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ain’t been saying mad stuff about him have you girl?
He was a terrible man!”
So who are her all time heroes really?
“It sounds really mealy-mouthed, but the people who
no-one knows the name of; they’re the heroes.”
So your other heroes have disappointed you?
“I don’t feel disappointed because I’ve grown up,
very late in life, and I realise people fall short of things
for a reason as we’re all human. Like all the bad things
Mr Castro has done to gay people. The heroes are the
people we never ever hear of and that is the essence of
their heroicness. There’s a certain reason why people of
real quality don’t rise to positions of power. People like
my dad; who have nothing to prove. I’ve no element of
self-loathing but I do realise that part of my success is
just me showing off, and wanting to queen it over other
people, to be frank with you. When you get people like
Emma Thompson, Dawn French, Lenny Henry, the Red
Nose lot – unless you tied the fuckers down and wired
them up to a lie detector – and then you’d get it – you’d
never get them to admit that there was any element in
their desire to be famous other than them wanting to
help people in Niger. To me it’s the glory of being a
human being that we are a mixture of complete corruption
and the most shimmering, mercury-like goodness.
Of course there are some just purely evil people – like
Dido – and just purely good people – like Jordan. But
then there’s the glory and the black hearted corruption.
BUY Julie Burchill books online from and
It just knocks you out sometimes if you think about it
too much. That’s why I prefer not to think about it too
much and watch Tricia instead. A great deal of my life
is spent running away from … my brain.”
In my review of Sugar Rush I presumptuously wrote
of the characters: “No-one talks like that, not even Julie
in real life”. I was in fact completely wrong. Friendlier
(to me at least), and with lots more swearing, but she
talks pretty much as she writes. I won’t let the Iraq war
go though, I’m catching the argument bug off her.
“Ben! Ben! What would you rather live under?!
Listen I was brought up as a Soviet Empirist. My dad
taught me to believe – literally – that American brains
were one third less the size of ours. It’s been a very
hard journey to lead me to support Mr Bush on this.
But I do feel that a struggle of the dimensions my
father saw, light against darkness, has emerged in the
Middle East. The Arab people deserve everything we
have. If that makes me a fucking racist then yeah. I
won’t make any exceptions for these filthy rich people,
the Saudi dynasty, or the Syrian Ba’athists who
call themselves socialists.”
But surely the idea that Bush is exporting democracy
to the Middle East is rather undermined when he lets
the CIA organise a coup against democratic Venezuela?
“One thing at a time Ben! When a Hugo Chavez
can emerge in the Arab world … I know about Allende.
I’m not idealistic about America. It’s a dirty
128
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