A Review Of The Brazen Head
“G-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-ghosts?!” The blood drains from Anton’s face as I recount to him a potted history of The Brazen Head, Dublin’s oldest pub, mentioning that it is allegedly haunted by the ghost of Robert Emmet. “There is no way I’m going in there!”.
I leave Anton at Dr. Quirkey’s and make my way down the quays to the pub, the specter of his fear, that had then seemed so risible, now haunting my thoughts.
The Brazen Head is the sort of cavernous, “organically”-architectured pub that is at once cinematic and familiar to the point of delicacy. Its walls are a mosaic of photographs and cultural artefacts, its present assailed and adorned by these fragments of the past, its brick and mortar adorned with the splintered paraphernalia of a nostalgia without locus point. The curiosity of the (Irish) old-fashioned pub lies in its dedication to displaying images of a unified past while itself not being there; the nostalgic space created in the present is an interesting one. On their request, I take a photograph of some American tourists with a disposable camera.
Though there is no sign of ghosts nor any paranormal activity, the service is uniformly horrific. Even before the place fills up as the evening progresses, I am ignored by conversing staff at an empty bar, then made to feel as though I am being done a favour by the barwoman’s facilitation of the exchange of money for soft goods. The Champions League is left on mute in the corner, that the assembled customers might better apprehend the chasmic silence of enmity between themselves and their servers.
The Guinness is good but expensive at €4.70, with prices for a Kilkenny rising to €5.50, which strikes me as the sort of thing that Robert Emmet would be disgusted by. One could only recommend The Brazen Head to tourists and the curious.
I thumb through my receipts as I leave the bar: the residue of transaction, of capital reasserted. The long walk home, with my mind swimming in an underwhelming reappraisal of The Brazen Head’s prodigious submission to cliché, is complemented by a howling wind along the quays, and I can swear I hear the air singing: “All that’s beautiful drifts away / Like the waters”.
This review ought to have appeared in last year’s “Ghost Issue” of Totally Dublin, but did not due to publishing constraints.
A Review Of Marvel Avengers Assemble
Director: Joss Whedon
Release Date: 4th May 2012
We open on a subterranean military silo, in which a “powerful energy source of unknown potential” called The Tesseract is being secretly held for experimentation by the forces of earthly good. Not so effectively, however, that the fortress is immune to penetration by the portal-aided arrival of the villainous Loki, who plans to use The Tesseract’s power to wage war on Earth, leading a Chitauri (read: “bad alien”) army against our humble planet. As you may be beginning to tell, Joss Whedon plays fast and loose with metaphor and the self-conscious “drawing of earthly parallels” technique so beloved of superhero films. And it is by this tack that Marvel Avengers Assemble, as the coherent, thoughtful text the Buffy creator wants it to be, is irredeemably pierced. Conflicts are resolved not on their own terms, but through the invocation of the extra-terrestrial, the alien, the unknown: indeed, the very basic conflict upon which the film is predicated is that of (Super)humans vs. Aliens. It is thus that we might understand the piercing of the defense of a weapons silo (all too familiar to viewers, perhaps, as those of a nuclear variety, said to be kept in Iran) not as the result of the use of the advanced “bunker buster” missiles recently developed by the U.S. for just such a purpose, but as the inevitable result of alien invasion.
“S.H.I.E.L.D. have as much blood on their hands as Loki!” cries Tony Stark (Iron Man and Robert Downey Jr.) at one stage.
“I know. But now we have to put that behind us and just get … this … done!” replies Captain America (Chris Evans), facing the alien invasion, the onslaught of abjection, in which it comes absolutely naturally for him, as well as the audience, to choose the side of humanity: the side of Good.
As unscrupulous as Whedon’s constant appeals to interstellar, ecstatic authority are in providing the glazed and garnished morality of a superhero flick, he does provide genuine laughs amidst the chaos and destruction. The juxtaposition of comedy and impending apocalypse is an effective one, for a world in which FX is prepping a comedy series about drone pilots and two hours watching the reaffirmation of the values of a country waging war in six separate countries is considered not only time well spent, but two whole stars out of five in Totally Dublin.
Indeed, the film’s assembled ideological illness is not that we, as an audience, are given to understand The Avengers in terms of global conflicts, but that we understand these real conflicts in terms of The Avengers.
*
2/5 blue squares
*
This review originally appeared on the Totally Dublin website.
A Review Of The Ginger Man (The Pub)
As a child, before he became a bully in his own right, Anton was teased for having red hair. Now he keeps it tightly shorn to his pale, tight scalp, its auburn barely distinguishable from brown save in this spring sunlight where, having pushed me to the ground in Archbishop Ryan Park, it meets my startled eyes as a thread-thin, jagged halo around his grinning, freckled face. He points to his t-shirt. “Let’s go to the pub,” it says.
A stiff breeze. Glasses warm-washed and filled again. Anton’s crumpled tenner. The Ginger Man, J.P. Donleavy’s 1955 novel, is an enduring monument to misogyny and the celebration thereof: small wonder, then, that we thought to name a pub after it in our nation’s capital. But humorous though Donleavy’s creative writing exercise may intermittently be, the prices in this Fenian Street haunt do not tickle one’s ribs: James Fintan Lalor would be spinning. You won’t get much change from a fiver for a pint of Guinness (at €4.75) and the quality of it is not really worth writing home about, though you could certainly do worse. It’s cold, yes, but it’s still somewhat grainy. Bring your own sieve. There are “house beers” to sample and, though not to my taste, I have known good people to be complimentary of them. The similarities with the pub’s namesake end there, however.
Despite being full to the point that there are no free seats, the spacious downstairs area has not been opened, and we recline against a thin counter next to the corridor where the toilets are. The pub, all dark wood and polished picture-frames housing faded images, convulses with conversation and laughter around us. The harsh light from the toilet corridor meets the dimness of the rest of the pub exactly where we are, talking loudly and moving from side to side to facilitate the various movements of others. The two more pleasant snug seating areas have long since been occupied, and a large table to our right is occupied by two men in their mid-twenties deep in discussion, one with a necktie around his forehead. To the front of the pub, a small, heated smoking area bustles with activity, patrons spilling out onto the footpath beyond.
The incongruity of a pub named for a novel in which a layabout, misanthropic, student alcoholic spends his time scrounging for money in order to facilitate his drinking being so eminently on the upper end of the price scale is enormous and, indeed, self-evident. But this is the trick with Dublin bars: to project a sense of fundamental difference to their respective clientele. So, as far as student bars for rich people go, you could do worse. Certainly, I’d recommend it over the book.
Anton pulls a bobbled hat over his nearly bare scalp as we step again into the Lincoln Place air. In the space of three hours, the sun has set and Dublin is cold again. His t-shirt is now covered, perhaps satisfied. A puffy coat makes him look twice as big as usual. He tells me he’s fed up of being single. I say something he might have said to me, had I uttered his words, something like “bitches ain’t shit, man,” and I feel immediately uneasy. He laughs, and I feel somewhat pitied by him.
The Ginger Man, 40 Fenian Street, Dublin 2
—
A version of this review appeared in Issue 92 of Totally Dublin.
A Review Of The International Bar
I pray that there is no comedy on in the International tonight. Not only for the obvious and immediate misery of sitting in front of an open mic for an evening, but for Anton’s incorrigible tendency towards heckling, mainly focused on challenging performers’ sexuality and threatening violence. Being myself possessed of an inexplicable fear of accidentally heckling, saying something aloud or standing up at a comedy performance, his company could not be less desirable this evening. But I have a Faustian pact to uphold, and I may never leave his side. Duty pulls us inexorably towards Wicklow Street and the International Bar: a place, in fact, one finds oneself only through duty, misinformation or basic misfortune.
The International Bar, so called because of a strip of pendant-flags of various countries hanging from one side of the ceiling to the other, is a Dublin institution the appeal of which is hard to grasp. The ground floor bar is cramped and sticky of floor, full of Scotsmen visiting for the Six Nations (naturally, they are not a permanent fixture), with a television too small for purpose, in a room too small for public television-watching, poised perversely in the corner by the entrance to the toilets. Downstairs, some lad plays covers of popular songs on a guitar. The ceiling feels too low. Bar staff are brusque and busy. A pervasive sense of dread causes one to drink quicker: an unorthodox business strategy but effective nevertheless. It all feels as though it might descend from Dickie Rock to Nick Cave at any moment. The greater worry that Des Bishop might be upstairs keeps us pinned in the basement area, in which one’s sense of time and space collapse amidst American accents and the second verse of “All Along The Watchtower” repeated endlessly.
The Guinness is tart and grainy, but mark that no drink could taste nice in surroundings so disagreeable. A grim rendition of the quintessential Irishness (TM) of “The Black Stuff” finds a neat home in the black, beating heart of the Irish comedy circuit. It may be an unfair criticism to make of a public house, but if they didn’t serve drink here, it would be empty. A bottle of Michael Collins whiskey gazes out from behind the bar. Two Jamesons, please. They are served in what seem to be parfait glasses: narrow at the bottom, with a wider brim. Des Bishop is speaking Irish upstairs, probably.
How can one sum it all up? The International Bar is a waste of time: an overpriced, unwelcoming, overcrowded, city centre pub with unwarranted cultural significance. They might as well replace it with a giant rack of Tommy Tiernan DVDs and a couple of sheets of flypaper for the joy it provided me and my company on the eve of my visit. If you’re looking for somewhere to blow the money you would have been spending on the household charge, this most certainly isn’t it.
Anton heckles the fellow playing guitar downstairs as we leave, using the “You suck!” détournement of Kurt Angle’s theme tune while at WWE. The fresh air comes as such a shock, walking out onto the street, that one might as well have been drowning for all the time spent inside.
The International Bar, Wicklow Street, Dublin 2
—
An edited version of this review appeared in Issue 91 of Totally Dublin.
Misogyny and Sexual(ised) Violence in the Work of David Lynch
Who would be a David Lynch heroine? They inevitably suffer some sort of misadventure or violation, be it suicide (Mulholland Dr), sexual assault (Wild At Heart), domestic abuse (Blue Velvet), inflicted drug addiction, rape and murder (Twin Peaks; Fire Walk With Me) - and indeed, often his works, including those above, contain a mixture of some and all of these things. The great director has a singular “way of seeing” which transforms banal reality and Americana into something altogether more disturbing, dysmorphic and dream-like: just as he straddles cinematic conventions of reality and a surreal, transcendental filmmaking style, so too does he operate in the liminal space between commercialism and artistic credibility. His films often feature female lead characters, but do they privilege a female perspective? A close analysis suggests a rather troublesome relationship between Lynch and the female (or feminine), as evidenced by his portrayal of violence, particularly sexual violence, against women.
Twin Peaks, arguably the director’s most lasting contribution to contemporary culture and best work (indeed, the original TV series one might describe to one’s friends as “great television” telling them how much you think they’d like it), in which the investigation of the rape and murder of local high school student Laura Palmer (played by Sheryl Lee) by the FBI and local police leads to the uncovering of supernatural forces of evil, spirits and demons, is notable in this regard: throughout the series, we never experience anything through the victim, Laura’s eyes. Twin Peaks is a mystery pieced together through the memories of those who knew Laura Palmer, artifacts of her life, and the frequent invocation of the supernatural.
The feature film which followed the series, Fire Walk With Me, seems to address this issue of visibility and perspective, featuring as it does Laura in the central role. But it is in Fire Walk With Me that Lynch’s misogynistic attitudes towards the rape and sexual assault of women come to the fore in a more direct and disturbing way. In it, much is clarified about the rape and murder of Laura Palmer by her father Leland. Laura has been raped by Leland since she was 13 years old. Leland is “possessed” by BOB, an evil spirit who feeds on fear, when he commits these acts; Laura sees only BOB but, before the events that lead directly to her death in a train-car in the forest, realises that he and Leland are, and have been, one and the same.
The Leland/BOB dichotomy, which has existed in the audience’s mind as much as it has done in Laura’s, is brought into chaotic focus as a false construction. Leland’s actions are viewed not just as the unspeakable evil born of demonic possession, but as a disturbing sort of retribution, of a hellish paternal discipline. Leland notices Laura’s half-heart necklace at the dinner-table and is upset (worried, jealous, perhaps); that night, he rapes her. Laura has a sadomasochistic group-sex session with two men and another girl in a hut the forest, which Leland sees through the window; after the men leave, he rapes and murders her. If the description of these instances makes for disturbing reading, it is merely a repetition of the content of Lynch’s work. The rape, torture and murder of Laura Palmer ceases to be the result of demonic possession, of simple evil, and begins to take on a dual nature, incorporating or at least implying her responsibility for her tragic end. However, Lynch never peers beyond causal superficiality, lacking the nuanced approach required to morally investigate the evil he portrays. We are left, simply, with a mess of abdicated responsibility, victim-blaming and sexualised rape.
The gruesome rape scene in Fire Walk With Me has a lot in common with Lynch’s other works. In Blue Velvet, the scene in which Dorothy (Isabella Rossellini) appears to somewhat enjoy being beaten by Frank (Dennis Hopper); in Wild At Heart, the scene in which Bobby (Willem Dafoe) makes unwanted sexual advances on Lula (Laura Dern), threatening to rape her, until she begins to “want it” - and there are more. In immersing himself in the iconography of American cinema, and thus its ideology, Lynch’s metamorphoses are of a purely superficial nature, his surrealism concealing a fundamental conservatism.
David Lynch is/was a Reaganite, a co-signatory of the letter from Hollywood luminaries demanding the exoneration of Roman Polanski for drugging and raping a thirteen-year-old girl, and he recently ate a woman’s underwear live at an online Q&A.
——
This piece appeared originally in the April issue of Totally Dublin.
Mother’s Day
Would you still love me in a K-Hole, mam?
You held my hand without the urge to scold
or run your nails across my calves and told
me I was yours and it was there, though numb:
that rocking pram and dark of old; I am.
I felt it all though distant from that fold
inside your armpit when, at five years old,
I shared the breast with Aaron; now a man.
Mine is more than to lower my eyes or bite
my tongue, clench fists, while blows are dealt, or meant
and da’s voice reduces me to less than might
have stood his ground or shouted, swung and went.
And god I’ve wished that I could stand and fight
for you; no movement, love and youth misspent.
Speech by John Berger on accepting the Booker Prize for Fiction at the Café Royal in London on 23 November 1972
Since you have awarded me this prize, you may like to know, briefly, what it means to me.
The competitiveness of prizes I find distasteful. And in the case of this prize the publication of the shortlist, the deliberately publicised suspense, the speculation of the writers concerned as though they were horses, the whole emphasis on winners and losers is false and out of place in the context of literature.
Nevertheless prizes act as a stimulus - not to writers themselves but to publishers, readers and booksellers. And so the basic cultural value of a prize depends upon what it is a stimulus to. To the conformity of the market and the consensus of average opinion; or to imaginative independence on the part of both reader and writer. If a prize only stimulates conformity, it merely underwrites success as it is conventionally understood. It constitutes no more than any other chapter in a success story. If it stimulates imaginative independence, it encourages the will to seek alternatives. Or, to put it very simply, it encourages people to question.
The reason why the novel is so important is that the novel asks questions which no other literary form can ask: questions about the individual working on his own destiny; questions about the uses to which one can put a life - including one’s own. And it poses these questions in a very private way. The novelist’s voice functions like an inner voice.
Although it may seem somewhat inappropriate on my part, I would like to salute - and to thank - this year’s jury for their independence and seriousness in this respect. All four books on their shortlist demonstrate the kind of imaginative non-conformity I’m talking about. That they gave a prize to my book gave me pleasure - because it represented a response, a response from other writers.
G. took five years to write. Since then I have been planning the next five years of my life. I have begun a project about the migrant workers of Europe. I do not know what form the final book will take. Perhaps a novel. Perhaps a book that fits no category. What I do know is that I want some of the voices of the eleven million migrant workers in Europe and of the forty or so million that are their families, mostly left behind in towns and villages but dependent on the wages of the absent workers, to speak through and on the pages of this book. Poverty forces the migrants, year after year, to leave their own places and culture and come to do much of the dirtiest and worst-paid work in the industrialised areas of Europe, where they form the reserve army of labour. What is their view of the world? Of themselves? Of us? Of their own exploitation?
For this project it will be necessary to travel and stay in many places. I will need sometimes to take Turkish friends with me who speak Turkish, or Portuguese friends, or Greek. I want to work again with a photographer, Jean Mohr, with whom I made the book about the country doctor. Even if we live modestly as we ought to and travel in the cheapest way possible, the project of four years will cost about ten thousand pounds. I did not know exactly how we would find this money. I did not have any of it myself. Now the award of the Booker Prize would make it possible to begin.
Yet one does not have to be a novelist seeking very subtle connections to trace the five thousand pounds of this prize back to the economic activities from which they came. Booker McConnell have had extensive trading interests in the Caribbean for over 130 years. The modern poverty of the Caribbean is the direct result of this and similar exploitation. One of the consequences of this Caribbean poverty is that hundreds of thousands of West Indians have been forced to come to Britain as migrant workers. Thus my book about migrant workers would be financed from the profits made directly out of them or their relatives and ancestors.
More than that, however, is involved. The industrial revolution and the inventions and culture which accompanied it and which created modern Europe was initially financed by profits from the slave trade. And the fundamental nature of the relationship between Europe and the rest of the world, between black and white, has not changed. In G. the statue of the four chained Moors is the most important single image of the book. This is why I have to turn this prize against itself. And I propose to do so by sharing it in a particular way. The half I give away will change the half I keep.
First let me make the logic of my position really clear. It is not a question of guilt or bad conscience. It certainly is not a question of philanthropy. It is not even, first and foremost, a question of politics. It is a question of my continuing development as a writer: the issue is between me and the culture which has formed me.
Before the slave trade began, before the European de-humanised himself, before he clenched himself on his own violence, there must have been a moment when black and white approached each other with the amazement of potential equals. The moment passed. And henceforth the world was divided between potential slaves and potential slavemasters. And the European carried this mentality back into his own society. It became part of his way of seeing everything.
The novelist is concerned with the interaction between individual and historical destiny. The historical destiny of our time is becoming clear. The oppressed are breaking through the wall of silence which was built into their minds by their oppressors. And in their struggle against exploitation and neo-colonialism - but only through and by virtue of the common struggle - it is possible for the descendants of the slave and the slavemaster to approach each other again with the amazed hope of potential equals.
This is why I intend to share the prize with those West Indians in and from the Caribbean who are fighting to put an end to their exploitation. The London-based Black Panther movement has arisen out of the bones of what Bookers and other companies have created in the Caribbean; I want to share this prize with the Black Panther movement because they resist both as black people and workers the further exploitation of the oppressed. And because, through their Black People’s Information Centre, they have links with the struggle in Guyana, the seat of Booker McConnell’s wealth, in Trinidad and throughout the Caribbean: the struggle whose aim is to expropriate all such enterprises.
You know as well as I do that the amount of money involved - as soon as one stops thinking of it as a literary prize - is extremely small. I badly need more money for my project about the migrant workers of Europe. The Black Panther movement badly needs money for their newspaper and for other activities. But the sharing of the prize signifies that our aims are the same. And by that recognition a great deal is clarified. And in the end - as well as in the beginning - clarity is more important than money.
John Berger currently lives in Haute-Savoie in the French Alps. Linked is the most recent interview with him I could find.
Racism, Football and Morality
This post, in a slightly different form, was published on my previous blog on the 20th of November 2011. I have added postscripts with additional information about the incidents which has emerged since the post was written.
Incidents involving Chelsea’s John Terry and Liverpool’s Luis Suarez have caused a stir in English football recently, with the two allegedly (and respectively) referring to QPR’s Anton Ferdinand as a “fucking black cunt” (or similar) and Manchester United’s Patrice Evra as “negro” or “negrito” (or perhaps something else), depending on which source you read. As football fans, we ought to find this particularly disturbing, for obvious reasons. Media coverage of the incidents has been relatively minimal (perhaps more so with regard to the Suarez-Evra case) both in order to facilitate the Football Association’s investigation (and that of the Metropolitan Police re: Terry-Ferdinand) and as a result of the “established media“‘s general hesitancy to discuss racial issues in less than abstract terms. This tendency towards abstraction here extends to Harry Redknapp’s willingness to criticise Sepp Blatter (the pantomimic head of FIFA) for his own abstract (and typically diverting and ignorant) comments regarding “these kinds of” incidents (and let us note that Redknapp has certainly not been alone in his condemnation of the King of FootballCo.) but a marked absence of indignation directed at those who ought to be central to the debate, namely Terry and Suarez*.
Fig 1.1 - @Magnetic_Man’s iPhone enters the fray
Regarding how the Football Association deals with these matters: thorough investigations are required and, for those found guilty, appropriate sanctions must be handed down. In the absence of proven guilt, the Association may not act. Its internal machinations, and their (abstract?) goal of Justice are not to be directly considered here; the legal issue is separate to our concerns. For football as a sport, a culture, an industry: a thing in general, these incidents raise an important topic for consideration: To what extent does morality have anything to do with football? and how ought it to manifest itself within the game’s existing structures? Any comment on “what these incidents mean” would be speculative, given the lack of information available about the incidents and their respective contexts, though as with so many other social issues, punitive action taken by “the state” (here represented by domestic football’s governing body) on offenders (should they be found guilty) can be seen as a bandage of sorts placed over an open wound. If “things” have progressed to the point where Terry deemed it acceptable to refer to Ferdinand as a “black cunt” then surely the damage has already been done: his deviancy merely speaks of a wider one in society in which white trumps black and race is a go-to pretext for insult and provocation. If British society tolerates this and so does Football, then significant and far-reaching action must be taken beyond the specific and murky area of the England captain’s behaviour.
Fig 1.2 - The moment it all began?
Furthermore, if Suarez referred to Evra as “negro” or “negrito”, as is being alleged (see links provided earlier), then how are we to react? With a broadly researched and qualified justification, such as Rob Gutmann’s? Is it acceptable to use “cultural differences” as an explanation for the expression of cultural prejudice? If so we, must ask ourselves: whence does cultural prejudice come? Interestingly, in relation to the use of what seem to be racial epithets to the Western reader, I have a Uruguayan friend who was happy to discuss “on the record”, as it were, the significance of the words Suarez allegedly used. “Negro”, he says, is an extremely common thing to refer to one’s friends as, regardless of and without respect to race. It is used just as “man”, “bro”, etc. are in social situations in Western society. He stressed that there is no “racial significance” to its use, and that it merely suggests familiarity with the person at whom it is directed. “Negrito” (or “little black man”), however, is something which he said he would never refer to a black person as; it is the diminutive of “negro” but carries with it a condescension and distinct racial element which would be particularly inflammatory. It would be “dangerous” to refer to a black person as such, and obtuse to use it with a white person. At the same time, he said that he would certainly never refer to anybody as “negro” or “negrito” over here (Ireland - not a million miles from England), following up with a wry “obviously … ” Bearing this context in mind, we can hypothetically explain Suarez’ choice of word(s), but does it offer anything in terms of justification? In a situation such as this, do we defer to the interpretation of the (alleged) abuser or allow for the victim to assert his own self-determination? Should the idiomatic fogginess of Uruguayan social discourse hold primacy over Evra’s right to respect and equal treatment? In basic terms: who writes the rules, as it were, of inter-racial discourse?
Fig 1.3 - Roberto Carlos is offered a banana, playing at Zenit St. Petersburg
Racism exists in football as it does in wider society, and Britain’s comfortable “multicultural” editorial position, nestled in the notion that “other countries [read: Italy, Spain, Russia, Poland, etc.] are worse off” with regards to racial prejudice, is now under threat by the apparent reality that overt racial abuse exists between fellow professionals as it does between fans and, occasionally, pundits. Punitive action must surely be taken as a matter of course, but how is “Football” and “Wider Society” to create a situation in which the tensions and prejudices and ignorance that give rise to racial abuse no longer exist? Football must treat the symptoms of this sickness, but it must be viewed in the clearest and harshest manner possible by the general public and especially fans, when a popular reaction by Chelsea and Liverpool** fans has been to side with their clubs’ football-playing employees in spite of allegations, often not denying the charges, but embracing them! Sport’s phenomenal ability to polarise and divide is unquestionable, but in the context of racial hatred, club allegiances must come second to the provision of justice.
POSTSCRIPT:
The Crown Court’s investigation of John Terry for the alleged racial abuse of Anton Ferdinand is ongoing.
Luis Suarez was handed an eight match ban and fine of £40,000 when an independent investigation found him guilty of racially abusing Patrice Evra. The term used was “negro”, the panel finding that he used the word seven times. Suarez and Liverpool FC have yet to make an apology. Two instances of racial abuse at Liverpool matches have been investigated by the police since the club’s refusal to acknowledge Suarez’ guilt. Anti-racism charities have called for the club’s conduct, and that of their manager, Kenny Dalglish, to be officially investigated by the FA.
*Though incidents involving Terry and Suarez are distinctly separate, along with their culpability (or lack thereof) in each, one may view them as morally similar (or “inseparable”) for our purposes in this piece.
**Note Lawrenson alleges that Suarez used the word “negrita”, the feminine version of “negrito”, the significance of which is explained first-hand earlier in this post. Without wanting to directly accuse anyone of deliberate and wilful misinformation, to suggest that the word is “harmless” and “accepted” is deliberate and wilful misinformation. POSTSCRIPT: Mark Lawrenson (along with Alan Hansen and a host of ex-Liverpool players-turned-pundits) alleged, wholly incorrectly, the term used by Suarez to describe Evra, and proceeded to moralise on it, despite an FA request for the issue not to be discussed while investigations were ongoing.
POSTSCRIPT: Gus Poyet has stuck his oar in. Make of it what you will.
