We add our voice to the gathering campaign (it will begin gathering soon) to make Eminem Journalist of the Year.

Virtually without exception, everybody with a megaphone in the US media has ducked the duty to present a counter-cultural discourse through the fraught days since September last year. Almost on his own, young Master Mathers sashayed jerkily into the breech:

“This looks like a job for me/So everybody just follow me/’Cause we need a little controversy.”

The great Al Giordano of Narconews.com wrote upon the release of The Eminem Story: “With this work, Marshall Mathers has rekindled the Romeo and Juliet love affair between white American youth and black America.” The Elvis of our epoch, then.

“Yeah the man’s back/With a plan to ambush this Bush administration/Mush the Senate’s face in and push this generation/Of kids to stand and fight for the right to say something you might not like…”

If it is the job of the journalist to chronicle history as it happens, to describe important events in a way that makes them meaningful to masses of people, to uncover hidden truth and extend free speech to the muffled and marginalised, then let’s snuggle up with narco.news and see Eminem as the champion Pulitzer prize-fighter of the age. Take this from his recent big by-lined yarn aimed at short-circuiting Dick Cheney’s pace-maker (the FCC is the Federal Communications Committee, headed by Colin “My Lai” Powell’s son, Michael, currently engaged in hollowing the integrity out from all means of exchanging ideas, so that the bland might better lead the blind to hell or Baghdad):

“I know that you got a job Ms. Cheney/But your husband’s heart problem’s complicating/So the FCC won’t let me be/or let me be me, so let me see/They try to shut me down on MTV/But it feels so empty, without me/So, come on and dip, rum on your lips/Fuck that, cum on your lips, and some on your tits/And get ready, cause this shit’s about to get heavy/I just settled all my lawsuits, FUCK YOU DEBBIE!”

Debbie being, of course, the mum who sued her son for saying in a song that “my mom smokes more pot than I do,” which some of us would have thought wasn’t a federal offence to lay on a parent, so she was fobbed off with $25,000 which from a man who makes a million every time he rises out of bed with a rhyme was a deliberately derisible sum.

Lynn Cheney came out with a statement demanding that Eminem withdraw, then reversed to maintain that what he said didn’t matter anyhow on account of he was so sexist and homophobic. Imagine. The moll of the made man who’s number two in the Bush mob damns a journo-rapper as a sexist homophobe.

Doubts about Eminem’s journalistic authenticity should have been dispelled by the prick Moby presaging Cheney with a complaint some time past that the troubador of trailer trash was “a misogynist, a homophobe, a racist and an anti-semite.”

I’m told that experts are still working on that “anti-semite” reference but what I reckon is that words like “misogynist”, “homophobe” and “racist” seep down unthought from
the middle-class minds of the downwardly mobile to ooze out in rivulets along their pancaked chins to be collected like unction from a Blessed Virgin statuette, as meaningless as the words in what passes for music in the crass little plagiarist’s own oeuvre.

When’s the last time the Moby Ahab stood in line against sexism, racism, homophobia, any evil whatsoever?

Eminem still has issues to confront, as we experts say, and not even the most dazzlingly delightful of verbal felicities excuses the faux-ironic offensiveness of much that’s gone before. But in The Eminem Story he has told a true tale that the cowards, the whores and the war-mongers didn’t want heard outside the ghettoes of minds where it can be safely coralled.

“All I hear is lyrics constant controversy/Sponsors workin’ round the clock to try to stop my concerts early/Surely hip hop was never a problem in Harlem, only in Boston/After it bothered the fathers of daughters startin’ to blossom/Now I’m catchin’ the flack from these activists when they raggin’/Actin’ like I’m the first rapper to smack a bitch and say faggot/Shit, just look at me like I’m your closest pal/A poster child/The muthafuckin’ spokesman now, for… White America!/I could be one of your kids/White America!/Little Eric looks just like this/White America!/Erica loves my shit.”

Giordano makes the point that Lennie Bruce could shock by telling Kennedy to “appoint niggers” to high places so that no kid called “nigger” in the schoolyard need feel put down. Days of innocence! Now the bar is set so high you have to strain fit to bust to have a shot at putting your point over.

Eminem gets it better than any other hack hard at work. A fervent NUJ card is surely on its way.

Enough to make you weep

Patty Powell says “I’m no saint”, but Sister Joan, Chau Nguyen and the Blessed Virgin Mary might all disagree.

The BVM is currently in residence at Patty’s home in Perth, Western Australia. Patty is a friend of Perth-born nun Sister Joan Evans, now working with the poor in Bangkok. Chau is Tien Huynh Thi’s oldest lad.

The fibreglass statue of the BVM had been sitting atop a shelf in the hallway of Patty’s bungalow “for years”. Patty says she would occasionally have “nodded” to it in passing, but that it wasn’t until Sr. Joan explained the significance of its tears that she paid real attention.

“I saw a glistening on the cheeks and at first assumed it was condensation,” explains the 42-year-old “ordinary Catholic”. “Then I rubbed my forefinger on the surface and found that it was oily. You wouldn’t expect tears to be oily. I assumed it was something to do with the paint.”

It was Sister Joan on a visit home last summer who realised that the oilyness had served only to confuse the issue. “As soon as Joan looked at the statue, she could see that there was something extraordinary about it,” recalls Patty. “Those are real tears,” she said, “even if they are oily.”

In September, Chau, a Thai immigrant living in Sydney, brought his Buddhist mother, Tien, 82, suffering from stomach cancer, from Bangkok to Perth, where she spent “hours just looking at the statue.” Now, says, Chau, she’s cured.

“The doctors have said she should live for another year at least. Before she went to Perth she was exhausted after half an hour. But we went out last night and she was chatting away and laughing until well after midnight.”

Chau says he has “no doubt at all” that it was the BVM’s tears which made the difference.

“The evidence does seem convincing,” agrees Patty’s parish priest, Fr. Harry Walsh. “I heard about the cure by telephone. It is all very exciting.”

The Catholic Times reports: “The statue continues to attract a steady flow of believers from around western Australia and across the world, including an American priest who flew to the coastal town to collect oil.”

In the month following Sr. Joan’s revelation of the miracle of the tears, visitors donated stg.£7,850 to the Weeping Virgin of Western Australia, all of which has been passed to Sr. Joan to support her work among the indigent of Bangkok. “I have known Patty all my life,” says Sr. Joan. “She is so full of grace. We are blessed.”