“Never write about race,” my English teacher said, “whatever you say you will be called racist.” Look, look at my bank balance. Look, look at my humanism. I am a good person: you cannot touch me, I never said it. I insinuated it, but I deny that. It will never stand up in court. You will hear from my lawyers…This was the life he was trying to save me from. Never write about it, and, perhaps, never write about women and homosexuals and Jews. Is that all? Yes, mostly. The Catholic Church? Well…if you are from Europe, there is no fun to be had with the Christians. If you want to attack the Christians, go to America; they have a bit of fire out there, or they did, a decade ago, but I hear some atheist preachers rolled through and now all the kids have converted to the state religion and cut their dicks off. You want a really fearsome Baptist? A man with a gun and God and gold and no time for niggers and faggots? May I recommend Hollywood? They are always casting for this role. The Baptist monsters offer iced tea with too much sugar and attach sentimental messages to refrigerator doors. “The family that prays together stays together.”—big, if true.
The French boomers, they pay for their impiety. You want to mock the Prophet? Fine, we will slice the heads off your priests. They know, the advanced cadre, the sword of Islam, about the real churches: the rock concert and the bar. Bataclan was an attack on Dionysus. The French, when it comes to satire and cartoons, are pungent. There are French writers, like this crew at Charlie Hebdo, or that character Céline, who are pungent like ripe French cheese. Have you ever had a good French cheese in the fridge? I opened the door once when a Frenchman bought me a cheese as a gift and I had to stand back. This is what these French satirists are like: they give you a good whiff of the Prophet, complete with a cheesy cock. And they pay. Dirty French, but unlike the polite Anglo-Saxons those French know it will be “off with their heads”. What is it about this country and decapitation? First they invent the guillotine, now they bring in Algerians and Moroccans whose mode of attack is purely artisanal. This is some kind of decadence: the French mastered the science of decapitation centuries ago, and now they settle for some Arab sawing off their head with a kitchen knife they bought from Carrefour (I use the name so you know I am a sophisticate, I went to France. It was okay, I lost my virginity there by a dirty shower stall).
So, you get the picture, the Muslims have killed a few priests but nobody is concerned. We haven’t worshipped there in years. It is all the same, the Christians. Can we have some nuance?— concerned columnist writes, justifying an MA in Global Culture and Society. “Did you know there are many different sects of Islam?”. The Islamist sits in a Brussels suburb and dips his frites in mayonnaise. The rap music plays. The poster of a turquoise Caribbean beach, torn at the corner, curls in the damp Belgium November. “Did you know there are many different sects of Christianity?” he mumbles, turning up the rap and resting his joint. Christian. It is the same: whores in short skirts or the old queers in dresses. The tween concert queen with a skirt so short a thousand men subject the hemline to computer-enhanced inspection, in search of pubic hair—or the old lover of choirboys. For us, it is all Christian: it all ends in a permanent genuflection, blood on the floor.
Okay, I told you about the dirty French, but you have to look at Hergé and Moebius, then you will know about the divine French; the French who really know God. They are our modern mystics, you know.