Birthday in Budapest.

28th of October 2018

Birthday 

Today was my birthday, another year passed, another number, another reason to evaluate, another moment to take stock of what’s gone and what is yet to come (maybe).

For my Birthday weekend me and my wife organised a three day trip to Budapest, I’ve been there before to perform comedy a few times and there is something about the place that intrigues me. A city that has had it’s share of tears and fears, the Hungarians sided with Hitler until 1944, Hungarian nationalists played a big role in the deportation of thousands upon thousands of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and everyone else who defied the nazis. The role of the Hungarian nationalists gets ‘played down’ by the present Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban, himself a nationalist, but there are sites all over the town that still bear witness to the deportations and the murders. 

Not far from parliament on the edge of the Danube there is a monument to the place where Nazis and Hungarian Nationalists forced Jews young and old, male and female to stand and be shot, their bodies falling into the Danube and being swept away by the tide. Shoes line the harbour wall as a monument to the monsterous ‘ethnic cleansing’ of jews by the Nazis. Seeing this monument, trying to imagine the fear, the disbelief, the horror of those times, parents watching as first their children were shot and thrown into the river before they themselves were murdered. Visiting the Jewish area of the city imagining the German trucks loading jews onboard to be brought to the cold banks of the Danube,anger and imense sadness engulfed me that afternoon. How far we’ve come, the streets of Budapest now full of tourists from all over the world, young, old all sharing everything that Budapest has to offer for the city tripping tourists of 2018. I met up with a friend I made while performing here, he’s a young non european comedian, we had a coffee talked a while about comedy then the talk turned to how it is living as a black person in Budapest, he told tales of the brushes with the administration, flagrant acts of racism, about how intense and stressful it is for him when he leaves the country and comes back, always fearing that he won’t get past border control although he’s in Hungary completely legal. Fear of racism , discrimination in this city? after all it’s been through, after it’s own fight for freedom from the Russians in the 1950’s, go to the ‘house of Terror’ museum see the photos of the ‘patriots’ gunned down by Russian troops during the rising. This city now very vibrant, young people from all over the world come here. Yet as in many cities all over europe at the moment ,people are again looking for scapegoats, others to blame for their woes, politicians all too eager to oblige by pointing the finger toward the migrants, the homeless,the gypsies...

We have come a long way from the evils of the Nazis and the terror of Stalinism, but have we beaten the scourge of racism, anti semitism, homophobia etc etc? Or is our ‘progress’ just a thin coating? Today I read in the newspaper that an american racist gunned down and killed 11 people at a synagogue, he’d rushed into the building guns at the ready shouting ‘all jews must die’ , last week also in America a radical republican had sent pipe bombs to politicians and others outspoken in their dislike of Donald Trump, thankfully none had exploded.

We have come far, but there is still some way to go before we humans come to the realisation that we are all one tribe, one sort, one species. 

Today was my birthday, lots of people sent me best wishes through messages mostly on line. We are now all connected through internet , no corner of the globe excluded, we now have the chance to unite our sort over the whole of our planet how great is that? Let’s do it, for our own sake.

Thanks for all the birthday greetings. 

Data Raped.

I went for a walk this morning, not far, just the streets around where I live, I need the exercise after my hip operation. It surprised me how many nods and smiles and 'good mornings' I received. I remember thinking to myself ‘there must have been a ‘purge’ of all the miserable negative people overnight’, or they might all be indoors tweeting or whatever it is that we are all supposed to be doing nowadays. Maybe it’s the solution to safer and happier streets, if all the moaners and the groaners and the ‘end is nigh’ folk stay indoors and argue online, then the rest of us can get on with our lives and each other. This being said - I am a ‘twitter warrior’ myself, spent hours the last couple of years, on twitter or other ‘social media’ outlets letting people know about my views, provoking, disliking, annoying etc etc ,it was good fun - annoying people that have different political or social views than I have. But it changes nothing, nada , sod all. When you tweet nothing happens - except that some people get annoyed and open a so say ‘debate’ that is never a debate, just a shouting match that ends when one party decides to ‘block’ or ‘ignore’ the other. So what is this ‘social media’ thing? just a way of keeping us occupied so that we don’t actually get around to doing anything constructive? There are some positives in social media - it has been used to gather support on important issues that might have been ignored, or forgotten about by traditional media. The downside is that it has opened the doors of hell and let the nutcases loose. Baseline is that social media is a big, gigantic ‘earner’ for the few. Every time we are on social media we get ‘data-raped’, we are being followed and being ‘defined’ so that advertisers can pinpoint the new (mainly useless) products that fit our profile. That’s it end of the business model, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram are first and foremost businesses that are in the business of selling our data to third parties that want to know everything about us, they are not ‘neutral’ people loving organizations. Once again ‘it’s all about the money’. Meanwhile the hounds of hell are loose and we spend the majority of our days fishing for likes to stroke our ego, others spend their days offending, or arguing or just joining in the ‘hate soup’ on one subject or the other. This shit pool of ‘non debate’ creates an image of the whole world being seemingly at odds with each other, we get frustrated, hurt, elated, have sleepless nights about it while the data we produce gets harvested . 

I need to get off social media, not completely, it has its uses ,like to promote up and coming events etc, but that’s it basically. In the future I’ll keep my thoughts to myself, except on stage. 

So get off Social media, get outside, go for a walk and have some realtime, with real people. 

We are the Champions

It’s a great time to be human! Why? Because........(drum roll)..........we won! yeah ‘we are the champions’ etc . We absolutely won, beat all other species into submission or extinction. ‘We do what we want, we do what we waaaaant we are human we do what we want!’ 

We used to sit cowered in our caves afraid of all the big animals out there, but where are they now? Gone! Dinosaurs? gone, only living family members are chickens - chickens ffs! so who’s afraid now dinosaur ? Not us, the animals are on the run, soon to be just a memory - we won hands down. This planet is our ‘hood’ and only ours, if you want to be here you better be usefull or you’re out- if we can eat you, screw you or take photos of you for instagram then you are on your way to the ‘little book of extinct animals’. 

A truly great time to be human.

Where's the reset button?

As far as I can remember it all started with the Brexit referendum in the UK, America -not to be outdone by the Brits- organised their own 'Apocalypse Now' moment by electing 'Big White Rich Bully' Donald -Brain Damage- Trump as president to follow that and since then nothing, absolutely nothing is as it was.
It's only been a few years, but the speed with which we are losing all respect and dignity is mind boggling. I have just watched the President of the United States of America mock a woman who came forward to give evidence about her trauma of being sexually abused during her student years. What a complete asshole Trump is, whatever you think of her testimony it's obvious she suffered, and it took guts for her to come forward. The venom and spite that bully Trump spat out on her will not only verify the fears she had about coming forward but it is also a message to all other women saying " even the president of america will heap scorn on you if you dare speak out against sexual harassment", and that is undefendable and downright disgusting.