The Horror. The Horror.

Dressing up for a dressing down. The problem with ‘cultural appropriation’

Back in my day, our capital’s most bone chilling tourist attraction was The London Dungeons.

A dank and musty former wine cellar beneath Tooley St, just at the southern end of Tower Bridge, which had been transformed into a terrifying subterranean theme park.

Featuring a blood drenched range of macabre exhibits, life-like, gory, waxworks, depicting human sacrifice, dismemberment, crucifixion, burnings, and torture.

If other, more snooty tourist attractions like The Tower of London, and The British Museum, were all BBC, Blue Peter, and Radio 4, then the London Dungeons was ITV, Tiswas, and Viz.

This house of historical horrors was gruesome, grisly, and utterly gratuitous. And the British public, especially its blood-and-guts craving younger members, absolutely loved it.

I still remember the abject terror on the face of one creepily true-to-life mannequin, as I watched it being slowly hung, drawn, and quartered.

It was a look of utter horror, revulsion, and disgust which I would not see again on a human face until thirty five years later, when the BBC’s David Dimbleby was forced to read out the results of the Britain’s Brexit Referendum.

These days our nation’s most heart stopping, bone shivering, blood curdling, tourist exhibits are no longer to be found languishing mustily beneath South London streets.

Instead they adorn the walls of the revered National Portrait Gallery, in Trafalgar Square.

Which has just slapped trigger warnings on artworks depicting national hero, T.E. Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia.

With staff instructed to keep a charged-up defibrillator on standby, just in case these harrowing images cause an aneurism among the gallery’s more jittery, anxious visitors.

Not you understand, because the artworks show Lawrence engaged in acts of violence, bloodletting, cruelty, torture, or oppression.

But because he is depicted, flagrantly wearing, the wrong type of hat.

The pinch faced pearl clutchers who police the gallery have

‘flagged as “sensitive” artworks depicting the First World War hero in tribal dress [which] may clash with “today’s attitudes”

But who exactly do they imagine will be offended by these images?

I doubt any Bedouin tribesmen, up The Smoke for a cheeky citybreak, would be shocked or disgusted at the sight of Lawrence dressed in their traditional garb.

After all, they gifted him the outfit in the first place.

And if hordes of visitors from the Middle East do turn up at the National Gallery and find their noses put out of joint.

Then not to worry. We can simply do what we always do in similar situations.

And buy them off with a free house.

Lawrence of Arabia. Wearing the wrong kind of hat.

But let’s be honest, despite the National Gallery’s po-faced insistence, these aren’t really ‘today’s attitudes’ at all.

They are simply the niche prejudices, mad obsessions, and unwavering shibboleths of an ideologically driven, pathologically censorious, imperious, and high-handed, cadre of bullies, busy bodies, and petty tyrants.

A class of mendacious meddlers which has taken over every single one of our museums, art galleries, and cultural institutions, and turned them each into joyless, theme parks of self flagellation, mirthless instruction, and anti-British loathing.

And besides, what’s the big issue with white people wearing Arab costume?

As far as I can see, ‘tribal dress’, in the form of the keffiyeh, is basically mandatory for any white student attending a modern British university.

And if Arab dress is considered an appropriate form of attire for pink haired undergraduates at Bristol University, studying ‘studying’ post colonial power structures and oppression through the queering lens of body piercing and interpretive Jew hatred, then surely it’s good enough for an actual Arabic warrior, like T.E. Lawrence.

And I also doubt very much whether most normal people give a monkey’s about what sort of headscarf Lawrence of Arabia wore.

Mainly I suspect, because hardly anyone under fifty five has ever heard of him.

For the last few decades our schools have been far too busy instructing our kids that the seas are on fire, that money grows on trees, and that gay children must suffer genital mutilation for their own wellbeing, to waste any time teaching about our revered national heroes some old dead, racist, white guy.

But was Lawrence really a racist?

Trick question.

He’s old, dead, and white. So yes. Of course he was.

The modern charge against Lawrence is that he was a ‘colonialist’.

But that doesn’t seem to be a completely fair assessment.

From what I can tell, T.E. Lawrence spent much of the First World War risking his life fighting alongside the Arabs in their quest to free themselves from their actual colonialist overlords, the Ottoman Empire, and secure for themselves, a sovereign state.

Of course things didn’t go quite as planned, and at the end of the war, Britain (Hurrah!) and France (La Boo!) betrayed both Lawrence, and the Arabs, carving up the Middle East amongst themselves.

And we all know how brilliantly that turned out.

Still, you’d think the left would be right behind a high ranking member of the British establishment putting the rights of angry, tooled up Muslims before the interests of his own country.

I mean, they didn’t seem too bothered when West Midlands Police, Chief Craig Guildford was recently caught, doing exactly that.

And don’t get me started on King Charles.

Some might counter that if Lawrence wasn’t an out and out colonialist, he was something almost equally as bad, a ‘white saviour’.

Who was perpetrating the false conceit that other cultures need rescuing from themselves by the beneficence of white westerners.

I have much sympathy for this position.

Which is why I’d like modern Britain to stop behaving like we’re a global saviour, providing welfare, benefits, health care, and slush funds, to the entire planet.

Perhaps it’s even time for Britain to call for reparations, and demand back, all those hundreds of billions of pounds in aid money, we’ve spent the last thirty years, showering on foreign despots, international ‘charities’, unaccountable NGOs, and Hamas The UNWRA.

With absolutely no discernible benefit either to the British people paying for it all, or the genuinely poor foreigners, who are supposedly the beneficiaries of our seemingly limitless largesse, but who unaccountably, never seem to get any better off.

Besides, undeveloped, backward, Third World, countries don’t need our help. They are clearly able to stand on their own two feet.

The evidence is right there in front of our eyes.

Just look at the stunning success the locals have made of Wales, and Scotland, since the English left them in charge.

Topping the charts in everything from child illiteracy to shortest life expectancy.

These plucky nations are really showing us who’s boss.

Though unfortunately for the decent, proud, people who live there, that boss is the SNP, and Welsh Labour.

Director David Lean made his Oscar winning epic, Lawrence of Arabia way back in 1962.

No one would be making a movie like that today.

For two main reasons.

Firstly. Because the self hating sensibilities of modern Britain, would no doubt dictate that the story must be reimagined.

And retold from the point of view of Lawrence’s wise cracking, but oppressed, non-binary camel.

And secondly. Because nowadays no high status member of the current British establishment is actually achieving anything worthy of celebrating on the big screen.

I can’t imagine anyone making a three hour blockbuster immortalising Gary Neville tearing down some England flags, Liz Kendall banning Grok. Or Sir Keir Starmer beating off some Ukrainian arsonists.

Though if it did, I expect Netflix would cast Cynthia Erivo as the lead in all of them.

And it’s not just T.E. Lawrence who has earned himself a trigger warning for having the audacity to pop on some inappropriate head gear.

Lord Byron has received a similar dressing down, for dressing up, like an Albanian.

Whilst in Albania.

As did a portrait of Italian Giovanni Belzoni, (nope), a sculpture of Edward William Lane, (again, I’m drawing a blank), plus

An 1850 portrait of British officer Sir Herbert Benjamin Edwardes [also, a bit sketchy when it comes to Sir Herbie TBH] dressed as an Indian nobleman was also given a warning.

Byron: Fabulous hats, wonderful poetry, run of the mill burgers.

Of course all of these dead white men’s most heinous crimes, at least the ones associated with their manner of dress, are covered by the modern sin of ‘cultural appropriation.’

Which lambasts anyone who dares dress up for fun in nice clothes from round the world for a party steal the cultural artefacts, dress, or customs of oppressed cultures, and pass them off as their own.

Fine.

But if it’s inappropriate for British people to wear Middle Eastern dress then someone should tell the hordes of men forever streaming out of the Islamic Centre at the end of my road, wearing exactly that.

How come these grossly insensitive cultural appropriators get a pass?

Which is all I can assume they are doing, since I am being constantly harangued, browbeaten, and lectured, that they are ‘as British as you or I’.

Maybe someone should stop telling me, and start telling them.

Let’s be honest. The glass eyed mantra that ‘diversity is our strength’ is an explicitly anti British sentiment.

Because logically, if diversity is our strength, then the more of it you have, the stronger you get.

And so conversely, the more diluted, watered down, and diverse, British culture gets, then supposedly, the more potent, coherent, and successful it will become.

The logical conclusion is that at some stage our nation will become so diverse, that there will be no ‘Britishness’ left at all.

And at that point, Britain will become the strongest it has ever been.

This process seems akin to some form of cultural homeopathy.

And just like regular homeopathy, it’s utter nonsense.

(Please don’t bother telling me how amazing homeopathy is in the comments. Unless you are a cash customer, wanting to put down a deposit, on my new line of magic beans.)

Look. Despite my cynicism, we do of course need to be sensitive to this issue.

We must acknowledge that simply donning another group’s clothes, and outward appearance, does not in any way bestow upon you membership of that group.

Unless of course you are a man dressing up as woman.

In which case, yes, dressing up as an exaggerated, and to many actual women, (and men), deeply offensive, female caricature, does indeed magically, automatically and instantly transform you from a wonky faced pervert, and self deluding nonce, into an actual woman.

Here’s a question.

Why is it only clothes, (or at a stretch, food), that we are accused of stealing from other cultures?

And never their inventions, innovations, or perhaps superior systems of governance?

Well maybe, possibly, perhaps, it’s because for the most part, they haven’t created anything worth nicking. At least not recently.

I mean, thanks for coming up with the whole numbers thing, and that.

But you can’t just keep coasting along on that I’m afraid.

I guess this might be why ‘cultural appropriation’ has become such an exclusively one way street.

It’s fine to condemn white people for wearing Native American dress. But not Native Americans for wearing wristwatches.

It’s OK to decry drunk white students for jauntily popping on a sombrero, but not Mexican shopkeepers for having the audacity to own computers.

It’s fair enough to pillory as insensitive and ignorant, British folk for calling Eskimos ‘Eskimos’, like I’m insensitively and ignorantly doing right now.

But no one is condemning Eskimos for their culturally insensitive use of electricity.

I mean, steady on Arnaaluk, old chap(ped lips) how dare you nick our light bulbs?

If you want to illuminate your igloo, please be respectful of my cultural boundaries, and go slaughter some whales or something, you haughty imperialist.

Sure. My argument is ridiculous, narrow minded, silly, and idiotic. Of course it is.

But in reality it’s no more ridiculous, narrow minded, silly, or idiotic, than condemning Jamie Oliver for the ‘cultural appropriation’ of selling ‘jerk rice.’

In the end ‘cultural appropriation’ is literally a nonsense. An absurdity. Just another stick to beat and bully the compliant, indulgent, and forbearing, white majority.

To make nice people feel guilty, to persuade the tolerant they are bigots, and to make considerate people live in fear.

Making them always worry that they might be just one Halloween costume. One poorly chosen word. One dreadlocked haircut (Actually, I’m with them on the whole ‘white people with dreadlocks’ thing) One karaoke tune. One ranty Substack article, away from being condemned as a racist, a ‘colonialist’, a ‘hater’, and ‘far-right’.

One silly hat away, from being literally Hitler.

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LSO