Tox Report 49. Boo away the violence
Some thoughts on protest and hate at Eurovision
Hello, and bienvenue, welcome — especially to those of you arriving for the first time from
’s guest edit of Substack Reads! And also please don’t get too close, because I’ve got that whooping cough everyone’s talking about and it’s horrible. I have a pretty strong sickroom game developed when I had glandular fever as a teenager, based on staying in bed listening to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (full cast productions, primary and secondary phases only), and sleeping until it’s time to take more paracetamol. But this time my convalescence was disturbed by a prior commitment to cover Eurovision for the Sunday Times and talk about it on Times Radio the next day, so I very bravely relocated to the sofa for Saturday night.Because I’m ill, there probably won’t be any weightlifting content for a couple of weeks, so apologies if you were hoping for more in the line of the 20-squat programme post that Helen featured. But to tide you over, you can read me in UnHerd on the brilliant lesbian gym horror revenge movie Love Lies Bleeding. I also reviewed the new book by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, who is probably one of the writers to have influenced me most: Father Time, about the surprising adaptation of male humans to care, has some astonishing insights into just how novel our standards of fatherhood are. Usually when I’m writing about men and family, I’m writing about deficiency (sorry men), but there should be space to acknowledge the extraordinary plasticity we have as a species. As Hrdy says, we don’t know how many men are now acting as primary carers for children, but whatever the number is, it’s unprecedented.
Listened
All the Eurovision 2024 songs
It wasn’t only the whooping cough that gave me a feeling of dread when I got out of bed at 7pm on Saturday to ready myself for the show. It had been a spectacularly unpleasant buildup to the contest, mostly focused on Israel’s inclusion. The protests outside were one thing, but the sniping at Eden Golan from fellow contestants upset me quite a lot.
The Netherlands’ Joost Klein heckled her at a press conference, before being disqualified for allegedly threatening a crew member in an unrelated incident; Greece’s Marina Sati seemed to pretend to fall asleep while Golan was answering a question (but denied she’d intended to offend Golan); and Ireland’s Bambie Thug was told to remove pro-Palestinian slogans, and appeared to be in rolling hostilities with the Israeli camp. There was a dignified, effective way to register opposition to Israel’s military campaign within the bounds of the contest (just talk about peace a lot, everyone loves peace), without personalising it to Golan. This wasn’t it.
I think there’s a strong case for Israel to have been formally sanctioned by the UN for its actions in Gaza. But since it hasn’t been, I don’t understand how the EBU (the European Broadcasting Union, which organises Eurovision) is supposed to ban a country that doesn’t seem to be in breach of the rules. And making one 20-year-old woman the target of a BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions) campaign looked deeply ugly. (For reference: Bambie Thug, who cried about Israel qualifying for the final, is 11 years older than Golan. This just feels gross to me.) Even more distressingly, the song everyone was mad that Golan was singing — “Hurricane” — is a response to the 7 October massacre.
Well, it isn’t, because the lyric was rewritten to be less political per the contest’s rules. But it is: “Baby, promise me you’ll hold me again/ I’m still broken from this hurricane.” Come on. Even if it doesn’t directly reference the Hamas violence, it’s clearly written out of that grief (it’s also an exceptionally good song, more so in the live performance than in the recording, which is over-processed in a way that Golan’s voice doesn’t need). It’s as though there was an extra layer of resentment, not despite Golan articulating her national tragedy, but because she was articulating this national tragedy; the old instinct that a Jew’s claim to sympathy must be manipulation.
Watched
Eurovision 2024 (iPlayer)
So by the time I was ordering my Wagas and setting up to work, I was starting to worry that the quite nice assignment I had taken on might end up with me having to quick-turnaround a response to (worst case) a terror attack live on air, or (less catastrophically) the dissolution of the Eurovision as I watched. That, obviously, did not happen. In fact everything went off extremely smoothly. Yes, there were a couple of no-shows for the flag parade. Yes, there was booing. But the show went on.
Only after the contest was over did Bambie Thug come out and say “fuck the EBU”. Which struck me as very funny. Bambie could have disrupted the show by pulling out at the last moment, or by going off-script and chanting “freedom for Palestine!” from the stage. Instead, Bambie complied with the EBU at every step, and wanted to be seen as a brave political fighter having enjoyed the platform of Eurovision for all it was worth. (I’ve looked at the contents of Bambie’s complaint that Israel’s national broadcaster incited “hate” and see very little merit to it: the broadcaster said the performance was “scary” and “satanic”, and if I didn’t want to be described as “scary” and “satantic”, I probably wouldn’t dance in a pentagram while wearing devil horns. On TV.)
I imagine this will all play perfectly well for Bambie in a future on the #queersforpalestine circuit. Activism as branding, with no danger of actually sacrificing anything. (For the avoidance of doubt: the point of a protest is to sacrifice something for your cause, in recognition of the cause’s value to you. If you don’t think Israel should be in the contest, you leave the contest and do your performance for the protesters. Yes, you would miss out on being in Eurovision. That would be where you derived your moral authority.)
But the Bambie Thug position is not an intellectually impressive one all round. Hamas, as has been widely noted, is not particularly friendly to “queers” (and probably not keen on nonbinary witches specifically). It’s possible to criticise Israel without adopting an all-in pro-Palestine stance. To do the latter from a pro-LGBT position demands Judith Butlerite magical thinking, which claims an alignment between all oppression: none shall be free till all are free, therefore the “anticolonialist” in Gaza must be a friend to the destroyer of heteropatriarchy on the streets of Malmö. This is self-evidently very silly, but emotionally gratifying if you are anxious to believe in the geopolitical importance of your wicca drag act.1
Read
Ian Leslie, “Zadie Smith and the ‘both sides’ problem” (The Ruffian)
The good version of ‘both sides’ entails (a) Making the effort to understand the arguments and sentiments of the other side (that is, other than the one to which you’re instinctively drawn) (b) Understanding the other side’s perspective so well that you actually make it harder for yourself to take a clear view. (c) Having done so, taking a clear view, and therefore risking counter-arguments, fair and unfair. Centrists tend to do a little of (a) and (b) but sometimes duck (c) in the name of nuance. Leftists tend to skip straight to (c) while denouncing opposing views as evil. Doing all three is really hard.
I realise that I have not done a very good job of fulfilling Ian’s criterion (a) in the above section, so let me try again. Israel’s actions in Gaza have been the cause of terrible, avoidable loss of life — and have been prosecuted without much obvious effort to attenuate that loss of life. It takes more benefit of the doubt than I’m capable of at this point to see this as anything other than an attempted permanent expansion of Israel’s borders and an end to any prospect of a Palestinian state coexisting with the Israeli one. In many contexts it’s probably fair to say Israel is singled out for stigma, but it’s not like any of the other big international law infracters are in Eurovision, so that doesn’t apply here.
This can all be true at the same time that it is true Israel is justified in retaliating against Hamas and pursuing the recovery of the hostages. A war can be both justified and badly conducted. They are separate moral judgements. (And I suppose here I have offered what Ian calls my own “clear view”, and opened myself to counterarguments both fair and unfair.) A strong opposition to Israel’s actions in Gaza would, I think, begin by accepting the facts of Israel’s initial injury and Hamas’s moral monstrosity. You cannot boo away the violence of 7 October, however politically inconvenient it may be.
I’ve turned off comments, but if you would like to reply, use the message button below — I might include some of the responses next week.
Gimme, gimme more…
Amanda Knox was convicted of a crime she didn’t commit. When she encountered Jens Söring’s case, she assumed they were the same. And then she started to have doubts.
Not linking to the whole Piers Morgan mess, but the Baby Reindeer situation has very much escalated with no clear sign of ever stopping.
I thought I was on top of the Drake-Kendrick beef until a friend casually dropped the phrase “BBL Drizzy” into a chat.
Of all the looks at an underwhelming Met Gala, Lana’s was the one I wanted to love, but no. Compared to the 2007 original of this McQueen look (right), she has all the elegance of a shrub hastily wrapped in fleece for the winter.
I would usually have been quite into the whole Wicca drag act thing, and it was a pretty great performance. Bambie’s song was the weak part of the package for me — two ideas crammed together that never actually gelled. Nemo’s winner was a much better example of that high-contrast collage thing.