Bugle 283 – #JeSuisCharlie

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Hello buglers

and welcome to 2015.

Yet another year they seem to keep on coming.

And a bugle will, as ever, be here to chronicle every single moment as the countdown to the end of the third millennium keeps rolling on.

Still quite a way to go, but still.

I'm Andy Zoltzman, live in London, and joining me from the silly side of the Atlantic, relatively, it's the man who turns the big apple into a massive flagon of cider by squishing it in his cider press of probing side swipes, fermenting it in the vats of veracity before presenting it to the world in sweet bottle bullshit form with which to drink away its pain.

It's John oliver hello andy hello buglers happy new year to one and to most mostly all uh hope 2015 has been individually and collectively acceptable to you so far i was back in the uk over the holiday for a week during which time i played football with both andy and chris which was a true festive delight despite the fact that my personal performance was not up to my regular standards.

I'll quickly say that.

I will then go on to say in my defense, Andy, if you took Pele and got him to play a game at his peak after getting off an international flight last thing the previous night, you get a similar performance.

What I'm saying is, I'm a jet-lagged Pele, Andy.

Right, I mean, that's a big...

That's a big...

Let me tell you, you know, if you took Pele off a transatlantic flight the day before and removed 90% of his central nervous system and repeatedly smacked him around the head with a frying pan, yeah, maybe you're getting somewhere there.

I mean, it was afraid.

The point is, I'm like Pele.

Yeah, it was.

What's the point?

Yeah,

when you play like a 75-year-old.

That one was an abject display, John.

It wasn't.

It was truly abject.

I was bossing it, knocking it around the midfield.

Like,

I mean, very much like a young Beckenbauer from the back of the back.

Knocking it around the midfield.

Sweeping up from the back.

But not to too many of your own players.

That's not the point, though, isn't it?

That is true.

If you can't read it,

Chris has got one hell of an engine.

He ran around like a triathlete.

He even tried swimming across the floor at one point.

What I would say Chris, in answer to your suggestion that not all my pastors found teammates, is if you can't read the book don't go in the library.

So this is Bugle 283

for the week ending the 9th of January 2015, which means that tomorrow is the 10th of January in 49 BC.

On this date, Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon,

the river, the celebrity river in Italy, a move that cannot be unmoved.

The phrase came to be known as a boundary that once crossed cannot be uncrossed.

And on exactly the same day, 2056 years later, eight years ago...

Today, my wife and I crossed our own personal Rubicon, by which I mean we had our first child.

There's no going back.

Once you've done it, absolutely no going back.

And a week ago, John, Matilda,

heading up towards the heady heights of turning eight, turned to me with quite a serious look on her face and said, Daddy, I think I'm getting a little bit too old for some of your jokes.

And

yeah, I mean, it's...

I mean, that time was always destined to come.

And in many ways, I'm thankful that it took so long to get there.

On this day in 1776, well tomorrow, 10th of January, Thomas Paine published Common Sense.

If you're listening, Thomas, an updated version would be handy.

Your message still hasn't hammered home to everyone on the planet.

They've recently discovered unpublished excerpts from the original Common Sense, including chapters entitled Why to Avoid Large Spikes, Don't Urinate on Crocodiles, and the Do's and Don'ts of Trampolining at Funerals.

Top story this week, it's 2015.

Hopefully this year will contain some happier news than last year.

It's not like it can get any worse.

Hold on a second, what the fk is happening in Paris?

So this is going to be a little tricky as the situation is fluid, a very depressing fluid as well.

But on Wednesday there were horrifying scenes in Paris as a pair of gunmen or gun douches to describe them in the mildest possible way killed 12 people at the offices of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.

Killing a bunch of innocent people because you're offended by a joke is a bombastically boneheaded act of barbarism, Andy.

To commit murder over a cartoon is almost cartoonishly stupid.

And perhaps we should first do a bit of background explaining exactly what Charlie Hebdo is, just in case you don't know or were unable to find out this week due to understandably throwing your TV out of the window in frustration when this story first started to break.

The satirical magazine has actually been attacked before.

They were firebombed back in 2011 in November after it published a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad under the title Sharia Hebdo.

So this is nothing new.

They've also featured cartoons insulting Christians, Jews, politicians, and even the British, although I can't think what they could possibly find mockable about us.

The point is, pissing people off and entertaining them has very much been in Charlie Hebdo's raison d'être over the years or whatever the French for raison d'être is.

The magazine was born in 1970 fittingly from an arguably offensive but pretty good joke.

There were two big news events around that time, a massive fire at a disco tech which killed more than 100 people and the death of former French President General Charles de Gaulle.

A magazine called Harakiri led its edition making fun of de Gaulle's death and the hysterical reaction to it with the headline Bal tragique à Colombé une mor, which translates as Tragic Dance of Colombé, which was De Gaulle's home, one dead.

Pretty good joke,

especially for 1970, Andy, where the bar of jokes was very low and very racist.

However,

there was a scandal which led to Harakiri getting banned, and the journalist employed there responded by setting up a new weekly paper, Charlie Hebdo.

Flash forward to decades of cartoons, both entertaining and infuriating people, and that gets us to Wednesday with two maniacs and some guns.

And what a shitty Wednesday it was.

Yes, as is often the case, the actions of a nano-minority of hyper-c ⁇ from a dark cranny of religious filth were met with a globally extended middle finger of defiance as France and the rest of the world united in revulsion.

Terrorists, John, it seems, even in 2015, still struggling with the public relations side of things, seem no closer to winning over the floating neutral.

Much of the media, particularly in Britain, I don't know if this was the case in America as well, did come up with some slightly odd mixed reactions to it.

They expressed their defiance of the terrorists by A, not reprinting the cartoons in question, and B, publishing instead video footage of the terrorists slaying a policeman and photographs of the blood-stained crime scene.

I found these rather mixed messages from our media being sent out, messages which included, you can't look at this, it's too disgusting, and hey guys, look at this, it's really disgusting.

And they seemed to have got confused over which was supposed to be which.

One exception to the prevailing tide tide of global opinion was Anjem Chowdhury.

And I don't know if he's had a lot of airtime stateside.

I noticed he had an article on the USA Today website.

Now, he is one of Britain's gobbiest wits and a man who must make 99.9% of Muslims

unbelievably frustrated because he is bafflingly wheeled out on news programs with alarming regularity.

Now, I know even less about Islam than I do about Judaism, but I would imagine putting Anjem Chowdhury on telly to talk about it is the equivalent of having a golf commentator who spends the whole day saying, this player defies the laws of golf.

Put the five-iron down, infidel scum.

You should be using a baguette and a dog's testicle.

He would speak for, at best, a very small minority of golf fans.

One of the biggest questions that people have tried to wrap their arms around is why?

Why would people do this?

Why would they kill innocent people over a cartoon?

To which the answer is, because they're arseholes and that's basically it it's easy to overcomplicate a response to that question and in doing so people will then add their own beliefs or prejudices to the motivations but if you really boil it down the answer they're arseholes really gets to the nub of the question that you're trying to ask because it's a fair rule to say if you kill someone for making a joke you are an arsehole no matter what that joke was or whether you liked it or whether that joke was even particularly good or not you are committing the act of an arsehole for reasons reasons entirely consistent with arseholey.

And that is not to say that you can't be offended by things.

I'm sure many of the things that Charlie Hebdo published offended a lot of people.

It's okay to be offended by things.

In fact, it's absolutely inevitable you'll be offended by things in this world.

It's impossible not to be.

This is an offensive planet.

Feelings get hurt.

That's the inherent design flaw with feelings.

They make you feel things.

What you can't do is kill people just because you're offended by something.

That makes you a sociopath.

That makes you Joe Pesci in Goodfellas.

And no one wants to be Joe Pesci in Goodfellas.

But you have to also ask questions over the

quite the thing, the logic behind it.

Charlie Hebdo is quite a well-known magazine, but had a circulation,

I read, of around 30,000 in France and a reputation for being not entirely complementary towards the big celebs of global religion, your gods, your Jesuses, your Allahs, your Muhammads, your Moses's, you know the type.

One assumes that of these 30,000, fewer than 30,000 were Muslims and much fewer than 30,000 were fundamentalist Muslims.

These things tend to be quite easy to avoid if you are sensitive about them.

However, that avoidance has become significantly less easy now because

these terrorists have made Charlie Hebdo at the moment the most famous magazine in the universe.

I don't know how many other potential second Earths you astronomers find.

This magazine is planning now to raise its print run run from its standard 30,000 or 60,000 red, a couple of different figures, to, for next week's issue, 1 million, making it by sheer weight of numbers

3,300% more offensive to the average fundamentalist Muslim.

In fact, what they have done, John, is taken a magazine with a roughly equivalent circulation as the American Ship Review.

1859, for those who don't read it, that is a specialist magazine about the state of Oregon.

And Donye Yebazi, an Iranian bi-weekly Persian-language computer games magazine.

And with a significantly lower circulation than either the New Zealand Gardener or Britain's Simply Knitting.

And I sincerely hope Simply Knitting, as a gesture of solidarity, runs with a crochet your own profit story on the front cover next week.

Charlie Hebder has only around five times higher circulation than the highly prestigious and influential Potato Processing International magazine with whom I once had a job interview.

And what these terrorists have done has turned it.

Wait, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

Andy, we're going to have to take a diversion there.

Does that mean you had an interview with the potato magazine and were not good enough to get the job?

Well,

I'm glad you didn't think I had an interview to try and publicise my tour.

No, this was back in the happy days when I was looking for gainful employment post-university.

And went from...

And you didn't get the job, Andy.

I don't think I conveyed the requisite level of enthusiasm for sub-editing articles about the international potato processing industry.

Albeit

that's

potato processing internals.

It is the global leader in the potato processing industry globally in terms of magazines.

Right, pump the brakes, Andy.

You're not in the interview now.

And I wouldn't have just been Potato Processing Internationals, and I've also been working for Asia Pacific Baker as well.

So let's not forget that.

For a grand salary of, I believe it was £10,000 working in an industrial estate in Kemsey, near Seven Oaks in Kent.

Happy, happy days.

Now, I've never been more delighted to receive a rejection letter.

So what they've managed to do, John, to return to the point, is turn a magazine with a circulation of generally, you know, 30 to 60,000 into the single highest profile magazine issue in the history of humanity.

That is counterproductivity of the highest order.

It's also a problem for the attackers in general on a practical scale, this level of irritation at something so small.

Because if you are that angered by a cartoon, you must be angry literally all the time.

Because you don't get to be murderously angry over a cartoon and then not not be murderously angry over, let's say, your takeaway pizza being cold.

If you're going to set the bar for killing that low, you have to accept the irritation of everything that is above that bar.

If you're a terrorist who is willing to kill someone for a joke, then when a train is cancelled and someone starts screaming in frustration, you do not get to say, oh, come on, mate, calm down, it's just a train, let's try and get this in perspective, shall we?

No, you have to be intellectually consistent and you have to kill every train driver who has ever been late to anything.

That is just a fact.

There is concern now in France about how some people may respond to this because to put it mildly, racism is very much a club that some French politicians have in their bag or in their satchel as they would put it.

The Le Pen family have a long poisonous history of inciting race hatred and as if to get ahead of that there were some interesting campaigns to try and raise people's belief in humanity in the aftermath of this horrible event.

The Jusui Charlie campaign was instantly popular, as was an extension of the Jusui Ahmed movement, referencing the fact that one of the 12 people killed was 42-year-old Muslim policeman Ahmed Marabet shot outside the Charlie Hebdo offices.

Other responses, of course, were a little less measured.

Here in America, ex-NSA director Michael Hayden was asked broadly on TV how humanity might best be able to avoid future tragedies like this.

A general question to which he answered, well, I was talking to you guys about 12 months ago about those massive amounts of metadata the nsa held in storage that metadata doesn't look all that scary this morning and i wouldn't be surprised if the french services pick up cell phones associated with the attack and ask the americans where have you seen these phones active globally oh f you to a tremendous extent this is not about you you little f ⁇ er

In another media low point on CNN, Don Lemon was interviewing Arsalan Ifitar, who is a prominent prominent Muslim human rights lawyer here and senior editor at Islamic Monthly.

They were discussing Islamic extremism.

That was the stage upon which Don Lemon was about to take a gigantic shit.

Because he then said, Don Lemon, to his guest, in August, 16% of French citizens support ISIS.

Would you describe those who support ISIS as Islamic extremists?

Do you support ISIS?

To which his guest understandably responded, wait, did you just ask me if I supported ISIS?

And that's a fair response, Andy, from a Muslim human rights lawyer.

Because if you're wondering whether your guest, a, let me reiterate, Muslim human rights lawyer, supports ISIS, the answer to that question should probably lie in how you fing introduced him.

Many publications have expressed their solidarity by reprinting

many of the Charlie Hebdo

cartoons.

Now, obviously, we're an audio publication,

so we can't reprint those cartoons.

but all we can do is issue our own audio cartoon in response to the attacks.

A man with a beard who may or may not be a prophet wearing a not-in-my-name t-shirt with an angry look on his face.

Take that terrorists.

Take that.

2015 prediction section now and well 2014 as John suggested has thankfully fed right off into the annals of history like the cranky little shitbag that it was.

2015, as many predicted, has taken its place and has not started too promisingly.

Oh, it started f ⁇ ing depressingly, haven't it?

It's a shitty start to a year, this.

Yeah,

it's a shitty...

It is, as you say, it is a bad start to a year.

But thankfully, there's a Cricket World Cup and a Rugby World Cup

coming up to distract us.

So it's time for our bugle predictions.

Let's start with oil, John.

I know you're a massive fan of the black stuff.

In 2014 OPEC launched a surprise massive half-price sale on oil, just 50 bucks a barrel for all the crude oil you can drink.

That's 50 bucks a barrel while stocks last, and a free subscription to Rising International Tension monthly magazine.

The oil price last year deflated like the hopes and dreams of a cosseted idealistic teenager reading his first copy of the Daily Mail.

Down from over $110 a barrel, still not bad.

That's a lot of oil in a barrel and you can can just pour it on your next door neighbor's garden.

And if they complain, you just say, hey buddy, think how many birds you've saved by having this on your lawn instead of in the sea.

You're a f ⁇ ing hero.

And you get a free barrel for rolling down a hill when drunk.

So even at $110 a barrel, for me, it was a bit of a bargain.

But this year,

it just touched $50.

a barrel.

I'm going to jangle my crystal balls in the underpants of future history on this one and say that oil is going to keep sliding down like a hippo in a bobsled.

And by December, we will all be waking up to a knock on the door and opening it to find a Saudi prince outside with a free barrel of oil saying, please take it and have a tenor for your troubles.

John, what's your

prediction for oil this year?

I think it's going to be big in people's engines, Andy.

And I think it's going to be big on people's pelicans.

You heard it here first.

Russia.

Now, Russia, the celebrity nation, acted like a proper tool for much of 2014, has started 2015 in similar form.

It is listed in new legislation, apparently, transsexual and transgender people amongst those who will no longer qualify for...

Any guesses?

I know.

Driving licenses.

Other quotes, mental disorders that can now bar people from driving include fetishism, voyeurism, and exhibitionism, which bars you from driving, but not evidently from being president.

That's a very important legal demarcation.

But I guess, John, you know, it might seem a little intolerant to ban people who enjoy fetishism, voyeurism, and exhibitionism from driving, but...

As the old saying goes, you cannot drive a car on a motorway at 70 miles an hour whilst hog-tied to a refrigerator with a dominatrix dressed up as a giant cucumber standing over you screaming, who lives in the vegetable box.

You cannot possibly hope to negotiate the Moscow rush hour whilst looking through an industrial telescope as you drive along through every single window of the nearest block of flash to see if you can spot spot a hot housewife doing some naked yoga.

And you cannot negotiate your way through the tricky switch-back mountain roads of the Caucasus if you're driving along with your plums out of the window shouting, say hello to the dangly Douglases.

Road safety simply has to come first.

And I'm glad Russia has taken the lead on this.

You might think that passing this kind of legislation in the state Russia is in at the moment is classic procrastination tactics.

Sort out the small stuff to justify ignoring the massive looming deadlines.

We've all done it.

We've all decided to catalogue our socks and arrange our pens and pencils in nib thickness order before filling out that tax return or before going to hospital to have that severed artery checked out by a specialist.

Russia, can we deal with a collapsing economy, international pariah status and an absolute arbuckle of political corruption?

Now that can all wait.

First, let's stop transgender people from driving.

After all, as Putin himself would almost certainly say, if they can't decide if they're a boy or a girl, they're going to have trouble with left and right.

Now someone filled me with my shirt off riding a horsey.

Oh yeah.

So, my prediction by the end of the year, John, I think Russia will probably have got a bit overexcited after its takeovers of the Crimea and Ukraine and have had a pop at Mexico.

I think you could have Russians massing on the border trying to sneak into Texas.

What's your prediction for Putin's year this year, John?

Well, it's not so much a prediction as an overall thought, Andy, that if Russia leads the news in 2015 as much as it did in 2014, we're all in serious shit.

I think that's a very fair point.

Yeah, if the news starts, we begin in Russia.

It's not usually for anything good.

And Britain, of course, we've woken up this year and election fever is once again gripping the nation.

May the 7th.

General election now looming over the British public like a dessert of shit ice cream on a set menu at a restaurant.

We know it's coming and we're just trying our best to enjoy the rat cutter old main course as best we can.

It's going to be a fascinating election, John.

The relationship between the British electorate and their politicians is roughly equivalent to that between a jam-covered family at a picnic and some wasps.

They don't want to hear them, they certainly don't want to see them and they definitely don't want to give them their money.

All the traditional parties are in a state of somewhere between complete and partial disintegration.

The Conservatives, the dominant coalition partners, have overseen an economic recovery that looks good on paper.

If the paper you're reading it on is either the Daily Telegraph or a certificate saying congratulations on being absolutely minted.

For most other people, that paper would be best flushed down something.

Labour, rather hamstrung by a number of problems, not least their leader, their previous leader, and the leader before that one, whilst the Liberal Democrats are currently doing an Ernie Shackleton and getting stuck in the icy nether regions of the opinion polls for an extremely long time.

A touching tribute to the great polar explorer

on the 100th anniversary of his significantly longer than planned Antarctica expedition.

And into the gaps has come UKIP, whose leader, Nigel Farage,

has been mostly for the last couple of months since he became increasingly prominent, been playing a kind of game of political hit the mouse.

That game in which you have to whack a mouse with a hammer when it pops up out of the board.

And instead of hitting and mice, it's shutting up and the lunatic candidates his party has to choose, including this week himself, as I'm frankly.

ill-timed at best and at worst totally horrific comments in the aftermath of the the Paris shootings.

There are so many balls in the air, John, and the British public is understandably taking cover.

My prediction, I think that we could be heading for the first ever 0% turnout in a British general election.

And the Queen will rightfully retake absolute power.

And I think that would make this nation significantly happier.

Oh, Andy, you're starting to sell our Russell brands.

I thought that was one of my predictions, that you certainly start to resemble Russell's career a little more.

Do you still get to vote, or has that been correctly stripped away from you since you were

everything has been all power has been stripped away from me in Britain, Hundy?

I've had everything,

all elements of power has been taken away out of pure spite because of my deigning to spend more than three weeks outside the country.

Including the power in your once mighty left foot.

Oh, the evidence of that foot was going to be black.

And of course, democracy is going to be gearing up in in America for the 2016 election.

This being 2015, there's going to be an absolute welter of

build-up action.

Are you excited, John?

Well, yeah, although it's not so much starting, Andy, as it never ends.

The election cycle is a true cycle in America.

It's a circle.

There is no start or ends to the whole thing.

It just goes round and round and round.

I was looking at the odds because, I mean, it's not just a significant political event, but more importantly, it's a gambling opportunity as well.

The favourites, Hillary Clinton, 5-4 favourite, Chelsea Clinton, 1500-1, maybe four years too soon for Chelsea.

And second favourite, Jeb Bush.

And I guess, John, you're kind of helping me thinking, what the world needs right now is that surname on some very American-headed note paper.

So it could be Clinton v.

Bush again.

It's like 1992 all over again, which could only mean David Garr getting unnecessarily dropped from the England cricket team again.

But

it does seem rather incestuous now, American politics.

And I think, I mean, looking at it, I think America should just be honest with itself, stop digging around and take the monarchy back.

Because what American politics has become is basically the British royal family in the 15th century, but without this straightforward decency to actually assassinate each other.

Yeah, and without the really spectacular costumes as well.

So any potential big movers from outside the favourites?

Michelle Obama listed at 66 to 1 with one book.

66?

That is not long odds enough, Andy.

Not long odds.

David Letterman, I mean, interesting, interesting timing.

Can't be coincidence.

Derek Jet has got to be worth a go.

Surely.

You might split the New York vote.

Any plans for yourself, John?

I mean, I know you're technically not American, but that hasn't stopped the last guy, you great big Muslim.

That's,

I mean,

I'll have to attack the Constitution first.

You know, there are those in America who think I'd do that on a regular basis.

Anyway, so

I was reading in a tech section they've got new technology that can recreate Abraham Lincoln's brain and use it as an app to run government.

So that's one potential

avenue for America to go down.

Let's call that 72 to one.

So who who let's have your early prediction?

I mean, it's still quite a long time to go.

I can't do it, Andy.

If I engage in predicting the presidential debate, I'm going to throw myself out of the window of my office.

Right, what floor are you on?

High enough, Andy.

Eight.

Eight.

Okay, probably not worth it then.

Anything below four, you know, give it a go.

The exciting constitutional event this year in Britain is the 800th anniversary of the publication of the smash hit blockbuster Magna Carta.

A bit dry to read these days.

Can be basically summed up as a bit about fishing and how to stop kings being pricks.

Like many things cited as being quintessentially British, it is A, covered in layers and layers of historical bullshit, and B English.

It initially

worked pretty well, the Magna Carta, for about two months before war broke out between naughty King John and his barons, which I think was the working title for your HBO show initially, wasn't it?

It absolutely was.

King John, renowned as one of our worst ever kings.

Here is a bad, bad review, John.

This is from a monk at the time writing in St.

Albans.

Black as is hell, King John's presence there makes it blacker still.

Zing, that is one star.

Within 10 years,

only about a third of the Magna Carta was still being used.

And now there are just three remaining clauses on the statute book, including we will sell to no man either justice or rights.

In other words, please, if you're in government, don't flog off the criminal justice system to a road haulage company.

Thank you very much.

And the 800th anniversary celebrations will be huge.

They just announced a special series of enormous public concerts in which singers such as Coldplay, Adele, and Bitsky Snickodik will sing specially commissioned songs explaining the 13th century feudal system and whether or not you'd been allowed to plant a forest where you're standing 0.8 of a millennium ago.

So all that to look forward to in 2015.

As we say, it started.

To be honest, John, at this stage, I would take a three out of ten year.

I think last year was about 1.5.

I'm looking for a bit of a bounce back, but I'll take a three out of ten year this year for the world.

Bad start, though, Andy.

Bad, bad start.

It's like a Grand Prix.

You've got to hit the first corner well.

Well, that is it for this week's bugle.

It's,

well, it's been nice to be back doing the bugle, but uh

ideally

slightly nicer circumstances yeah yeah it's not been fun has it this week it's not it's not been fun no next week andy there's always next week yes um

so if you are listening and you are a terrorist please uh grow the f up uh we'll be back next week uh do check out our soundcloud page soundcloud.com slash the hyphen bugle do send your emails into info at thebuglepodcast.com no further questions Goodbye.

Bye!

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