Fantissimo

One of the things that stood out for me from a report of the trial of young men accused of having planned a series of bombs to waste slags and other kaffirs in London was the vocabulary they are said to have used to describe past and future bombings of random strangers: "beautiful" and "fantissimo".

Setting aside my proclivity to be facetious for a moment, I´ll make a supplementary observation to Grahame Thompson´s comments on fundamentalism: these boys look to me to be not too far from the white youths connected with the stabbing of Stephen Lawrence who fantasised extreme race hate crimes (if reports are correct). In both cases the hated "other" looks to be a product of insecure young masculinity expressed through loathing for another race or gender.

A second observation is that, fundamentalist/criminals as they may have been (if reports are correct), their means of expression and thought is partly shaped by profoundly non-fundamentalist cultural milieu. Setting aside my proclivity no longer, I´ll note that fantissimo was a horse with a bell for a heart on a 78 record of the 1950s, a song by Living Jane, and the fan site of what looks to be a German crooner of the kind who wears lozenge-patterned sweaters and, in the best seventies kitsch, jeans traegt und modern denkt.