The Eponymist

Best Things Ever #15

2011-07-02T01:45:00.009+01:00

Spaced

"You are so blind! You so do not understand! You weren't there at the beginning! You don't know how good it was, how important!"

I like funny. There are a handful of shows that I have seen dozens of times, know almost every line, and yet still find myself roaring with laugher at. Jeff’s rants in ‘Coupling’ and virtually everything that Malcolm Tucker says in ‘The Thick of It’ are two examples. However, for no other comedy is this more true than the cult classic, ‘Spaced’.

‘Spaced’ was broadcast over two series on Channel Four between 1999 and 2001, running to a total of just fourteen episodes. It tells the tale of two twenty-something underachievers, Tim Bisley and Daisy Steiner, who meet in a cafe and fake being a couple in order to rent a flat in North London. Tim works in a comic book shop, but dreams of being a graphic artist. Daisy wants to be a writer, but uses every distraction as an excuse for not doing any work (a character I can completely identify with). A small band of friends and associates join them in a series of mundane adventures which, through the rose tinted filter of pop culture reference, take on a whole new level of excitement.

It is the pop culture references which drive the show. There are simply too many to name every film and TV show that ‘Spaced’ references or pastiches, but they include ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’, ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’, ‘Fight Club’, ‘Robot Wars’, ‘The Omen’, ‘Scooby Doo’, ‘Rhubarb and Custard’, ‘Terry and June’, ‘An American Werewolf in London’ and ‘Platoon’. In the ninety second opening to the episode ‘Change’, ‘Spaced’ manages to reference ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’, ‘Dawn of the Dead’, ‘Back to the Future’, ‘E.T.’, as well as every war film ever. It is a geek’s paradise, a rich vein and a rare example of a TV show that assumes the intelligence of its viewer rather than dumbing down to serve the lowest common denominator. If you don’t get it, well that’s your loss.

What makes ‘Spaced’ unique amongst its contemporary sitcoms is its reliance on more than merely its script and performance. Since the beginning of television, most sitcoms have been recorded in a studio with a two or three camera setup and the comedy comes from the individual performances of the actors. Even modern, verite comedy like ‘The Thick of It’ and ‘The Office’, which use hand held, one camera set ups, are still largely reliant on an interpretation of the script in order to generate the laughs. The script for ‘Spaced’, written by Simon Pegg and Jessica Hynes (Tim and Daisy), is brilliant, as are the performances of all involved. However, the devil is in the detail and what elevates ‘Spaced’ to comedy gold ('Fried Gold', to use Nick Frost's phrase) is as much to do with director Edgar Wright’s use of camera pulls and wipes, which give ‘Spaced’ a style all its own. What other show references ‘Evil Dead’ by having the camera make a series of graded, staccato movements from top right of the set, to top left, to bottom left? Or has such confidence in the strength of the script that it can afford to underpin so much of it with a contemporary soundtrack and trust that it won’t distract or detract from the plot?

Comedy has an important social role to play in allowing cliques to gravitate towards each other and coalesce. Great comedy is repeatable and quotable, like some form of arcane language. As teenagers, my friends each had scenes from Holy Grail and Life of Brian memorised and would rattle them off at a moment’s notice (“Found this spoon sir.” “Well done Centurion. We’ll be back for you. Weirdo.”). In ‘An Audience with Billy Connolly’ (a video tape I wore out through repetition), Connolly talks about the parties he used to go to in 70s, where people would sing songs. For us, it was always the comedy routine, from Python to Red Dwarf to the Fast Show, that we would perform for each other. We were not drama students, none of us went on to be actors (although some of us did dabble in Media Studies). We were just bored, working class kids with too little money and too much time to kill and this was how he kept ourselves entertained.

Later, it was through ‘Spaced’ that those same friendships were reinforced and a whole new set formed. As good as shows like ‘The Office’ are, their appeal is so broad that a common love isn’t conducive to long-term, lasting friendships. It’s like saying you like to eat bread: It tells you nothing. A mutual love of ‘Spaced’ doesn’t guarantee mutual understanding, but it’s a better barometer than most. I have friends in the States that I have introduced to ‘Spaced’ by watching it together over Skype. When I came to write the short story, ‘Re:JJ13h’, I used ‘Spaced’ as the catalyst for two of the main characters becoming friends. I could think of no more effective a shorthand for geek friendship.

In terms of sheer quotablity, ‘Spaced’ must have the highest density of quotable lines of any show. Its idiom has become such an integral part of my vocabulary, that I’m barely aware I’m even doing it. “Hello you.” “Skip to the end.” “Oh my God! I've got some fucking Jaffa Cakes in my coat pocket!” Whenever someone returns from an holiday or an event, I feel compelled to ask, “So how was it kitten, was it magic?”

Yet because ‘Spaced’ doesn’t dumb down, the viewer is rewarded for their knowledge. The ‘Star Wars’ references are often so obscure that only a true sci-fi geek would notice them. “How’s it going?” “Same as always.” “That bad, huh?”: “Ok, well take care of yourself Tim, I guess that’s what you’re best at.” Not to mention the entire plot to ‘Change’, where Tim gets sacked for shouting at a child for wanting a Jar Jar Binks doll (and vocalising the general disgust that we all felt at the abysmal prequels). Or the coup of having Peter Serafinowicz, the voice of Darth Maul in ‘The Phantom Menace’, repeat, verbatim, Maul’s lines in the guise of Tim’s nemesis, Duane Benzie.

In fact, ‘Spaced’ has an impressive list of cameo appearances from the elite of British comedy. Mark Gatiss and Reece Shearsmith from ‘The League of Gentlemen’, Jo Scanlan, who would go on to play Terry Coverley in ‘The Thick of It’ and co-write the darkly funny, ‘Getting On’. David Walliams of ‘Little Britain’, Paul Kaye, Kevin Eldon, Bill Bailey, even a blink and you’ll miss it appearance by Ricky Gervais. It also launched the career of Nick Frost, who hadn’t acted before, until playing Mike.

However, perhaps the greatest legacy of ‘Spaced’ is its big-screen spin-off, ‘Shaun of the Dead’. Following on from the episode ‘Art’, where Tim takes speed, stays up all night playing ‘Resident Evil 2’, causing him to hallucinate being under attack from zombies, Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright discovered a mutual love of zombie movies. They therefore set out to write and make a parody of the zombie movie genre, with the usual rugged hero replaced by an incompetent slacker (played by Pegg). ‘Shaun of the Dead’ brings with it all of the same subtle references and attention to detail that made ‘Spaced’ such an exceptionally good show. ‘Shaun of the Dead’ was followed up in 2007 by ‘Hot Fuzz’, Pegg and Wright this time satirising the buddy cop genre. A third film, ‘The World’s End’ (working title) is due to be made at some point in the future.

Watching ‘Spaced’ a decade on since it concluded, it has dated surprisingly well. Some of the references, like those to ‘The Matrix’ and ‘Sixth Sense’ are very much of the time that it was made in, but there are enough other references to previous decades that they don’t stand out so much. And while I know every line, there are still bits I roar with laughter at, no matter how many times I see them. Daisy moaning about trying to find a flat in the opening episode, crying that, ‘Every morning I wake up and it's the same. I get up and I buy the paper, and I circle them all, and I phone them only to discover they've been taken by a bunch of fucking psychic house hunters’, makes me laugh every single time. It’s all in Hynes’s delivery. I like funny, but I love ‘Spaced’. A few shows have since come close, but it has yet to be bettered. It’s unique. A one-off.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go and bogle to Aswad. Research. >>Skip to the end.

Bloomsday 2011

2011-06-16T02:12:00.012+01:00

Today is Bloomsday. To celebrate the day on which James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ was set, 107 years ago, I have written a trilogy of new pieces. Happy Bloomsday! Enjoy (click on images to enlarge):

Ulysses Prime

Like most things in life, I came to ‘Ulysses’ late. I was twenty five, in the second year of an astrophysics degree (I’d also come to university late), but having serious doubts about what I was doing. Astronomy was something I’d had a passion for since I was young. I’d spectacularly failed to apply myself at school, but having done a foundation year in physics and maths at night school, working my backside off in the process, I talked my way onto my preferred course at Cardiff University. Once I got there, I didn’t really a have a clue about what to do next.

So, after an indifferent first semester, in which I just scraped through exams, I did even less work during the second and flunked almost every subject. Taking re-sits over the summer, I did a single night’s revision for most subjects, managing to pass everything but the Theoretical Physics module and had to wait a year before I could sit the exam for a third time. I shouldn’t have gone back, but once I did, you’d have thought I’d have learned my lesson and applied myself. But no. I was spectacularly failing all over again. And these were the conditions under which I first read ‘Ulysses’.

It took three weeks that first time. I should have been studying Schrodinger’s wave equations and logic circuits, but instead I was playing ‘Legend of Zelda, Ocarina of Time’ on the N64 and reading ‘Ulysses’. My reward for finishing a dungeon on Zelda was that I got to read a chapter of ‘Ulysses’. An odd way ‘round to do things, I know. I probably didn’t understand one fifth of what I was reading (I missed the Blazes Boylan subplot entirely), but I knew that what I was reading was a revelation. Countless times people had told me that such-and-such a novel or play was a masterpiece and I had read them and always felt let down. It wasn’t that they weren’t great works, but appreciation is a matter of expectation and if you expect genius and find merely brilliance, there’s an sense of underwhelming disappointment. ‘Ulysses’ was the first book I read that exceeded those expectations.

In many ways, it is an experience from which I have yet to truly recover. I dropped out of university soon after. Astronomy may have been my first love, but another obsession had been creeping up on me those last few years. What I really wanted was to be a writer. It was something for which I seemed to have a talent. I think I thought it would make a good career. I’d had no artistic pretentions, the life of a hack would suit me just fine.

Reading ‘Ulysses’, all I could think was, “You mean you’re allowed to do this? Why did no one tell me?” My literary third eye had, to paraphrase Bill Hicks, been squeegeed clean. A whole new world had opened as to what literature could achieve. You weren’t limited to telling a story at the surface level, the syntax and associations of the words you chose to employ could tell another story entirely.

I worked for a year, then went backpacking around Europe (another late first), taking ‘Ulysses’ with me and reading it again. I read Joyce’s other masterpieces. When Jim Norton’s unabridged reading of ‘Ulysses’ was released, I listened to that and got a handle on the few chapters that were still troubling me. And all the time I was teaching myself the skills that I thought would make me a better writer. I knew that I would never be as good as Joyce, but that was fine. Joyce was (and is) my high water mark. Joyce is an unscalable peak, always ahead of me, reminding me to never stop climbing.

It is therefore no coincidence that in making one of my first attempts to write a short story, I turned to both Joyce and Greek legend for inspiration. In ‘Eden Stir Her Laceless Veil’, I borrowed Joyce’s switching between the passive and active voice in ‘Eveline’ (from ‘Dubliners’) and appropriated the myths relating to Jason and Medea, performing the same Viconian transformation that Joyce had made on the legend of Odysseus when writing ‘Ulysses’.

Giambattista Vico was a 17^th/18^th century Italian political philosopher who theorised that all of human history moves through three cycles, The Age of Gods, The Age of Heroes and The Age of Man, before the Ricorso, the time of chaos before everything resets itself and begins the whole cycle again. In ‘Ulysses’, Joyce transforms Odysseus into Leopold Bloom. Whereas Homer’s hero is a brutal hothead, Joyce’s ‘Poldy’ is a thoughtful pacifist. God’s and nymphs are replaced by the ordinary men and women of Dublin and great signifiers of power and virility become objects of the commonplace.

In writing ‘Eden Stir Her Laceless Veil’, I studied the legends connected to Jason and Medea in great detail and sought mundane modern equivalents to their key events. Ultimately, I don’t want to write like Joyce. As brilliant as he is, his later works are so opaque and obscure that they put most people off. Few people read the classics as it is and I’d rather find a happy medium between art and popularism. I want to be read. That said, I wanted to write a short piece where virtually every word had meaning: where, like Joyce, no other word would do than the one I had chosen. For a first effort, it’s not bad, although I’ve written better since (you can read it here: http://bit.ly/mk2Ypz along with some companion pieces).

‘Ulysses’ remains not only my favourite novel, but my favourite work of art, period. With each successive reading, I discover subplots that I hadn’t noticed before and new nuances to the text. It is the book that just keeps on giving. ‘Ulysses’ had a profound effect upon me on that first reading and I am still reeling from the effects over a decade later. I may spend the rest of my life as an enthusiastic amateur, eeking out a living from writing reports, but it’s a life affirming path with some breathtaking views. And there’s always the next reading of ‘Ulysses’ to look forward to. I envy anyone reading Joyce for the first time.

Ulysses “Seen”

As should be readily apparent by now, I love ‘Ulysses’ and all things Joyce. Since his works were first published, it’s from the United States that the most interesting and enlightening Joycean work has come (ironic, given America’s significance in ‘Finnegans Wake’, representing the afterlife to Dublin’s Egypt). From Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson’s book, ‘A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake’, written in the years immediately following the book’s release against noises of general derision, to ‘James Joyce Quarterly’, published since the 1960s by Tulsa University, Oklahoma, American scholarship has embraced Joyce like no other country outside of Ireland. Maybe even more so.

Today, the most interesting interpretation of Joyce’s novels is still coming from the other side of the Atlantic. In Philadelphia, a small group of artists and scholars have set themselves a task that has something of the Herculean rather than Odyssean about it. Robert Berry, Mike Barsanti, Josh Levitas, Janine Utell and Chad A Rutkowski of Throwaway Horse have set out on the epic quest to translate ‘Ulysses’ into comic book format. ‘Ulysses “Seen”’ is the result, published online and through its own iPad app. The project is still in its infancy, with only two chapters so far completed, but that’s one of the many exciting features of ‘Ulysses “Seen”’. There is so much more of it to look forward to.

Partly, one wonders why no-one has thought to draw ‘Ulysses’ before. It is after all a book of the senses, every page alive with sights and sounds and smells. ‘Ulysses’ is also a great sprawling novel. Despite being set on a single day, it veers wildly off course in time and space and reality, before returning to the streets of Dublin, 16 June 1904. You can therefore appreciate why no-one’s been brave enough to make the attempt. It would be all too easy to make a mess of the entire venture. Spend thirty minutes in the company of ‘Ulysses “Seen”’ and you realise that the book is in very capable hands.

Of course no comic book, no matter how beautifully rendered, can substitute an actual reading of the novel. Yet, for first timers, ‘Ulysses “Seen”’ is a splendid introduction to a challenging novel. For those of us who have long since put that first, difficult reading behind us, rereading and rereading until we know its passages so well, ‘Ulysses “Seen”’ brings a new twist to an old favourite. Reading any book is an act of symbiosis between writer and reader, the one sketching out an outline, the other filling in shadows and colours from their individual experience. Yet there is so much going on in virtually every word, clause and sentence of ‘Ulysses’, that a visual production is an ideal way to illuminate a number of key passages in the text. TV or film couldn’t quite manage it, too much would still get lost between the gaps. The comic book format, with its traditional mixture of images and thought bubbles, is a much better bet.

We can get an idea of why this is so by considering a number of panels from ‘Calypso’ in ‘Ulysses “Seen”’. Leopold Bloom has popped out to the butchers. As he makes the first of many journeys across Dublin, he thinks about his wife still lying in bed, nymph like, behind him in Eccles Street. Molly was born in Gibraltar and as Bloom’s mind drifts, thinking about the track of the sun, Dublin is transformed into a Moorish scene of minaret and casaba. Bloom daydreams about faraway lands, his black suit and bowler hat transformed into bright yellow robes and green turban. Then we see him think, “Probably not a bit like it really.” and the rounded Arabian skyline returns to the flat tops of Dublin.

The series of images here make me think of an episode of ‘Mr Benn’, although I appreciate this association is meaningless to anyone not brought up on 1970s British television. The scene is one of many visual jokes, one of many Ulyssean comments on the chasm between perception and reality that can get lost in a purely literary reading of the novel. ‘Ulysses “Seen”’ manages to tease out some of the detail and obscurities. It can’t catch them all and nor does it try. Yet there is more than enough here to entertain and enthral and send the viewer back to the text with a fresh appreciation of the genius of James Joyce.

‘Ulysses “Seen”’ is a joy to behold and I look forward to the chapters that are to come. I can’t wait to see what they do with the newspaper headlines in ‘Aeolus’ and the gigantism of ‘Cyclops’. I can’t wait to see Bloom’s coronation, his trial, his transformation into a woman in the Mabbot Street brothel of ‘Circe’. And at the end of it all there will be Molly Bloom and her unpunctuated soliloquy. There are many years and adventures ahead of us. If you’re a fan of ‘Ulysses’ or the comic book genre, head for www.ulyssesseen.com. See now!

Ulysses Found

I was born on 2 February 1973, exactly 91 years to the day after James Augustine Aloysius Joyce. So, at the end of January 2004, I set off on a pilgrimage to find his grave.

It didn’t start well. I could have just flown straight to Switzerland, but that would have been too easy. Instead, I decided to fly from Liverpool to Paris first, spend a few days in the city where Joyce finished writing ‘Ulysses’, then catch a train to Zurich.

I spend the night before departure with my cousin and her boyfriend over the water in Birkenhead. In a rush to get out in the morning, I manage to leave a pair of jeans behind, with my bankcard in the back pocket, and have to use a credit card for the rest of the journey. Then I nearly miss the bus to John Lennon, a bus which seems to need to travel almost 360^o around the perimeter fence before it can enter the airport. Still, I’m Henry Rollins like in the speed with which I fly through customs and in the end have thirty five minutes to spare.

Fuck me, I think, as we fly south, how can people do this day in, day out and not convert to Buddhism? Before today, I had been on a grand total of three flights. The first was an internal British flight when I was about eight months old. The second a 1950’s Cessna with no door. I jumped out of that with a bit of canvas strapped to my back. The third flew from Madrid to Liverpool, me with a girl terrified of flying who had to drink almost an entire bottle of vodka before she would even contemplate boarding. Luckily it was pitch black outside, but I still spent most of the three hour flight trying to keep her calm.

At 29,000 feet you finally realise why so many of those men who went to the Moon didn’t come back quite the same. The plane’s silhouette is cast upon a bank of cloud cover, backlit by the sun. Doughnut shaped rainbows are projected by the cabin windows onto the ruffled hills beneath, which are thrown like a duvet thrown across the world. And then a break in the cover and geodesic fields are revealed beneath, dusted with snow. Motorways cut into landscape. Man’s order imposed upon nature.

Over the channel, the merest flecks of clouds are all that stand between me and the deep, dark waters below. They’re so small that for a moment they look like wakes left by fish or other marine creatures. The French coastline already fills the view ahead. Ten minutes is all it takes to cross the channel and the clouds, now more like soiled nappies, return to engulf us. I hope this isn’t an indication of trouble ahead. We begin a slow decent.

An hour. That’s all it takes to reach Paris. It takes me longer to get to work in the morning. I need to fly more, I decide. By the end of this journey, I will have doubled the amount of planes I have been on in my life. It’s good for the soul to be this high up. Flight widens your horizons and expands the scope of what seems possible. Not good for the environment though. Maybe I should take up hand gliding. Or ballooning.

It takes an age to get from Charles de Gaulle to Paris, especially when your hostel lies in an arrondissement on the opposite side of town. It’s strange being back here in this city and this hostel. The last time I was here, four years ago, I got drunk with two English guys, had an in depth conversation about the Beatles and then the three of us spent hours trying to find somewhere that sold take away food. Not a Parisian speciality and we ended up buying crisps and other junk from one of those walled in, windowless mini-marts that are a feature of most French towns.

I love Paris. I love travelling on the Metro better than any other underground system in the world. It’s the aroma of engine oil that I find so romantic and a perfect metaphor for love: Overpowering and not exactly good for you. I love the handles you have turn to open the carriage doors. I love the pharmacies every three shop fronts and the newsagents that don’t sell tobacco. A concept alien to the British. News. Nicotine. Can they not see the obvious connection? No, they put their tobacconists inside cafes. The Gallic idiots.

I check in, dump my stuff in my room, take the Metro over to Montparnasse and just start walking. Anywhere, it doesn’t matter. I pass the Jardin du Luxembourg on my way, a place that almost every writer who came here to live in the 30s speaks about with such passion. I’ve never really understood the fascination. The Eiffel Tower calls to me in the distance. Draws me in like an old flame. It’s nearly closing time and I just pay to walk up to the first couple of levels. In the chill of the January gloom, it doesn’t seem quite the same. When you’ve been here in love, it’s hard to return to alone. Too many memories. C’est la vie. Abandon the old and stale. Let’s look ahead to the new.

***

Day two and another inauspicious start. At the Pompidou Centre for 9, only to discover it doesn’t open ‘till 11. So I wandered aimlessly back to Notre Dame to find Shakespeare and Company, but that’s shut too. A lot more aimless wandering and eventually I find the Picasso Museum and hey, third time lucky, it’s open.

I’m never quite sure what to make of Picasso. He used to do nothing for me. And then I went to the Reina Sofia in Madrid and saw ‘Guernica’. I was blown away. In the interceding years, I have grown to love much of Picasso’s earlier works, particularly from his pink and blue periods. Yet much of what’s on offer in the Picasso Museum in Paris is his later works and they’re all a little samey. It’s a museum that seems to pander to the stereotypical view of a Picasso work, too many cubist works, not enough variation. I prefer Dali. Lot’s going on. Subliminal and subconscious. Or Magritte. Simple, but grandiose. A true surrealist. Maybe Picasso’s not pretentious enough for me.

By the time I return, the Pompidou Centre has been open for an hour. Huge. Just about every modern artist you can think of is represented. Chagall, Miro, Dali, Magritte, Warhol, Matisse and, of course, Picasso. It’s not something to be absorbed in one visit. The Louvre in miniature. I’m there three hours and by the time I come out I felt like a futurist painting: shattered. Now Picasso’s futurist paintings I do like.

Late lunch and on the Metro to Montmartre. The Basilique de Sacre-Coeur is my favourite building in the whole of Paris. It has the best views, but they’re a hard won reward. The climb to the top leaves one exhausted. But it’s worth the aching lungs. Great Byzantine teats protrude from the smaller domes, framing the view from out of the main dome. The Eiffel Tower stands astride the narrow world in the distance. Worth climbing every worn step and squeezing past every person heading in the opposite direction.

I go back via the crypt. Weird. There’s a carved image of Christ lying in his tomb, which despite being in bronze and black, is so lifelike that you half expect him to resurrect himself at any moment. There’s also an huge statue of a former Bishop of Paris holding the whole of Sacre-Coeur on the tips of his fingers. The arrogance of religion!

When I was here first time, I sat on a stone bench at the base of Sacre-Coeur, by a water feature, and read from ‘Ulysses’, feeling very pleased with myself. However, it’s the nadir of the tourist season and the street artists and sellers of cheap tat here are desperate to reel in any chump. Not a time to be hanging about.

Saturday morning, La Défense McDonalds, listening to the first Elbow album. It’s my strongest abiding memory of this time in Paris, sat here eating rubberised meat for breakfast, listening to ‘Bitten by the Tailfly’. I only ever patronise the evil arches on holiday, it’s the only way to ensure that the meat is incinerated properly, especially in France. I came up here first thing, just to have a look at the arch, which is ok. There’s a lift to the top, but it doesn’t seem to be open. Still, you can see all the way back to the Arc de Triomphe from the front steps, which is good enough.

I seem to spend most of this last day in Paris reading ‘The Garden of Eden’ on the Metro. It’s one of Hemingway’s less well known novels and one of the few I hadn’t read. I read over a hundred pages just travelling under Paris. The plan is to have it finished and be rereading ‘A Portrait of the Artist’ by the time I enter Switzerland (“Ooh err” as it says in my journals from the time). Did I succeed? Stay tuned.

Leaving La Défense, I head for the Museum of Science and Industry on the opposite end of Paris, spending most of the rest of the day there. I pay extra for the Planetarium, but the soft voice of the French woman doing the voiceover is so relaxing that she nearly puts me to sleep.

Then I finally get to visit Shakespeare and Company. The original Shakespeare and Co was run by Silvia Beach, the woman who first published ‘Ulysses’. The shop that now bears that name is in a different location and, to my surprise, mainly sells new books. It runs some services for writers, but in the winter of 2003/2004 I was no more than a dreamer and to me it is nothing but a shop selling books for inflated Parisian prices (at the original Shakespeare and Co, Henry Miller was apparently notorious for returning borrowed books late). I buy a copy of Kerouac’s ‘Dharma Bums’, complete with Shakespeare and Company stamp, and a postcard, now framed and propped up against one of the many piles of books I have stacked up, very much in the tradition of Shakespeare and Company.

I want to visit one of the Parks of Paris. I pick Viciennes, but when I get to where the Metro map says it is, it isn’t immediately evident where I should go. I wander around lost for quarter of an hour, give up and leave. Someone has a heart attack in one of the other carriages coming back, delaying us for half an hour until the Paramedics arrive. I change some money for Swiss Francs on my way back, pass Invalides without going in, and go back to the hostel.

I’ve enjoyed being back in Paris. It’s a good city in which to acclimatise to the continent before moving on. The hostel is virtually deserted that last night, but apart from a few gaggles of children on school trips, it had been throughout my stay. This is not the time of year to expect to make new friends. January is as off season as it’s possible to be. In Zurich I am to be staying in a hotel, so there I can expect even worse. I have a CD player, a long wave radio and James Joyce with me. I’ll be fine.

***

The French countryside rolls past the window. Paris lies two hours behind. Very tired. I lost count of the amount of times I woke in the night, panicking I’d overslept. I had to be up for 6.30 and my phone kept slipping out of reach. So the routine would go: Arrggh, what time is it? Shit, where’s my phone. Can’t find my phone, can’t find my phone. Oh thank fuck, there it is. 3.38. Shit!

When I did have to get up, everyone else was still asleep in the dorm and it was pitch black. I spent 15 minutes just trying to get my sleeping bag back in its bag. I got a new one especially for this trip, but seem to have bought a child’s size. I’m quite short and yet I can just about fit the hood over my head. When I did eventually get the bloody thing in the bag, I remembered my money belt was still in it and I had to start the whole frustrating process from scratch.

The train left Gare du Lyon at 8.10 and I finished reading ‘The Garden of Eden’ by 9. Not Hemingway’s best book, not his worst. Graphic in places. Ménage a troi between the two girls and the Hemingway character. Yet what I love about Hemingway is that what he doesn’t say is as important as what he does. He is as a writer should be, recognising the symbiotic relationship between writer and reader. He assumes a level of intelligence in his reader and leaves them to fill in the gaps. Which is the antithesis of modern culture, where everything must be explained and re-explained ad nauseum, to the point where it ends up saying nothing. God forbid that anyone should think or exercise their own imagination.

Despite sitting in a reserved seat, a seat I reserved before I left Britain, the guard informs me that the back few carriages don’t go as far as Basel (where I have to go through customs and change trains), so I have to move to the front of the train. Glad to see that it’s not just British train companies that operate without rhyme or reason. Joyce and Ani DiFranco’s ‘Educated Guess’ accompany me past Alpine chalets and snow draped hills into Switzerland.

Ah Zurich. I only quite like it. My first impression is the same as of all cities: a harsh industrial and commercial town, peppered with the classical beauty of previous ages. It’s not Paris, but it has its own charm. There are two things people tell you when you mention Switzerland; that it’s ridiculously expensive and ridiculously clean. Guilty on both counts.

I’ve been seven hours travelling and with a long day planned tomorrow, I need to chill and get an early night. However, I head out and wander in my same aimless style for a couple of hours. Mountains hang on the horizon, snow capped and imposing. Lake Zurich fills my vista as I stroll over to the waterfront, snaking away into the distance to meet the mountains at their foothills. I try to comprehend it all. That Joyce walked these same streets eighty years before, that great swathes of ‘Ulysses’ were composed on these same avenues. Of course the same is also true of Paris, but here it is even more so. I am following the ‘Ulysses’ trail in reverse. If I had the time and expense, I would head for Trieste, where it all began. Ah well, I’ll have to content myself with being in the place where most of the book was written, and, of course, where Joyce died and is buried.

***

Bourseday. There’s some texts waiting for me when I wake and a couple of cards to open in my bag, but it feels weird being hundreds of miles from anybody I know today. With a little investigation, I find the Joyce Foundation. It only opens Tuesday to Thursday. The museum beneath it doesn’t open ‘til 12, so I head for the Modern Art Museum. That’s shut on a Monday as well.

By now I am totally fed up, but find an internet cafe, discover that Joyce is buried in Fluntern Cemetery and head for Tourist Information. I’m told to take the no 5 tram to Fluntern. The tram leaves from the other end of town. The trams in Zurich are odd. You pay not for a journey, but for a period of time. It’s the supermarket sweep of public transport: get as far as you can get in an hour, go! The tram goes up a steep hill, where I jump off and ask a woman in a kiosk for Fluntern. “Joyce?” she asks. I nod. Get another tram up to the zoo, she tells me, but looking on the map I can see a huge park marked, Fluntern. The cemetery is on the edge, easily within walking distance.

Just before 1pm on the 2 February 2004, exactly halfway through my trip, I stand before the object of and the impetus for this journey. A dark grey slab of marble lying in a sunken pit, cut away in the turf. The grave has been cleared of snow, but still covers the ground around it. A statue of Joyce sits off to the right behind the gravestone, right ankle resting on his left knee, cigarette in his hand, walking stick resting against hip, gaze off in the distance to his right.

Not only James, but wife Nora, their son George and his wife Asta are buried here. ‘James Joyce, Dublin 2 11 1882’. Hang on, what? November. Joyce was born in November? No, that can’t be right.

The whole plot is given over to the Joyce family grave and there’s bench at the opposite end. I sit down and dig out my copy of ‘A Portrait of the Artist’ and check the notes. 2^nd February 1882. Oh thank fuck. What an anticlimax that would be to travel all this distance only to discover that I’d gotten it wrong.

Then it clicks. For reasons best know to themselves, the Swiss have put the month in Roman numerals. Not 2 11 1882, but 2 II 1882. I feel an enormous sense of relief. I send some texts, take some photos, then read from Portrait and feel immensely pleased with myself. It may not be the source of the Nile, but it is the source of much that is important to me (see Ulysses Prime).

I don’t know what I hoped to find when I got here. I think in my head I half expected to find the girl of my dreams laying flowers at Jim’s grave. I am nothing if not a hopeless fantasist. I stay an hour, but no one else shows up. I guess Bloomsday is the major event in the Joyce calendar. At least it happens in summer rather than the dead of winter. Helen, who I stayed with before flying out, was born on Bloomsday. My brother was born on St Patrick’s Day. A proper Irish family. Well actually, no, asides from having Irish ancestry and a few accidents of birth, that’s about it.

For the rest of the day, I revert to my default state and wander aimlessly around town, listening to ‘Blood on the Tracks’. Down to Lake Zurich to take some photos of the Alps, then up to the Botanical Gardens, which are more like an allotment. Then back up the hill to find the FIFA building: A complex as soulless as the organisation it houses. I manage to get lost on the way back down and walk for hours before finding the right road. Yet before long I am sat in a cafe, back by the shores of Lake Zurich, eating sausage and half a chicken.

Our birthday ends back in my hotel room, having my first alcoholic drink in six months (vodka and coke) and watching the UK Snooker Championship on Eurosport. The holiday would end, after a day in Geneva and a 6.30 flight the following morning, with me watching the final of the snooker in a coffee shop in Amsterdam. But as Amsterdam has nothing to do with James Joyce or ‘Ulysses’, that’s a story that can wait for another time.

Best Things Ever #14

2011-06-04T13:20:00.006+01:00

Bruce Dickinson, The Chemical Wedding

”’Have you read Harry Potter, Stew, and the— and the Tree of Nothing?’ No, I haven’t. I haven’t read it, but I have read the complete works of the romantic poet and visionary William Blake. So fuck off.”

Stewart Lee

Nebs. That’s what the Indie kids called us. After Knebworth Park and the Knebworth Festival. Yes, even though heavy metal wasn’t really associated with Knebworth. I guess logic rarely penetrates the mind of a fifteen year old.

Metal was the first scene I got into. It was the early 90s and British Heavy Metal was going through a resurgence. Kerrang Magazine were calling it the Second New Wave of British Heavy Metal, with bands like The Almighty, The Wildhearts and Thunder coming to prominence. Iron Maiden went to number one with ‘Bring Your Daughter… to the Slaughter’, and their future singer, Blaze Bailey, first inspired me to want to be a writer through his rants in the fanzine of my then favourite band, Wolfsbane.

I had the leather jacket. I had the drainpipe jeans and studded belt. I made the pilgrimage to the Monsters of Rock festival at Castle Donnington that all good Nebs were required to make (the Indie kids should have called us Dons!). Friendships were formed based on the bands that we listened to and many of those friendships have endured to this day. And even after I’d discarded the long hair and denim waistcoat cluttered with band patches, metal still held the power to energise me. By 1996, my tastes had widened and I was listening to Supergrass and Chumbawamba. Yet when my dad died a month before exams, it was the music of Metallica, Dub War and Rage Against That Machine that drowned out the world and lent me the strength to focus on revision.

Fast forward a decade. Up in Sunderland to visit my brother (a dedicated metalhead). He gives me a copy of Bruce Dickinson’s 1998 album, ‘The Chemical Wedding’. Bruce had spent most of his career as lead singer for Iron Maiden, before quitting the band in 1993 (and rejoining in 1999). He had released a series of solo albums, all different styles, from trad. rock to grunge, but all with something to recommend them. I hadn’t heard his last couple of offerings, but Rich sent me home with a copy and a wink that said, ‘trust me’. I arrived back and loaded the disc into the five CD changer that I used to use when reading. Nina Simone, Jeff Buckley, 'The Basement Tapes', Miles Davis and the like came and went from the mix, but ‘The Chemical Wedding’ remained. Over the days and weeks, I came to see it as the epitome of everything that had attracted me to metal in the first place.

I like music that is about something. We all have trash hiding away in our collections, and I am no exception. Yet while my tastes have diversified over the years to take in most anything from Shostakovich to Slayer, I’ve never been able to tolerate mainstream, manufactured pop. That’s because it’s about nothing. Words plucked out of the air, arranged into some semblance of order and wailed over a tinny drum machine. Add a full orchestra if you like, it’s still of no value. And yes, I know pop music is for dancing to. Sorry, I don’t dance (not in front of other people at least). Good music is be listened to and appreciated on a constant loop, until every lyric, note and cadence is memorised. And then you write a two thousand word article about what you’ve heard (sarcasm).

‘The Chemical Wedding’ is about something. It’s about a lot of things. Dickinson initially set out to make an album about alchemy and transformation, but found that after the first few songs he had blown himself out. And then he turned to the poetry of William Blake. The album takes its title from ‘The Chymical Wedding’, a seventeenth century alchemical text, but it is Blake that lies at its core. I used the planned writing of this article as an excuse to go and read Blake’s works in their entirety.

I had read a lot of Blake in my youth, most of it from earlier works like ‘Songs of Innocence and Experience’ and ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’. Yet it his longer, prophetic works that inform much of The Chemical Wedding: Songs with titles like ‘The Book of Thel’ and ‘The Gates of Urizen’, as well as spoken passages from ‘Milton’ as voiced by Arthur Brown (of The Crazy World of Arthur Brown fame).

I must say that when I first set out to read ‘The Book of Thel’ and ‘The First Book of Urizen’, I was confused. They seemed to bear no relation to the songs that bore their names. Blake’s Book of Thel is about a young girl drifting around a garden (possibly the Garden of Eden) and conversing with anthropomorphised forms of nature; the lily, the worm, the cloud. Dickinson’s Book of Thel is about human sacrifice. Was I missing something?

Then I found an old interview with Bruce on YouTube, broadcast on ITV around the time the album had been released. He talks about, ‘trying to borrow Blake’s spectacles’; that ‘the album had a mentor’, with three or four new songs immediately pouring out of him upon reading Blake’s works. The album had entered existence as a meditation on alchemy and transformation, but through Blake the lyrics had taken on the additional themes of renewal and rebirth. Listening to the interview,

the scales fell from my eyes.

Blake’s prophetic works are reimaginings of contemporary events and biblical tropes. ‘America: A Prophecy’ and ‘Europe: A Prophecy’ retell the recent American and French Revolutions, with their generals and kings transposed by Blake’s own mythical forms, Orc, Albion, Enitharmon: Giants of antiquity that sleep for millennia and do battle from across oceans. In ‘The First Book of Urizen’, ‘The Book of Ahania’, ‘The Song of Los’, through to Blake’s last epic poems, Creation itself is replayed, bearing little relation to the original biblical texts. Blake was constantly defining and redefining his own mythology, drifting further and further from the sense of his initial prophecies. Urizen as found in ‘Milton’ bears little relation to the ‘self-closed, all repelling’ shadowy figure of The First Book.

Taking all this into consideration, it is of course appropriate for Dickinson to have borrowed Blake’s spectacles, appropriating the names of Thel and Urizen and remoulding them in his own image in exactly the same way as Blake had done. Bruce’s own Book of Thel even contains lines borrowed from ‘Macbeth’ (‘By the pricking of my thumbs, Something wicked this way comes.’). But then, if any artist plundered the past for ore with which to shape his plays, it was Shakespeare.

Yet even as Bruce borrows from Blake, so he returns the favour in kind in that eternal cycle of renewal and rebirth. On ‘Jerusalem’, Dickinson takes the words of Blake’s most famous work and expands upon them. Blake provides the verses: Bruce adds chorus and refrain.

I’ve always had a problem with ‘Jerusalem’. It’s its jingoistic associations, its dreary appropriation by the Church of England, its arrogant assumption that Jesus had somehow made a pilgrimage to our ‘green and pleasant land’. Whenever I hear spoken or sung its series of rhetorical questions, I feel compelled to offer my own commentary:

Blake: And did those feet in ancient time, Walk upon England's mountains green?

Me: No.
Blake: And was the holy Lamb of God, On England’s pleasant pastures seen?

Me: No. No he wasn’t.

And so on.

Los, aka Blake

And yet once you start reading Blake (and around Blake), a number of things become readily apparent. For a start, the poem isn’t called ‘Jerusalem’. The words commonly known as ‘Jerusalem’ actually form part of a short preface to the longer poem, ‘Milton’. This preface is written in part prose, part verse, a classical form to be found in the works of Seneca, Dante’s ‘Vita Nuova’, and even ‘The Chymical Wedding’.

Secondly, Blake had a habit of writing and printing prefaces to his illuminated works, that he would then discard at a later date. ‘Milton’ is no exception. Only two extant copies exist of this preface and it is therefore ironic that perhaps Blake’s most famous lines were regarded so cheaply by the artist himself. It is also ironic that ‘Jerusalem’ is such a popular hymn in the Anglican church, given that Blake was a member of dissenting religious sect which despised the priesthood and its substitution of virtue for pomp and privilege. Moreover, Blake was a republican (as were many of his contemporary poets), with ‘America’ and ‘Europe’ depicting the rebel angels as heroic in the face of the tyrant Albion. Think about that the next time you see a member of the aristocracy singing about not ceasing from Mental Fight, and allow yourself a smile.

Also, once you start reading the actual ‘Jerusalem’ (‘Jerusalem, Emanation of the Giant Albion’, Blake’s longest completed work), you realise that Blake isn’t talking about Jerusalem as an actual place existing in time and space. Blake experienced visions (suffered, some might say) throughout his entire life and claimed to regularly converse with angels. His poetry and artwork are the manifestations of these visions. Jerusalem is not England, it is not even London. It is wherever Blake walked, hence why the centre of the universe in his final epic is South Molton Street, the address where he spent many of his remaining years.

The issues that I had with the poem commonly known as ‘Jerusalem’ meant that for years it was the one track on ‘The Chemical Wedding’ that I used to skip. Knowledge brings tolerance and with a greater understanding of it lyrics, ‘Jerusalem’ regains its visionary charm (it is certainly less offensive than some of the passages in the actual ‘Jerusalem’, like where Blake addresses the Jews: ‘Take up the cross, O Israel, and follow Jesus’). Dickinson’s version reinvigorates the sterility of the hymn and gives it back its energy. Not only do I leave ‘Jerusalem’ playing these days, I’ll even find myself singing along. There’s progress.

I suspect that Blake would have been appalled by some of the other themes on ‘The Chemical Wedding’. In ‘Trumpets of Jericho’ for instance, the trumpets sound, but ‘still the walls remain’. Although in true Blakean style, the lyrics have little else to do with the Joshua of the Old Testament (and archaeology informs us that Jericho had no walls). The song also references the opening lines of Jean-Jacque Rousseau’s ‘The Social Contract’: ‘Man is born forever free, but is everywhere in chains’. I wonder if Bruce realises that despite being the father of the French Revolution, Blake came to condemn Rousseau along with Voltaire and Newton for their trust in reason above belief (“Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau: Mock on, mock on: ‘tis all in vain! You throw the sand against the wind, And the wind blows it back again”).

Newton, scheming, face turned from God

However, it takes more than a decent set of lyrics to make a great album. What makes ‘The Chemical Wedding’ the epitome of heavy metal isn’t just its morality plays or its references to Satan; it’s the apocalyptic openings of its songs, the duelling guitar solos, the contrasts in Dickinson’s voice between the melodic and the air-raid siren. It has the same grinding rhythms of any metal album. The same bass runs and drum fills. It can also be accused of being as clichéd as any metal album. And yes, there are clichés here too, but you know what? There’s nothing wrong with a good cliché. I’m not claiming ‘The Chemical Wedding’ as the greatest album ever made. If I want to listen to musical perfection, I also have Johan Sebastian Bach in my collection and he pisses all over every other composer in recorded time. Yet if you want to know what heavy metal music is about, with all of its energy, exuberance and excess, you could do much worse than to start with ‘The Chemical Wedding’.

‘The Chemical Wedding’ may not be the greatest album ever recorded, but in the same way that Alice in Chains’ album, ‘Dirt’, defines everything that the word ‘grunge’ conjures up for me, so ‘The Chemical Wedding’ represents everything that I hear when I think of heavy metal (right down to the Spinal Tap-esque mandolins on ‘Jerusalem’). It is metal’s epitome and its apotheosis. What elevates mere entertainment to the level of art is its ability to open the doors of perception to new experiences. If you haven’t read Blake before, Bruce offers you a way inside the troubled mind of genius. Blake wasn’t perfect, but he was brilliant. As with Blake, so ‘The Chemical Wedding’.

Bruce Dickinson interview on 'Faith and Music'
Harry Potter and that there Stewart Lee

Gylypso Weekend

2011-06-04T12:26:00.003+01:00

“The accordion and steel drum.” Rich said. “Not two instruments you naturally associate with each other. I’m not sure how this is going to work.” I didn’t either, but given that this was Helen, we agreed that it just would.

Friday night in Mello Mello, Slater Street; a little bit of New Orleans transported to the heart of Liverpool. Helen had brought me here once before in the daytime. Now though, herbal tea and cake have been replaced with bottles of Sol and Staropramen. The joint is a long, narrow bar with seemingly only one entrance. To reach the stage area we have to walk halfway up the street, enter, then walk all the way back, despite there being a door at the bottom corner, blocked off by the stage. I hate having to do the same thing twice.

Yesterday was Rich’s birthday and he and Caroline are down from Sunderland for the weekend. Ruth is out with mates, but is coming to join us later. Jez, Helen’s new squeeze, is also due to pop along later. They’ve been together three weeks today and in deference to the absent John (Sensei to windup merchants everywhere), I make Rich and Caroline promise me that at some point they will both say to Jez, “I understand that congratulations are in order.” “Please,” I implore them, “if you won’t do it for me, do it for John.” I haven’t seen John in a year, but he is still a bad influence on me. There’s a plastic banner in the window of a house across from mine that declares, ‘It’s a girl!’. I’m having to steal myself from knocking on and saying, “So go on then. What did she have?”

We are here for a new art exhibit that the cafe is displaying. It’s opening night and ‘The Helen Maher Ensemble’ have been asked to perform a forty minute set. Helen’s guitarist, John, had given us lift down from her pad up by Lark Lane. Walking in, each carrying a piece of musical equipment, I am immediately struck by the phrase, Scouse Orleans. At a worn looking upright sits a guy who I instantly decide came to Liverpool to study (probably music) and has been here ever since. He is apparently Jez’s flatmate, but it’s the guy accompanying him that catches my attention and triggers ‘Scouse Orleans’ in my mind. If you saw him on the street you wouldn’t differentiate him from half the men you witness in these parts: bull neck, bald head, shell suit and black trainers. Yet you would be dead wrong, because what separates him from the herd is the trumpet he blows, the colour of battered silver. In the last year I have slowly started to approximate a jazz aficionado and I recognise much of what he plays as stuff I have heard Miles Davis perform. I couldn’t tell you what any of the songs are called, but I do remember a classic skit from The Fast Show:

Louis Balfour: What are you going to play for us today, Jackson?
Jackson Jeffrey Jackson: Trumpet.
Louis Balfour: No, er, what tune?
Jackson Jeffrey Jackson: Tune? This' jazz!

And as Richard Feynman’s father said to him as a boy, “You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird.” So I guess the name of a tune is largely unimportant (which is probably why my team always does so terribly during the music round of the Cornerhouse Quiz every Monday night). All I know is that the me of even a decade ago would be appalled at the thought of actively listening to jazz. Jazz used to make me physically ill. The me of the here and now however is very much in love.

Most of the art on display, I have to say, leaves me cold. Most of it looks like upturned car bonnets stuck to the walls and asides from a sign reading, ‘God Slave the Queen’ (which strikes me a glib), most of the rest is instantly forgettable. The one piece that I like is a series of butterflies cut out of what look like wallpaper designs of various sizes, stuck to the wall. They look like they belong here anyway.

Besides, there are far more interesting things to observe here. Like the faux entrance behind the stage. It’s built in to a hollow cylinder and the glass front has ‘open’ written on it in reverse. A palette sits atop of it, its slats painted in red and black stripes, which might be part of the exhibit (actually, is the entrance itself an exhibit? I wonder). The stage is a foot off the ground and cluttered, with a stepladder propped up at the back (next to the fire alarm). The walls are mainly a pale yellow (fooling me into thinking that the place is called Mellow Yellow), and the lighting from the mini-chandeliers is, well, mellow.

Oh, and then there are the toilets, which are like something out of a David Lynch movie. You go down several flights of stairs to the basement and into a room of peeling walls, smelling of stale piss. One of the cubicles is taped off, with a sign saying, “This toilet is completely out of order.” I wonder what it did. But it’s the mirror that gives rise to the feeling a being in a Lynch movie. It’s bronze and ornate and looks completely out of place in these otherwise grotty surroundings. I half expect to see the ghost of Dennis Hopper looming out from behind the taped off cubicle to tell me that I’m completely out of order. I more or less flee back upstairs and send Rich down to have a look.

The place was rammed as we arrived and even though we manage to get a table right next to the stage, there aren’t enough chairs and half of us end up perched on the end of the stage. Then Ruth arrives, sat next to me on the edge of a speaker, and while we have plenty to chat about, as always, I figure that I get to see a lot more of her than Rich or Caroline do and I give up my seat so that they can catch up. Sometimes, just sometimes, I can be quite generous and thoughtful.

And then, finally, time for the gig. There seemed to be some problem with the P.A. that required a lot of fiddling, because the band seemed to start much later than anticipated. It’s also supposed to be a three piece, with Helen and John joined by Paul on double bass. But in a classic example of a phenomenon known as, “The Helen Maher Effect*, she has also drafted in steel drum player, Clifton, at the last moment, prompting Rich to ask, “I’m not sure how this is going to work.” But of course it did and in a single evening a new musical form was born. ‘Gylypso Jazz’ me and Rich name it, after a couple of abortive attempts to find the suitable phrase. I love the way that Helen conducts the soloists with barely a tilt of her head and the way that Paul grins and laughs throughout, thoroughly enjoying himself. I thought that jazz bassists were supposed to be solemn, brooding figures, but I guess I’ve been influenced by Miles’s description of Charles Mingus (‘Mingus Ah Um’, what an album!).

The gig finishes and the throng thins out and by the time Jez makes an appearance, there are more than enough chairs for everybody. Well he’s a musician and I love music and my current obsession is P J Harvey’s new album, ‘Let England Shake’, which even though it’s only March I have already declared album of the year. It’s just that good. No, not good, an absolute masterpiece. Jez has heard it once, but agrees and from there we quickly hit it off (Helen later telling me that talking about P J was inspired). And before long it’s 2am and Jez heads home (Ruth already having left) and me, Helen, Rick and Caroline bundle into the back of a black cab bound for Aigburth.

John Mayall’s ‘Empty Rooms’ plays as we sit around, chatting, head’s nodding, and before long there is a splintering into three and a traipsing to Slumberland. ‘The Now Show’ plays on Helen’s Mac in the back bedroom/study as I drift to sleep.

***

I first came to this place six months ago, shortly after Helen moved in. The second I laid eyes on it, a converted coach house nestling behind a block of Georgian houses, I thought to myself: Yup, she’s not moving from here anytime soon. It is very Helen. In ‘A Woman of Conviction’, I constructed for her fictional self, Helen Marr, a Dutch barge, complete with antique furniture and oriental furnishings. Curse you reality, you have outdone me.

You enter from the side of the flats backing on to the coach house, through a wicker gate and into a garden area too small to be of any use to anyone but the pixies. Herbs grow out of pots. Enough shrubs and creeping plants fill the periphery of the short path to make it seem as if you’re entering Alice’s wonderland, half expecting to find yourself much taller by the time you reach the two perpendicular doors at the opposite end. Both black, one leads out to the back alley, the other contains the stairs up to the flat proper.

The stairs bring you to another door, which opens into the living room. As a writer, you become obsessed by small details and minutiae. There is a Yale lock to this door that you can turn by ninety degrees and it locks in place without having to press down the usual button switch. Rich and Caroline state at me like I’m mad when I try to explain the genius of this, not helped by my having been drinking and smoking, nor by the fact that the bloody thing experiences what kids today call an epic fail when I try to demonstrate.

Details, details, details. Each of the alley-facing windows are made up of five glass slats, slid into place in upward steps. The windows run the length of the corridor which travels from living room to kitchen, passing doors to the main bedroom, bathroom and study on its way. The walnut piano that Helen, her dad and me went to pick up from Crosby one Sunday afternoon (Helen playing it in the back of the transit all the way home) sits in one corner of the living room, next to a sideboard of modern speakers and old fashioned phonograph. Fights threaten to break out over the hogging of the paired down rocking chair. It’s too damm relaxing and too much fun. The sofa bed that forms out of the L shaped sofa provides one of the most undisturbed sleeps I have ever had. Once you clear the sofa of the infestation of cushions that breed wherever women nest, you discover that it is the colour of olive green.

Caroline has noticed that the flat has no TV. For me, this is such a familiar feature of a visit to Helen’s, that I barely notice it anymore. Aside a couple of shared houses, I can’t remember Helen owning a TV. It’s one of the many excellent reasons for paying a visit. I’m not a hippy, I don’t believe in ‘energy’, except as a physical concept (kinetic, potential, chemical etc), but coming here is a break from the norm and a retreat from the stresses of modern life.

***

To paraphrase Michael Palin, if it’s midday on a Saturday in Liverpool, then it must be time for the Albert Dock. It’s a running joke within the family. Whenever we used to visit the Scouse branch of the family as kids, we always ended up at the Albert Dock. Even as adults, we come here of our own free volition, despite no one seeming to have noticed that aside from the myriad cafes and restaurants and the souvenir shops selling tat (and not even Liverpool specific tat either), there really is little to do here. Oh no wait, there’s the Maritime Museum, which as children of ex-naval parents is another recurring joke. Dad was obsessed with ship modelling and as kids we spent half our lives being dragged around modelling exhibitions. So of course it is outside the Maritime Museum that we are to meet mum.

Likesay, there not much to do, certainly not enough to fill an entire afternoon, and by the time we’ve been around the Maritime and Slavery Museums and looked in some tat shops and taken tea on three separate occasions in three separate places, it’s a matter of killing time. Helen is at Clown College for the day (“That advertisement had absolutely no effect on me whatsoever.”), but meeting us for dinner at Kimo’s with Ray, Ruth and Paul. So we take a spin in the big wheel. Ferris Wheels always have the power to strike acrophobia (not vertigo) into the mind of even the most rational. I can stand on the edge of a cliff face and feel nothing. Stick me in a glass box, spinning at an inconsistent speed in a variable wind and I feel deeply uncomfortable. All four of us feel it. I think it’s the lack of control. At the edge of a cliff you are reliant on your own sense of balance, feet firmly planted in the ground. Not here though.

Still, you get three spins and the views of the three graces and the Mersey are fantastic. I can’t help but look out over the river and think of the A.L.P. sailing out at the end of 'A Woman of Conviction'. Bring the ship back Andy. I want a turn now.

Eventually boredom overwhelms us and we drift up through Liverpool One (a soulless complex imposed upon a city with such character and energy) and over to Mount Pleasant, arriving at Kimo’s much too early. The restaurant only accepts cash, so we have to retrace our steps to find a cash machine. We find one back in the town, next to the NHS walk in centre which I imagine will be doing a roaring trade in a few hours from now.

I like Kimo’s. It’s cheap and cheerful, but has a certain charm, with ample space and a cool interior that’s a relief after spending most of the day in the sun. The food and the furnishings are Middle Eastern in nature and you can picture the smoking of hookahs going on in here before the smoking ban was indiscriminately imposed on all public establishments. My culinary tastes have expanded over the last few years, but this afternoon all I want a burger and chips and something soft in the way of liquid refreshment. We end up sitting at a long table, four either side, a business meeting of the family Maher, bubbles of conversation that expand and merge and pop and form new bubbles, before the obligatory posing for photographs. The bill is settled, the meeting adjourned and we head out into the evening air.

There’s eight of us and only mum has come in by car. Me, Rich and Caroline have Saveaways, so we decide to catch the bus, while everyone else travels back in the car. Of course, we wait an age for a bus and when one does eventually arrive, it’s a Stagecoach and they do their own version of the Saveaway (Stagecoach: Taking you home, while we take the piss). I can’t be bothered waiting any longer so I just pay us on before any one has time to object. Everyone else has to walk back to Albert Dock first, but we’ve got the keys and still need to pick up booze. There’s only so much time to waste.

***

Later. The parents have taken tea and taken their leave. Only the kids remain. Wine has been imbibed and pipes consumed (an entirely different sort of tea). Jez is here, as is Sarah, Helen’s mate from the flats and the allotment. Me and Rich take turns as DJ, moving from Rodrigo y Gabriella, to the Crow Soundtrack and, eventually, to P J Harvey. It’s a mellow end after a full couple of days.

Sunday lunch is taken at the Moon and Pea, after a brief look around the shops on Lark Lane. I revert to my usual gleeful state outside the second hand bookshop and come away from it with works by Virginia Woolf, Flann O’Brien, Zola and Pullman. The Pea is as busy as ever (and there’s five of us to accommodate), but we get a table eventually, and after a gentle stroll in the aid of digestion, it’s time for Ruth to walk back to her place on the opposite side of Princes Park and for Rich and Caroline to start the drive home. I wave them off with Helen and after a brief chat about the enduring ghosts of relationships past, it’s time that I too was making a move. I am cat/chicken sitting at Mike’s for the week and it’s going to take two buses and two trains to get back. I have a long journey ahead of me...

***

It takes three hours and when I return, I discover that the front door has been deadlocked with a key I don’t have. Rick has been up to check on the chooks and assumes I hold copies of all the keys. I try ringing him, but City have been playing and he’s in the pub and quite drunk. Me and a neighbour have to smash a pane of glass in the backdoor to get in. It’s a frustrating end to an enjoyable weekend, but just one of those things.

*A much better band name IMO, it has something of ‘Jazz Club’ about it

And Another Thing... Never Say Never Again

2011-06-02T00:56:00.014+01:00

"No wonder the country's fallen apart, no one says 'forsooth' anymore."

Mark Steel

I love the English language. It is probably the most versatile language in the world. And not because it is the language that I speak, but because it is the convergence of a nexus of older languages (Saxon, French, Greek and Latin), liberally sprinkled with myriad words from other languages (Sanskrit, Arabic, Urdu, German, Yiddish, Spanish etc) to swell its vocabulary to well over a million words. It is elastic and it is constantly evolving. The English of Shakespeare is different to that of Chaucer; the English of Mary Shelley different to that of Alice Walker. It had myriad dialects and variations, with a kaleidoscope of shades of meaning. The idiom of Jane Austin is drastically removed from the slang spoken in African-American ghettos, yet they remain essentially the same language.

English is also a rare example of a working class victory, with the dialect of the serfs having usurped the French spoken in the forts of knights and kings, absorbing and overpowering it in the crucible of the Medieval marketplace. And even after China becomes the dominant economic force in the world, English will probably survive in one form or another (being the language of international business), as a mishmash of English and Chinese. It started life as Anglish and will probably end up as Panglish.

That said, I believe that there are certain words that should be given special protection and only used in certain circumstances. The words ‘genius’ and ‘tragedy’ are two examples. The constant need of journalists in the English speaking world to sensationalise every trivial event has come to mean that these words are far too often abused. Lionel Messi, for example, is certainly a very talented footballer, but he is not a genius. Michelangelo was a genius and no matter how much spin Messi may be able to generate on a football using boots specially designed for that one purpose, at the end of the day all he’s done is score a goal. If you’re impressed by that, go to the Accademia in Florence and take a look at Michelangelo’s David: It’ll blow your fucking mind.

And this isn’t snobbery either. I’d say Newton was a genius, but not Einstein; James Joyce, but not Shakespeare. I can’t exactly define why I think this, but I think that it has something to do with Newton and Joyce having a fine grasp of complex ideas, while Einstein and Shakespeare seem to have guessed and hoped for the best. I suppose that I associate genius with the action of having a grasp of what it is that you are doing, rather than taking a leap of faith. William Blake attacked men like Newton for trusting to reason rather than belief, yet to me reason is what makes Newton a true genius. However, this theory is open to debate (like any good theory) and I’m not entirely convinced by the weight of my own argument. Einstein and Shakespeare are still godlike to me. And I’d always considered Bob Dylan to be a genius, but given that he has always claimed that he has no idea where his lyrics come from, I have just rendered him ineligible for consideration.

The word tragedy is believed to come from ‘tragus’, the Ancient Greek word for goat. Tragic plays developed from songs composed during festivals to the god Dionysus, when goats were sacrificed as an offering to the god of wine, theatre and fertility (amongst his other patronages). From these songs came the great tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides, where the tragic hero’s fate is already sealed by the gods long before he was born. The classic tragic hero of course is Oedipus.

Two and a half thousand years later and now every time some teenager dies of a drug overdose or a soldier is killed by an IED in Afghanistan, it is referred to a tragedy. As sad as these events are, they are not tragedies, but statistical probabilities. We should perhaps not refer to them in such cold and unemotional language as ‘statistical probabilities’, but to resort to the opposite extreme is just as ludicrous. Unless it was prophesised by a soothsayer that such deaths would occur and the victim’s parents had done everything in their power to send the victim away at birth and prevent the event from coming to pass, then they are not tragedies. If you want to read a true modern tragedy, read Donna Tartt's 'The Secret History', where the victim's fate is declared during the novel's first sentence.

It barely needs to be said that when our forces kill civilians during drone attacks, these deaths are put down to ‘human error’, or, as George Bush I said of the ‘accidental’ bombing of an Iraqi fallout shelter filled with woman and children during the First Gulf War, a ‘PR disaster’. We don’t mean to kill civilians and so no one should make a fuss when we do, as if carelessness is any less a crime than directed terrorism. By application of the word ‘tragedy’ to the deaths of our own troops, we can gloss over the very real truth that their lives are worth as little to the architects of the War on Terror as the hundreds of thousands of ‘non-combatants’ that have been killed by ‘our’ side.

(As an aside, we should always be suspicious of words like ‘non-combatant’. They are the Orwellian equivalent of phrases like, ‘Don’t think of an apple’. The first thing one does is think of an apple because the clause, ‘Don’t think of an apple’, contains the sub-clause, ‘Think of an apple’. Similarly, ‘non-combatant’ contains the sub-clause, ‘combatant’, immediately planting doubt in the reader’s mind as to just how non-combatant these so-called ‘non-combatants’ are. Politicians are practised distorters of the English language and should be guarded against at all times. Our first defence against their dissemination should be simply to turn them off and judge them purely in terms of what they do, not what they say. Our second line of defence is to always to ask the question, ‘What are you really up to?’.)

However, the word that is misused by more people than any other, the one that really gets my tragus, is ‘never’. I hear it being abused in one form or another on a weekly, if not daily, basis, in some form as thus: “I’ve never had chips since last week.” It makes me want to scream: “Well then you have had chips! LAST WEEK FOR A START!!!” ‘Never’ is an adverb meaning at no point in the past and at no point in the future and is in fact a contraction of the adverbial phrase, ‘not ever’. If you say, “I’ve never been to Rome before” while you’re stood ouside the Coliseum, that’s just plain wrong. However, if you say, “He always wanted to see Rome, but he never got the chance” over the grave of your recently deceased father, well that is correct (but not indicative of a tragedy).

I’m as guilty of misusing ‘never’ as many other people, but I’m trying to consciously replace it with ‘haven’t’ or ‘hadn’t’ or some other appropriate word or phrase. There is a certain laziness creeping into our language, with verbs like ‘do’ and ‘got’ replacing more descriptive phrases, even among the academic community. Sentences like, ‘We’ve made a series of calculations’ are being pushed out by more simplistic phrases like, ‘We did the sums’, as if we’re all still in primary school. The shades of meaning in our language are being lost in favour of extremes. What will we do when a true genius comes along or a true tragedy takes place? How will we be able to convey the state of something not ever having taken place when we have disabused our once noble language of all meaning? And does anyone else care?

Like the Newspeak of Orwell’s ‘Nineteen Eighty-four’, the loss of descriptive language robs us of the ability to express complex ideas and emotions, which is all the more essential as we become isolated from each other through the loss of common experience. Technology was meant to bring the like minded together and yet it seems more and more to me that its real purpose is to divide and to subdue. All the more reason to protect from cultural erosion the keystones to effective communication.

Best Things Ever #13

2011-05-19T22:14:00.009+01:00

The Collings and Herrin Podcast

“Opposition is true friendship.”

William Blake

Over the last couple of years, podcasts have come to represent my main source of audio-visual entertainment. There are many fine examples of this relatively new form of media, but my personal favourite is the Collings and Herrin Podcast.

What is Collings and Herrin? Well, imagine an anthropology experiment gone horribly, horribly wrong. Or a hostage situation where the only survivor is desperately trying to appease his captor, who is all the time waving a gun around and calling his captive a fucking idiot. Imagine all that and you have some sense of the Collings and Herrin Podcast at its most gleefully vitriolic and childish. It is all done for comic effect and works brilliantly, regularly rendering me helpless with laughter. It is not for the faint hearted or the easily offended, but for a small band of us in the know the sight of a new episode downloading to iTunes is the highlight of the week. Which probably speaks as much about our sad little lives as it does the quality of the show, but bear with me.

The format is simple: Stand up comedian Richard Herring sits in his attic with the broadcaster and film editor of the Radio Times, Andrew Collins, and they talk, with no script and a minimal amount of planning, for roughly an hour about everything and nothing and then publish the results as an audio file, free to download later that day. And that’s it.

So what’s all the fuss about? Well, partly it’s their dedication to the project. While other podcasters have fallen by the wayside due to inertia or working commitments, the Collings and Herrin Podcast has been broadcast weekly, virtually uninterrupted, for over three years. Even when one or both of them is unavailable one week (usually due to Richard being on tour), they have recorded extra episodes to fill the gap. Also, at recent Edinburgh Festival’s they have performed increasingly more and more live episodes, last year doing a total of ten over a two week period. That’s the kind of obsession I can get behind.

There’s more. I’ve been thinking about dedicating one of these appreciation pieces to Collings and Herrin for some time and so as first step I went back and listened to the entire run from the beginning. My day job involves writing reports for an Ombudsman. It’s the kind of thing I can do in my sleep and listening to Herrin berate Collings for his belief in homeopathy broke up the day. Having been back through the entire run, I would firstly advise new listeners to stick with it. The initial half a dozen episodes are a little ropey, with some sound issues, as well as the usual problems that any new show has as it beds in and tries to find its feet. Also, it takes some time for Richard Herring’s alter ego, Richard Herrin, to emerge, with his unerring ability to say the most inappropriate thing at the most inappropriate time. However (and I’m sure Andrew won’t thank me for saying this), by the time Herrin first calls Collings mum, ‘a fucking idiot’, you realise that you are listening to something rather special.

You see, the role of the true comedian is to exist on the fringes of society, testing its limits and advancing its boundaries. The best comedians, from Linda Smith to Jerry Sadowitz, have always been the ones that serve as an observer, looking from the outside in. Of course best doesn’t necessarily mean most successful and in many ways mainstream acceptance is the death of comedic creativity (I’d take Daniel Kitson and Simon Munnery over a post-Thatcher Ben Elton any day). A truly great comedian doesn’t just go on stage and make glib statements like, ‘Hey, have you ever noticed X? Isn’t it funny when that happens and aren’t I hilarious for noticing the same thing as you and saying it out loud?’ A truly great comedian stands on stage and says, ‘Hey, have you ever noticed X? Isn’t the world insane? We should do something about that. In the meantime, let’s laugh about it and the world might seem a little brighter’. Success doesn’t always kill good comedy. Yet when you compare the rhythmic and lyrical genius of just about any classic Bill Hicks routine to the sight of Peter Kay wallowing in the stagnant, fetid stench of his own shit observations, you see that the correlation generally holds true.

By extension, Richard Herring is one of the finest and hard working comedians currently on the circuit. If you’ve ever seen one of his shows, you will have seen a man who through over twenty years of performing is Hicksian in his timing and ease with an audience. In fact, along with his former comedy partner, Stewart Lee, he embodies the true ethos of Hicks’s comedy. And in the guise of his podcast alter ego, Herring channels the spirit of Bill’s own alter ego, Pan the Goat Boy, with his continual pleading to Andrew to let him bum him, fantasies of fucking Jesus in the stigmata (and being cock slapped by the selfsame Messiah), and arbitrarily deciding which side is right in most of today's major world conflicts. It doesn’t always make for comfortable listening and if you allow yourself to be offended by it, you will be without any difficulty. Richard says that he doesn’t often listen back to the recordings, preferring them to exist in the moment. It’s also the best way to listen: Make a drink, give the moral centres of your brain an hour off, and just go with it. And as you howl with laughter, unburden yourself of some of the cultural baggage which restricts the ability to form an objective assessment of the world. Laughter is to fear as reason is to knee jerk reaction.

Yet it takes two to make a successful partnership and while Andrew may often play Herrin’s straight man, feeding him stories and taking the brunt of a tirade issued in response to something he has said or done, Collins is also a very funny man in his own right. His Free Fringe show, ‘Secret Dancing’, is bloody good and it is a pity that Andrew has said that it will be his one and only stand up show, because for a first effort it is exceptional (the DVD is available at www.gofasterstripe.com, as are all of Richard Herring’s recent shows, as well as one-off Collings and Herrin recordings). Andrew is a regular co-writer with Lee Mack on his acclaimed BBC1 sitcom, 'Not Going Out', and you will often find during live podcasts that it is something Collings has said that gets the biggest laugh (audiences are also prone to booing him for some mildly offensive thing he has said, one of the podcast’s many running jokes). There are no passengers here.

And there is still more, because I was only half joking when I described the podcast as an anthropology experiment gone wrong. It is also a chronicle of our times. Since it started, we have seen the Cumbrian shootings and the death of Michael Jackson; the first hung parliament in a generation and the days of stalemate that followed. We have also seen the BNP gain seats in Europe and their leader appear on the most anticipated edition of ‘Question Time’ since its inception. And each of these events has been given the Collings and Herrin treatment. In fact, it’s amazing to listen back to the entire run and hear the idea for Herring’s anti-fascist show, ‘Hitler Moustache’, almost spontaneously appear during one episode. The idea of growing a Hitler moustache is muted by Richard one week and by the following week it has became the basis for his new Edinburgh show.

But there is also the meta-experiment, because the Collins and Herring Podcast is a record of itself: A small internet community, gathered around one central focus, self-funded, profile-raising and autonomous. But maybe that’s just me, because small internet communities fascinate me, as they seem a good model for the future, with more people likely to become self-employed, working from home (in a return to the pre-industrial model) via the internet. And as the office is worker is decamped and sent home, these small internet communities may just take on greater social significance.

You get some idea of that significance when you consider the podcast’s own brief and abstract chronicle, from its early beginnings, reviewing the Friday papers, mocking John Gaunt’s right wing comments in The Sun (and attracting his attention), to tales of the Mitford Sisters and the theft of an iPhone. A rhino-not-for-sale sign has not been for sale, Andrew has abandoned his Sisyphean attempt to remove graffiti from the toilets in the British Library, and Richard has offered to call any of your friends cunts for a small donation. It has even seen one dedicated fan, Tina Wiseman, die at a tragically young age and I think it is a testament to the podcast that her death affected so many people at the time, even those of us who never met her. Because the real tale of the first hundred and eighty odd episodes of the Collings and Herrin Podcast is the birth and evolution of a friendship. Two men who had been colleagues in the past, became partners through necessity and friends through opposition. And above all else it is the development and the transformation of that friendship, as heard over an hour a week, which continues to fascinate me.

If you’ve been affected or offended by anything in this article, then the Collings and Herrin Podcast probably isn’t for you. Don’t worry about it, the world is an enormous place and there are plenty of other spaces to hang out. Yet its improvisational and iconoclastic style are endearing enough for a virtual community, a model village for the future, to have sprung up around it. Come on in, if you dare.

http://www.comedy.co.uk/podcasts/collingsherrin/

Why I'm Giving Up Football

2011-05-15T21:37:00.003+01:00

In the last few hours I've come to the decision that I am giving up watching and being generally interested in football. It’s not that I don’t enjoy football, I do, and Liverpool have a bright future under Kenny Dalglish, but it’s what football has come to represent that has been bothering me for some time, probably ever since last year’s World Cup. The South African World Cup was meant to offer some hope and be a new start for a nation sorely treated by the west. Instead, it ended up being about a swarm of corporate locusts flying in, landing, stripping an already poor country (thanks to the IMF and World Bank’s involvement) of even more money, before fucking off to relieve the next recession hit country of its assets. A five mile exclusion zone was placed around each stadium, preventing street vendors from getting in on the act, while Budweiser and Coca Cola made a fortune. And that, in a nutshell (yes, I am the nut), disgusts me.

I forget who said that when the painter paints what the public demands, it’s no longer art, but business. And football, indeed sport in general, is no longer sport, it is about selling respectability to the likes of McDonalds and Carling, which is like BP sponsoring Greenpeace. I thought that I could assuage the guilt I feel by not actually contributing anything to the business. I watch most games on the internet, the only two games I’ve been to in my life (both last season) were with tickets bought by other people. I own one scarf, and that’s it. But it’s not good enough and no matter how I try to kid myself that the last few Liverpool games have been great for the club and city, the nagging of my conscious is still there.

This week Steve McManaman and Robbie Fowler, along with Maradona and some other has been footballers, travelled to Chechnya to play an exhibition match for the Russian backed warlord who runs the country (a particularly nasty fucker). Kadyrov himself played and by all accounts they let him win. This is the final straw for me. I cannot continue to be a fan of a sport where that level of idiocy and lack of self awareness is an everyday occurrence. Presumably their next stop will be Burma or Syria.

Yet it’s more than that. You see, the reason why I own no shirts or merchandise is that I have desire to belong to any nation or race or class or clan generally. ‘I must Create a System, or be enslaved by another man’s, I will not Reason & Compare, my business is to Create’. So says Los in Blake’s Jerusalem (the proper Jerusalem, not the hymn commonly called Jersalem). This weekend I have finished reading The Complete Works of Blake, Volume 2 of Robert Graves’s Greek Myths, and a second reading of Finnegans Wake, probably the most challenging work of fiction ever written. When I finish writing this piece I am going to spend the rest of the night redrafting the second chapter of a novella I am working on. And you what? I’ve achieved all this on my own. I didn’t need an overpaid advertising Whoarding (sic – very Wakean) to act as proxy because I have nothing else in my sad little life to look forward other than liver failure, I did it on my own. Which isn’t to say my life isn’t sad, it is, but I actually like it and I’d actually like to get on and achieve something of my own. No matter what Liverpool do or do not achieve next season, I'm still going to have to get up and go to work in the morning.

I don’t enjoy the rivalry, I don’t enjoy the feelings of dislike to people who follow some different arbitrary bunch of millionaires to the ones that I like. I named myself the Eponymist because I practice my own ideological belief called Eponymism. Eponymism is simply the recognition that we are all unique and so everyone’s core ideology should be likewise unique. That doesn’t mean that you can’t be part of an appreciation society or have similar hobbies to others or like the same films and music as others, but the partisanship and the sectarianism of football makes it more like an organised religion than anything else and I hate organised religion and I can’t continue to take an active (or even passive) interest in football. Football makes you see the world through rose tinted spectacles, claiming the obviously untrue as gospel, which is certainly like every religion ever created. Yet unlike Blake, Reason and the scientific method are of great importance to me and this atavistic tribalism only clouds judgement. It means that I will now have nothing to talk to with most people in the world, but fuck it, if that’s all they’ve got then they’re not worth knowing. I’m not judging anyone who continues to follow football, it’s your life and what you do with it is your own affair. It's just not for me anymore.

Think I’ll still watch cricket though. I can enjoy that without becoming emotionally involved (and it's slow enough to allow reading).

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/11/chechens-flock-team-soccer-stars

6th Epistle to the Foxnewsians

2011-05-07T15:04:00.004+01:00

Dear Foxnewsians,

Now come on, you must have been expecting an epistle from me on this of all weeks. Sorry it’s a bit late, but as we’ve previously seen, I do like to take my time to reflect and consider before speaking, so that I can try and form a cogent argument (after all, I’m not Sarah Palin and a stream of non-sequitors doesn’t really work for me). So grab a coffee, sit back and smoke ‘em if you’ve got them, because this is a gonna be a long one. You should also be aware that the words, ‘hypocritical cunts’ are liable to be used on a number of occasions.

So Osama Bin Laden is dead. My first reaction was this: Yawn. It would be like if Al Qaida had killed Dubya. You’ve killed a figurehead. Well done, well done you. My understanding is that most of the actual masterminds of 9/11 died in the attacks. Bin Laden was the money man. So what? I hear you foam, it’s the same thing. Well then, when the Indonesian Army invaded East Timor in 1975, slaughtering 200,000 people, a quarter of the population of that tiny country, 90% of the funding for the invasion and 90% of the weaponry used came from the USA. The then US ambassador to the UN, Patrick Moynihan, said that he was ‘proud’ that it was his obfuscation that prevented the UN from taking any action to prevent the wholesale slaughter of civilians. Where’s their ‘justice’? Hypocritical cunts.

Now don’t get me wrong, I have no strong feelings about an international terrorist being killed one way or the other, but if I’m going to celebrate the death of a mass murderer then I’d rather save my jubilation for when a major one goes, like Kissinger, Bliar or Cheney. The 9/11 attacks, for all their perceived global significance, were a minor event in terms of casualties. More civilians have been killed by US drone attacks in Pakistan in the last five years than died in the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. Evil and cowardly we call it when it is done to us, yet the majority of those drones are controlled by twenty year old kids, sat behind VDU screens and joysticks in an US Air Force base in Colorado. Kids who have been raised on a diet of Call of Duty and Splinter Cell. If you blow yourself up, you’re a coward. Sit behind a screen 10,000 miles away, slaughtering people who you don’t even have the common decency to look once in the face and you’re a patriot and a hero. Hypocritical cunts.

In fact, I think I’ve worked out the real reason why the US government has decided not to release the photos of Bin Laden’s corpse. It’s because Osama was the millionth person to be killed in our so called War of on Terror and it wouldn’t be great PR to see a photo of his body sporting a party hat, surrounded by balloons and ticker tape. I hope his family gets to keep the car though. Is it still a car you get for being the millionth?

It changes nothing. It won’t end the war in Afghanistan because the war in Afghanistan was never about Al Qaida or 9/11. This is, ultimately, why I don’t believe in a 9/11 conspiracy. I mean apart from it being totally barmy (take one look at how incompetent the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were conducted and tell me these people were capable of carrying out anything so well executed as 9/11) The invasion of Afghanistan had already been announced in the European press in May 2001. If you’re planning a massive conspiracy to kill your own citizens, why announce what you’re going to use that as a justification for in advance? There are even some suggestions that Osama gave the go ahead for 9/11 as a pre-emptive strike in response to the planned invasion. Cart before the horse people, cart before the horse.

If the West had really wanted to destroy Al Qaida following the attacks, it only had to do one thing: nothing. Al Qaida were already a spent force in the Arab world. Their attacks against western tourists in Egypt in the 1990s saw a wave of protest from moderate Muslims denouncing terrorism and Fundamentalist Islam. But then Arabs have always been far more politically savvy then we in the west. The Middle East was a land of moderate Islamic democracies until the end of the Second World War, when western dependence on oil became an addiction and democracies were overthrown and replaced by tyranny and brutality.

The prime example of this is Iran. In 1953, President Mosaddegh renationalises the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now BP), leading to his overthrow by the CIA and British secret services, execution by their agents, and the return of the Shah, who instigates a 26 year program of some of the most bloody repression that the Middle East has ever witnessed. But here’s the punchline: Jimmy Carter makes a state visit to Iran in 1979, telling the Iranian people how proud they must be to have such a benevolent leader. This is the final straw for the brutalised Iranians and Carter’s visit leads to the Islamic Revolution (*drum roll, crash of cymbal*).

International terrorism is entirely the preserve of the west. Not only is the most successful terrorist organisation in history the CIA, but Al Qaida’s effectiveness in recent years is down to us, because you see, we need scary Muslims in the world to justify the continued manufacture and sale of arms. Following the 1929 Wall Street Crash, America only emerged from the Great Depression because of the start of the Second World War. Armament contracts to Britain boosted GDP and this was the reason why America joined the fight, to protect its investments (bombing Japanese Pacific bases just long enough to provoke a reaction). If Britain had lost the war, the US wouldn’t get paid (although the Bush family would have been just fine, they did make their fortune from business done with the Nazi’s after all). Since that time, the American economy has been largely reliant on its arms industry, which in practice has meant fermenting conflict the world over. It’s also why so many democratic governments in the Middle East and South America have been overthrown and replaced with genocidal cunts. A regime living in fear of its own people has far more need of security equipment than one of elected representation.

During the Bush II years, the US government passed the point where it spends more on weapons and defence each year than every other country in the world combined. The internal collapse of the Soviet Regime had presented a real problem for western leaders, because they could no longer blame international terrorism on communist forces. The only other viable ‘evil empire’ to scare US citizens with was Islam, representing 20% of the population of the planet. Ever since the Berlin Wall came down, the west had been looking for an excuse to elevate Islam to Global Enemy No 1 (remember the Oklahoma City bombing? Remember how quick the US media was to blame it on Islamic terrorists, until it became clear that one of their own homegrown fundamentalists was responsible). 9/11 was (for a time) great for US business. $1.13trillion have been spent on our phony war. Hundreds of thousands of innocent people have died, but they’re only poor people, so they don’t count. It’s nothing new. In response to Al Qaida’s 1998 attack on US embassies in Nairobi and Dari Salaam, Bill Clinton bombed what he said was a chemical weapons factory in the Sudan. In fact, it was one of only two pharmaceutical factories in the country. The last figures I heard suggested that 20,000 people died of preventable disease as a result of that terrorist outrage. But again, because they didn’t die in glorious Technicolor on the Breakfast Hour, they don’t count. Bill Clinton, you are also a hypocritical cunt.

Nor is the USA, or even the west, solely guilty of this hypocrisy. There is another continuing war, besides the War on Terror. It is a forgotten war, because it is taking place in Africa and no one gives a fuck about Africa. It is happening in the Republic of Congo. Over four million people have been killed since 1998. It is being perpetuated by arms companies from the USA, UK, France and Russia. Altogether now: Hypocritical cunts.

I didn’t bother to watch the crowds celebrating Bin Laden’s death in New York (if I wanted to watch a bunch a idiots celebrating a non-event, I could’ve watched the Royal Wedding, but I’m not simple), but it was depressingly familiar to see many Americans who, when given the opportunity to demonstrate some humility and decorum, instead opt for the usual flag waving and triumphalism, as if there is anything worth celebrating (it really was like the Royal Wedding). The usual cries of ‘an eye for an eye’ were to be heard, but I am sure that you, Oh Foxnewsians, remember the words of the big JC. We covered it last term. Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? “You have heard that it was said, 'Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth. But I tell you, Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.” Anyone seen this before? Ask me what I think about Christianity and I will give you the same reply as when Ghandi was asked what he thought of western civilization: I think it would be a good idea. If the precepts of Christianity had been applied ten years ago, then Al Qaida would, like its erstwhile figurehead, have disappeared beneath the waves a long time since.

I’m a cynical cunt, of that there is no doubt, and I suspect that the timing of Bin Laden’s assassination has a lot to do with the Arab Spring that is flowering across the Middle East. The protestors have largely been peaceful, despite facing the usual western backed repression, killed with our bullets. Be in no doubt, our leaders are terrified of a moderate Middle East. They have no need of our arms. They have no need of us, period, but we need their oil, and that, however much naive idealists would like to bury their heads in the sand, is what it all comes back to. Killing Bin Laden seems a desperate attempt to re-energise Jihadist groups (the US had known he was in Abbattobad since at least August last year) in order to maintain the transparent lies of the War of Terror. It would appear a futile gesture. The Arab Spring heralds the winter of American Imperialism. The Arab Spring is your Suez Crisis (goggle it).

I know that the ‘lefty-liberals’ in both our countries would love to continue to think the best of Obama, because he’s black and a Democrat and his wife is hot, but it’s time for a reality check. Bill Hicks said that whoever’s President, they get shown footage of the Kennedy Assassination from an angle you’ve never seen before. “And then the screen goes up and the lights come up, and they go to the new President, ‘Any questions?’ ‘Er, just what my agenda is’." However, the US educational and political systems are set up in such a way that you don’t get to be President if you’re likely to challenge the established order. After doing what Bush couldn’t (wouldn’t) do and take out OBL, Obama’s a shoehorn to be re-elected, and he will be as ineffectual in his second term as he has been during his first. And then, like Clinton and Carter, he can spend his days touring the world promoting peace and democracy and everyone will kindly forget that under the laws we established at Nuremberg in order to try the Nazis, he would be guilty of the same crimes of aggression. Just like every US President since Truman. One last time, with feeling: Hypocritical cunts.

You shall hear from anon.

Amused, Manchester.

PS: Two words: Glen Beck. *al la Nelson Muntz * Ha ha!

www.philosophyfootball.com

5th Epistle to the Foxnewsians

2011-05-07T14:59:00.005+01:00

Dear Foxnewsians,

Long time, no sense. Well, unless a sea-change has taken place in the offices of Fox News during the last six months. I freely admit that I finally went and got a life and stopped taking an unhealthy interest in your activities. However, I don’t want you to think that I’ve forgotten about you and so here I am to give you a hearty prod and see if my contrary opinions can’t push y’all to clutch your chests and fall to the ground in a heart-attack-domino-drop. I live both in hope and denial of the superiority of my own dialectic.

Well, I see that Mid-terms are upon us (upon you rather). However, I am nothing if not perverse and so I’m going to ignore that and turn instead to the issue of Mel Gibson.

Mel Gibson (and I think this is an matter on which we can agree some common ground) is an idiot. Mel Gibson denies that the Holocaust took place for the sole reason that his father didn’t believe in it and his father never told him a lie. Kind of like the story of George Washington, only in reverse (and just as fictional). I assume then that Mel Gibson’s father never made a mistake. I assume that Mel Gibson’s father never took the wrong turn off the freeway or backed the wrong team or incorrectly answered a trivia question or got caught in a storm without a jacket or failed to receive a hefty return on an investment. I assume that Mel Gibson’s father never died, but ascended from planet Earth to take up his position as King of the Galaxy, because according to Mel Gibson, his father was infallible and for an infallible being this would seem the only logical end. Either that or Mel Gibson’s father’s son is an idiot.

And I appreciate that to some this may seem disrespectful to the father-son relationship, an accusation which I would deny. I’m sure that Mel loved his father very much. I loved my late father too, but that doesn’t mean that I think he was perfect. He had no sense of direction whatsoever and sadly I have inherited that defect. Then again, I did also inherited his Complete Works of Shakespeare, Complete Works of Oscar Wilde and The Complete Sherlock Holmes Stories, so it’s swings and roundabouts (or whatever the equivalent American phrase is, figure it out for yourself).

Yet we all know that Mel Gibson hates Jews, we’ve all heard the tapes. And why does he hate Jews? Because they killed Jesus. Cue my eight point rebuttal:

What, so people who are alive today are responsible for an alleged event that took place two thousand years ago? Well that seems a healthy and balanced view of the world (sarcasm). It’s like in this country, I know people who hate all Germans because of the war and the Holocaust, as if the people in Germany today are the same as those that were alive then and are therefore responsible for firing up the ovens. And isn’t it interesting that for someone apparently so in love with Jesus, Mel would much rather follow the Jewish creed of “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” than the diametrically opposite belief that Jesus states during the Sermon on the Mount (“You have heard that it was said, 'Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth. But I tell you, Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.”)?
Now my biblical knowledge may have a few holes in it here and there, but if I remember my New Testament correctly, it was the Pharisees that demanded Jesus be punished for blasphemy. The Pharisees were a Jewish political group that colluded with the Romans so they could retain power and influence over the poor and less influential Jews in the Empire, while living off them and keeping them subservient. So what Mel is saying is that the actions of any political group that claims to represent a clan or nation speaks for that nation entire and that any crimes committed by that group are the responsibility of all.

Taking points 1 & 2 together, this mean that every American and Britain alive today is responsible for the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and for the mistreatment of Native American tribes. Every Italian alive today is responsible for the genocide of eight million Iroquois on the island of Hispaniola that was perpetrated by Christopher Columbus and his men: Every Spaniard is responsible for the actions of the Conquistadors in Latin America. And you, Oh Foxnewsians, you yourselves are responsible for the deaths of the over one million Tibetans who have been murdered by the Chinese government and for the ethnic cleansing of Tibet’s population, which has been largely replaced by Han Chinese. And why? Because your Great Leader has media interests in China, which mouth Chinese state propaganda. The Great Leader is in cahoots with the Chinese government and as we know, that means you too are in cahoots and the perpetrators of genocide.
If I remember rightly, Hitler thought something similar. And yes, I know that according to internet chat room protocol, my argument should be null and void at this point for merely invoking Hitler’s name, but in this case there is a specific correlation (as opposed to the kind of spurious links that your channel seeks to make between Hitler and Obama or the Democrats or Muslims or Orange County Waste Management or teachers or salamanders or the left handed or whoever else you’re trying to demonise in that instant before another circuit around the Fox Goldfish Bowl of News refocuses your attention on some different arbitrary target). It is my understanding that as a Christian (and not an occultist as Indiana Jones would have you believe), Hitler also thought that the Jews were responsible for killing Jesus and if he killed all the Jews, God would reward him by granting him a place on His right hand side.
I wonder if Mel realises that according to the mythology that he purports to follow and believe in, it was necessary for Jesus to die on the cross (or a stake in the ground or nailed to a tree or hung from and then thrown into a tree, depending on which bit of the Bible you chose to believe). According to God’s nonsensical and downright weird covenant with Adam, God would send a Messiah who would die for our sins, thereby absolving us of Original Sin. So God, an omnipotent, pantheistic being leaves temptation in the way and then is surprised when the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge is eaten. Yet while he holds Adam and Eve responsible for this, he also agrees to send a Messiah to Earth as a sacrifice (which might be taken as an admission of guilt in a court of law). If Jesus doesn’t die then there can be no forgiveness of Original Sin and the entrance to heaven remains blocked. So surely Judas, the Pharisees and the Jews are the heroes of this piece. And yet somehow this is the fault of anyone directly or indirectly related to any of the Jews living at that time. Which leads me to my next point…
That that actually includes everyone alive today. Whether you’re Jewish or not, whether you believe the world is 4.5 billion years old or 6,000, by simple application of geometric progression, you are related to everyone from that time that produced offspring. We all have two parents, four grandparents, eight great grandparents, sixteen great, great grandparents and so on. Even assuming four generations of your family per century, going back just one millennium assumes that you are related to over a billion people. Yet given that there weren’t a billion people alive on Earth at that time, many of these direct decedents must have been one and the same person (your great-great-great-great-great-grandmother on one line of the family would also have been your great-great-great-great-great-grandmother on one, two or more lines). There is then a lot of doubling and trebling up and it turns out that we don’t need to go back very far into history before we reach a point where we are all related to a particular historical figure like Charlemagne or the Pharisees. And if their crimes are the responsibility of anyone in anyway related to them, then that includes everybody.
Mel, you do realise that Jesus was Jewish, don’t you? Moreover, you do realise that most of the book that you revere as divine revelation tells the mythology of the Jewish people? So if you’re upset that Jesus was killed then you surely only have the right to be upset by his death, if it can be proved that he was the son of God and therefore the Messiah (although of course the Old Testament never says that the Messiah will be the son of God). Yet as Tom Paine pointed out back in the 18^th century, if the Jews, the people whose Messiah Jesus is meant to be, if they say he’s not the Messiah (“He’s a very naughty boy” etc), then he’s not the Messiah, so what are you bitching about? In fact, if I remember rightly, in a couple of the Gospels Jesus is recorded as saying that while he is the Messiah, his sole responsibility while on this Earth is to return to God the Jews who had turned away from their faith (lost sheep, with all the implications that that metaphor implies). Gentiles need not apply. He actually said that (not in so many words, but the meaning is clear: Christianity is a club open only to Jews). It was only because the Romans needed to install a monotheistic faith upon the Empire, to implant in the minds of its population the idea that one God = one Emperor, thereby securing the imperial dictatorship of Constantine and his heir and successors after years of quasi-democratic rule, that Christianity was adopted in the first place. And yet even those censored texts that were included in The Vulgate (the Latin Bible) are quite clear on this point (well, as clear as the Bible is on anything): Jesus was a rabble rousing rabbi, fighting against the occupation of the Holy Land and the corruption of the Pharisees and that was that all he was interested in. If he came back today he would most likely be found in Gaza, railing against those same corrupt politicians.

And I’m bored of this already. I could go on, but what would be the point? It’s like when people ask what came first, the chicken or the egg. This must be a pre-Darwinian question, because clearly it was the egg. A chicken is a bird, but reptiles lay eggs, same as amphibians and fish, and they all predate birds. So it’s the egg ok? The egg came first. The egg. The chicken came a few million years later. And like the chicken and egg, Mel Gibson’s prejudice against Jews predates his justification for his hatred, which is delusional on so many levels that it would require an essay ten times this length to peel away the multiple layers of self-deceit. And anyway, as we have recently witnessed (or at least heard), his unfocussed hatred is not restricted to Jews, but flies at African-Americans and women and probably anyone else who isn’t a bigoted prick in exactly the same way that he is. In other words, deep down Mel Gibson probably hates just plain everybody. And when you hate everybody, well that’s such a very lonely place to be that it can’t rightly be called hatred anymore. What it is is fear.

Jesus said, “God is love.” And Leopold Bloom, the eponymous Jewish hero of James Joyce’s Ulysses, said of hatred, “That's not a life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it's the very opposite of that that is really life.” Jesus, Bloom, Marx, Chomsky, Emma Goldman, Shylock, as much as Mel and his ilk hate and vilify Jews, they do seem to resonate throughout history and throughout literature. For a people that today represent just one quarter of one percent of the population of the planet, they’ve done well for themselves. Which leads to all kinds of conspiracies about a Jewish cabal ruling the western world. The proponents of this conspiracy are so vacuous and educationally sub-normal that even the writing of this sentence has already expended more energy than their horseshit is worth. Indeed, I have often speculated whether Judaism would have survived as a religion had not the Holy Roman Empire wanted someone to persecute as a distraction from its own sins. Did the very act of persecution reinforce the importance of Judaism in the minds of its followers and give the religion a longevity that it wouldn’t have otherwise had? If Christianity hadn’t been adopted by the Romans, would Judaism have ultimately been absorbed by Islam, which is the true successor of Judaism anyway, not Christianity, which is a pagan religion painted over with whitewash to make it look new and Eurocentric.

All of which I admit is mere speculation. But hey, what’s speculation to some is a full day’s ‘fair and balanced reporting’ to others.

You shall here from me anon.

Amused, Manchester

PS: Oh go on then, I can’t resist it. So, big surprise, Americans have replaced one set of corporate puppets with another set of corporate puppets, the status quo is preserved for the 234th year in succession and somewhere, in a BP boardroom, executives are lighting cigars off the flaming back of an oil soaked pelican and manically laughing. Less enlightened individuals refer to this state of affairs as a democracy.

“Hey, the country’s fucked.” “What do we do?” “I know, let’s vote back in the people who fucked it up in the first place.” It’s hardly surprising for a midterm president to be defeated in elections, doesn’t that happen like every four years anyway? After all, with the ‘choice’ of two alternatives that are essentially the same, the difference in votes for each ‘party’ is only ever going to be marginal. Moreover, in a country where as little as 50% bother to vote for either party, quite big changes can be affected with little actual swing from one arm of the Republican-Democratic party to the other arm of the Republican-Democratic party. A large part of the population of your country (and here too) don’t vote because they know that their interests won’t be served by either faction, but your population seems stuck in a monotonous swing from one arm to the other and back again, without anything actually changing in the meanwhile. Even when the ultra right rise up and form the Tea Party (no tea, no actual substance of any kind as far as I can see, just a bunch barely sentient reactors banging on about “No taxation without representation” while they are manipulated by multinational behemoths who already have all the representation they will ever need to ensure that they pay as little tax as is offshoredly {is that an adverb? It is now} possible), well even then all that the Tea Party can think to do is form a more militant wing of the more militant arm of the already quite right wing Republican-Democratic party.

“He not busy being born is busy dying.” sang Robert Zimmerman (to preserve today’s theme). And the more that America stands still, the more it slips from its once unassailable position, towards the historical mire that awaits all once great empires, with a dozen fledgling bullies waiting to take its place on the global stage. The Tea Party volleys and thunders, but they are like the tolling of the church bells that Keats described as the death rattle of religion, “sighing, wailing, ere they go into oblivion.” Yet as those lines were not written by an American, the patriotic and ideological adherents of the ultra right will most likely not even know his name. Which is a pity, because one of the things that the English have always done better than anyone is poetry. And of the English poets, Keats may just be the greatest.

The Sun God, Apollo

Best Things Ever #12 The Air Conditioned Nightmare

2010-10-25T22:11:00.008+01:00

I hate complacency. Complacency is the tool through which special interest groups convince you that your way of life is under attack: And then they tell you who is to blame. Curiously, those responsible usually turn out to be the self-same people blocking the route to power of these special interest groups. Complacency leaves you vulnerable and once vulnerable the individual disappears beneath the weight and the inertia of the mob.

I’ve been thinking about complacency a lot recently, having reread Henry Miller’s sublimely cynical rant, The Air Conditioned Nightmare. Written in the 1940s, Miller had just returned to his native United States after a decade spent slumming in Paris. War was raging in Europe, America was about to enter the fray (late, as usual), and Miller set off on a journey across the continent to assess the state of the country of his birth.

What he found was a nation in decay. “Never has the status quo seemed more hideous to me.” he wrote. “This is not the worst place to me. But I am here and what I see hits me hard.” Actually, he just meant Pittsburgh, but his assessment was as bleak in Boston as it was in Los Angeles; New Orleans as in Mobile. Miller understood only too well the dangers of complacency. “Nothing is deader than the status quo whether it be called Democracy, Fascism, Communism, Buddhism or Nihilism.”

Today, as then, Americans feel that their way of life is under attack. We in Britain have often been jealous of the American capacity for boundless optimism and certainly during times of unending growth, when there is more than enough food in the trough, it is a fine attitude to possess. Yet the quality that many Americans have always lacked is a healthy sense of cynicism. When recession bites, when the rich plunder and the poor are blamed, well then a lack of cynicism is like having not been exposed to illness as child: You have no immunity. You become sick and put all your faith in snake oil salesman, like the oddly named Tea Baggers.

Reading The Air Conditioned Nightmare is an antibiotic shot to the arm. There are those even amongst Miller’s fans who describe the book as being uncharacteristically pessimistic and negative, but I don’t find that in its pages. What I take from it is a sense of realism, a sense of perspective on the American dream, which has always been just that, a dream. Miller observed his nation’s fears that its very institutions and way of life were under attack and his conclusion was damming:

“[T]here are things which ought not to be defended, which ought to be allowed to die; there are things which we should destroy voluntarily, with our own hands.”

Before you can start changing your life for the better, the first thing one needs to do is enter into a period of reflection and self-assessment. America is a country which from the outside looking in is tearing itself apart through tidal forces. The institutions which laid it low, dragging the rest of us with them, are now the ones who now ask the poor and dispossessed to have faith in them. The American Right is somnambulistically sleep walking into fascism, when what it really needs is to wake up and take stock of its place in the world. “How to become conscious?” Miller rhetorically asks us:

“It’s very dangerous you know. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you will have two automobiles and own your own home with a pipe-organ in it. It means that you will suffer still more – that’s the first thing to realize. But you won’t be dead, you won’t be indifferent, you won’t be insensitive, you won’t be alarmed or panicky, you won’t be jittery, you won’t throw rotten eggs because you don’t understand. You will want to understand everything, even the disagreeable things. You will want to accept more and more – even what seems hostile, evil, threatening. Yes, you will become more and more like God. You won’t have to have to answer an advertisement in the newspaper in order to find out how to talk to God, God will be with you all the time. And if I know what I’m talking about, you will listen more and talk less.”

This is Henry Miller finally reengaged with the world, a work as near to a restating of the principles of the Sermon on the Mount as anything written in the twentieth century, which is probably why, like the actual teachings of Jesus, it is almost entirely ignored in America. And yet there are passages contained within The Air Conditioned Nightmare that should be recited every Sunday in every church up and down the country. The American Right would have its followers believe that Barack Obama has destroyed America, and yet Miller observes that even by 1940 it had been a broken nation for a century or more.

What Miller reminds us is that there are no easy answers to life: There is nothing in life worth having that is easy to come by and those who claim that there are should be treated with suspicion and dismissed. “It’s the democratic way.” Miller reminds us:

“And so the future, which is always imminent, gets aborted and frustrated, shoved around the corner, stifled, mangled, annihilated sometimes... a world of finite curves that lead to the grave or to the poor-house or the insane asylum or the concentration camp or the warm, protective folds of the Democratic-Republican party.”

Henry Miller was far from perfect. That’s ok, none of us are. To err is human and Miller was certainly that. However, to live with one’s own imperfections is to be open to the possibility of being wrong. Only with that important precept in mind can one start to move forward, freed from the inertia of prejudice and paranoia and mindless patriotism, which another great American, Ambrose Bierce, called, “Combustible rubbish ready to the torch of any one ambitious to illuminate his name.” It’s almost as if he’d met Glen Beck. Then again, opportunistic chancers fill the pages of history. Men like Glen Beck are ten a penny and they are worth even less. People like Henry Miller are stardust in comparison.

Besides, there is always hope. “If you have a dream of the future, know that it will be realized one day. Dreams come true. Dreams are the very substance of reality.” You just have to be awake first.

Modern Fable

2010-10-24T02:55:00.002+01:00

"Have you not learned, my esteemed communicator,
That the created is not the creator?"
Arthur Conan Doyle, To An Undiscerning Critic

Chapter One

There once was a town in the north of England. In days gone by it had been a giant of the Industrial Age: Now those dark, Satanic Mills were shrouded in dust. How dismal it was in the bleak mid-winter and no amount of gaudy lights or glass baubles on plastic trees could mask the pervading air of pessimism. It is here that our tale begins.

On this grey afternoon, a group of lads rode into town. They came with the flag of St George rippling in their wake. They parked, descended into the precinct and prepared themselves. Their self-appointed leader stepped forth to speak:

“We have come here today to issue this town with a warning. We are in danger; danger of losing our identity. There is a growing threat to our town, a dark cloud that looms over us, threatens to wash us away. It is threat of immigration. A threat that has been clear and present in our once proud nation from before I were born.”

“Both my grandfathers fought in the fields of France. Fought and died, I tell thee, that Europe could destroy fascism forever. And for what? How did our leaders reward us for defeating Hitler? Huh? They filled ships with foreign garbage and dumped it on our shores to stink up place. Britain has become a dumping ground for everyone else’s unwanted junk. Well I say enough is enough. Shut the borders and ship them out: All of them.”

“Now, a man will ask, ‘I was born in this country, but I’m Muslim, can’t I be both?’ And I'd ask him, then what cricket team do you support?” He smirked. “Obviously he would reply, ‘Pakistan’.” He emphasised the first syllable of the final word. “Then you are Pakistani. Go home, your country needs you. Mine does not. Go, worship your heathen god in your own land and I will do same in mine. This…” An oblong of Islamic green was held aloft. “This is his flag.” A white star and crescent at its centre, a white bar at its seam. “It is not my flag and it is not yours. I will not let it end up mine. If you feel the same as me, you must stand with us, arm in arm, shoulder to shoulder on cliffs and shores of this still proud nation and protect it from barbarian hordes.”

The others applauded their leader, bolstered by a single pair of hands from the crowd. Half a dozen people had stopped to listen. Most wandered off at the end, reluctantly accepting the leaflets that were foisted at them. Only one remained. Two women, previously unseen, approached the group. They stopped in front of the leader.

“Michael John Brown,” said one, “you ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

“Too right.” said the other. “That young Asian lad’s not two minutes out of hospital and here your lot are back on't streets preaching hate.”

“Ladies, ladies.” Mick replied, calmingly. “We ain’t preaching hate to no-one. We’re exercising our democratic rights. We’re standing up for our right to live in a white Britain. To not have it swamped with bogus asylum seekers who scrounge off social, then blow us up in return.”

“Oh yeah,” rejoined the former, “and what about young Rasif, eh? Who had he blown up?”

“Now Maggie, you know right well that case hasn't come to court yet and I’d be in contempt to talk of it. When it does, my lads will be acquitted.”

“Oh please,” Maggie said, “everyone in town knows you lot did it.”

“Aye,” said the other, “though I see you managed to get off scot free as usual. You always were good at letting others take blame for you. Like our Chris.”

“Your brother got expelled ‘cause he got caught. Had nowt to do with me. As for that Paki, he had it coming, whoever dealt with him.”

“What, because he stepped out with our Ashley? Where was t’arm in that?”

“Where’s t’arm? Where’s t’arm? What if they had a kid? We need to keep this country white, our blood’s already thin enough from all the fucking Jews we took in. No, whoever dealt with that little shit stinker deserves a medal. If that’s what it takes to stop us from turning into mongrels, like them, so be it.”

“Oh, now your true self comes out, Mick Brown.” The argument had attracted far more attention than the speech that caused it. “You say your stopping us from becoming mongrels, but your t'ones that roam about place like pack of dogs.” There were many nods and noises of general agreement. “Your mother would be ashamed to see what you’ve become.”

All pretence vanished. “Never, EVER insult my mother again.” Mick towered over the women. “If you do, I will make sure you regret it.” Unbowed, Maggie made some reply, but another of the gang was speaking at Mick’s ear and pointing to the far end of the precinct. Two policemen were striding towards them. “Mick, let’s get out ay here.”

“I don’t fear no pigs.” Mick sneered.

“Aye, me neither, but see us three, we’re on parole, Gaz here is on probation. You, ya jammy cunt, you can stay and stand up tae them if ya like, but we canny afford nae more trouble from police.” The last word sounded like, poll-eece, in his thick accent.

“Fine, go.” Mick commanded. “But I’ll not forget this.” The others pushed through the swelling crowd, using its mass to obscure them from their pursuers. Once clear, they jogged off. Mick turned to the crowd, raised a fist in the air and declared in a proud, clear voice, “No surrender to Paki-fucking-stan.” Then he ran.

Their captain may have missed a penalty, but the crowd of the George and Dragon were philosophical about the 0-0 draw. “I’d rather be a Paki than a Turk.” they sang. “I’d rather be a Paki than a Turk. I’d rather be a Paki than a Turk.” Someone started a chorus of Rule Britannia, the rest quickly joining in. “Britain never, never, never shall be slaves“

Centre stage, Mick’s gang occupied their usual table. A sheet of bronze coloured material overlaid the MDF. Pools of beer had formed between the bumps, the ashtray smoked from the continuous supply of half-finished cigarettes.

“Nice speech that today Ian. Nice and short.” Mick told him. “Might even use it at demo tomorrow.”

Ian drained his pint. “I still say you shouldn’t have changed it to, ‘before I were born’.”

“We’ve been over this Ian, it were too long.”

“What did it say before?” Frasier asked.

“It said,” Ian replied, proudly, “’before the men who stand before you here today were born’.”

“Like I said.” Mick replied, sternly. “Too long.”

“Aye, right enough.” agreed Frasier, “that’s tae long son. Don’t want tae confuse cunts with tae many words.”

“See.” Mick said. “Even the Jock agrees. No offence Frase.”

“None taken.”

“Yeah.” said Tom, the youngest of the gang. “Jock knows something about speeches, ‘e’s always making ‘em at work.”

Frasier stared daggers at Tom. “See if you call me Jock again son, I’ll fuckin’ do you so I will.” He hooked a thumb at Mick. “That cunt there is the only one who calls me Jock.”

“Aye, ‘cause I’m the only one that would last ten seconds against him. Shut the fuck up Tom. Our Frase may be a Jock, but at least he ain’t a cockney fairy like you. Happen that’s as bad as being a fucking Paki.” The northerners laughed at their southern cousin.

“Hey Frase,” asked Ian, “can we call you a Scot then?”

“Sure son. That’s what I am, a Scot and proud of it.”

“And yet these Pakis hate being called Pakis. I don’t get difference.”

“Who gives a fuck what Pakis think.” Mick bellowed. “They’re Pakis and they can fuckin’ well lump it.”

“Hey.” said Gaz, returning fully laden from the bar. “Check out guy at bar.” A man in corduroy jacket and spectacles sipped from a cognac glass.

“Don’t know him.” Mick said.

“Apparently, that’s Carl Miller.” Gaz informed them.

“Carl Miller’s an urban legend.” Ian replied.

“Nah, Harry swears down that’s Carl Miller.”

“Who’s Carl Miller?” Fraser asked.

“Carl Miller, so it goes, married a spook.” Mick replied. “African she was.”

“He was a teacher at the college.” Ian joined in. “She was one of his students, Nigerian I reckon.”

“Does it matter, Ian? They’re all the fuckin’ same, wherever they got hit with ugly stick. Anyway, turns out she were only after a green card. Soon as her papers came through, she fucked off with another coon. Had a boyfriend all along.” Mick swigged at his ale. “Well that’s what you get for trusting a fucking nigger. Carl Miller, eh. Excuse me lads, I gonna have a word with Mr Nigger-Lovin-Miller.”

Mick picked up his pint and slammed it down on the bar. “You’re Carl Miller.”

The other turned his head, looked Mick up and down, then faced forward. “I know.” he said.

“You married a nigger.”

“Well, I was married to a woman of African extraction, if that’s to whom you’re referring.”

“Well, I hope you’ve learned your lesson. Coons will fuck you over soon as look at you. Just like the fucking Jews.”

“Very enlightened I’m sure.”

Mick sneered, “You’d do well to mark me lad. They’re not like us.”

“I know.”

“They’re different.”

“Right.”

“Ya hear me.”

“Yeah, yeah, Black people are different to white people, I get it.”

“Right.”

“Same as Muslims aren't like Christians.”

“Yeah. Bunch of fucking extremists.”

“And the French aren't like the British.”

“Dirty, soap dodging bastards.”

“Nor are the Welsh like the English.”

“Sheep shaggers.”

“Or southerners like northeners.”

“Bunch of queers.” Mick's voice directed back towards his table.

“Or Yorkshiremen like Lancastrians.”

“Don’t even get me started on them cunts.”

“Or City supporters like Rovers fans.”

“Blue scum.”

Carl's laugh was filled with scorn. “Mick, is it?”

“Aye.” Mick wasn’t laughing.

Carl narrowed his eyes, “So, if I understand you correctly, you hate anyone who doesn’t live like you do.”

“If they ain’t white, aye.”

“So long as they're not French.”

“White, British, smart arse.”

“Unless their Welsh or from the south or Yorkshire or support the wrong team or, presumably, are gay or drink the wrong beer or live in the wrong part of town, eh.”

“Oh you’re a real fucking smart arse, aren’t you!”

“I am. See, this is my theory.”

“I don’t care.”

“I wasn’t giving you the option. See I think you’re so ignorant, your incapable of accepting that there might be any other way to live life other than the one you’ve chosen. Which must confuse you, yeah. You’re infallible, why aren’t you much better off? Well it must be someone's fault, right. So you look out of your window and what do you see? Muslims and Jews and southerners and Goths and City supporters, all living an alternative lifestyle to your's. Well, if you ain't to blame, it must be their fault. If they lived according to your creed, or went back where they came from, you’d be ruler of the universe by now, wouldn't you.”

Mick stared through Carl. “I am going to make you regret every word out of your fucking mouth.”

“But isn’t that fascism? Make everyone dress like you, think like you, worship you, and eradicate anyone who deviates from the norm. Then, and only then, can you claim supremacy, while the world inexorably regresses.”

“Did you hear what I said?”

”Yeah, yeah, I hear you loud and clear. You don’t have a coherent counter argument so instead you resort to threats of physical violence.” Mick made to speak again, but Carl silenced him with a raised hand. “Please don't delude yourself into thinking that I'm the least bit afraid of you, Mick. I pity you. But perhaps you're right. Get rid of the Pakis. Get rid of the Niggers too. And get rid of the Yids and the Frogs and the Queers and the Poles and the Reds and the Blues and the Green Eyed and the Trannies and the people who live at No 73. But keep people like you. Come the apocalypse, we'll need someone to sweep up.” Carl drained his glass dry, while his opposite stood frozen with rage. “Anyway, must be going, I’ve obviously been here too long, I can feel my IQ starting to dip. Besides, having witnessed your sing-along-a-bigotry earlier, I'm a little concerned you're about to start throwing faeces at each other.” Mick's face was bright red, but still he didn’t move. “By the way,” Carl said, spinning back ‘round, “you might be interested to know that I married Mbelina to stop her being deported back to rape and torture. I married her to save her life. A friend did the same for her fiance.” He winked. “See ya around.”

After a time Mick seemed to emerge, as if from a trance. He looked about, but Carl was long gone.

“So, did ya give that nigger lover what for?” Frasier asked, as Mick’s sat down.

“What? Oh, yeah, yeah.” Mick drained his glass. “Who’s ‘round is it?”

“Tom’s.”

“Right, Wendy, four pints of beer, as you’re still drinking that fizzy, queer shit.”

“Now look Mick, I don’t mind a joke, but don’t call me queer.”

Mick grabbed Tom by the jaw and pulled him close. “When you sup a man’s drink then I’ll call you a man. Until then, I’ll call you whatever the fuck I like and you’ll take it.” Mick released him. “Don’t make me add your name to the list of people who are gonna get my foot up their arse. Like those two witches, and Carl fucking Miller. Move it, bummer boy.” Tom sulked off to the bar. Four sets of bitter soaked lips laughed.

The ale flowed and time marched on. Last orders came and went. Ian was the first to leave. 'The Wife' texted him home. “Come in number four, your time is up.”

“Aye, you’re just jealous. Night lads.” He wrapped himself in a German Army and jacket and slipped out the door to much laughter and pressing of thumbs to foreheads. And when, an hour later, the landlady insisted it was time for bed, there was much innuendo.

The gang bundled out into the winter chill and splintered into three. Mick went his own way, as did Gaz. Frazier and Tom staggered down the street together. For a time, neither man spoke, each lost in his own intoxicated thoughts, boots against pavement the only sound as long, rubbery strides brought them closer to home.

They came to an alleyway to piss. Frasier crashed his hand against Tom’s shoulder. “Listen son,” he said, his neck no longer able to support his head, “I’m sorry about before, showing yous up in front of them cunts.” He clumsily buttoned his fly. “They nae more respect me than they do yous, y’know. It’s no respect son, it’s fear. See if they didnae know I could do the lot of them, they’d treat me nae different.”

“Mick, ‘e don’t fucking respect you though, Frase.”

“No, son, but I ain’t about to mess wee that cunt. The man’s insane. Y’know what he tells me? He tells me he writes, ‘I Hate Pakis’ on fivers wee one of they ultraviolet pens. Then he pays for drinks at the George.”

“So?” Tom replied, the two men balanced against each other in a wobbly triangle.

“So? So some daft wee cunt pays wee a twenty and gets one ay Mick’s fivers wee he’s change.”

“Right.”

“Right, so he goes tay buy fags at the Paki shop and they’s one of they ultraviolet lights Pakis use to check you’s no slipping ‘em fakes.”

“Shit.” said Tom with a dawning realisation.

“Aye, Paki checks the guy’s money and it says, ‘I Hate Pakis’. At best he gets a mouthful ay abuse. At worst three ay they cunts work there kick shit out ay him. Happened to Wayne Archer last week.”

“Fuck.” said Tom, incredulously. “What did Mick say?”

“Nothing.” Frasier replied. “Says it’ll teach cunts no tae buy from nae Pakis.”

“Jesus man, cunt’s fucking tapped.”

“Hey, none of your blasphemy. And none ay your jive talk neither. Just ‘cause ya smoke that shit, there’s nae excuse for talking like nae nigger.”

“Sorry Frase.”

“Nae problem son. What I’m saying son, what I’m saying is it’s one thing beating up a Paki, but when it’s our own kind, that’s bang out ay order, ya get me? I disnae give a fuck who cunts is buying from, you don’t turn on your own. My old dad taught me that.

“Agree with you there Frase, bang out of order."

"Listen son, I’m sorry about showing yous up before.”

“Ya said Frase.” The Englishmen patted the Scot on the shoulder.

“Aye, right enough. You’re a good lad, Tom. Stick wee me and I’ll see ya go far.”

“Cheers, Frase.”

“Oh and Tom.”

“Yes Frase.”

“See if you tell anyone what’s been said here, I’ll cut ya fucking balls off.”

“Yes Frase.”

“No even me, ya here.”

“Yes Frase.”

Silence.

“Come on.” Tom said. “Let’s get fucking ‘ome.”

“Aye, right enough.” The men staggered on their way. A pair of eyes watched them from the darkness.

The door slammed louder than expected upon Tom’s return. A curse escaped from his lips, but no sound echoed from above. He slipped on the chain and crawled upstairs.

Tom crept into his room and switched on the bedside lamp. He kicked off his aging trainers and threw his Burberry cap on the floor. Then he removed the pint glass from his bedroom table and tiptoed across the landing. Here he rinsed it, filled it with water and drained it dry, before filling it again. It clinked heavily on return to its original place. His hand slipped under the mattress, removing the cigarette papers and brown material hidden there. He burned one edge of the eraser shaped lump and crumbled the pieces into the cigarette paper, adding tobacco to the mix. The lot was rolled into a tube and his tongue ran down the rim. He roached one end and twisted the other to a point. Then he drew the curtains, turned two handles at either end by ninety degrees and pushed the window open. Once his head was clear, he ignited the cigarette pursed between his lips.

“Allo” said a strange voice.

“Fuck me.” Tom jumped, the joint nearly falling from his fingers. “What the fuck are you doing there?” A face had appeared at next door’s window.

“Err, I am sorry, I am new ‘ere.” A slow, hesitant voice.

“Great, that’s all we fucking need.” Tom replied. “Fucking Poles moving into the area.”

“Pardon?”

Tom spoke loud and slowly, “Are… You… From… Poland..? Why… Don’t… You… Fuck… Off… ‘ome..?

“Err, no, I am Engleesh.”

“No offence mate, but you don’t sound very English to me.” Tom took a toke and blew smoke in the stranger’s direction.

“I am, how you say, born in this country, but my family move away when I am enfant, no.”

“Yeah? Funny, ‘cause I was born in London, but ma dad brought us back up ‘ere, where ‘e was born.” He sucked on the spliff once more “So 'ow come you come ‘ome?”

“Err, I do not like France so much, so I come ‘ere, to my ‘ome, no. The French, they are too arrogant, no.”

Tom laughed. “Ha ha, nice one. Nah, seriously mate, good on ya. We need more guys like you, coming ‘ome, ‘elping us to stand arm in arm, shoulder to shoulder against these black cunts swarming in.”

“Pardon?” said the man, furrowing his brow. “I do not understand what you say.”

“Pakis, blacks, coons, ya know. From Africa and Iraq and that.”

“Ah yes, I understand ‘ow you say, you do not like black people?”

“Nah, some of the coons are alright I suppose. Guy I get my stash from is half-caste. ‘e’s pretty sound. For a nigger. By the way, don’t tell anyone you seen me smoking this shit.”

“Smoking sheet?” The same baffled look.

“Yeah, weed, y’know.” Tom replied, taking another pull. “’Ere son, get on that.”

“Thank you.” the man replied, pinching it by the middle. “You are most kind.”

“Sorted. Keep it quiet though. Jeez, Mick would ‘ave my balls if ‘e caught me smoking weed. Nigger poison, ‘e calls it. ‘E’s one to talk. Cunt snorts so much coke, swear down ‘e’s the only one keeping them cunts going.”

“Ah, I see, this Mick, ‘e is your frère?”

“What's that? My frère?”

“Oui, your frère, your, eh, ‘ow you say, brother.”

Tom laughed again. “Mick, my frère. Ha ha, nah, I ain’t related to that twat. ‘E’s just a guy I know. Nasty fucker, too. I mean, fair enough, I ‘ate Pakis, right, but that cunt ‘ates every fucker. Pakis, coons, Jews, cockneys, queers, the lot of ‘em.”

“Pardon, I still do not understand, what is, ‘ow you say, Paki?” The man handed back the spliff.

“Cheers. Pakis, from Pakistan, Muslims like. Y’know, there are streets in this town where whites like us get our ‘eads kicked in just walking down 'em. Not that you’d want to go down ‘em, smelly bastards. Cunts are too busy blowing themselves up to bother to wash. We go down for a rumble though. Bang a few Paki heads together like, teach cunts a lesson.”

“Ah, I see. So I ask, if you were in charge, no, ‘ow would you do them?”

"Sorry mate, I don't get ya."

"Err, if you were in charge, the, 'ow you say, ruler."

“Ah, right, you mean what would I do with the Pakis?”

“Err, yes, these Paki.”

“I’d ship ‘em out, get rid of them.”

“Get reed of them?”

“Yeah.” He smiled at the thought. “If I ‘ad my way, Pakis wouldn’t exist.” There was a moment’s silence. “’Ere,” he said, passing the joint over, “finish that off will ya mate. I ‘ave to go to bed, my ‘ead’s gone all furry.” He giggled.

“Most kind.”

“See ya ‘round.”

“Ah yes, bonne nuit.” The window shut and the man was left alone. He took a single drag on the butt and flicked it out into early morning air. “Never existed.” he said, in perfect English. “Interesting, very interesting.” An instant later, he was gone.

Modern Fable

2010-10-24T02:54:00.002+01:00

Two

In the valley in the wintertime, the sun is a late riser. Barely has it poked its head above the surrounding hills than it is already sinking. What little light lifts above the bowl is quickly absorbed by a bank of perennial, pregnant cloud, which lauds it over the town like an overseer. In the valley in the wintertime, will spring never come?

Tom too was a late riser that next morning. He had twice woken, groaned, swigged at his water and dropped off again, before eventually emerging from beneath the quilt. He pulled on the same pair of black tracksuit bottoms from the night before; there was a rising smell from the socks he still wore. He removed a football shirt from the drawer with the number six emblazoned across its back. He put it on, pushed on his trainers and removed the cap from the floor, applying it to his closely shaven skull. He walked out to the landing.

“Oh Thomas,” his mother said, “must you always come down like a herd of wild elephants?”

Before he could offer a reply, a loud voice bellowed from the living room, “’Ere, speak of the devil, here he is now. How do, wog whacker?” The man laughed heartily, his spectacles jiggling with satisfaction.

“Alright there Uncle Fred. Nah, this guy weren’t a wog, ‘e was a Paki.”

“A what now?”

“A Paki. A Pakistani like.”

“Sorry son, you’ve lost me. What’s a Pakistani when he’s at home?” There was a tinge of nerves to his chuckle.

Confusion flickered across Tom’s face. Then his mouth opened and his eyes scrunched together. “Yeah, very funny Fred. Like you don’t know what a Paki is, enough of ‘em work at your fucking place.”

“Thomas, language.”

“Sorry Mum. Fred, I know you like a joke, but that really is piss poor right.”

“Sorry son,” his father chimed in, “I don’t know what a Pakistani is either.” A half filled room of people stared blankly at him.

“I can’t fathom how you kids keep up all these new words you come up with.” his mother said. “Bakistani indeed.”

“It’s Pakistani mum.” he snapped, spitting out the words. “Pakistani. The place is fucking crawling with ‘em.”

"Language."

“What place?” his dad asked.

“Crawling with who?” Fred added.

Tom sighed, loudly. “This fucking town is crawling with fucking Pakis, dad. Sorry Mum.”

“Pakis? Hang on, do you mean the Asians?”

“Yes.” Tom said in frustration.

“Well I wouldn’t say there’s a swarm. Mind you, they reckon a couple of streets up Whalley Range is all wogs now.”

Tom starred at his dad in amazement. “A couple of streets? A couple of streets? Whalley Range is full of Pakis.”

“Now son, I don’t like them being here any more than you do, but you shouldn’t exaggerate. There’s a couple of hundred at most.”

Tom gave an elongated sigh of rising impatience. “Na,dad, I ain’t buying this. I’m away out, ya doing ma fucking head in.” He turned his back on the bewildered room and slammed the door behind him.

“Tom son, just in time.” Fraser shouted, as he walked into the vault of the George and Dragon. A twenty pound note was wafted in his direction. “Go tae the bar for me will ya son.”

“No probs Frase.” The teenager smiled. “You’ll be wanting ya change in coins.”

“Aye, too right.” The burly, red faced man returned his grin.

“What the fuck are you two going on about?”

The men exchanged a look. “Nothing Mick.” Tom said.

“Aye.” agreed the Scot. “Shit! Ah havenae shown yous what ma boy sent me.”

The others were huddled around Fraser’s phone as Tom delivered the drinks and a pile of small change. “That’s top.” enthused Ian.

“Aye, shit hot.” Gaz agreed. “Hey Frase, you couldn’t Bluetooth that to me could ya?”

“Bluetooth!” Mick exclaimed. “I never knew you were such a nerdy fairy Gaz.”

The big man looked positively shocked at the suggestion. “Nah, I reckon Gaz has got a good idea there Mick.” Ian said, leaping to his friend’s defence. “If Frase were to send it to all of us, then we could all set it as our background. Be like a badge of honour.”

“That’s no a bad idea.” agreed Fraser.

“What ya on about?” Tom asked.

“Hey, Tom ain’t even seen it yet.”

“Here, get ay load of this.” Fraser said, passing Tom his phone. On the small screen was a photograph. Two men of Middle Eastern extraction lay horizontally away from each other. They were both dead. Embedded in the foreground was a bomb, intact, its propeller sticking up at the viewer. Dripping red lettering above and below read, ‘Kill All Wogs’.

“That’s top.” said Tom. “Where’d ya get it from?”

“Ma youngest sent it me. See it's of when Saddam gassed he’s own people.” His expression was melancholic. “Tam’s unit got shot up the other day. Pal of his got killed.”

“Well you know what I think Frase.” Mick said. “They shouldn’t be out there.”

“Aye.”

“When that war were over we should’ve pulled out and let them sand niggers fucking well kill each other. Then we could’ve taken all the oil we wanted.”

“Wee ya there Mick.”

“Hang on.” said Tom, staring at the image. “Frase, you reckon this is from when Saddam gassed them people?”

“Aye, son, that’s what he’s text said.”

“Shouldn’t it say, Kill All Pakis then?”

The others stared at him. “What the fuck is a Paki?” Mick said.

“For fuck’s sake.” Tom exclaimed. “You boys aren’t in on this too?”

“In on what?”

“This kidding on you’ve never ‘eard of Pakis.”

“I’m no kidding son, I don’t know what you mean.”

“I’ll say again,” Mick didn’t like wind ups, “what the fuck is a Paki?”

“Pakis, Mick. From Pakistan.”

“Is this a fucking dream you’ve had, boy? Where the fuck is Pakistan?”

“Listen, what do you call Muslims?” Tom persisted.

“I call them stinky little wogs.” The others laughed.

“No, no, no, wogs are Indians.”

“Aye, Indians are wogs.” Fraser agreed. “And Muslims and Hindoos and Iraqis. All they cunts from Middle East.”

“Err, India isn’t actually in the Middle East, Frase.” Ian said.

“Shut the fuck up Ian.” Mick commanded. “Just ‘cause you’re the Quiz Night Queen, this is no time to be a smart arse. What I want to know is what the fuck this Cockney cock sucker is on about.” He stared hard at Tom. “Well, bummer boy, what the fuck is Pakistan?”

“Nah, sorry Mick, I ain’t ‘aving this. Paki-fucking-stan, Mick. Pass me ya bag.”

“What?”

“Ya Adidas bag, pass it to me.”

“This better be going somewhere, I am not fucking amused.” Mick leaned over and picked up a brown sports bag, circa 1978.

“See, I ain’t as thick as you all think. You forgot about the flag boys.”

“What about it?” Mick said.

“Aye, what about it?” parroted Fraser.

“Ya always carry a Pakistani flag, so you can shit people up, Mick.”

“Really.” Mick said. “Well this should be good. I’m looking forward to seeing a flag from a place I’ve never fucking heard of.” There was extra venom in the f of fuck.

Tom unzipped the bag and pulled the rolled up cloth out in lengths, like handkerchiefs tumbling from a conjurer’s pocket. He grabbed two corners with his fists and held it out at arm’s length. “See.” he said. Mick’s eyes had fixed him throughout.

Mick smiled thinly and nodded down at the cloth. Tom followed his gaze. Three stripes of saffron, white and green ran horizontally, a blue wheel central to the rectangle. Tom’s face fell.

Mick rubbed his temples. The pub had fallen deathly silent. “Lucky for you, we’re due up at Whalley Range.” His words were slow and heavy. “But I swear, if that wog flag isn’t back in my bag in the next thirty seconds, I’m gonna sack off the demo and go to work on you instead.”

“Yes Mick. Sorry Mick.”

“Damm right you’re sorry.” The others shook their heads at him. “I’ve already got one spastic in't gang, I don’t need another. No offence Gaz.” The apology was made for comic effect. It worked.

While Fraser and Ian laughed at Gaz, Tom packed the flag away in record time. He zipped it up and handed it back to Mick. Mick received it and clipped Tom ‘round the back of the head. Then he span him ‘round and kicked him up the backside. “Get out of the fucking door. And you three, hurry up, I haven’t got all day.”

It was still early as Tom headed home, but already dark. The street lights cast an eerie sodium glow across the underbelly of unbroken grey. Tom crossed a car park and climbed a ramp and came to a dimly lit stretch of canal. He traipsed along the bridleway, his face red from the bitter north wind. The water's surface was as black and as still as obsidian, swallowing all light that fell into it.

The path took Tom past the old industrial heart. The waterway had once served as main artery to mechanised kingdoms up and down the country. Now those dilapidated mills littered the bank-side, like corpses left to rot in the street. The embankment bushes were decorated with discarded shopping bags and rusted solvent cans. Graffiti adorned the underpass of every bridge. Craig sucks old mens cocks. We R All Just Pawns In There Game. UP THE BLUES.

The lock ahead marked the point at which Tom left the path for home. Sat on the lock gate arm, a figure was clearly silhouetted. It hopped down at Tom’s approach, leaning upon a cane. Tom stiffened, his fists clenched. “Ah Tom.” a voice called, “Hello there.”

“Oh it’s you.” he replied. “’ey, what ‘appened to your voice?”

“Well, I went to try and see a dentist, but they said I had to wait for a cancellation. There were no cancellations, so I sat there all day and watched this thing you call television. It was very good, I learnt much.” He flicked a piece of fluff from his greatcoat.

“Yeah? ‘ey, where’s there a dentist open on a Sunday?”

“Ah, it is a special dentist, a long way from ‘ere.”

“Right.” Tom said, suspiciously. “’ey, what you ‘anging around the canal for? You ain’t an arse bandit are you?”

“Arse bandit?”

“You know what I mean.” the teenager replied, menacingly. “A queer boy. They ‘ang around the canal looking for cock. Fuck me, don’t tell me I shared a spliff with a shit-stabber.”

The stranger smiled. “Well I hardly think a few pulls on a cannabis cigarette is the same as sharing the pipe of peace. Lovely alliteration though. No, as a matter of fact I was waiting for you, Tom.”

“I knew it.” Tom spat, backing off. “You are fucking queer.”

“Tom, I am not gay!” The stranger advanced a pace, his hands up in mock surrender. “If you will allow me to finish, I was waiting here only to ask you a question.”

“Go on.” Danger. “I’m listening.”

“How do you like your world, now it is free of Pakistanis?”

Stunned silence. “What’s that?

“Well, it was you that put the idea in my head. And after you were so kind to me, a stranger in your town, newly arrived from foreign shores, the least I could do was to grant you your wish.”

Tom laughed. “Sorry mate, I ain’t being funny, but are you a bit fucking simple or what?”

“Spoken to a lot of people today Tom?”

“Yeah, so what?”

“Any of them heard of Pakistan? Or Pakis for that matter?”

“No. None.”

“Then why do you doubt your senses? Examine a map if you don’t believe me. It doesn’t exist. It never has. It never will.”

“Serious?” Tom asked, removing a packet of cigarettes from his pocket.

“Yes, no thank you, though I should explain. When India gained independence, it remained a single country. Pakistan, and Bangladesh for that matter, never came into existence. I erased the event from history. Millions died in the ensuing violence between Hindoos and Muslims”

“Shit.” The end glowed at the lighter’s touch. “You’re really fucking serious, aren’t you?” He exhaled. “’ow can you do that?”

“I have certain powers at my disposal.”

“Yeah? Make me rich then?”

“Sorry, that’s not the game we’re playing. Think of me more as a removal man, if you will. Like Pakistan.”

“Look, ya daft twat, when I say Paki, I don’t just mean cunts from Pakistan.”

“You call Scottish people Scots, don’t you?”

“Yeah, the Jocks are Scots. But Pakis, they’re all the Arabs, all the Muslims.”

“Well which is it? Arabs or Muslims?”

“What fucking difference does it make? They’re all the same.”

“Well no, they’re not actually. Muslims are members of the world wide Islamic faith. Arabs, on the other hand, are citizens of any one of half a dozen countries situated on the Arabian Peninsula. Tom, you need to be clear in your terms of reference if you are to get what you wish for.”

“Right, but what good is sacking off countries if the cunts are still coming over here?”

“Well you have to admit there are far fewer than there were yesterday.”

Tom smiled at the realisation. “Yeah.”

“Besides,” the stranger continued, “Pakistan was merely an example of my work, a free sample. Of course I can erase any group you wish. Within reason.”

“And what?” Tom snorted. “You’re telling me you can just get rid of them?”

“Name your enemy and when you wake tomorrow it will be as if they never existed. Which they won’t. You will be the only one who remembers them. However, games have rules.” The stranger wagged his finger, like a conductor waiving a baton. “You need to be specific and strictly one request per day.”

“Right, well get rid of the Pakis then.”

“I think we’ve already established that you have.” The stranger made to speak again, but was cut short by a sound. A dog came padding down the adjoining path. “’arry’s dog.” Tom said, watching the spaniel scamper towards him. He turned back to the stranger, but he’d vanished.

A shape in wax jacket and flat cap walked down the path, resolving itself into that of a middle aged man. “Oh hello Tom, I didn’t know you come down here.”

“What? Nah, you got it all wrong ‘arry, I’m err, waiting for someone.”

“There’s no need to apologise Tom lad. Maybe we could wait for each other sometime, if you get me.”

Tom’s face became thunder. “Keep walking, Gaylord.” Harry’s head lowered in disappointment as he wandered off. Tom watched the man ‘til he was out of sight.

“May I make a suggestion?” the stranger said, causing Tom to jump.

“Fucking ‘ell, where’d you get to?”

“Just over there. It’s not a good idea that I be seen by too many people. Anyway, I recommend getting rid of the Arabs.”

“Ya reckon?”

“Yes. No Arabs, no Mohammed. No Mohammed, no Islam. And if I understand your vernacular correctly, that would mean no ‘Pakis’.” He made speech marks in the air around the last word.

“Yeah, right on.”

“And no Judaism either.”

“Even better. Big nosed cunts.”

“However, I am morally obliged to issue you with this warning. If I erase Arabia from history, I do so for all time. Any inventions, any contributions made by the people of that region will likewise be erased, never to be replicated.”

“Big fucking deal.” Tom snorted. “Cunts haven’t done anything for thousands of years anyway.”

“A very enlightened attitude I’m sure. Well then, all you need do is ask me formally.”

“What, to get rid of the pak, I mean the Arabs?”

“Yes.”

“Ok, get rid of the Arabs.”

The man removed a glove, spat on his hand and held it out. Tom shook it. The man bowed. “It shall be done. Right, well I’ll go and set the wheels in motion. And pick up my dry cleaning.”

“Dry cleaning?”

“Yes, it is a specialist dry cleaners, opposite the dentists. I will check in on you tomorrow.” He threw his cane out in front of him and strolled off.

“Yeah, see ya later.” Tom replied, absentmindedly. He stayed for a few moments, then went on his way.

Modern Fable

2010-10-24T02:53:00.001+01:00

There was something wrong when Tom woke. His sand filled eyes darted about the room. The sound of girls skipping drifted on the air. The brass bedhead creaked gently. Suddenly something seemed to snap into place and he jumped up. “We’ve been fucking robbed.” he cried. “We’ve been…” Tom held out his arms and examined his attire. He stood in a pink and white stripped nightgown reaching to his ankles with hat to match. “What the?”

Two children poked out of the covers at the foot of the bed. “Who the ‘ell are you two?” he asked.

“Oh Thomas.” replied the elder, a girl of about twelve. “I’m Mary. I’m your sister.”

“I don’t have a sister. Or a brother.”

“Now Tom, you know right well you have two sisters, and Jack here is your brother.”

Tom sneered. “Well then, sister, what ‘appened to me fucking stuff?”

“Please don’t swear Thomas, it’s common. What stuff are you talking about?”

“Me tv and Xbox and that.”

“What on Earth is an Xbox?”

Tom made to spit something else in reply, when he did a double take at the ceiling, then looked towards the door. “And where’s the friggin’ light gone?”

“Why, it’s by the bed of course.” Mary pointed to a candlestick on the bedside table. She sighed. “Perhaps mother is right after all. She says you’re turning simple. She says that’s why the factory sacked you.”

“Sacked? When was I sacked?” He jumped down off the bed. “I’ve gotta find out what’s going on ‘ere. Something’s very fucking wrong.”

Having struggled with the unfamiliar clothing for some time, much to the embarrassment of his siblings, Tom flew out of the house, the words barely formed in his mother’s mouth as the door slammed shut behind him. His boots were tied up with string; his trousers held together with a safety pin. He scratched at himself where the coarse, brown material irritated his skin. Mary insisted he wore a hat.

The street on which Tom lived had always been cobbled, but he was shocked to come to the main road. There was no main road, only more cobbles. He glanced back and it was only then he seemed to notice that his street was devoid of cars.

Two horses drew a cart laden with beer barrels down the road before him. A sign swung from the side: “Celebrate Saturnalia with Andersen’s Ales.” “Oi.” a voice sounded from above. “Look out down there.” A woman held a wooden pail out of a first floor window. He stepped in the road as she upended the bucket, spilling its contents onto the street. The stench of excrement was nauseating. “You want to watch out ma lad, not everyone’s as considerate as me you know.” She withdrew.

However you judge Tom he seemed to have learnt from the previous day. For hours he wandered, his forehead held tight in a frown of concentration, keeping any thoughts he may have had to himself. Yet whenever he passed a row of houses, he never failed to check above.

His aimless wanderings brought him to the canal. It bustled with activity. The mills had been resurrected; yesterday’s half demolished chimneys arisen and belching out smoke. The royal standard hung from every flagpole. The same design Tom had unfurled from Mick’s bag the before day hung from windows everywhere. And on the streets, men burnt cloth of a different hue, a green dragon on an orange background. There looked to be a dramatic increase in the number of faces dissimilar to Tom's about town.

The night came down. By chance, Tom found the pub. “The Griffin” was now a Tudor tavern, but seemed the same old place inside, save the straw on the floor. Mick and the others were gathered around the fireplace. “Tom.” Mick bellowed, clearly intoxicated. He held a flagon of ale out to Tom. “Drink deep ma lad, for tomorrow we’re away to war.”

“War?” Tom replied.

“Aye.” Frasier confirmed. “We all took the king’s shilling. Signed yous up too. We leave first thing.”

“War with who?” Tom asked.

“The Chinks, you nob.” Mick said. “Ha ha, the Chinks you nob. Get it? ‘Cause you’re a bummer boy.” He glared at Tom through heavy eyelids. “Don’t think I haven’t heard about you hanging about canal.”

“Mick, ‘onestly it’s not what you think. It’s ‘arry you wanna worry about. Faggot.”

Mick shook his head. “Doesn’t matter now lad. The Chinks will probably kill you before you can hump ma leg anyway.” The others roared with laughter and flagons of ale were consumed. “Just try and take a few of slitty-eyed-cunts with you.”

“Ok Mick, I will.” Tom looked confused, but knew enough to humour a drunk.

“Aye, you’ll do for me lad.”

“Mick.” said Gaz, cocking his chin. “Look who just walked in.” Carl Miller had arrived. He treated the looks of hate with a grin and headed straight for them.

“Oi, Miller.”

“Alright Mick, mon frere, where are the other two?”

“Other two?”

“Yeah, I thought there were seven dwarves. Now how does it go again?” He counted out on his fingers. “Fear, anger, ignorance. Immaturity, ineptitude, intolerance and, err, oh yeah, impotence.”

"What the fuck is he on about?" asked Frasier.

"Nothing, he's just a smart cunt." Mick sneered.

“Hey Miller.” asked a guy Tom didn’t seem to recognise, “did you ever fuck one of her family by mistake?” The others giggled.

“One of who’s family?”

“That nigger ya married. I can’t tell ‘em apart.”

“Well surely that says more about your poor eyesight that it does about black people.” The others glared at him. “Hmmm, weak eyes to go with a weak brain. And you have the nerve to call yourselves superior.”

“What the fuck does that mean?” Mick sneered once more.

“It means that no matter how many times you tell yourself that you’re better than them, that you’ve been born with white skin,” Carl explained, “you are and always will be at the bottom of the barrel. Get rid of any section of humanity you wish, it won’t make any difference to your standing in life.” He stared straight at Tom.

“Now you’ve done it.” Mick said. “You and me, outside.”

“With pleasure. I believe the back yard is big enough for our purposes.”

Carl strode out back, the others following. Mick ran at his back, but a leg hooked back and hit him in the temple. Mick went flying, clattering into a bin. The others advanced, but Mick halted them with a raised hand. His other brandished a serrated blade. Carl removed his glasses and slipped them into his pocket. “Fuck me, it’s you.” said Tom.

“I might have known.” Mick said, rising. “Two bummer boys together.”

“You know,” the man said, “where I come from it’s been shown that the more overtly homophobic a man is, the more likely he is to become aroused by the sight of two men fucking.” Someone laughed. Mick lunged, stabbing. The knife flew into the air with a single blow from the other’s outstep. He took a pace forward and delivered a further blow to Mick’s solar plexus, lifting him once more off the ground. Mick tried to rise, but a roundhouse knocked him out cold.

“Anyone else?” the man advanced. “I’ve fought armies, so a bunch of pot bellied rejects shouldn’t present much of a challenge.” They cowered in retreat.

Mick came to with a groan. Tom came to his aid. Mick used his weight to pull himself up, then socked him in the jaw. Tom collapsed in a heap.

From ‘Carl’s’ hand a silver pool of water seemed to drip. It shifted shape, solidifying into a broadsword.

“What the..?” several voices said in unison.

“Impressive, I know. They call it a labile. Anyway, let’s play a game. I’ll count to a hundred and then I’m going to come after y’all. The first one I catch will be finishing the evening in several more pieces than he started. One, two, three, four.” By five, only Tom remained, sprawled on the ground.

“Hey Tom, wakey, wakey. Come on, let’s get a cold compress on that jaw.” Tom moaned, as he was lifted on to a beer barrel.

“Ow. You, Jesus man, ‘ow did I never notice it was you before? Was only when you took off them glasses. Seemed obvious then.”

“Yeah, something I picked up on my travels. Emergent technology.”

“What the fuck’s ‘appened? Why is everyone living in the past?”

“Ha!” the man exclaimed. “A very apt sentiment. It’s you Tom, you brought everyone here.”

“What ya on about?"

The man sighed. “Come.” he said. “Let’s get away from the smell of stale beer and piss and I will try to explain.”

“Where?” Tom asked.

“Through that wall.” the man replied, pointing across the yard.

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding.”

The man sighed once more and twisted one wrist with the opposite hand. He clicked his fingers and on cue the wall began to dismantle. The bricks span outward, hovered midair for an instant, then flew inward, resolving into a path leading inside. “Come on Scarecrow.” the man said, offering his hand. “Let’s follow the yellow brick road and see if we can’t find you a brain.”

Once inside, it was obvious the scene was fabricated. The horizon was never more than ten feet before them, the stone path curving in a short arcing cylinder. The sky was midnight blue, the same tree passed them several times before a man was seen sitting beneath it. He wore breeches and waist coat, with a mane of black wig. He had a semblance of humanity, but was as fake as the scenery.

“What the…” Tom exclaimed.

“Oh I know.” said the man. “It’s a child’s toy, something I found in a jumble sale. Cheaply made, but it does the job nicely. Know this guy?”

“No.” Tom petulantly replied.

“This is Issac Newton.”

“Oh.”

“Know him now?”

“Yeah, an apple fell on ‘is ‘ead and shit.”

“I’m glad to see schools are still teaching history with such vigour.” Tom made to reply. “Ah,” the man placed a finger to his lips, “the time for you to talk has passed. Keep quiet and pay attention and you may actually learn something. I take it no other demonstration of my not inconsiderable power is required this evening?” Silence was as good as assent.

“Excellent. I will try to speak slowly and in a language even you can understand. Now, try to put yourself in Newton’s position. You have all these wild notions about the universe. Gravity and optics and the laws of motion, etcetera. What you need is a form of notation with which to write it all down. What you need is to invent integral calculus and then spend years accusing Leibniz of stealing your ideas. But you see there’s a problem Tom. When you erased Arabia from history, you erased all that its scholars achieved, including algebra. Without algebra, Newton has no notation, no shorthand to explain his ideas. It was difficult enough for people to understand them in his day as it was. And so he died a penniless drunk, driven mad by the sheer weight of his intellect rattling around inside his head without a conduit with which to channel it. No one else but you even remembers his name and all you know about him is that an apple fell on ‘is ‘ead and shit.” The man gave a mirthless laugh. “This man’s ideas were at the forefront of scientific knowledge for three hundred years. His laws of motion helped put men on the moon and I doubt you can recite a single one of them. Hmmm.” The man walked on.

“No Newton, no industrial revolution. And as with Newton’s Principia, so Gaussian Law and Maxwell’s equations, which led to the harnessing of electricity. All humanity’s greatest achievements, gone, all because of you. A once noble language, reduced to pidgin by the removal of one apparently redundant section of the community. Humanity never really got started Tom.” They had arrived at a spiral staircase. “Up.” the man commanded.

“Of course, “ he continued, climbing up after Tom, “no Arabia, so no Muslims and no Jews either. Consequently, no Christianity. Without the glue of a monotheistic faith, stop me if I’m getting too technical for you, the Roman Empire crumbled decades before it was meant to. And with no Islam to act as buffer, the Chinese Dynasties have always been a threat to the west. They invaded India a century and a half ago. The Diaspora there has been going on for nearly as long. Their armies now occupy Europe as far west as Berlin. Personally, I think they’ll be in Londinium by Eostur.”

“Where the hell are we?” Tom asked. The stairs had brought them out on the deck of a large sailing ship.

“This is my ship.” the man answered. “I sail it across dimensions.”

“Yeah? Take me.”

“Why the hell would I want to do that?”

“For company and that.” He pressed his fists together in front of him. “I could see them other dimensions.”

The man shook his lowered head and chuckled. “You still don’t get it, do you?”

“Get what?”

“I don’t like you Tom.”

“Then why are you ‘elping me then?”

Another chuckle. “You think I’m helping you?” he said, incredulously. “I’m not helping you, I’m condemning you. Condemning you to live in that most frustrating of worlds, a world where you get exactly what you ask for. A world where you live as you say, not as you do.” His words had menace. Tom was rooted to the spot, every muscle in his body frozen. “You wanted a world free of ‘Pakis’.” As he intoned the word, multi-coloured balloons, the shape of exclamation marks, appeared in Tom’s hands, floated skywards and popped. “Well you made your bed, Einstein, not that he exists anymore either, bless his scruffy big brain. For company, haha. Sorry, I already have a ship’s cat. She’s a jaguar and she’s far, far smarter than you.” A snarl was heard astern. Tom eyes filled with fear. Unable to blink, tears rolled down his cheeks.

“Anyway.” the man said, releasing Tom with a wave of his hand. “Time we were getting you back. Now, what’s the quickest route?”

Tom rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand. “Traitor?” he cried. “You’re supposed to use your powers to help us. England for the English.”

“Sorry, I was born in my own country. However, it was a long time ago and I’ve achieved so much more since then.”

“But why me?” Tom pleaded.

“Because I was bored. So I cried ‘haunted, condemned and execrated.’ to my ship, span her wheel and she brought me to you.”

“But why me ya dickhead?” he persevered. “What about Mick, he’s a proper racist cunt?”

“Mick?” the man fumed. “Oh I’ll do him for free when you make your next choice. So, who’s for the chop today?”

“Oh no, no more, I’m getting out, you’re a fucking mental.”

“Come on Tom, you know you can’t quit now, you need your fix. Besides, we had a deal. Strictly one request per day. We shook on it remember. Who’s it to be? Pick someone or I’ll have to take you instead.” The man stood close, whispered in his ear. “Think of it this way, with Mick gone, you won’t wake up with that red mark across your jaw.”

Tom hung his head. “Alright.” he said, without looking up. “I guess. I guess the Chinks.”

“The Chinks? Oh, I see, you mean the Chinese?” Tom nodded. “To be honest Tom, I grow increasingly tired of this game, as well as your tedious presence, so why don’t we move things along and just get rid of all the Asians.”

“Whatever.”

“Well, ask me nicely then.”

Tom grunted. "You tricked me, you cunt." he muttered. The man ran at him, yanked him to his knees, sword to his neck. He screamed: “Tell me to get rid of the Asians or I’ll cut your fucking head off.“

"Get rid of the Asians, get rid of the Asians.” There were tears in his eyes.

The man retreated and bowed, sword resting at his nape. “Consider them gone. Mick too. Right, I think the shortest way home is for you to walk the plank.” The man’s voice was distant.

Tom looked up. “’ey, I ain’t walking no fucking plank.”

“Too late.” the man replied. Still knelt, Tom now see-sawed above the waves on a single piece of wood. Before he could move, it was yanked out from under him and he plunged into the sea. A whirlpool swirled beneath him, pulling him in. The waves washed over. He went under…

…and fell into a sodden heap in his bed. His siblings woke with a scream; he urged them quiet. They stripped him and toweled him dry and pressed their own frozen bodies against him to lend what little warmth there was to go around. He seemed content. He smiled. Exhausted, he slept.

Modern Fable

2010-10-24T02:52:00.002+01:00

Crack. He stirs in his sleep.

Crack! Something is choking him. He pulls at the collar at his neck.

CRACK! Ahhhnd lo, Tom awoke with a yelp. His shirtless back stung from the blow which had struck. From the corner of his eye, a large, dark mass was seen, a whip brandished in a gloved fist. Tom bounded to his feet to face his assailant. A punch to the stomach was his reply. Winded, he sagged to his knees. And though it is hard to say when he realised he was now outside, there was no mistaking the look of recognition at the manacles around his wrists. Nor the shock of seeing muddied, disheveled creatures front and back chained together by iron collars about their necks. His bound hands rush to his own neck and two semi-circles of metal clank together at his touch. Agog, he is hoisted by an armpit to his feet.

There were perhaps two dozen other members of this grim procession. They barely registered as human. Mud caked their bodies head to toe, giving the skin the complexion of graphite. An occasional patch of flesh poked through, seen as a paler shade, but it was still essentially gray. Some wore shorts, some sackcloth, others little at all. They flinched at the approach of their captors, who circled like vultures around carrion.

The group move off to the rattle of chains. Tom sized up his new masters with glances out of the corner of his eye. They were each dark brown in hue, tall and well built. At over 6”6’, the tallest also appeared to be the leader. Fur lined trench coats adorned their bodies, the roughly hewn slabs of leather sewn together with thick stitching. Their squat, cylindrical hats were of the same pelt as the lining, a back piece extending to the neck, covering their ears. Each wore knee length, leather boots; each carried a whip in hand and machete at waist. They scarcely spoke but all cowered when they did.

Tom’s back was aflame and he didn’t have to look too far for a mirror to his wound. The man ahead has deep, cavernous scars down his back. The wounds were packed with thick, dark peat like mud. Tom winced at the sight. He tried to attract the man’s attention, making a ‘psst’ sound, then tapping him on the shoulder, when he got no reply. The creature still ignores him and he tries a harder push. The shoulder dropped and rolled away from his touch, angry pleading words were mumbled in a language Tom could not understand. “Great.” he said, aloud. “Cunt’s sent me to Poland.” A further whip to his spine is delivered in a dialect he understands only too well. He said no more.

Having trudged for uncertain hours, only the sky marked time in this land, the trees begin to thin and they emerge into grassland. Here the group were allowed to rest on a hillside. The spot is well chosen, three corpses hang from an oak tree at the brow of the next hill. They are silhouetted against the pale sky, but the rent in their stomachs can be seen. The entrails of one hung from his bound feet.

Water is given on a wooden ladle. Tom clenched his fist as the pale draws closer. It reaches the man three places before him. The man eyeballs his captors. Words get exchanged between the guards that are too swift to catch. Head nodding, they seem to agree and guard with ladle punches prisoner in face. He drops like a stone, blood flowing from his cheek. Tom’s fist goes flat like a board. He drinks and keeps his head down.

Fireball in sky go early time in dark season and formless gray gives way to formless dusk. The frosts come down. Long are the shadows and bitter the air. Those in chains they march fast or they get beat. White fist on black cloth, it carried on high everywhere. On path, many dark men in circle, shouting. In centre, dark man on light girl. She cry as dark man put phallus in. Other men have phallus out, their turn next. Chained men heads low, some cry for girl. They know she die when dark men end.

Man who get hit in face, he angry. Man strong, he break free of collar. Man attack dark man, hit dark man in face. Other dark man use big knife, cut strong man hands off. Blood comes from strong man’s arms, he run round like chicken when head come off. Strong man scream. Dark man got hit, he cut off strong man head with big knife. Two times dark man chop. Head fall in mud. Body in mud too. Boy Tom get in dark man way. Dark man beat Boy Tom. Boy Tom teeth go to mud. Face swell. Pain in body too.

Dark come. All men rest. Dark men make fire. Gray men stay from fire. Gray men know get beat, take heat from dark men. Gray men lie near, make warm. Boy Tom in mass, hard say where, he look same now. All men sleep.

“Tom.”

“Oi, Tomboy.” Fairy man, make people go, he come early day. Fairy man call Tom boy. Tom boy wake. “Well, well, well, Europeans enslaved by Africans, who knew? Except me, obviously. You know, it’s a pity the Greeks never progressed much beyond the Stone Age, I think your tale would have fitted nicely into their mythology. Tom Thompson, the boy cursed to live a life of perpetual, bigoted irony. You could have been Midas for the twenty first century. Except everything you touch turns to shit.”

“Fuck off.”

“Charming. See if I didn't come out of my way to see how you're getting on and what do I get in return? A mouthful of abuse. That’s gratitude for you. Still, I see you’re making new friends.”

“Just fuck off and leave me alone.” Fairy man stand. “Wait.”

“Well.”

Boy Tom sing, “England never, never, never shall be slaves.” Tom boy cough-laugh. Tom boy sad. “Where am I?”

“Where are you? About twenty miles from your house. Or at least where it used to be.”

“What ‘appened to my ‘ouse, my family?”

“Let me tell you a little story.” Fairy man sit. “See, I could’ve just let you get rid of the Chinese. Then the compass wouldn’t have been invented. So we’d have no trade routes to America and nowhere for the huddled masses to flee to. Consequentially, the disposed Europeans would have had to remain and face their aggressors. Imagine it Tom, no Highland clearances or mass exodus of Irish peasants during the second potato famine. Plus, no gunpowder, so the sides would’ve been more evenly matched. Ah, in that world the Celtic tribes give the English such a continual headache that they’re looking the wrong way. By now, French would have become your national language once more. But I knew you wouldn’t like that and, as I said, I’m bored and looking forward to the endgame, so I brought you here, to a world devoid of Asians. Did you ever even consider what that would mean? Huh? No, you didn’t, did you. Let me fill you in.”

“No Asia, no major migration routes. The entire population of Europe is descended from people who crossed over here from Africa into Spain, a fraction of those that came up through Asia. With a vastly reduced gene pool, modern day Europeans are inbred and not very bright. No major civilization developed. There are a few scattered city states, but nothing like the majesty of Athens or Rome or Sparta. Meanwhile, Africa flourished, partly due to your non-interference. Their civilizations are truly majestic Tom, but, unfortunately for you, they do require large quantities of slaves on whose bones to build their empires.”

“What’ll they do with me?”

“I expect you’ll be taken back to Africa and sold at market. Ha, how’s that for irony? More than likely you spend the rest of your life down a mine or working a quarry somewhere. But I wouldn’t worry, miners don’t usually last more than a couple of years and with your doughy physique, I give you three months. Being maimed is the worst thing that can happen to you. They tend to bash the head in of anyone who’s no longer of use to them. Anyway, I should be going. Plenty more worlds to see.”

“Take me with you.” Boy Tom cry. “Please take me with you.”

“I told you Tom, I already have a pet.”

“But I can change.”

“Too late. I won’t say Au Revoir.”

“Wait.”

“What now?” Fairy man angry.

“Get rid of them.”

“Who?”

“The Africans, get rid of them.”

Fairy man smile. “But you know what will happen.”

“I don’t give a fuck, just wipe the black cunts out.”

“Ok then, but don’t say I didn’t warn you. Get some rest Tom. You have a long day ahead of you.”

Tom boy sleep.

Modern Fable

2010-10-24T02:50:00.000+01:00

there you are where the fuck have you been ive been looking everywhere for you where the fuck is everyone

theyre all gone tom you got rid of them all remember

i said get rid of the africans

were you listening to me yesterday the human race began in africa you idiot when you got rid of africans you got rid of the human race entire youre the only one left

theres just me

yes if you didnt exist then there would be no one to get rid of anyone so no one would have been erased but that would mean you werent erased either so then you would exist and couldve got rid of them but then you wouldnt exist and can you see how the whole situation would have descended into one big paradox and paradoxes are a logistical nightmare to deal with let me tell you so i protected you from erasure endgame

where are you going

theres no one left to blame tom so you have nothing left of interest to me

so what the fuck am i supposed to do

how would i know its your world now may you live in it happily ever after

wait come back take mewith you whereareyou going imsorrycomebackwai

Modern Epilogue - The Descriminating Individual

2010-10-24T02:22:00.006+01:00

I: Fairy Tales (all photos in part I courtesy of John Harrison)

The deputy sheriffs, the soldiers, the governors get paid,
And the marshals and cops get the same,
But the poor white man's used in the hands of them all like a tool.
He's taught in his school, from the start by the rule,
That the laws are with him, to protect his white skin,
To keep up his hate, so he never thinks straight,
'Bout the shape that he's in, but it ain't him to blame,
He's only a pawn in their game.

In this talk (I do not intend to lecture here), I am going to discuss some of the themes explored in my story, ‘Modern Fable’.

Briefly, ‘Modern Fable’ tells the tale of Tom, a teenage member of a far right group in a provincial northern town. Tom meets a genie, a genie who can erase from history any section of humanity Tom wishes. Yet as he gets rid of first Pakistanis, then Arabs, then Asians, humanity regresses to the level of the Yahoo. Finally he erases all Africans, humanity ceases to exist and only Tom remains, trapped on a prehistoric world of his own making.

Now, the advantage in telling a fairy tale is that certain narrative conventions can be circumvented without the need for extensive explanation. In the land of fairy tales, geese lay golden eggs; monstrous beanstalks sprout from magic beans overnight; and even the sky can come crashing in. Yet the main reason in choosing a fairy story is that racism, like all forms of arbitrary prejudice, is childish. And naïve. And unevolved. It is based on no real accounting of the world. No interaction or data gathering. It is based on the follow-the-leader mentality of the herd, a lack of introspection, ill conceived notions, half heard conversations, and tall tales. It is something we should have outgrown, unlike fairy tales, by age 12. And in that sense it is the ideal medium in which to illuminate the intellectual slavery inherent in judging others purely in terms of their ethnicity.

We all like a good yarn. Here’s one I heard the other day. “It concerns a woman…”

“living in a terraced house, who is awakened one night by a scuttling above the bedroom in the space between the roof and rafters. Imagining there are rats in the roof, she urges her husband to go and investigate. He squeezes through the trap door… and stumbles across a Pakistani sleeping on a mattress. But that is not all. There is a series of mattresses the length of the street, each containing a sleeping Pakistani. They were said to have gained access through a single Pakistani household at the end of the street and to have been wandering around freely.”

The preceding passage is taken from ‘City Close-Up’, Jeremy Seabrook’s 1960’s study of the working classes of Blackburn, Lancashire. Believe me, this tall tale was still doing the rounds when I lived and worked in the town and it hadn’t changed in thirty years. It persisted until quite recently in local lore when the mass demolition of said terraces made the lie harder to maintain. Seabrook recounts hearing the same tale repeated in Birmingham and Manchester:

“Each time I was told this story, it was said to have originated in a different (and named) street in the town. Nobody could identify the protagonists. It was invariably told to the storyteller by a friend who personally knew the individuals concerned, but who remained always at one remove from the actual informant.”

A description which could be equally well applied to any urban legend. Like an urban legend, it plays on our basic primal fears. The Pakistani hiding in the attic, he's the escaped lunatic on the roof of the car, the husband's decapitated head in his hands; he's the Yucca plant full of eggs that hatch, releasing thousands of tarantula babies, each ten times as venomous as the adult. Of course, the tale of the escaped lunatic is an old fashioned campfire story. And tarantulas lay their eggs underground and are caring parents, not prone to abandoning their brood. The young are no more dangerous than the adults, who aren't particularly venomous to humans anyway. Coincidentally, this is a tall tale I have also been told in Blackburn.

More than merely a primal fear, this story plays on a regional fear, for an Englishman’s home in his castle, and what true Englishman would not become incensed at the threat of foreign invaders squatting in his keep? What conscientious family man hearing this story could help but fear for the safety of his wife and children? It is a tale designed to strike terror and fury into the heart of the hearer: To swell the mindless ranks of the far-right: To dehumanise both victim and audience alike.

Knowledge is power, so let’s consider three more passages as cautionary tales against adopting scapegoats:

“Nearly all the people I interrogated had stories to tell. Whole villages, they said, had been put to fire and the sword. One man, whom I did not see, told an official of the Catholic Society that he had seen with his own eyes Germans chop off the arms of a baby which clung to its mother’s skirts.” (1)

“All Hutus must know that all Tutsis are dishonest in business. Their only goal is ethnic superiority. We have learned this by experience from experience.” (2)

“[T]hey are a sinister flood creeping upwards to engulf himself and his friends and his family and to sweep all culture and all decency out of existence.” (3)

Here we see where such tales lead us. (1) is taken from ‘The Times', 1914. It is a classic piece of propaganda (note the reporter had not actually met the eyewitness). Its aim was to portray the Germans as inhuman monsters, already in Belgium and but a short sea crossing from English shores, thus hastening enlistment into the British Army. The First World War was an entirely futile exercise to all but a few men, not involved in the actual fighting. Ten million died in the ensuing conflict of commerce and colonialism. All that it achieved was to lay the foundations for the next world war, where the enemy actually was monstrous. Further propaganda ensued, ensuring that millions more died in the gas chambers.

Modern propaganda is little different. Iraq's phantom weapons of mass destruction are the most recent, and least sophisticated, example of political misdirection, but there are many others. In 1999, for instance, Serbian atrocities in Kosovo were massively inflated in order to justify NATO's bombing of Serbia. I took part in the Amnesty International campaign calling on the UN to intervene, but it seems that in those post Cold War, pre 9/11 days, NATO needed a ‘conflict’ to justify its existence. Five thousand missing Kosovans were inflated to a hundred thousand, the spectre of Hitler invoked, and the bombs rained down. In fact, the majority of the ethnic cleansing took place after, and in direct retaliation for, those airstrikes. They ended when the west put economic pressure on Russia, which put economic pressure on Serbia, which withdrew its forces from Kosovo. If only someone could have thought of that in the first place!

(2) is the fourth of 'The Hutu 10 Commandments', published in 'Kangura', a Rwandan newspaper, in 1990. This and other demonising propaganda left a million Tutsis dead, slaughtered by their brainwashed neighbours. As with all such lies, it better described the ambitions of the authors than the intended victims. The editor of 'Kangura' was eventually convicted of crimes against humanity in 2003 and sentenced to 35 years in prison.

"He who fights dragons too long," warns Nietzsche, "becomes a dragon himself." It is a quote I will never grow tired of repeating. If we allow ourselves to be manipulated by dehumanising propaganda, then we are required to become as vicious as the enemy we seek to quell and can fast find ourselves hacking at our neighbours with machetes; blowing ourselves up in packed tube trains; firing up the ovens. "Sometimes I gotta ask myself what I feel about things." Bill Hicks once remarked. "That way I can get a closer reading of what's true." It's good advice.

And what of (3)? Time for a multiple choice question. (3) is a quote taken from which of the following:

(a) 'Mein Kampf' - Adolph Hitler
(b) ‘The Road to Wigan Pier' - George Orwell
(c) ‘Judaism in Music’ – Richard Wagner
(d) ‘The Shape of Things to Come’ - H G Wells

The answer is (b), although the other three have something in common. Richard Dawkins (of whom much more later), notes H G Wells's comments in a 1902 edition of 'Anticipations':

"And how will the New Republic treat the inferior races? How will it deal with the black?...the yellow man?...the Jew?...those swarms of black, and brown, and dirty-white, and yellow people, who do not come into the new needs of efficiency? Well, the world is a world, and not a charitable institution, and I take it they will have to go."

I quote this as an aside: Beware of socialists, for they can turn fascist in an instant!

Back to (3): “[T]hey are a sinister flood creeping upwards to engulf himself and his friends and his family and to sweep all culture and all decency out of existence.” This is how Orwell describes the Middle Class attitude to the Lower Classes in 1930s Britain. It could equally be today’s editorial on immigration in any right leaning British newspaper. Here we find a new objection to racism. For you see, prejudice is cyclic and it is top down. The things I have heard said of Muslims are the same things I have read of people saying about Jewish refugees in the '40s. Before the immigrants arrived in Blackburn the town’s failing were blamed on the Irish. The loutish behaviour we now condemn our children for is little different to the actions Orwell notes were ascribed to working class ‘Hooligans’ a century ago. If your strata of the community is making accusations against the one immediately below it, you can be damm sure you’re being accused of exactly the same things by the one above you. And if you refuse to accept them as true of you, why accept them as true of anyone else?

It is called prejudice for a reason. It’s pre-existent, pre-programmed, it exists whether there are Pakistanis or Muslims or Asians or Africans or not. In fact there is only one person with whom those feelings have any resonance. Like Tom, who is there left to blame when all your other excuses have been found out?

Let’s hone in, because I want to focus on one example of racial childishness. I have heard many disparaging comments made against people of Middle Eastern decent, but most germane to the current discussion is this: They smell. A typical ‘joke’ goes, “Why do Pakis smell? So blind people can hate them too.” There are many others told like this, equally as unfunny and unpleasant, serving only to confirm the idiocy and inadequacy of the teller. And five minutes later that same person will be bragging about how northerners are so much friendlier than southerners. Five minutes after that, he’ll be slagging off Scousers or Mancs or anyone else that has irked him in that instant.

So, Pakistanis smell do they? I’ve always found this a curious statement. For a start, it’s a tautology: Everything smells. You mean people of a certain ethnicity give off a different odour to you? Well let’s counter that claim by returning to ‘The Road to Wigan Pier’, for Orwell talks of “four frightful words... that were bandied about quite freely in my childhood. The words were: The lower classes smell.”

“That was what we were taught – the lower classes smell. And here, obviously, you are at an impassable barrier. For no feeling of like or dislike is quite so fundamental as a physical feeling. Race hatred, religious hatred, differences of education, of temperament, of intellect, even differences of moral code, can be got over; but physical repulsion cannot.”

Racism is the act of making false pronouncements about those you keep at a distance and therefore know nothing about. Take one failing, one flaw of humanity as a whole and make it the exclusive domain of whosoever you wish to demonise. The lower classes smell. Pakistanis smell. The Chinese used to say that Europeans smelt like corpses. I’ve been on public transport when a group of builders have boarded at the end of the day and smelt that sickly sweet odour of sweat. At such moments I can appreciate Orwell’s comments, in a poorly ventilated carriage the stench is quite nauseating. Yet by taking the advice of Bill Hicks, I am led to one inescapable conclusion: It is human beings that smell. This is where lack of interaction leads to misapprehension, for your experience of an entire race may come exclusively from the man behind the counter in your local off licence. You credit his body odour to his ethnicity because our sight and smell combine forces to create a false impression, never considering that he might smell because he’s overweight, or has poor personal hygiene, or just that he’s man; or that, yes, he has a different natural odour to you because his culture dictates a different diet and his antecedents evolved in a different climate to yours. People from that part of the world have only started to live in Britain in any great numbers in the last few decades and you have not yet had the hundreds, the thousands of years to acclimatise to his people the way you have to all the other minorities that surround you. You’ve even fallen into the trap of categorising those minorities as a single, superior race.

I have yet to hear a serious objection to any group that didn’t, on closer inspection, apply to the whole. I know Asian families who live quite handsomely on benefits and I know white people working and claiming incapacity benefit. Moreover, tax avoidance schemes by large corporations cost the UK economy a hundred billion pounds a year, including the proprietors of the selfsame newspapers that demonise benefit fraud. Refugees are blamed for jumping the housing list, as if they’re the ones running the councils and housing agencies. Yet the houses and flats they are given are so dilapidated that only someone fleeing tyranny would lower themselves to live in them. The French are described as arrogant by the English, which is like the Swiss mocking Germany for its efficiency. And diving is considered the exclusive domain of foreign footballers. Again, not a failing of foreigners, but overpaid footballers who start to believe their own bullshit and think they can get away with anything. Wayne Rooney and Steven Gerrard are as guilty of this as Drogba or Ronaldo. These are the transparent excuses with which the narrow mind seeks to justify its pre-existing prejudices.

Before moving on, here’s one more passage which nicely draws together everything under discussion up to now: Of propaganda and cyclic prejudice; of scapegoats and becoming the dragons we have slain. It is told by the American historian, Howard Zinn:

“In the 1960s, a student at Harvard Law School addressed parents and alumni with these words:

‘The streets of our country are in turmoil. The universities are filled with students rebelling and rioting. Communists are seeking to destroy our country. Russia is threatening us with her might. And the republic is in danger. Yes! danger from within and without. We need law and order. Without law and order our nation cannot survive.’

There was prolonged applause. When the applause died down, the student quietly told his listeners: 'Those were words were spoken in 1932 by Adolph Hitler.’”

He who fights dragons too long becomes a dragon himself.

Modern Epilogue - The Descriminating Individual

2010-10-24T02:16:00.014+01:00

2: Prejudice and the Art of Discrimination

From the poverty shacks, he looks from the cracks to the tracks,
And the hoof beats pound in his brain.
And he's taught how to walk in a pack,
Shoot in the back, with his fist in a clinch,
To hang and to lynch, to hide 'neath the hood,
To kill with no pain, like a dog on a chain,
He ain't got no name, but it ain't him to blame,
He's only a pawn in their game.

How do we define race? Excluding homonyms, onelook.com states:

noun: people who are believed to belong to the same genetic stock ("Some biologists doubt that there are important genetic differences between races of human beings");
noun: (biology) a taxonomic group that is a division of a species; usually arises as a consequence of geographical isolation within a species.

The operative phrase in the first definition is, ‘believed to belong’. Every human being that is alive today is descended from perhaps 20,000 humans that lived in east Africa 100,000 years ago. We can each trace our ancestry back to one of seven women who lived before this time and right back to a single, most recent common ancestor, who lived within the last 200,000 years¹. Before that time, our ancestry is parallel, a single branch on the tree of life, uniting with all other forms as we trace our line back to the primordial ooze from which all life on this planet originated.

The concept of race is put forward in order to arrange humans into species or subspecies and rank them in order of superiority. The author’s race invariably comes out on top (after all, ‘race’ also refers to a contest). And yet studies show that 85% of all genetic variation found within humanity occurs within perceived races, with only 15% found between these groups. As Steve Olson observes in ‘Mapping Human History’:

“Among the elephants of eastern and southern Africa, 40 percent of the total genetic differences occur between groups. For the gray wolves of North America, group differences account for 75 percent of the total genetic variation. Most conservation biologists hold that group genetic differences have to exceed 25 to 30 percent for a single species to be divided into subspecies or races. By this measure, human races do not exist.”

Richard Dawkins uses the idea that humanity can be categorised into discrete races as an example of what he terms, “The Tyranny of the Discontinuous Mind.” For example, skin colour. There is no one swatch that we can hold up to any person to identify them as either ‘black’ or ‘white’. Like all false dichotomies, ‘black’ and ‘white’ are abstract concepts that have no basis in reality. Human skin colour is a continuous spectrum of pinks, yellows and browns, with a person’s skin tone as individual as their fingerprints. Dawkins draws on the example of the former US Secretary of State, Colin Powell:

“It is an interesting example to take a colour photograph of Colin Powell standing next to some representative ‘white’ men (they must be next to each other so the lighting conditions are the same). From each face, cut a small uniform rectangle, say from the forehead, and place the patches side by side. You will find that there is very little difference between Powell and the ‘white’ men with whom he is standing. He may be lighter or darker, depending on the particular cases. But now ‘zoom out’ and look at again at original photograph. Immediately, Powell will look ‘black’. What cues are we picking up on?”

Here we see the contradiction with which humanity confronts itself. On the one hand, we are all one. Indeed, within the last 75,000 years Earth suffered an event so cataclysmic (probably an exploding supervolcano), that it decimated the proto human population. Fewer than 10,000 survived, meaning that the humans alive today are far more closely related than would be expected. Without that event we may indeed have broken down into sub species. As it is, an indigenous Khoisan of Namibia can easily mate with a Dutch Irish Pennsylvanian, or a Papuan with a ‘Metis’ person of Canada, and produce offspring themselves capable of producing offspring. If there were any racial barriers to cross, these unions would be barren or sterile.

Despite the reality, we sub-divide our species with ease. Colin Powell’s parents were Jamaican immigrants, and he is also of Irish and Scottish ancestry. However, he is referred to as the first African-American Secretary of State. It would be more appropriate to describe him as the first Afro-Caribbean-Scots-Irish-American Secretary of State. That may sound pedantic, but if we’re going to hybridise our society then why not go the whole hog? Barrack Obama has been elected the first African-American President of the United States. He is truly African-American, his father was African and his mother American. Yet all Americans are African-Americans, whether their ancestors arrived by crossing the Bering Strait, or on the Mayflower, or a slave ship, or signing for a Major League Soccer Team.

America is a fine example of humanity’s ambivalence. The country portrays itself as, “one nation under god” but there are no actual Americans in the United States. There are Native-Americans and African-Americans and Irish-Americans and Italian-Americans and Asian-Americans and Polish-Americans and Creoles and Militiamen and Republicans and Democrats, but no actual Americans. Not one nation under god, but nations perpetually and wilfully divided. Possessing infinite potential: Doomed to a death by a thousand cuts.

This behaviour is not typical of America, rather representative of the whole. Catholicism was meant to unite the entire Roman Empire under one religion and one god, yet since the time of the Protestant Reformation the number of Christian sects has been growing exponentially. Even before then, there were Franciscans and Benedictines and Jesuits and Augustinians and Camelites and Dominicans. The Quran teaches Muslims to avoid those who split their religion into schisms (“As for those who sunder their religion and become schismatics, no concern at all hast thou with them.”). There are still Sunnis and Shiites. And then there are the British, who will sub-divide down into European against American, British against European, English against British, northern against southern, Lancashire against Yorkshire, Liverpool against Manchester, and on, and on, ad infinitum.

Of course, our tribal behaviour is a throwback to before humanity came to be. We share a common ancestor with chimpanzees, and also share 98% of the same DNA, more than either species shares with any other (Simpleton Alert: Only fools believe we are descended from chimps). Chimp tribes are brutal. When, in ‘Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors’, Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan described a day in the life of a female chimp, they called the chapter, ‘Gangland’. Turf wars between rival clans are common. Chimps are also rigidly hierarchical, yet their loyalty to one another is so lassez-faire that they have been observed to randomly snatch infants from their mothers, dashing the head against a rock and consuming the flesh. Is this the behaviour we seek to ape?

In engaging in tribalism rather than society, we display an atavistic attitude. It is the scaffolding of human society, it may have served some purpose in the distant past, but it now obscures us from re-examining ourselves. Once the structure is complete, the scaffolding must be removed before the majesty of the cathedral, the museum, the mosque can be revealed. Which isn’t to say humanity is the finished article. Far from it.

We discussed the folly of prejudice in the previous section, but there is another word, often described as being synonymous with prejudice, but which is in fact its polar opposite. That word is discrimination. We each discriminate, in the clothes we wear, the food we eat, the people we idolise and fantasise about. There is nothing wrong or unnatural about that, even our senses discriminate, filtering out 95% of the sights and sounds within our perceptual range. We would be incapable of functioning if they didn’t.

It is only when this discrimination is blinkered by prejudice that we find ourselves in trouble. Prejudice is narrow minded because it removes great swathes of experience by finding nothing worthwhile in anything beyond a restricted field of view. I have met many people who believe that because they live a certain way this must be the only way to live, bypassing any realisation that the world would be an infinitely poorer place as a result. One Dylan, one Dawkins, one Ani DiFranco is a marvel. An entire world of them would come to seem like hell. By stripping away the social layers, we leave only self. Only then can individuality guide you in the something approaching a true course.

This is why I could never agree with the ‘God Hates Fags’ fundamentalists. Aside from the moral repugnance of a supreme being punishing two consenting adults with eternal damnation for the simple act of loving one another, I cannot abide such a one dimensional world view. Fundamentalism fails on three counts; it is unimaginative, boring, and simplistic. A comedian, whose name I forget, once said that God’s great joke was that He created myriad different sexes but told humanity there were only two. He may have a point. Traditional thinking looks to restrict the number of sexes to two. Yet when I look out of my window I observe a universe dedicated to expansion and creation. Yes, in the past there may have been one human sexuality, but we’ve moved on since then. At one time there were no iPods, cars or skyscrapers either. There are now. They say homosexuality is unnatural (which it is, most naturalists agree that bisexuality is dominant amongst higher primates), but so are iPods, cars and skyscrapers.

Fascism fails to hold sway because it fails to agree with the world in which we inhabit. As with all forms of fundamentalism, it demands that the Earth’s pole lie at 90^o to the plane of the sun. Unfortunately for the fascists, the North Pole leans at an angle off 23.6^o. Without this tilt there would be no seasons and the time between sunrise and sunset would remain fixed throughout the year. Then the world might bear division along primitive lines, but I can’t imagine the creatures there evolving very far. A 23.6^o angle gives rise to a planet rich in biodiversity, necessitating myriad solutions to the unique problems of deserts and forests and jungles and plains and tundra and rivers and seas and abyssal oceans. One of those solutions became the human race. Maybe it would simpler if the world could be reduced to the fundamental dichotomies, good and evil, black and white, us and them, but what rational person would want to live in such a world? Fundamentalism demands that the universe be static, when any damm fool can see it expanding. And because its ideology is skewed to reality, its only recourse lies in tyranny.

We need to remove the blinkers and learn to discriminate with the scalpel rather than the sledgehammer (to borrow from recent political parlance). If you wish to hang out only with people who look like you, fine, but ask yourself, what is it which leads you to believe that you have anything else in common with those people other than an approximate skin tone? And what is it which makes you believe you’re so pure anyway? If you are British and your family has been resident here for several generations then you’re probably a mongrel of the highest order. Britain is prime real estate and has been invaded many times, by the Picts and the Romans and the Vikings and the Saxons and the Normans, as well as absorbing people from all over its once all powerful empire. There are over 1,000,000 words in the English language, compared to an average of 50,000 in other languages. This is because English consists of words from Gaelic, Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, Norse, Saxon, French, French Latin, Spanish, Sanskrit, Urdu, and many others. Should we expel these immigrants too?

“He not busy being born,” sings Dylan, “is busy dying.” Any society which is not absorbing new cultures, new ideas, new technologies becomes stagnant and slides into the historical mire. Multiculturalism is not only preferable, it is essential for the evolution of the species and the continued creation of high art. The works of Shakespeare are multicultural, he absorbed the work of European poets and dramatists from the previous three thousand years and advanced them to the next plateau in his own inimitable style. The same is true of the music of the Beatles. And if a densely populated, multicultural society is so disadvantageous, explain New York then. Is there a more vibrant city on Earth?

Look, the average person will have nothing in common with 95% of the people they meet in their lifetime, maybe because of colour or nationality or religion, but more likely because they like a different sport, or support a different team, or listen to a different style of music, or have personal habits others find distasteful, or hold political views different, even abhorrent, to others, or any number of other criteria. If we are extremely lucky there will be one, maybe two people in our lifetimes with whom we feel sufficiently comfortable to allow the mask to slip. No man is an island, but he is a peninsula, perennially inaccessible on three sides. Doesn’t that already seem restricting enough, without allowing the arbitrary lines of race and nation to reduce our sphere of influence to zero?

Free yourself. Move towards a natural conclusion. Every element in your body was created in the heart of a supernova billions of years ago and travelled light years across space to randomly arrive at this point. Migration is encoded into your very DNA. Like King Cnut before the tide, the far right thinks it can stop immigration, but it is a futile endeavour. The seas swirl, the tectonic plates shift, and mankind beats to the drum of its nomadic roots. Yet it is possible to step beyond that stampeding herd, recognise your uniqueness, follow the Hicksian way, assess the world with a truly subjective world view (rather than being indoctrinated by paper, party, or the latest vacuous celebrity cult), and come to conclusions based on information, rather than fearing and despising those with whom you only ever interact weakly. You might also come to realise that the only real barrier to success is self. All the ethnic minorities in the world can’t thwart the truly talented or motivated individual. If you’ve sunk low enough to blame whole sections off society for your low station, you’re probably exactly where you’re meant to be. Get used to it, 'cause ya ain't going nowhere.

Of course a person’s ethnicity and nationality do have a bearing on whom they are as a person, but this is at least in part due to the underlying prejudices which still exist in human society. A ‘black’ person has a different perspective on the world than a ‘white’ person due the stereotypes with which both are judged. Moreover, a Nigerian has a different experience of being ‘black’ than a ‘black’ New Yorker or Parisian or Londoner. Skin tone, nationality, sex, sexuality, physical ability, mental prowess, height, weight, eye colour, hair colour, sexual endowment, these many layers go to make up who we are as individuals, shaping how we view the world and how the world views us.

It’s the difference between seeing your ego as a point particle and a matrix. The difference between:

'black'

'white'

and:

Female	Financial Administrator	Arsenal Fan	Batman Tattoo	Rose Drinker	Sci-Fi Fan	Atheist
Bajan Mother	Jamaican Father	London Born	Makes a mean mutton curry	Fave Novel: The Great Gatsby	Brown Eyed	Black Hair
Collects Shoes	Stubborn	Sea Food Lover	Loves Purple and Silver	MG Driver	Geek	Perfect 10 Listener
6 Music Listener	Dog lover	Practical	Mac User	Cynic	Sarcastic	Hates ITV
Allergic to coffee	Independent Reader	Radiohead Fan	Scrubs Fan	Green Party Member	Heterosexual	Grazia Reader
Gardener	Omnivore	Wii Owner	Theatregoer	Mother	Passionate	Antifascist
Unticklish	Eldest Child	Pro-active	Right Handed	Gregarious	Hates Celery	Resolute

or:

Male	Writer	Liverpool Fan	Dylanite	Theatregoer	PC User	Atheist
Scots-	Anglo-	Irish-	Welsh-	German-	Arabian-	African
Radiohead Fan	Hates UHT Milk	Amnesty Supporter	Collects Books	Cognac Drinker	Brown Eyed	Black Hair
Independent Reader	Eyebrow Stud	Private Eye Reader	Fave Novel: Ulysses	N.I. Reader	Sci-Fi Fan	Geek
Eldest Child	Perfect 10 Listener	Scrubs Fan	Radio 4 Listener	Heterosexual	Omnivore	Hates ITV
Sarcastic	Gregarious	Socialist	Cat Lover	Left Handed	Ticklish	Antifascist
Imaginative	Stubborn	Passionate	Lazy	Distracted	Cynic	Eponymist

No two people are alike (even twins have unique world lines), we merely converge at certain points. Inversely, no two people are entirely unalike. I have long believed that you could take two people with disparate ideologies, a white supremacist from Alabama say, and a member of the Nation of Islam, lock them in a room and after a few hours of intense hatred they would discover a mutual love of flower arranging. This idea is perfectly illustrated in a story I heard on Radio 4. It was told by Jon Holmes of The Now Show and featured Abu Hamza, the radical Islamic preacher, and Nick Griffin, leader of the BNP, back stage at a debate at Cambridge University. As Holmes recounts, “Griffin couldn't open a packet of Hob Nobs (let's face it, biscuit packets are tricky) but the Hook-Handed Hob Nob Hacker was a dab hand. In a manner of speaking.” Hamza came to Griffin’s aid, slicing open the packet of biscuits with one of his hooked hands. “It was a wondrous and beautiful moment. Then they went onstage and had a massive row.”

So what are we worrying about? I don’t mean to put on a hippy wig and start singing, ‘Give Peace A Chance’ here, but if Nick Griffin and Abu Hamza can come together over anything, even a packet of Hob Nobs, then there’s hope for us all.

History begins at conception. I was born in Britain, but do not consider myself British. The former is where I was born, the latter a state of mind to which I cannot subscribe². Great Britain is an arbitrary border, less arbitrary than any mainland continental country, but still determined by centuries of conquest and immigration of which I played little if any part. I have not been to every city and town in the UK and am unlikely to. My country is my country, as individual as I am myself. “What ish my nation?” asks MacMorris in Henry V. “Who talks of my nation?” My nation is Cardiff and Manchester and Liverpool, but it is also Paris and Madrid, Amsterdam and New York. My nation is the halls of Elsinore and Gormanghast, the island of Pianosa during World War Two and the streets of Dublin, June 16th 1904. Yes, the geographical location in which I live, in which I have spent most of my life, has a bearing on the person that I am. My sense of humour, for instance, is typically British, motivated by suppressed anger, but my personality is also determined by the authors I read, the music I listen to, the films I watch, to create a unique consciousness, never to be repeated. I am a distinct blend of experience and influence, and pride in my individuality outshines all other considerations.

Human civilisation stands at a crossroads. For thousands of years its basic structure remained unchanged. A person from the 14th century would have been able to converse with someone from the 19th on roughly equal terms. Yet with the onset of the industrial age, into the mechanisation of the 20th century, through to the computer and internet ages, the technical evolution of humanity has progressed at something approaching an exponential rate. With this explosion, the foundations on which society was based for millennia have borne the strain and cracked. It is now possible to communicate with someone on the other side of the world as if they were in the next room. Fixed, national boundaries start to give way to the virtual, floating lines of cyberspace. Where once there were the English and Scots and French and Pakistanis and Nigerians, we will increasingly come to find nations of Trekies and Lost fans; Jazz aficionados and classic car enthusiasts; Wine tasters and Joycean scholars (not to mention the inhabitants of Second Life, World of Warcraft et al.). In antiquity humanity was required to bond to those who shared a common space in order to survive the ravages of winter and invading armies. On the virtual plane we are finally permitted to unite with those with whom we share a common interest. Accidents of birth need no longer confine us, the only borders now are our own imaginations. There is still such a thing as society, it is merely undergoing a transformation. When the Harry Potter fans secede from the union, we will know the transformation is complete.

Brian: Look, you've got it all wrong! You don't NEED to follow ME, You don't NEED to follow ANYBODY! You've got to think for your selves! You're ALL individuals!

Crowd: Yes! We're all individuals!

Brian: You're all different!

Crowd: Yes, we ARE all different!

Man in crowd: I'm not...

Notes
1 It’s actually a little more complicated than this, but accurate enough for the purposes of the present discussion. See the ‘Eve’s Tale’ section of ‘The Ancestor’s Tale’ for a more detailed explanation.

2 Bill Hicks was once asked if he was proud to be an American. “I didn’t have a lot to do with it,” he replied, “my parents fucked there and that’s about it.”

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