Note to Self: Kick my Conscience

Blur, 1993, Modern Life is Rubbish
Now: Listen to the single nag nag nag from Cabaret Voltaire (1979). Sure, it's on YouTube.

I'm shocked. Again. Radio 1 in Flanders might sponsor the culture of nagging with taxpayers money... Can you believe that? Last monday I wrote about complaining as a national sport, the next day I read about the plan of Pat Donnez. The excellent radiopresenter and -producer is planning a tryout for a new show. He wants to put Grumpy Old Men on the radio. He calls it Gromberen (growling bears). A show for the discontent in Flanders, so that's for almost everybody. He wants to create a forum and an opportunity for the dissatisfied to throw it all on the airwaves.

Than there's Steve Michiels, a painter and a cartoonist. He says he started publishing his cartoons when he was sixteen. At least once a week he wants to tell us what he thinks about this world going to pieces. Very loud and over-simplified: there is no way out, we are on this boat together and we are sinking. Michiels calls it a case of mental hygiene, putting the garbage outside. Now, other peoples' garbage makes me sick. So, stop that. When the cat crawls your garbagebag to pieces, I do'nt care and I don't want to know. Take care of it yourself. Clean it up and shut up.

I see no problem when Pat & Steve keep knocking on my door to bother me about hunger in Africa, people dying in the streets of Brussels because of deprivation or the hole in the ozon layer. That's about kicking me a conscience and in the end I've got one. It is the popular theory of the famous writer Louis Paul Boon. But nobody can convince me that the world should know or understand his big problem with (a) the cashier in the supermarket with the fake nails, (b) the world famous chef who puts his name on instant meals, (c) the total collapse of civilisation or (d) the lack of parkingspace in your street.
Get a life and have the guts to show the world that you are happy and a very lucky bastard. If you have AIDS, your wife has got cancer or your 3 year old dissapeared when on holiday in the Algarve: point taken. In that case I was not talking about you. Of course I was not.

PS When nuissance becomes government...
Delcambre, Louisiana, US. It's forbidden to wear baggy trousers showing your underpants. If you do you risk a maximum of 6 months in prison and a penalty of 500 $.
Will my country, with a little help of our national naggers, be the first to tackle this problem:
(1) whale-tail and
(2) celebrity whale-tail?