Christina Patterson: Politicians on Reality TV are a Good Reason to Get Out Your Gun

To the man in Wisconsin who shot his TV when he saw Bristol Palin on Dancing With The Stars, I have one word to say: respect. I imagine that he, like me, usually only watches adaptations of works by 19th-century novelists, adaptations that involve crinolines and bonnets, but definitely not sequins, and was disappointed that there were sequins, but no bonnets.

I imagine that he, like me, also found it a little bit depressing that you can't switch on the telly now without seeing a politician, or a politician's child, wiggling their hips in moves that are clearly meant to emulate sexual intercourse, even if they've never had it, or even if they are members of a religion that says you mustn't have it unless you're married, which you aren't. I imagine that he thinks that if you liked dancing you would be dancing, instead of slumped on a sofa eating a family pack of Doritos and watching people dancing, just as if you liked football, you would be kicking a ball and not a telly.

I imagine that he was just feeling a bit fed up. He may, for example, have been watching the programme about Bristol's mother, who is also a hockey mom and a mama grizzly, which is a special kind of mother from which key parts of the brain have been surgically removed, and he may have watched her climbing mountains and leaping across crevasses and catching bears and fishing for salmon, and he may have thought that the woman who, two years ago, ran to be Vice-President of the world's only superpower, and who is now planning to run as President, was beginning to look a bit like Vladimir Putin.

I don't think he would have thought that she looked physically very like Vladimir Putin, who used to be a president and is hoping to be one again, because although you can put lipstick on a pig, and you can put an awful lot of lipstick on a presidential candidate, even when they're watching bears or fishing, you can't really put it on a Russian Prime Minister, or, if you did, he would look a bit less masculine than the photos of him sitting on horses or fishing, sometimes without even a top on, would suggest he wants to. But he might have thought that the fact that she liked doing the same kind of things as a man who seemed to be really rather nasty wasn't a brilliant sign, and nor was the fact that she liked doing them in front of TV crews.

He might, in fact, have thought that when politicians, or ex-politicians, or aspiring politicians, start doing things in front of TV crews that you would usually only do when their weren't any TV crews, it was usually a sign that they might be a bit confused about what was their life and what was pretending to be their life, about what, in other words, was truth and what was lies, and that they might, in fact, think that there was no difference. He might think that where this applied to a very silly former member of the British Parliament who was hanging around in a jungle with a bunch of other people who were called "celebrities", but most of which nobody had ever heard of, to make a programme that it was too painful to watch, that it didn't really matter because, although the man didn't seem to have anything that you might call common sense, or knowledge of human nature, or of himself, he was unlikely to hold any kind of public office again and might need to earn some kind of living by taking part in televised freak shows, which certainly wouldn't do any good to anyone, but might not do any harm. But he might think that when this applied to politicians who wanted to make the laws, and policies, that would shape millions of people's lives, and even, in some cases, determine the length of them, it might matter quite a lot.

He might also think that politicians who thought a lot about how they appeared on TV, so that in some cases they had hair transplants and plastic surgery, and also bought up most of the TV stations, and in other cases wore stacked-up heels, and made people stand on boxes, so that they wouldn't look small, even though they were, didn't tend to be the people who did the most to make other people's lives better.

He might think that he was very lucky to live in a country which, although it seemed to have an awful lot of very, very, very stupid people living in it, people who thought that the best way to run a country was not to run it, but to be like grizzly bears who look after baby grizzly bears, but don't, apparently, give a monkey's about anyone else, and where quite a lot of these people were running for political office, and one of them even wants to be president, by some amazing quirk of fate, or luck, or perhaps by an act of God, but not the God of the people who want grizzly government, has a President who is thoughtful and intelligent and brave.

It has a President who, when he was asked to feign emotions, because he lives in a country which prefers emotion to thought, refused to, and when he was asked to act a part, because he lives in a country which likes acting, refused to, and who prefers to sit in a study and write books than strike poses on mountains. It is this President who has managed to do something that presidents for a century have tried, and failed, to achieve, which is to pass a bill to make sure that people, even mentally ill people who fire guns at their TVs, can get treatment from doctors or in hospitals, even if they're not rich.

It is this President, who is very far from perfect, because no politician anywhere is perfect, but who is trying to make things better for poor people, though most people, including quite a lot of the poor people, don't seem to want to let him, who will, in two years' time, probably be running against the woman who prefers grizzly bears to people. If he doesn't, or if he does and doesn't win, we might think it would be a good idea if someone fired a gun at us, too.

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Christina Patterson: Why We All Need a Rally to Restore Sanity

"Anger," said a man who used to call himself a Sex Pistol, and now appears in ads for butter, "is an energy". Well, it can be. You could, I suppose, say that filling printer cartridges with an explosive that can't be picked up by X-rays, and sticking them in the post to a synagogue in Chicago, though actually you're hoping it blows up the plane it's being carried in, and, of course, the people in it, is an energetic thing to do. Not, perhaps, as good as a half-hour on the Stairmaster, or maybe the rowing machine, but certainly better than a waddle to the fridge.

You could also say that running to become a member of a legislative body that helps to run the world's only superpower, even though you don't seem to have read its constitution, or anything else, except perhaps a pamphlet on witchcraft for beginners, and another one on how masturbation is almost as sinful as providing affordable healthcare for poor people, is quite an energetic thing to do. You've got to get your hair blow-dried. You've also got to make TV ads where you say things like "I am you", which isn't as easy to understand as "this butter is nice", which is, in fact, and particularly if you don't get your hair blow-dried, extremely confusing, but you probably can't say it's not energetic.

Can you say that sitting at a computer, and hammering out messages, while somebody is paying you to do something else, to whoever will listen, which may, I'm afraid, be not very many people, about why everything, and everyone, and in particular the columnist on whose work you're ostensibly commenting, but which actually you don't seem to have read, is rubbish, be described as energetic? To me, it doesn't seem very energetic. To me, it would be more energetic to go to one of the adult literacy classes that are now quite widely available, and learn some basic grammar which might mean that you could one day write a sentence and put your real name next to it, but I can understand that that would take a lot more effort, and that you may very well be someone who doesn't like effort.

Is it energetic of the firefighters to say that they won't go to work on Bonfire Night? It's sometimes quite hard to see how not going to work is more energetic than going to work, though it's true that some jobs, and particularly those where you spend most of the time sitting around and perhaps watching telly, may not be that energetic, and you can also understand that if you've got two jobs then you might want your second one to be a little less energetic than your first one. You could, I suppose, say that it takes some effort to all agree to not work at the same time, though with things like email and text messages you can probably do that while also watching telly.

Was it energetic of an awful lot of French oil depot workers, train drivers, tube drivers and air traffic controllers to all not work at the same time, to try, in fact, to bring the country to a halt, because they didn't want to have to carry on working beyond an age that was several years lower than for most of us? You could say that it looked quite energetic, because they weren't all just sitting, watching telly - quite a lot of them were marching in the streets, and waving their arms, and waving placards.

Quite a lot of people in Washington on Saturday also marched in the streets and waved placards. The placards they were waving said things like "Maybe you're wrong, maybe I'm wrong - let's grab a beer", and "I disagree with you but I'm pretty sure you're not Hitler". They also said things like "Even God gave it a rest for one day - tone it down America", because the point of all this energy, and all these people, some of whom had driven for more than 20 hours to be there, was to counter that other kind of energy, the energy that has a non-masturbating marketing consultant running to be a member of the Senate, because she, like many of her compatriots, thinks her country is being run, and wrecked, by Osama bin Stalin.

It was a "rally to restore sanity", a rally to remind Americans, and the American media, that hyperbole and hysteria may make for great headlines and TV ads, but they don't make for such a great political, or national, culture.

Certainly, you can understand that an economy which is still in the doldrums, and unemployment that's now near 10 per cent, and mass evictions from homes can make a lot of people very, very cross, though it's hard to see how a government which hadn't tried to stimulate the economy, and didn't want to help the people who were now losing their homes and unemployed, wouldn't make them crosser. It's hard, in fact, not to agree with the placard that said "Want to live in a place with no government? Try Somalia!" But Tea Partiers, and mama grizzlies, and blow-dried wannabe witches, and their acolytes, don't want to live in Somalia. They want to live in Utopia.

The Tube drivers who don't want any jobs to be lost ever, even if they don't involve any compulsory redundancies at all, and the firefighters whose new shift patterns might affect the ability of some of them to earn ￡20K - ￡30K for two days' work (and two nights' sleep), which they are able to do while commuting from a home in a much cheaper area, and claiming a London allowance, which may be why there are 40 applicants for every vacancy, also seem to want to live in Utopia, and so do the French workers who would like to retire at an age now barely considered middle youth.

We'd all like to live in Utopia. Some of us would like to live in a Utopia in which the terrible consequences of a massive sub-prime crisis caused under the watch of a very lazy President are instantly wiped away by a new President, but without having to pay any taxes, and without having to let poor people go to hospital. We would also like the country we live in to remain the world's leading economic power, even if a country with 1.4 billion people all offering very low-wage labour seems to make that rather unlikely.

Some of us would like to live in a Utopia in which a deficit caused by a global crisis is removed without anyone having any changes to their pay or conditions or pensions, or losing any public services, and in which the welfare system is fair to poor unemployed people and to poor employed people and to rich people, but without changing the whole system of property which means that in many cities you have to earn several times the average wage to even think about buying a small flat.

And some of us can't quite decide what kind of Utopia we want to live in. It might be a beautiful garden where there are roses and nightingales and virgins, and also the severed heads and limbs of the people we've blown up to get there, or it might be a place where we're famous and admired, and not in a job where no one minds if we spend all day firing off bitter little messages, but where our opinions are taken very, very seriously.

What do we want? We're not quite sure, but we definitely want it now. Until we get it, we'll shout, and scream, and rant, and rave, and write snarky little blogs, and call other people Hitler, and turn printer cartridges into Yemeni cocktails, and blame everyone else for everything all the time.

What do we want? We want to be happy. We want to be right. What we don't want is to have to do anything as energetic as developing, presenting and winning an argument.

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Christina Patterson: Risks to talk live on race

It's not all fun is monstered. Poor Katharine Birbalsingh, the former Marxist was hailed as a Messiah of the Conservative Party Conference, is back in London liberal as Judas.

Bad enough, one might think of the surreal experience of being clutch matron fold way to England and have pictures of her students met with the kind of art you can expect in a zoo, or perhaps in a House, but to get back to find you are suspended and then dismissed, and your name in the Metropolitan Liberal circles drop you is now mud - well, this is what one of your new friends might call a show poor jolly.

"Birbalsingh, it seems, noir.Ce is not immediately obvious his picture, but in a country where a permanent-tanned, former Prime Minister is classified as white, and several beautiful blonde people Métis, including a friend to me, I always thought was white until she told me she was black, are always classified according to their darkest parent, he is regarded as important.Cela means that you cannot go towers saying""white woman", people tend not anyway, but you can go towers saying"as a black woman", although Birbalsingh, so I can gather, do.

This also means that the so-called representation of ears (black and ethnic minorities) conservative Conference was massively increased, Samantha Cameron who happened to be filmed while sitting next to a couple of Asian beautiful appearance and may, as well as introduced Indian dancers for occasionally also were black David Cameron.

But Birbalsingh, perhaps because she is black and therefore much more likely to end up in prison, committed a crime.Elle mentioned "black underachievement", you are allowed to speak, because it is the kind of thing that you can place on a form, but that she said something terrible. She said that black underachievement was not as a result of "institutional racism", which you are also allowed to put on a form, but, at least in part, "accusations of racism", which you do not. She said that when lawyers argue against the exclusion of a black boy in school and succeed in obtaining him readmitted, then all other black boys "search this invincible child and copy its bad example. Black children blunted, she says, "as a result of the well-intentioned liberal made for him".

Well, it is so many crimes that we would need an employment tribunal to untangle them.You can't say things like "all other blacks boys" do this or that, because it is generalize it stereotypes and is racist. And you can't say things like "well-intentioned liberal" because, for the well intentioned liberal (but not Tory non-inter alia-good-sense), it looks like a label and labels are others forms give you their, check boxes, and well-meaning liberals try helping black, yeah?and as they are, not racist and some of their best friends are noirs.Mais, perhaps longer.

The Birbalsingh black friends are, apparently, not themselves with its rice paddies truths.This is his "white liberal bourgeois friends" who waltzed off the coast with smelling.Il salts is fortunate that they were not with me when a friend of mine was announced after an afternoon of chaos that had we risk being charged with GHB, can not be done business with black people because they are so bloody disorganized and cannot remain work for them, because they are still demanding a rabais.Je assumes that he was not talking black on the face of the planet, but in quite general terms, based on his experience of blacks, individual, because he is black, is broad enough.

I guess that it was not really talk about colour, either.What he was talking about was culture, which in this case, was largely Caribbean, as his parents, and in which, for example, time is not a door which sharply behind you, but a beautiful door you can swing open at any time, and favours are something give you freely to friends and family and ask freely, sometimes even a person who is only in the sense most remote "brother" and hospitality towards East, such as various friends exhausted mine can testify, distant relatives offered limitless.

If you choose to stick to certain aspects of this culture even when you're in another culture, then you can, for example, be a great person as a friend or relative, but you would be a good person to have your entreprise.Et if you belong to a group in a class who prefers the trouble that all work and then, when you get into trouble, yell racism, you can exercise do not perform, and make sure that nobody else can, then you can enjoy short power, buzz but probably not the type that could lead to anything that someone else might call success.

And if you're the kind of person that has black so you can say you are black, black friends friends friends you escape when they cease to be pets start to have opinions, and that you use the word "racism" lot, then you'll probably spend much time in a beautiful haze of complacency, but you're also probably not much to make the lives of black, brown or any other persons to do better.

Last week at an event on multiculturalism and integration, organized by a wonderful organization called point of faith, I was also monstered.Un harsh Jewish man, which had accused me of anti-Semitism abusive e-mails sent .a very polished, Muslim woman who did step sent me emails on the responsibilities of the media and to know if writing about female genital mutilation and marriages forced in the Muslim community, I was guilty of peddler, stereotypes and the mythes.Vous could, I suppose, call something that occur as often a stereotype or a myth, but the usual word I have explained, is a fact.

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