Chuckles Review Of 2009, Part 3

July
Truth is obscured in times of conflict by the fog of war. In China, where the smog of state-controlled media hangs heavy over everything like the ghost of a 13 tog duvet, the facts are even harder to discern.

Rarely has this been more evident than when a fight in a factory spilled over into days of ethnic violence in Ürümqi, in which between 150 and 200 people died (maybe more, according to some parties), with several others later sentenced to death. And the details remain reliably sketchy.

We know this much: on June 25, at least two Uyghur workers were killed in an 'incident' sparked by rumours of an assault on a young Han woman by Uyghur men at the factory in Shaoguan. Ten days later, hundreds of Uyghurs gathered in Ürümqi to protest against the government's handling of the incident, a protest which quickly turned violent, Uyghurs, Han and police all fighting in the streets. How the violence started and why is unclear. The Uyghurs blamed heavy-handed tactics by the police, Han bystanders told of unprovoked attacks by protesters, the government claimed that the riots were premeditated and engineered from the US by Rebiya Kadeer, exiled leader of the World Uyghur Congress.

The story was further obscured here in Britain when evidence of shadiness at the News Of The World, that bastion of quality journalism, sent the media into a cannibalistic frenzy. Newspapers like nothing better than an opportunity to launch into other newspapers, and after the Guardian discovered that the NOTW's notorious phone-hacking indiscretions from years previously had been much more wide-ranging than initially reported, it basically forgot to print any other news for about a fortnight.

Which must've pissed off some of the participants in Anthony Gormley's installation Pratform, for which Gormley did little more than invite some attention-seeking failures to stand on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square doing quirky, British things like nothing, or eating sandwiches.

Seeking attention for an actual, like, reason, a small group of workers occupied the Vestas wind turbine factory on the Isle Of Wight after the company announced plans to close the plant in favour of new ones in countries seemingly more committed to the production of renewable energy. Like, erm, the US and China (China, who - according to Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change Ed Miliband - single-handedly wrecked any chances of securing a deal at the Copenhagen Summit later in the year, but we'll get to that). The plant still closed, of course.

And let's not forget Michael H Jackson's memorial extravaganza. Did it actually happen? Or was it, in infinitely more plausible fact, a mass hallucination experienced by the entire industrialised world? 2,000 years from now, scholars from the First Church of Michael the Anointed will still be poring through articles on Fox Wikipedia, trying to sort fact from fiction. Mark my words, kids. Mark my fucking words...

August
Britain, as everyone knows, is a grey socialist shithole (a grey socialist shithole with an ingrained obsession with material wealth, a vacuously aspirational citizenry and the 6th largest economy in the world), and the most potent symbol of this is the National Health Service, which aggressively limits patient choice, puts people to sleep when they become too expensive to treat, kicks puppies and betrayed Jesus to the Romans.

So it came as no surprise when America almost tore itself wide open last August over Barack Obama's fiendish plan to ape our drab quasi-Marxism by making healthcare available to all. As the pressure group Conservatives for Patients Rights pointed out, British physicist Stephen Hawking, who lives in Britain, would not be with us today if he had been British. Which he is. America's extremely vocal right was outraged, and understandably so. Universal healthcare is undeniably a bad thing. Just imagine if it was implemented: the hospitals would suddenly all be overrun by poor black people.

The stupid, the selfish and the misanthropic took to the streets with erections and revolting grins like weeping, septic wounds, and Fox News' Glenn Beck became a byword in the UK for either rightwing fanaticism or psychopathic cynicism, depending on your view. My money's on the second one.

Americans had another reason to hate Britain later in the month when Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Al-Megrahi was given an early release on health grounds. Fortunately for Gordon Brown, the decision had been taken by the Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill. Not so fortunately, the pesky media wouldn't stop asking about Brown's involvement in the decision. Brown mainly went, "um, ah, um." It later turned out that he'd given the release his blessing, and the UK-US 'special relationship' took a knock. Although it has to be said, since Obama became President, the dynamic of that 'special relationship' seems to have been mainly thus...

BROWN: I have had several lengthy telephone conversations with President Obama on this matter.

WHITE HOUSE PRESS OFFICE: President Obama has not discussed this matter directly with anyone outside the White House.

BROWN: I have had no conversations with President Obama on this matter.

In his dreams, Brown stands forlorn and trouserless in the rain outside a restaurant, while Obama and Angela Merkel sit in the window, laughing uproariously.

It was a good month for famous prisoners, actually, with the decrepit Ronnie Biggs released after Jack Straw finally accepted that he was no more a danger to society than he was to solids, while Bill Clinton got to step back out from Hilary's shadow to rescue two US journalists from jail in North Korea.

Things were not so good in Afghanistan, though. The Afghan government chose to resurrect the ghost of Taliban rule by giving men the legal right to tell their wives, "give up the coochie or starve, woman." Ten days later, the UN declared that the country's ongoing election may have been massively flawed. In between, the British military death toll hit the magic number of 200, while August was later declared by the UN to have been the deadliest month of 2009 for civilians. There are no official totals for civilian casualties since 2001, but even the most conservative estimates are approaching 50,000. Operation Enduring Freedom, ladies and gentlemen.

Puts the Oasis split into perspective. Me, I consoled myself with a John Hughes box-set.

September
Times change.

In the 1950s, a man could be chemically castrated just for being gay. Even if he was the father of modern computing. Even if he'd played a key role in winning the Second World War. No exceptions. Bumboys got neutered, that was the rule. And it would take 57 years, his suicide and a massive online petition before the British government would say, "actually, yeah, that wasn't really on, was it?" Such was the sad tale of Alan Turing.

In 2009, however, a man who'd made some films could be arrested for sexually assaulting a minor, but find his peers rushing to defend him.

Roman Polanski - coaxed out of hiding in France to collect a lifetime achievement award at the Zurich film festival - was unexpectedly apprehended by the Swiss authorities in September, apparently for some silly youthful indiscretion way, way back in 1976, when he was just 44. The festival organisers' "great consternation and shock" was echoed in Hollywood. Whoopi Goldberg mounted a defence on US talk show The View, in which she drew a helpful distinction between "rape-rape" and Polanski's version, which we'll call 'sodomising-a-drugged-13-year-old-girl-rape'. I'm still waiting to hear her verdict on Jonathan King.

There was more stark contrast in the UK economy, when a Guardian survey revealed that - shock! horror! - the death knell of capitalism had yet to sound in the upper echelons of the business world, where executives still managed to award themselves an average 10% pay rise in 2008. Two days later, the Office for National Statistics published the highest unemployment figures in 14 years.

Shock! in Guinea too, where Moussa Dadis Camara, head of the military junta which swept to power in 2008 on the back of a bloodless coup, with lovely words about democracy, transparency and development, had actually turned out not to be such a lovely head of a military junta after all. Following an announcement that Camara would be running in the 2010 presidential election, despite an earlier promise that his leadership was purely for the interim, the people decided they'd had enough. A 50,000-strong protest ended with at least 157 dead, 1,253 injured, and accusations of secret burials, rape and genital mutilation levelled at Camara's forces.

Didn't get a massive lot of column inches, that. Patrick Swayze did, though.

Part four coming soon.