cities didn't look like they could be solved with just a few indigestion pills. That joblessness- especially among the young- soared. That prospects lowered, though rent bills did not. For more and more people the threat of joblessness and subsequent homelessness became not so much a distant threat as their daily reality. People were left to look on as the former masters of the financial universe squirrelled away profits gained from turbo-heating an economy that had brought so many to ruin. People looked to their politicians for help... Only.... they too had been caught with their fingers in the till of the turbo-charged economy. And even the most virtuous among them felt themselves little option but save the corporate beast as a whole, whilst simultaneously being unable to bring any of the agents of that destruction to justice- which included, of course, the politicians who'd led the deregulatory charge. It was therefore we who were left to pick up the tab. And it was this glaring injustice that drove people to try and occupy the London Stock exchange. Those men and women who not only no longer believed in the usual supplicants to the ills of our city, but felt that such supplements could only lead to further misery and impoverishment. Who believed that the hallowed political-consensus over deficit-reduction could only secure a continued immiseration for the already immiserated. For those whose jobs were already lost, or now threatened. For those who relied on the welfare state. Not to mention a whole younger generation who were greeted with nothing but closed doors where once they'd been promised a livelihood.

It was from this tinder-box of injustice that there exploded a conscience that sought to make its voice heard. Just as consciousness generally has its birth in the disharmony of the organism that is our body, so too did this social consciousness explode out of the disharmony within our social body. People were no longer content to be micro-managed into accepting the perilous existence that had been allotted them, that had been allotted their children. They wanted to make their voices heard- wanted a space where others could enter into a dialogue for transforming that society. That was what St Paul's was to be.

And to a degree they succeeded in universalising their message. Sure, the organism carried on functioning in spite of the Occupy protest at its heart for so many months. The trains still went in and out of London from first light. The flows of pedestrians and traffic kept flowing from the transport hubs to offices. The orderly queues for lunch at Pret remained. The reverse flows out of the city after dark kept on unabated. Most people got used to the camp, ignored it, channelling their energies down the well worn trajectories of work and home life, of pub and gym. But still some heard the message- whether their reply was of good or ill will towards the protesters. Even those of the sleepy Church of England were forced by their uninvited guests to choose between the money-lenders or those who, like Jesus, wanted them thrown out of the temple. And indeed, more and more people rallied to the universal message, to this collective expression of social conscience- including people not yet faced with the prospect of unemployment and immiseration. However, it was just these people, these signs of a universalising of the discontent, that the would-be repressers of social conscience fixed upon. So the right-wing rags hollered: they don't even sleep in the tents at night! With their infra-red images to back it up; seemingly thinking that the fact that not all the protesters had lost their homes was a reason to scorn the authenticity of the protest. And then, most recently, as well as most grotesquely, there was the Tory politician- Louise Mensch- who on discussing the protesters, did nothing but sneer at the fact that some of the protesters could afford to drink in Starbucks. Implying that everyone ought to be like her, who in having their own little bellies filled, ought to see no reason to look up from their own feeding trough; irrespective of the fate of their society as a whole. In short, she was a narrow-minded moron, but her scorn was symptomatic of a media and political class whose very vitriol was a sign that the protest was a genuine expression of social conscience that could not be micro-managed. For how many of us ever attack something so violently that we are not ourselves troubled in our conscience by? Their very vitriol told that this emergence of a social conscience in fact gnawed at us all, and that this visible sign of it meant it was a fact we could not just forget about it, micro-manage it, repress it....

....But yet, in spite of all that, it still ended in failure. The camp is gone. That megaphone-wielding Scot is the last dying trace of the social conscience that exploded onto the scene outside St Paul's. Why did it fail? Because the battle was, for the time being, won by those who fought so hard to repress that conscience- to make us see it as a cry of a lawless, trouble-making rabble who know nothing of 'the way of the world'. The discourse was won by those who wanted so badly to make us believe that things could go on as they were before, that each of us could just go on contentedly gorging in our own feeding trough just so long as we still had one. It was won by those who argued that our social ills could be solved with the masochistic logic of deficit reduction- that social unrest could be bludgeoned by police batons, that the homeless could be moved on, that though there were no jobs, the unemployed could be farmed out to corporations for free. That youth could spend the meantime racking up astronomical debt in the expectation of jobs unlikely ever to come. In short, it was won by those who offered a pseudo-solution to the very real rumblings of a corrupt, discredited order. And how many of us swallowed it?! All in the dear wish that we could re-immerse ourselves back in our narrow, well-worn furrows- whether it be in work or family, culture or the latest shiny electronica. We all have a tendency to do it. And as time went on, more and more people lucky enough to have other prospects left the camp- leaving behind only those who had no such option, together with a few hard-core activists, to be easily dissipated by a malevolent state bent on dispelling this violent intrusion of a social conscience into the very heart of the discredited monster of the City.

And what of those dissipated elements? They do not go away. And in our abandoning their cause- our real cause- all we have done is to make them lose any hope that society can face up to its own discontents; that they have seen the space opened for a collective social conscience ultimately rejected in favour of a collective social repression. That the growing numbers of those whose futures have been sold-out will have little else to do now but to either accept the appalling fate they've been left to, or to resort to the kind of immediate, apolitical violence we've seen before.... Such that it is a sure bet that London will burn again..... And when it does, those of us who have chosen repression over conscience will have no-one but ourselves to blame....

Whitney Houston and American Psycho

- a marriage made in the 80s

It might seem today that there are people born to war-torn, aids-ravaged nations with a higher life expectancy than the mega-stars of the music industry. Michael Jackson, Amy Winehouse, and now Whitney Houston, is to name but a few of those who've recently come to a self-destructive, premature demise. And with each death there of course follows the predictable, violently-opposed responses. On the one hand, there are those who hold dear the achievements of their star, looking upon the self-destructive addictions and chaotic relationships as tragic mistakes. And on the other, opposing such sentimental remembrances, is the druggy-bitch-had-it-coming brigade, ghoulishly revelling in the star's 'deserved' fall from grace; their tweeters and yellow-top columnists alike expressing much the same puerile sentiments.

Though of course, far more interesting than such moral and aesthetic wranglings is the question as to why we've such heavy investment in our mega-stars to begin with. And not just as to the question as to why we've the the need of such mega-stars generally, but also as to what the rise and fall of each particular celebrity tells us about the specific cultural needs of the world that elevated them to stardom. And with Whitney, the most recent mega-star to have fallen from grace, the culture in question is of course that of the 1980s. And it is the gambit of this article that the function of Whitney in Brett Easton Ellis's 'American Psycho' gives us the vital clue as to understanding that social world's investment in her.

Video link to Patrick Bateman on Whitney Houston

The scene posted is one of the most brilliantly comic of the film, and points too to the greatness of the film adaptation of the novel; the Whitney Houston speech being an interior monologue in the book, but is here brilliantly scripted into a scene with Bateman and two of his victims. Why then is the scene so comic? Why does the intoxicated Elizabeth laugh as Bateman delivers a treatise on the greatness of Whitney's top hit, The Greatest Love of All? It is because she knows, as we do, that by day he lives within the ruthless 1980s world of Wall Street, in Mergers and Acquisitions- or, Murders and Executions as Bateman brazenly tells a barmaid in another scene. Bateman's world is that of a poisonously competitive world where rampant, top-end consumerism is the badge of success; a world away from the love of Whitney's theme. So too are the cold electronic beats that were the back-track to Bateman's world of greed in flagrant incongruity with his giving a tender treatise on a singer from the tradition of gospel, soul and jazz. But there is another, yet darker side to the comic effect. We know too that he has surely brought the girls back to his apartment so as to sexually assault and murder them. Indeed, the hooker Christie, who looks peculiarly on at him as he affirms his passion for Whitney, is only there because Bateman has promised her money for plastic surgery so as to cover up the damage caused by his last orgy having ended with her being cut with the sharpened end of a steel coat-hanger. With Christie and our own knowledge then, the speech takes on a rather blacker comic hue.

Why then does Bateman identify with The greatest love of all. In his reply to Elisabeth's puzzlement the reason ought to be clear- that it is just because 'it is impossible in this world we live in to empathise with others'- that he identifies with the message of Whitney's song. That in spite of such impossibility of empathising with others, 'we can always empathise with ourselves'. That is where we find 'the greatest love of all' is, according to Whitney, 'inside of me'. So though Bateman exists within the vicious world of 1980s Wall Street by day, supplemented by the excesses of his orgies of sex and violence by night, he still hopes to find some love- some transcendence- there inside himself. That in spite of all else, he hopes that the love he finds in himself might mean that 'it is not too late to better ourselves', 'to act kinder'. Or in the context of the scene, a hope that might perhaps allow him to spare the lives of the already intoxicated girls upon the sofa....

....But yet Whitney's 'greatest love' doesn't save the girls from Bateman. Why? Well, whilst we might agree with Bateman that Whitney promises a certain transcendence from a world that robs him of all empathy, of all love, of his fellow man. But yet that song must come to an end. He must return to the world where such transcendence can only ever be a fragmentary escape- something bought as a mere commodity within that world like any other. That in fact, loving himself is made impossible by the same mechanism that makes loving his fellow man impossible. An impossibility owing to the fact that his world only runs in so far as he and his colleagues are in brutal competition with one another. In so far as they hate each other. Each must hate the successful for the success that transforms their own lives into failures. And each must in turn hate the failures because to empathise with them could only weaken their will to the top- empathy as such is ideologically impossible in that world. But why does this imply that such a man cannot love himself through Whitney's transcendence from that world devoid of empathy and love for others? It is because the only traits that seem to distinguish people from their more successful colleagues are the barely perceptible upgrades in the things that they themselves identify with. In the world of American Psycho, people are always confusing one executive with another, but yet at the same time they are always squabbling over the small differences between their status symbols. Hence Bateman is horrified that his more successful rival, Paul Allen, has much the same apartment as he himself has, only with a better view of the park. Or in another iconic scene of the film, Bateman becomes feverish at the slightly better quality of Allen's business card, otherwise identical to his own.

In short, Brett Easton Ellis makes us see why the very cause of the need for Whitney's self-love in its transcendence from the cut-throat 1980s world, is the very thing that makes it an impossibility. Self-love is not an option in a world where we must hate a fellow man who is all but indiscernible from us but for small advantages in things that we ourselves aspire to. It is thereby a world whose hatred of others implies self-hatred- a realisation that can be stayed only by hating those others and the world in general in a yet more energetic, violent form. Patrick's self-hatred implied in the hatred of his colleagues is the motor that leads him to lurch between outward destructive violence and inward self-annihilation- this is the dynamic at the heat of Easton Ellis's masterpiece.

And returning to Whitney, we might note that she herself always admitted to suffering from the cut-throat world of the music industry. So perhaps a depressing implication of her own demise suggests that even the most talented preachers of transcending the hatred of the world through self-love, struggle to live by their own preaching within such a world....

From Lady Prime Minister..... to Vegetarian Chancellor

-A World Exclusive from The Gadflyista. Inspired by the success of The Iron Lady, actor-turned-director Nell Gibbon met us in London to talk to us about his latest project, The Vegetarian Chancellor.

I'm sitting in a cafe in Soho, waiting patiently for arrival of the man I'm due to interview. Actually that's a lie- I may as well admit it, since he's safely back in California by now. He's in fact been standing in clear view of my window-side seat for some minutes now, raging obscenities at the cab driver who brought him here. I wonder again whether to intervene, what with him no doubt being unused to the pricklier variety of London cabby, but think better of it. It would be presumptuous indeed to think that the all-action star of such movies as Deadly Killer Machine parts I, II, III and IV would have any need of my help should it come to a scrap.

Eventually he comes in, looking grizzled. Everyone turns around as he approaches my table, recognising immediately the good looks and the lustrous mane of big name Hollywood actor-turned-director, Nell Gibbon. Though looks aside, his opening mumblings of the words 'worse than', 'Yids' and 'New York' could have given the game away too. I choose to ignore these mumblings, and after introducing myself, quickly offer an opening sally on the movie billboard now passing by up on the bus outside. I note again how out-of-kilter the phrase 'The Iron Lady' looks with the pale but sensual, very-human face of actress Meryl Street looking down at us, so I ask Nell what he makes of it. His point is clear: 'she knows what she's doing, Meryl'. 'So do the studio'. 'Cut out the crap' about her being the 'Butcher-of-the-Belgrano', the 'smasher of communities', and focus on 'the good stuff'- on a 'chick' 'wading her way through shit, all guns blazing' so as to be 'the first chick to make it to the top. Now there's a story!'

It seemed strange to me to hear him echo the sentiments of the liberal feminists discussing the film in this morning's papers- well, the stuff about 'chicks', 'shit' and 'guns' excepted- since Nell's notorious misogynistic remarks in the past seem about as likely to make him praise a feminist triumph, as the liberal feminist's 'leftist' remarks of the past seemed likely to see them praise a neo-liberal triumph. But perhaps Nell's own respect for the film has something to do with the fact that its success undoubtedly helped to make his latest project possible- a pet project that no studio would back as little ago as last year. But box office receipts don't lie. And such are the projected returns on The Iron Lady that rival studio, Revisomax, has commissioned Nell to make a similar resuscitation of a formerly loathed leader, again on the basis that they were the first leader of a group formerly excluded from holding power. Hence The Vegetarian Chancellor project was born, aimed to be be released next year so as to mark the 80-year anniversary of the coming to power of the first ever non-meat-eating leader of a Western nation.

So what's it about? Well Nell paints the following picture: of a sensitive young boy growing up in Imperial Austria, one of the world's most notorious fleisch-guzzling lands, only to find his conscience will no longer allow him to eat as his family eats. Nay!- what his whole culture eats. Dish after dish of schnitzel and sausage are set before him, but in spite of all the parental threats made, all the sibling mockery he has to endure, each time he refuses everything but sauerkraut. No innocent little animals would suffer on his account, no matter what the problems it caused him!

Remember, Remember. But what to remember?

(A thought for the day from the Reverend Gadflyista)

Why do we stand in silent remembrance of the war-dead? Is it for the tragic waste of life? Is it because they did their duty for their country? No. And if we do we do remember them merely as objects of our humanitarian pity, or still worse, as nodding dogs who shot whoever the government of their day told them to shoot at, then we grossly dishonour their memory. How? Because what is lost in the ambiguity of standing in silent remembrance of the deceased just as deceased is the grounds that truly makes their loss worthy of our respect. Namely, in the heroism that is staking their life for some cause. It is this we ought to remember them for today- what we need to remember them for today more than ever. To remember the heroism of every soldier who fought in fascist Europe not because he did what he was told to do, nor even for some notion of king and country, but to rid the world of the scourge of genocide, of barbarism. That we ought to remember every Union soldier of the American civil who fought, not because he was from the north, but because he was for the abolition of slavery.

But if such fidelity to a cause is indeed the ground that makes those brave men and women worthy of our respect, then we need to remember that not everyone is so fortunate as those allied or union soldiers, in finding themselves ordered to fight for the good cause. And in fact, it requires a still greater heroism, one yet more worthy of our adulation, to go to the limit for a cause when one is ordered to do otherwise; when one risks terrible punishment for so acting. It is therefore even more important then to remember all those who deserted when what they were ordered to do went against what they thought they ought to do. To remember every soldier of World War One who was shot because he refused any longer to participate in such senseless butchery of his fellow man. Every Syrian soldier who today refuses to be the mere lackey of a discredited regime; who has deserted rather than fire on their fellow countrymen who've set their faces against tyranny. People like Bradley Manning, who chose to expose the atrocities in Iraq rather than propagate them, in spite of the consequences.

It is these men and women who have earned not a gloomy two-minute silence in commemoration of their death, but a two-minute riotous cheer for the heroism of their life. Because when today, doing one's duty means, more and more often, standing on the side of the bad cause- whether in the police, the army, the bureaucracy or the corporation- then it is these men and women we need to be held up as examples to emulate. That in our own defiance we might do much better in honouring their heroism.

On the oddity of a certain species of 'egalitarian' enthusiasm

-A reply to yesterday's Guardian editorial on the Royal Succession (link)

These are hard times indeed for the editors of our centre-left press. For unlike their opposite numbers on the right, they do not lick their editorial chops over the government's daily butchery of the last few progressive institutions left standing on this near-bankrupt isle. A situation that leaves them in the uneasy position of though having to live amid the devastation of their old causes, their vocation seemingly prevents them from giving-up their faith in the progressive potential of government, in their own ability to influence such progress- for to what other end are their editorials directed? Such that, just as the Christian ascetics of old, in denying themselves the more carnal satisfactions of their peers, always found themselves desperately seeking some sign that their sacrifice had some meaning, that they had earned God's favour, so too do our centre-left editors today desperately seek out some sign that their progressive voice doesn't go unheard by our axe-wielding politicians.

For only in such a context can we understand the over-zealous way in which the Guardian editorial yesterday grasped the news that the monarchy was to get an egalitarian face-lift. Sure, they readily conceded, monarchy and egalitarianism are certainly not compatible bedfellows. But on the other hand, they added, it would surely be 'churlish' not to celebrate the 'egalitarian zeal' of the political classes in such bold policy-making. In fact, so carried away did the editorial get that they even summon-up some histrionics for the occasion: 'For 300 years, the mad and the bad have been ushered on to the throne on the shaky claim of their sex'. Though, of course, how having the eldest child on the throne as opposed to merely the eldest son would have spared us so many mad or bad monarchs remains a mystery; unless of course, we are to infer some highly inegalitarian claim that royal daughters are generally less mad or bad that their brothers. Such excesses amid the frenzy of their enthusiasm shouldn't detract us from the central message though: that we'd been given a sign that the egalitarian spirit was still alive and well. That the Bastille wasn't stormed in vain. That Martin Luther King didn't have a dream for nothing. For now all sexes and creeds have an equal right to....? An equal right to... become the lofty unequal of everyone else?

And isn't this just the rub? That what the Guardian editors see as merely 'churlish' opposition, is just this refusal to enthuse over certain forms of equality being realised internally to an institution which itself perpetuates the grossest kind of inequality. That anyone who wishes to retain anything like fidelity to progressive ideals ought to be highly discomforted by expending their energies and enthusiasm in reforming such constitutively backwards institutions.

Now of course, those editors will reply that should they get the chance to tomorrow, they would wholly enthuse over the abolition of the institution itself if that further promotes the cause of equality. And they'd say that such a commitment wholly compatibly with the fact they today enthusiastically affirm equality rather than inequality in the inequality-promoting institution itself. That in a world otherwise hell-bent on pursuing the grossest of inegalitarian paths, they'd say we ought to encourage even the most tentative of egalitarian steps in what are otherwise wholly inequality-promoting institutions. That they'd hold against us that to demand more today is to demand too much, perhaps to discourage those today willing only to take such tentative steps, but that perhaps, if encouraged, might tomorrow affirm more. Is there anything that can be said to be wrong with so seemingly sensible reasoning?

To see what's wrong with this logic we ought to perhaps take a look at another, more dramatic illustration of the commitments of such 'egalitarian' enthusiasm across the pond. Recall the 'don't ask, don't tell' policy of the US military that so enraged liberal egalitarians and gay rights groups in the US; a policy effectively preventing men from being openly gay in the military, until it was recently overturned by Obama. But what did all that egalitarian zeal thrown into the campaign effectively achieve? That openly gay men can march off to get killed alongside their heterosexual countrymen? Is this really what progressive politics wants to be committed to? That after all the campaign energies that went in to guaranteeing such equality, that people are not going to be happy, perhaps even shed a tear, at the sight of the first crop of openly gay soldiers drafted alongside the rest- irrespective of the fact that they're marching off to kill a lot of innocent people whenever their government decides that it might have been unwise to sell arms to some tyrannical regime. Is that really what today's 'egalitarian' enthusiasm wants to be committed to? A principle of equality-for-equality's sake which amidst the Holocaust, would have presumably got bogged down in insisting as to why only the Jews, the communists, the mentally ill are to be gassed and not anyone else? Missing completely the rather more fundamental question as to whether mass murder on an industrial scale really ought to be happening at all?

Such is the fate of any 'egalitarian' enthusiasm that is content to praise the realisation of some purely formal equality in what are otherwise the grossest, most inequality-promoting of institutions. That instead of campaigning for equality in the sex that might become monarch, progressives ought instead to campaign for the abolition of the inegalitarian monarchy. That instead of promoting equality in the sexuality of who gets to go and shoot a load of foreigners, they ought rather to be promoting an equal right to not to have to kill, or be killed, in whatever wars our governments decide are expedient. That when for the first time within the living memory of most of us, those institutions themselves are increasingly called into question, we need no longer be content with merely realising equality within an institutional framework that is itself the most grotesquely unequal in its consequences. That such 'egalitarian' enthusiasts, if they genuinely to be on the side of equality, need only turn their gaze away from the shadow play staged by the representatives of those discredited institutions- staged only to keep open a little glimmer of hope that those institutions might still be capable of realising their hopes. And instead to step outside the theatre and see those institutions naked, in the clear light of day- from the vantage points of the camps now erected outside stock exchanges and parliaments across the world. That they ought to talk to men and women there who are no longer content with enthusing over reforming that which is in itself bad; men and women who now suffer such bleak prospects in our masochistic age of austerity that, unlike the editors of centre-left newspapers, cannot afford the luxury of a naive faith in the 'progressive' potential of our discredited institutions. That the times are such that it can only be from their vantage point that any genuine egalitarian enthusiasm worthy of the name can be directed.

Berlin Blog

-The Carnival of Irreverence

I'd not been walking too far down Kreuzberg's main thoroughfare when the awful feeling of being watched crept over me. Sure, being watched along Oranienstrasse wasn't a particularly unusual event- what with its cafes, bars and pizzerias spilling out onto the street, allowing its customers to watch the world go by in between milling over the various alternative-type wares sold there- but this felt to me a far more ominous species of people-watching. So with that animal instinct famed us, my eyes were led with a sense of dread on towards the source, up on high, down along the thoroughfare.... And yes, there were the eyes I'd felt- 'the-eyes-of-a-killer' as Paul Merton once put it- those of Pope Ratzinger staring down at me from a poster spanning all 19 floors of some newspaper offices; there accompanied by the German tabloid Das Bild's craven headline: Wir sind Papst, or We are the Pope. The pope's arms were outstretched in accompaniment to this, though not so much in giving the impression of motioning down divine grace for his fellow Germans, but rather, as if to bring down lightening in a manner akin to his uncanny lookalike, the emperor from Star Wars. Bringing down papal wrath upon we atheistic types within Berlin's radical enclave.

Now the provocateur who'd set the poster facing-off against Berlin's Kreuzberg district was the the aforementioned Das Bild; a positioning of the poster that couldn't have done more to enrage Berlin's various radicals already already united in affront at the papal visit; an extraordinary unification of anarchists, leftists, feminists, and LGBT-activists that the Pope's particular brand of authoritarianism, political reaction, and sexual and misogynistic bigotry, seems especially well placed to achieve. The poster was a red rag to the bull then, whose equivalent for the tabloids themselves could only be, say, during one of their periodic bouts of frenzied anti-paedophile hysteria, walking up to their offices in a t-shirt reading: love all the paedos. And indeed, such everyday expectations of the tabloids so-called morals is what makes Das Bild's craven popery-worship so surprising. For if paedo-steria is as standard a tabloid fare as, say, brazen page 3 breasts or celebrity sex scandal, then one would have thought that they'd have paid particular attention to one of the most disturbing of papal criticisms- that is, of course, of his involvement in the church's child-rape scandal. Indeed, in a variety of countries there is clear documented evidence of the present pope doing everything in his power as Vatican enforcer to hold-up and eventually quash investigations into such abuse, allowing for what amounted to a child-sex racquet not merely to go unpunished, but in many cases to continue flourishing. It was indeed such an overzealous defence of his church above all else- even the welfare of children- that earned him the affectionate nickname: God's Rottweiler. Behaviour that managed to bring out ample numbers of mothers and Hausfraus onto the streets of Berlin, wielding the simple slogan "Nie Wieder", or "Never again"; women you wouldn't ordinarily expect to see alongside Berlin's more anti-establishment communities.

Now, of course, all of this about the pope is common knowledge, and I only risk banality in repeating it because, as Das Bild's action emphasises, we know it but seem to forget it every time His Popeyness does us the honour of a visit. As if the sight of someone who might otherwise be a cuddly-wuddly old man- the eyes excepted- or in the misguided sense that 'its nice for people to have some spiritual trappings in the modern world'- even if it's a spiritualism baptised in the tears of traumatised young children?- were sufficient to make us forget. But the truth of Das Bild's own blindness to the allegations against the pope is no doubt owing to its jingoistic nationalism- in the national triumph of a German leading the world's largest, all-powerful church. It is this that saves the pope from the fate meted out to others accused of helping to protect paedophiles; that rather than having his paparazzi-caught leer spread over the tabloid's front page, we get his glossed image celebrated on a 19-story high-rise block

As for the rest of the crowd assembled for the protest on Potsdamer Platz, the LGBT crowd were predominant, many decked-out in camped-up papal and nun garb- an act of defiance against a Church with a long history of making lives hellish for so many so-called 'deviants'- persecution we've seen the church forgo when the most monstrous forms of 'deviance' involves its own priests. It was therefore Berlin's lesbian and gay communities that led the rest of us in a glorious carnival-of-irreverence on the square, with provocative dancing, speeches, and street theatre- no doubt reflecting the kind of 'liberal society' that the pope has, almost unbelievably, gone as far as to blame for the corruption of his paedophile priests. But the more politically astute among the protesters made an especially nice allusion in this respect. Their message was clear: not only is the vision of a world free of intolerant, tyrannical dogma desirable for the church's flock, but so too for the present enforcers of that dogma itself. That the priests and cardinals themselves, with their desire and self-expression freed from the repression and distortion of papal dogma, might just have a chance of preventing the festering of perversions that have so frequently led their own low fall from grace, together with the awful, traumatic consequences that result.