Away with the fairies

"White Stripes my ass – how about something good?”
Woman starts like that, you have to hear what comes next.
“Jesus, Buddha, Allah… and whatever it is those hippies are up to – I think they’re all equally contemptible.”
Yellow Thunder Woman is a person of exquisite intelligence and rock-solid sense.
And the coolest eight-year-old in the universe puts the pope in the ha’penny place when it comes to morality.
I was searching for Bill O’Reilly when I came across Yellow Thunder Woman and thus learnt of the Bastard Fairies. O’Reilly, who is said to have “enthralled” a recent meeting of Trinity’s Philosophical Society, is presenter of The O’Reilly Factor on Fox News and mainstream hero of the US malignant Right. Searching for reference to his Dublin sojourn, I chanced upon: “I just happened to see him on Oprah that day,” says Yellow Thunder Woman. “I thought, ‘This guy is a fucking imbecile. We’ll nail him too while we’re at it.’”
Yellow Thunder Woman is the lead singer with the Fairies. Pondering video ideas for promoting their album, Memento Mori, the Los Angeles duo decided to expand on their anti-religious beliefs. “We thought that as long as we’re promoting ourselves we might as well be honest and tell people what we’re all about,” says Yellow Thunder Woman’s co-Fairy and partner, Robin Davey. So they scribbled a script and crafted a video, The Coolest Eight-Year-Old In The World Talks About O’Reilly, taking on the Fox man’s rant about popular culture dragging America down.
The winsome cool child confides to the camera (www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8x14cLGh5o): “Religion has caused a lot more violence than rock music or video games… Religion has caused the genocide of nations, and continues to… I’ll let you into a secret: if you made me go to church and interrupted my viewing of something far more educational, like Family Guy or South Park, then I probably would get medieval on somebody’s ass… We don’t need to be taught religion, we need to be taught empathy…”
The Fairies posted the video on YouTube where, within a week, it had 10,000 hits. At which point, an outraged O’Reilly aired it on his programme, to expose the Fairies as “child-abusers”. Within a month, it had scored a million and a half hits. The Fairies are now among the top 10 most subscribed-to bands in YouTube history, living the life of O’Reilly.
Yellow Thunder Woman, from the Sioux nation, is the daughter of Greg Zephier, an artist, singer and filmmaker and a former member of the American Treaty Council. She met Davey, ex-bass player with British blues outfit the Hoax, when he was producing her brothers’ band, Indigenous. The pair persuaded Eurhythmic Dave Stewart to put up $25,000 for a documentary about “the U.S. government’s genocidal policy toward Native Americans.” The film, The Canary Effect, premiered at Tribeca last year and is wending its way towards us.
Yellow Thunder Woman isn’t your standard-issue ethnic princess. Her “rather spectacular cleavage” featured recently in Playboy. I gather a “full frontal” is set for publication. “I have no problem taking my clothes off,” she told an interviewer last month, “I could have done this interview naked if you wanted me too.”
What we are to make of this, I’m not sure. But you should surely check out the Bastard Fairies. The videos look like they cost seven and sixpence apiece. The band is startlingly original, sharply intelligent, laugh-out-loud funny, and write good songs.
All you Mormons who like cussing, you are going to hell
All you preachers who like fucking, you are going to hell
Little boys that choke the chicken, you are going to hell...
All you Catholics wearing condoms, you are going to hell
All us fatties eating bonbons, we are going to hell
Unbaptized babies learn to limbo, purgatory is hell
Your religion is a gamble and you are going to hell.

Speaking of Native Americans and genocide, you may have noticed the pope was in Brazil last month. The visit was intended to buttress the Church’s position in the largest Catholic country on earth. But it left sensitive Catholics filled with dismay.
The Vatican website quotes from Benedict’s key-note address to a conference of bishops in the Basilica of Our Lady of Aparecida in Sao Paulo state on May 13: “The nations of Latin America and the Caribbean had been silently longing to receive Christ as their saviour” long before to the arrival of Europeans in the 16th century. Christ had been “the unknown God whom their ancestors were seeking, without realizing it.” The colonization of the continent should not be characterised as a conquest, but as the “adoption” of its indigenous people. “The proclamation of Jesus and of his Gospel did not at any point involve an alienation of the pre-Columbian cultures, nor was it the imposition of a foreign culture.” The effect of the extirpation of ancient religions and the forced conversion of whole peoples had been to make their cultures “fruitful” by “purifying” them.
The campaigns of rape and murder under the banner of Christ which wiped out 90 percent of the Amerindian population hadn’t been an atrocity at all, then, but a consummation which the victims had devoutly been pining for, not just “asking for it,” but, albeit unconsciously, “longing” for it.
Reuters news agency provided the balancing comment that, “Many Indian groups believe the conquest brought them enslavement and genocide.”
(Many Jewish groups believe that the Holocaust brought them enslavement and genocide.)
Benedict offered his remarks in a country where indigenous peoples are still hunted like animals and whole tribes wiped out.
Lawyers for the surviving members of a small forest tribe, the Ha-Ha-Hae, are currently seeking redress for a “health programme” in which a majority of its males were sterilised without their knowledge.
Public prosecutor Mario Lucio Avelar has told Survival International there are grounds to bring charges against the former governor and police chief of Matto Grosse state of “deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction in whole or in part of the group” – the Rio Pardo Indians, whose land has been forcibly expropriated by logging companies.
Earlier this year, campaigners warned that heavily-armed loggers searching for hardwoods had invaded the lands of the Arara and Macuxi at the mouth of the Amazon and that the existence of the tribes was in peril.
Sandro Tuxa, leader of a coalition of Indian tribes in the northeast of Brazil has described the Pope’s remarks at Aparecida as “arrogant and disrespectful... To say the cultural decimation of our people represents a purification is offensive, and frankly, frightening.”
Maybe the logging companies scything through the forest peoples will consider hiring Catholic chaplins to explain that the Ha-Ha-Hae, the Rio Parde, the Arara and Macuxi have, all unknownst to themselves, been silently longing for this adoption down the years.
Ignore the pope, people. Listen up to the cool kid.
“Religion has caused the genocide of nations, and continues to… We don’t need to be taught religion, we need to be taught empathy.”

I see that warmonger and promoter of world hunger Paul Wolfowitz had been booted out of the World Bank. But still no word from his best pal, Bono.